The Optical Illusion of 2011

Apparently this optical illusion is the best of 2011. What do you think?

This reminded me of that exercise we had in class about optical illusions and thought I would share. It's also funny because the article quotes Obi Wan Kenobi who once told Luke Skywalker: "Your eyes can deceive you. Don't trust them."haha

Farewell

Goodbye to everyone. It was wonderful having you all in class with me. I really enjoyed listening to the conversations and all the activities we did together were fun (especially this last activity; who doesn't love drawing pretty pictures in place of an exam?).

i hope my Western Thought II class next year is just as fun. : )

Ta-Da!

We made it! Congrats to Drew and Lance on their excellent presentations! You both chose very challenging angles and maintained grace under the pressure of public speaking. It was very clear you both allotted a great deal of thought to your ideas. And especially congratulations to the whole class! I really enjoyed this little glimpse into the minds of my classmates: each presentation seemed to reveal a bit of the inner-workings of the presenter. Now, here we are, our first year of college over, and, for most of us, another one soon to begin. I look forward to seeing what all of you will create in the coming years!

It's Over!

It's all finally over. The only thing left is for the people now to edit their papers, but the presentations are all over. How wonderful.



I enjoyed how Drew's ideas changed and how he showed us that they changed, from what is reality more into a what is knowledge type of adventure. It was interesting to see the process he went through in order to make these changes and realize that he himself didn't believe in what he originally set out to prove.

As for Lance, well, that accent was fabulous and amusing, I almost hardly paid attention to the presentation... Just kidding. The flow of coherent ideas was nice, and the interaction he put into us, the audience, was also nice as well. Even if I had to sip coffee, I thought the little experiment was fun in trying to deceive our senses and this preconceived idea we might have about some object.

Hey, presentations are over!
Good job, everyone.

It's cool how what we think we believe in changes so much with a little bit of deeper contemplation. I wonder what other of our beliefs we would change if we took the time to really think about it? I also love that, no matter how wide the range of our topics, you can see the common threads and thought patterns.
I wonder how different our presentations would have been if we had done them at the beginning of the semester?

It's really interesting how the nature of a paper/presentation changes from the beginning to the end. It's so easy to start out with a plan to prove a specific point, and in the process of writing, you end up arguing something else completely. In some ways this could be a good thing, but in a few cases I think it wound up working against the speaker. While trying to write out the thinking process, there ended up being contradictions, and thoughts that disproved the original point.
After the presentations are over, there is enough time to revise the paper, to either steer it in another direction, or to edit out the contradictions. I hope the class provided enough constructive criticism for any possible improvements to be easy to reach.

Was Late

And because I was late, I missed out on a good chunk of Brock's presentation. I felt really rude coming in and disturbing his presentation and rather sad because from what I heard, it was very interesting. An alternate universe? How exciting. It made me remember an episode of Futurama when they deal with alternate universes and how everything was the opposite from the 'normal' universe, just as Brock was saying. Except that, of course, the basics were still the same, it was merely the colors and people whom were different.

Jordan, to me, had a very sturdy idea to me that I found I could hardly argue. I think it was interesting the different break down of knowledge type and how we obtained information from it. What I really appreciated was how she never said 'knowledge is always true', because as the discussion was circulated, it seemed that two bits of knowledge could be in conflict, such as the formulate and emotional knowledge. But I suppose even if one or the other was wrong to someone else, it'd be true to oneself.

Sarah's paper to me presented an interesting topic, mostly because we as artists heavily rely on sight. Not to mention, I need to wear glasses/contacts at all times otherwise I can't see and everything becomes blobs of colors. I think it's a good point to say that sight isn't the best but that it's one of the more important factors to obtaining true knowledge.

Issac presented a topic that I found enjoyable but slightly controversial. I really, really enjoyed that God is a being created and sculpted from our own experiences. However, I disagree with the idea that we have to have an experience to know God. I feel that even if we don't have an experience with God, that would still shape an understanding of him a bit.

More food for thoughts. Yum,

Really...Short

Yesterday's class was rather short. Not that I'm complaining, I enjoy the extra time to do other work, but I've begun to really enjoy the presentations. Even if I don't normally speak, I really find them interesting. I wish the other two presenters had been there as well. Oh well, hopefully Wednesday we'll have everyone.

I really enjoyed the presentations yesterday, as usual. Kirsten's paper presented a more general topic rather than some of the narrowed down ideas that we've seen before. I think what I enjoyed the most was that she took on both sides of the change aspect: most people do have the ability to change and better themselves, but some people are incapable of it. I found myself nodding with this opinion because I find that the majority of the population can change and probably wants to, but for some people it's too difficult or they simply don't see their wrongs and thus don't do anything to change.

Then there was also Evander's paper. He put a lot of research into it and I could feel that he was trying, but like most I was slightly lost by what he was trying to accomplish. I agree with everyone else that if he narrowed down a bit more and, as he even stated, found a thesis, he'd be able to put all that research to good use. One point that stuck with me is that he briefly mentioned how babies are born with no knowledge. The more I thought about it, I thought how strange that seemed. I vaguely recall studies being shown that a baby understands the mother's voice and I want to say that Emily mentioned something about the gene coding in a child being so complex and wise that they have this preprogrammed notion of the world even before they truly understand it. Hmmm...

Overall, wonderful job. I can't wait for tomorrow's presentations.

Phew!

Hello all! I wanted to first congratulate all those who have presented thus far; I feel everyone put a lot of effort into this assignment and it showed! And hey, now we're done, hurray! Also, for those of you yet to present, best of luck! I'm really looking forward to seeing how differently (or similarly) people's opinions are on these subjects, and of course, for the questions and thoughts they will spur. Again, best of luck to you all!

I haven't been blogging even close to enough...

There were two presentations in particular that I found very interesting. The first was Julie's, and the second was Natalie's; though I liked them for different reasons.
I was thinking a lot about Julies, not because I found it terribly fascinating in and of itself, but I'm very intrigued as to why so many people reacted so strongly to it. After awhile of contemplating it, I think I've come up with a possible answer; there are two different ways of interpreting the concept of knowing everything. One is the way that Julie took it, and is hard to argue with; this is the literal way, that argues that it is impossible to know everything there is to know, because it will never be possible to know the facts of every individual person, let alone every individual creature. This is a strong argument, and not really possible to refute.
However, knowing everything can be taken in a different way, and this is the way that descarte though of it; he broke it down into systems rather then individuals. He believed that if he could understand the system by which people thought and functioned, it wouldn't be necessary to know the individual person, because people all functioned the same way.
I think half the class was in one pool of thought, and half the class in the other, and neither could understand the perspective of the other.
Natalie's I loved because it was almost spot on to my way of thinking, and my views on the subject were very similar. I think it was beautifully presented and though provoking. There is of course much more that could be argued and taken into consideration on the subject, but that would have taken all day. I thought it fit the assignment perfectly.

I've really enjoyed most of the presentations we've seen so far, I feel like we're getting know each other pretty well because of them. Individual personalities are coming through, because although the research aspect is important, the subject matter displays personality more then anything else. In a way I feel like these are very private things we're being asked to share, and they show how we have formed our identities.
I feel like some of them took a very broad topic, and narrowed it down a bit to far. I know that it is hard to cover the scope of the topic, and that sometimes it felt like it was necessary to make it more manageable, but in some cases I think it took away from what the assignment was meant to be.

Congrats To All

I wanted to say congrats to everyone who presented yesterday (Miranda, Julie, Diana, and Natalie). You all looked like you did a lot of research but managed to relate it back to your own opinions, something I didn't do correctly. Wanted to tell you all I'm a tad bit jealous you all managed to do that.

Miranda's was interesting in that is had me thinking what and how I knew about everything. thinking more about it, I do think there's a difference between cultural and natural influences since I've traveled a lot and have been effected by the different areas I've lived in. Though, no matter where I've gone, I still loathe carrots.

Julie's discussion that followed was interesting. I did think she did a wonderful job remaining calm under everything that was going on, but I also liked the discussion too. I enjoyed listening to everyone bounce ideas back and forth.

Diana's paper was interesting as well. I hadn't thought about animals in the way she presented them, as a representation of our own human personalities. It brings me to question that if animals are beautiful and we project ourselves onto them, does that mean we believe ourselves to be beautiful as well?

As for Natalie, well, I found it all very poetic and pretty. I almost wanted classical music in the background, it felt so elegant.

Thanks to you all for giving me food for thought.

Paper Presentations

I had fun tonight in class. I loved the hands on activities tonight. I didn't think of doing anything like that for my presentation, but now I gotta start thinking of something like that to do. Making the dolls was fun. It was creative, and it made me understand Emily's presentation even more. Jenny's presentation was also interesting. The way she blindfolded Miranda, and told her to describe the objects that were given to her. It's different though, being blindfolded and being blind. Like Miranda did tonight, she could still describe the items perfectly, because she has seen them before. But imagine a blind person who has never experienced being able to see what non blind people see. It's a totally different thing. And Kayla, Aaah. What a difficult topic to choose. Especially because there are so many questions that come along with What is God like. And to only be able to write it in 8 pages is impossible. So Good luck to her. Anyways. Now I have an idea of how I'm going to do my presentation. I hope.

Paper, any one?

Throughout this week I've managed to start piecing together my paper (in fact I'm almost finish now), but I was wondering if other people had as much struggle as I did starting it.

I tried to write my paper last weekend and I found my incapable of doing it. I must've started five different essays on the same topic, but I found myself bitter about it all. Now I'm managing to pump out ideas like it's no problem, but before it seemed like such a difficult process. I think what's making me even more nervous is that I'm presenting on Monday and while I'm confident in my beliefs, I'm more passive when it comes to other people questioning them and would rather not deal with it.

I was just wondering what other people might be worrying about or if this paper is coming any easier to someone else.

On Reading and Books

This reading was quite interesting...as are most of them. What was interesting to me what the fact that Schopenhauer suggested not to read. It's an interesting concept though, to his point of people losing their own point of view and ability to think for themselves without the influence of what they read. I'm not sure I would vouch for not reading, but I would agree that we are definitely influenced by the things we read and how we think. The same goes for the people we're around.

Something else that I thought about was his point to "it would be a good thing to buy books if one could also buy the time to read them." I'll be honest and say I'm not an avid reader, which is weird because I buy books all the time. I like to look at books and read through the beginning pages of them, but I life seems to get too busy that I loose track and interest until the available time rolls back around. I would like to read more though...soon...graduation is just around the corner.

While reading I couldn't help but think...

What did Schopenhauer think of Descartes for writing his philosophy is French instead of Latin, so that the common man could read his works versus exclusive academia? Schopenhauer makes a point that common knowledge is petty and naive and that there is practically no hope in it. He also states that worthless literature placed on the shelves leaves the works of great thinker's undisturbed. Yes, I see the truth in that statement, but all books have a purpose, whether to entertain or to educate. If the work's of the thinker's are so great then they will be able to stand on their own and are not comparable to those of writers who writer for money and fame. Descartes's purpose was to educate and he succeeded by writing in French. Schopenhauer has created a very narrow outlook on what is acceptable readings or literature.

So Schopenhauer made a few points that I found interesting, particularly his analogy of the food we eat, and the things we read; that though we take it all in, only some of it becomes a part of us. When we read, we are just a pallet for another persons thoughts, and that we only accept the points which align themselves with our own way of thinking. Then what should it matter that we read "bad" literature? Though I concede that if we spent all our time reading, or, in the modern version, watching movies or TV, we would cease to have original ideas.
On the other hand, he also comes off as an arrogant, miserable little prick, and I was tempted to stab myself through the eyes halfway through the reading.
Just sayin'.

Capitalism Kills Literature (among many other things...)

Schopenhauer criticizes contemporary literature for being written for its own sake and to exploit consumers and I agree. The majority of consumer products are not based on benefiting the mind's acuity and precision by exercising its comparative, analytic, and perceptual skills, or to enhance its spirituality and ability to synthesize emotion, but to feed some insatiable desire to escape the reality of our own isolated existence. Romance novels that target sexually-deprived and/or obsessed, lonely middle aged audiences flood the shelves of supermarkets and gas stations come to mind when I read Schopenhauer's bitterly critical essay on books. The fact that someone aims at writing such books for no other reason than to reap a cheap profit from those preoccupied souls willing to pay for it is beyond me. Why waste the precious little time you have on such fruitless endeavors?

Elizabeth Gilbert: A new way to think about creativity

This is the video I was talking about in class the other day. It's really good, enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86x-u-tz0MA

Depressing? Well..

Comical. That's the word I would use when reading this: comical. As I generally do with philosophers, I found him more amusing than irksome. I was practically grinning the whole time reading this and, surprisingly enough, I was a little sad it was one of our shorter reading assignments.

I really thought his idea about 'bad books' was very, very funny. I found it funny because I'm sure some...okay, most of the books I read would probably be considered 'bad' if a newspaper is consider 'bad literature'. I don't spend my time reading classics, generally, and what we imagine as classics now (Poe, Bronte Sisters, Austen, Hawthorne), I like to imagine he would possibly consider them bad authors in comparison to Plato and Aristotle. So, with them crossed off and a few other authors, I've pretty much been reading terrible books my whole life outside of some books from my literature class. What strikes me as most comical is the idea of authors shoving their ideas onto me, which I agree that they're doing, but without me being able to think. He made it sound as if I'm unwillingly accepting their ideas without giving even the slightest thought to what I am reading. I am. Besides, even if I do happen to read a so-called 'bad book' doesn't that make me more culturally aware of what the standards of my society are? Case in point: Twilight. I do consider that a terrible book (sorry).

However, I do agree with his idea that we should read a book more than once, I think more than twice in fact. I did nod my head and think that I do learn much more when my emotions aren't at their peek, waiting to see what happens next when I turn the page. I've read Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice about five or six times now and I find new, little details I always miss every single time. Fun times.