Week 5: Post 3 - Short Videos

Flame On, the video was about homosexuality and long list of famous people being homosexual such as Plato and Socrates. Those are the best philosophers, but not sure how they can live up with that. The term has become common in the 21st century, but in the previous centuries, people were afraid to go out and admit themselves as one. Not because it was wrong, but because people wont let them live or something. The one quote I really liked from the movie was “We simply don't know what is our best and worst quality”. That is 100% true, we human don’t realize how qualities in order to make use of them. If we just know, what we suppose to do, or even think positive, we can probably become better human being.

The short video was about re-living every moment, every single day of live, again and again. The argument was raised, will you live every moment of life again? For me, I would love, I would love to live my life again, and surely make a difference. Actually, I have thought of this question many times before, but never heard from someone else, like the one in the video. I’m not sure what will be the answer by most of the people, but for me, I can live every moment of life again without getting bored. But, the big question is that, if we live our life again, will we know the future, at this time we did this, and events like graduations, and all the major events that has happened? If, we don’t know this, than it might be a new life, such as the one we are living in now.

Week 5: Post 2 - Reading

On the Genealogy of Morals A Polemical Tract by Nietzsche. Nietzsche starts off by saying that we are very much ignorant in every way. He discussed morality of life, and how small things are bad. He mentioned two type of behaviors we are living with, either good or bad. He also talks about things are being forgotten slowly, that are not suppose to be forgotten, such as reading, people don’t usually practice anymore like they used, maybe because of the time. We have made ourselves so much busy that we don’t have time to do good deeds. Nietzsche state that we have made ourselves to forget things, we do not understand ourselves, and we are just enjoying things to be shown as experienced person.

Peace, Non-violence and Conflict Resolution by Gandhi. Gandhi is a well known idealist, who is known for peace by force of non-violence. People like Martin Luther King Jr, were also inspired by his actions of non-violence. Gandhi states that the nonviolence is a practice for everyone, not only for people in war, but for every regular person on the street. Gandhi proposed a very simple but effective formula that leads toward nonviolence. He shows very common way to fight violence: active force, matchless bravery, and the exercise is faith. Gandhi state that in order to fight violence, is by doing nonviolence, put all the guns down with literally no weapons against the enemies. Everyone can fight each other, they can be stronger than each other, but in his view, if everyone put downs the violence, then its truly democracy.

Week 5: Post 1 - Expert Lecture

The expert lecture by Sam Harris. Harris wrote a well known book The End of Faith. Harris started off apologizing on the lecture might offend people. Then he defined believe, what is believe. He defined it to be “believes are machinery and guidance to our behavior through time”. In his understanding that believes are becoming human suffering to religious people. He points out different religious moderations that are taking place, all of them relate to believes that have become compulsory to follow in society, such as the one Jesus coming to save the world. I could tell by the Harris examples regarding religion and religious believers were related to compatibility issue with science. Religious believers tend to focus on religion, and they believe in what Bible or Quran has to say, and ignoring the fact on finding ourselves in this universe can reveal so much unknowingness which leads towards moderations. One of the strongest points by Harris was that the Bible and Quran believers only believe in their books, which he said are the two books that are most powerful among other books in the world, but following blindly on a religion causes issues, from Harris point of view. It was a very good lecture. I found myself not agreeing with his point of views, but they were good points.

The lecture, Why Turn Vegetarian. First of all, the movie had very good reasons, why to become vegetarian, extremely well developed reasons. One thing I didn’t like about the movie was the killing of animals on screen, that’s horrible. I know that animals do fear, experience death, and want to be free. But, they are in the world to be eaten. There are also good sides to eating meat, such as very enormous amount of calories. It will take more time to eat same amount of calories if the person is veg. Furthermore, there are also bad sided to eating meat, such as fatness and unhealthy food. But that is true, there are more negative facts to eating meat.

Week 4: Post 3 - Short Video

“A Glorious Piece of Meat”, well said. The short video was very interesting. One of my favorite quotes from the video was “The soul is nothing more than complex network of neurons”(Crick). Which means that our human brain is extremely to understand how it works. Furthermore, we are clueless in knowing if Neurons comes first, or consciousness. What comes first, the matter or the awareness? If you pick matter, than you already knew it, that why you said matter.

Week 4: Post 2 - Reading

The reading subject was Neural Philosophy. The Astonishing Hypothesis written by Francis Crick in 1994. The Astonishing Hypothesis describes human as nothing more than bunch of nerve cells and molecules working. Crick mentions that we have created this illusion. Another very interesting reading was An Integral Theory of Consciousness by Ken Wilber which explains that the brain and consciousness is a biological phenomenon. Another reading was The Problem of Consciousness by John R. Searle. Searle says the most important scientific discovery would be to answer the following question “How exactly do neurobiological processes in the brain cause consciousness?”. Another good example is intrinsic feature of reality, which describes “physical objects have features that are intrinsic to reality” are all natural science. Moreover, the comparison between the readings would be to say, they basically talked about brain and consciousness. While they were talking about brain consciousness, they had similar theories how brain and reality worked.

Week 4: Post 1 - Lecture

Steven Pinker is a professor at Harvard University on Evolutionary Psychology. He has written couple of books such as How the mind works and The blank slate which are related to psychology and its traditions. One really interesting point he makes is that, the mind is very complex. So, complex that we are unable to understand how we can learn so fast, even faster than robots. Furthermore, he talks about the ideas that are sin, which means that the humans are persuade easily to those ideas. People have choice to fantasize reality or come up with an idea to avoid illusion.

Dr. Gerald Edelman talks about Neural Darwinism. Edelman started off with examining the mind processing techniques. He mentions that the brain is context-sensitive, if you look at it, or listen to some music, the brain tries to detect the motion perception. Edelman does show a robot who was driving itself, and maybe detecting the patterns, or trying to find things what it was programmed for. Edelman shows very interesting points, examples and even some videos. One of my favorite one was the robot playing soccer game against the human, which is very different thing I’ve ever seen. Basically, the robots are working on sequences basic, if it detects the sequence, it does something which is very competitive.

MidTerm

MIDTERM EXAMINATION
SUMMER 2007, Introduction to PhilosophyProfessor David C. Lane, Ph.D.Instructions
1. Be sure to place your entire midterm on your website and when youare finished send a link of your test to your teacher directly at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/msacphilosophygroup/post?postID=2amHfsi5JKY5DmcPtGx8RRAZz8QSqhZNmfCeLYRcDgqUquya-fNzZTlTGMAIVIe6IQ2TROurVOumsrxjMQ (don't sendit to any other email address, except that)
2. Make sure that it is YOUR OWN work and that if you use otherauthors please be sure to quote and/or cite the material appropriately. Plagiarism will not betolerated and you will receive an "F" automatically for the examination.
3. The test is due NO LATER than JULY 17 at midnight.----------------------------------4. What is your real name?

Week 3: Post 3 - Film

The short film had very interesting topic like the reading and the expert lecture had which is evolution. The evolution by Darwin, I think is based on survival from generation to generation. We should know that we have been edited by our parents. The short film, The Fundamentalism is a mental disease which is a photonic narrative. The Darwin’s black box has been critizied of being wrong on the science by many biologists.

Week 3: Post 2 - Reading

The readings were basically related to the evolution which helps us to understand the history of our lives. The theory says that we form ourselves to something we are not, something like monkeys did generation and generation ago. This entire concept began with Darwin’s theory which was first published in 1859. Why do we believe in such theory? Well because, that is the most evaluated and sensible theory that we can probably come up with.

I personally think the evolution theory by Darwin is really incredible and interesting to learn. The most interesting part is that the history of life, which is derived from the pattern from different spices. The evolution has not come in few years, but it has took more than thousands of years to change and it has took tons of process in adoption and modification. Now that we have survived our lives and generations, now we should be called “survival machines”. The best from the readings was the Meme Theory. The meme theory describes human behavior of passing on the thoughts and ideas with brain. We, make others believe in what we think are right, in our case, the other person start believing in same ideas which passes particular behavior.

Week 3: Post 1 - Expert Lecture

Professor Edward O. Wilson at Harvard University wrote many books, one of them is Social Biology which was one of the Wilson’s best selling which was about biology and social behavior. Wilson mentioned that if we can get into the brain, such as neurons, we can probably figure out human behavior and self conscious and we would be able to track every part of the brain. He also mentions there is no conperiecy in science, the goal of scientist is to make a discovery and even if you found something, you still keep looking.

Richard Dawkins and the strangeness of science at the Oxford. Dawkins, started off with Quantum theory, and Feynman works. Dawkins, did talk about some really interesting stuff, such as what is the war made of, of course atoms. I really like couple of jokes he made throughout the video. Dawkins also mentions the theory of big bang, and why we are here in this universe. Moreover, he talks about, if we understand the quantum theory, and we know that we understood quantum physics, we still don’t have full understanding of quantum theory.

Week 2: Post 3 - Short Videos

The short movie, The Little Things That Jiggle, the one main point I can probably point out is that our lives and science relates to each other that we wont be able to produce better living standards without it. Moreover, science and our lives are attached together, waiting for a meltdown “Human beings arefrozen popsicle of light waiting for final illumination on meltdown”. There were different quoates in the video, one of them was “It should be possible to explain the laws of physics to a barmaid” (Einstein) which means that everyone has the ability to learn and explore which we don’t really know much about.

Gods Do Decompose was hilarious. I was shocked with the title but I kind of liked the background music, it was relaxing. Than after watching the video, I think that it had a good point. Every religion, tells to pray to god, in other words believe in something that your not sure of. The video points out that the god might not exist, or he’s dead in other words. The video had good quotes, “God’s only excuse is that he doesn’t exist” (Stendahi).

Week 2: Post 2 - Reading

The readings were very interesting. The idea behind all the readings was that we are trying to prove our existence through physics, science, and experiments. First of all, the cosmic inflation which is known as part of the big bang theory which illustrates why the world seems flat. Furthermore, the cosmic inflation suggests that the growth of the early expansion of the universe was exponenetial “due to metric expansion of space” (wikipedia). Second, Was Cosmic Inflation The 'Bang' Of The Big Bang? By A. Guth mentions details of cosmic inflation. One intereting point I learned is that Alexander Friedmann marked the beginning of Big Bang calculations. Alexander evaluated that the universe is expanding.

This article explores Werner Heisenberg had very interesting examples and different ideas. First of all, I really liked the example where the cave man used to his shadow, and not underlying the reality behind it. The article used “Modern physics has been used here as an example or, we may say, as a model to check the results of some important philosophic systems of the past” which shows very strong arguments by Descrates and Kant who are the respectful philosophers.

Week 2: Post 1 - Lecture

Professor Owen Gingerich, Harvard UniversityProfessor Owen Gingerich, Harvard University talking about Astronomy, God, and Jesus. Owen has written couple of books, such as The Eye of Heaven and The Great Copermisuc Chase. Owen starts off with how great the universe is but the unknown purpose of our lives expands the questions of our purpose. Owen than talks about all different kinds of scientific common properties that relates to our daily lives such as oxygen. Owen mentions that “the Universe is easier to comprehend with purpose anddesign”. He also mentions a very interesting idea that we human only look around what we do, which is cause and effect.

Stephen Wolfram and a New Kind of Science: Cellular AutomataStephen Wolfram has written a book, A New Kind of Science. One of the thing he’s mastered at is Math. Stephen, combined math and phsyics to come up with complicated ideas. Not only that, but he also wrote the software that used his mathematics techniques. Furthermore, the software he wronte followed the patterns of the average user makes. What the technique is that, following the pattersn using the software is kind of hard, but the simple and complex level of software do solve many biological problems using math and science. The software is almost same as Lisa Randall example of multiple dimension of/outside the universe. Eventhough we see limited dimension of universe, but there are chances that there is multiple chances. Stephen’s idea expands to even time and space which gets complex possiblities.

Week 1: Post 3 - Films

The short movies Java Philosophy and De Docta Ignorantia both had very different ideas. First off, Java Philosophy, the author throws a question, “Who are you?”. What he/she really trying to do is get us thinking that do we really know ourselves. Moreover, another interesting point is that “I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations,-one can either do this or that. My honest opinon and a friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it—you’ll regret both”, I loved this quote. I think what he says is that we feel that we didn’t make the right decision since we always think back to a situation.

The other short movie, De Docta Ignorantia is by Nicholas of Cusa. The author showed a very interesting point, that is how things relate to each other, such as art pieces or music, and even math in this situation. The short movie dealt with ignorance and intelligence. Furthermore, one of the major points was that we must recognize our ignorance and stupidity. In other words, we must accept the fact we don’t really know whats going on in this world. Personally, my favorite one of both was Java Philosophy, I’m not sure, but I kinda liked that one much better than De Docta Ignorantia.

Week 1: Post 2 - Reading

The thing that got my attention was study from over 50 philosopher’s interview, who were asked some of the strong dominant questions that most people looking forward to hear and know about it. The Socratic Universe, Interviews with California Philosophers were done by Mt Sac Philosophy group. The question number one was about disagreeing with philosophical tradition. I would say there were many different answers by each philosophers, but one I would choose is that “Fischer (U.C. Riverside): I most disagree with what I would call a literary approach to the answers of the "big questions" because nothing is very clear. I like clarity and precision”. Another one of my favorite questions were asked, does god exist? And again, either people (philosophers) were on one side or another. Finally, I really liked a bright new idea that interviewing dozens of philosophers and put together thoughts which can be compared.

The History of Philosophy had really interesting information such as western philosophy and the most famous philosophers of all time. I’ve heard of few such as Socrates and Plato. Socrates is a ancinet Greek philosopher who basiclly now known as a person who made the foundation of western philosophy. Socrates was helped with information by Plato, another ancient Greek philosopher. Plato’s had thought student about philosophy which afterewards widespread with experiments such as logic.

Week 1: Post 1 - Expert Lecture

The gravity of light dvd version 2003, by Aldous Huxley. Huxley is a man who had different ideas related to phsycological and technology. What i really like about the documentary is that keeping the mystery about the man what he's really about. Furthermroe, one of the most famous books by Huxley Brave New World which focuses on reproductive technology and biological enginereering; The book was published in 1930's. Huxley mentioned that the future technology will be created by man, but "men himself will be the victem of its technology" (documentary). One of the best part in the documentary was that technology is made for man, but things are now turning around which is odd.

Francis Fukuyama is a professor at George Mason Uni. Fukuyama ha written many essays and few novals related to end of the world type of writings. Furthermore, his one argument point i can point is that current bioengineering is so advancing that human later on life might be able to control their future generations. Another idea i liked about Fukuyama is that human adobt certain ideas that relates to them, such as Japan doing against their human wills would not be successful since its going against human nature. Moreover, the books The End of History And The Last Man and The Great Disruption are both written by Fukuyama which points out the ideas that how history is ending. He also mentions that realality is showing that certain continents and/or countries shows pattern in the history how they have been acting. Another good point from the interview was that "the everyday behavior shapes the ideas from culture" which is adopted from where you live, people around you and other social interactions in daily life.

Phil 5

I'll continue posting on this blog for a Phil 5 Class which is online class that i'm taking at Mt Sac. From this point, it will be post related to phil 5.

Syed