Why?

I recently watched a video of comedian Louis C.K. talking about his young daughter who continuously asks “why?” to whatever response her father gives her. She simply asked, “Why can’t we go outside today?” He answered, “Because it’s raining.” An easy enough answer for an easy enough question, right? No. After being asked why over and over again, he realizes that he doesn’t really know why things are the way they are and his responses become less and less legitimate. By the end, he is babbling about how “some things are and some things are not.” Why? “Because something that is not can’t be!” Huh?

It is crazy how we seem to accept whatever response given to us. When we are young and just starting to understand the world, we are curious so it is easy to ask “why?” over and over again until we fully understand. But to do this with everything that is told to us would be exhausting, so we begin to accept anything. Louis C.K. answered her child in the easiest way possible because he wasn’t curious. Is this something that comes with age? It is sad that over the years we become less and less interested about the world. Our minds get filled with more and more strange and abstract concepts that we accept simply because it is “common knowledge” and if no one else is rejecting it, why should you?

Perhaps that’s why the world seemed like such a mysterious place when we were young. Let’s be honest. The world doesn’t make sense. So many things are still unanswered. Is there a God? Is the big bang theory true? If not, how did we come to be? How is it that everything is made of atoms that we can’t even see? Why can’t I see any?! Are all thumbs the same? How do we know? Have we checked every thumb in the world?

If someone were to attempt to answer a simple question like “why is the sky blue?” chances are that they will answer it easily and simply. However, if one is to ask you “why?” over and over again to your “simple” answer, it is easy to eventually realize that you have no idea why. Why are some things true and some things false? Who said so?

Knowledge is a crazy concept. How can we ever be sure that what we know is true? And if we’re not sure, can it really be considered knowledge? For example, the sky is blue. Is it really? It has been proven that different animals see things in different colors, but to us it is blue. How can that be knowledge if we don’t really know 100 percent that the sky is actually blue?

We live in a society where we are forced to go to school to learn. Despite the constant frustrations, stress, anxiety, and sleep deprivation, I sometimes sort of like school. But what is the point if we aren’t going to ask why? I believe that a child’s mind holds the best kind of thinking; a free and open way of seeing the world that is not foolish enough to accept just anything.

Lost in the “why” questions thrown at him, Louis C.K. eventually says that he doesn’t know because he’s dumb and he’s dumb because he didn’t pay attention in high school and was high all the time. This rises yet another question. Is school what makes us knowledgeable? Also, what is stronger, knowledge that is told to us or knowledge that is gained by experience? I believe that to be truly knowledgeable, we can’t just accept anything and everything that is thrown at us. If we truly want to know the truth about something, we have to answer any and all “why” questions.

Forgive the various questions, but I believe that a wild concept like knowledge can’t be addressed simply. I don’t have all the answers.

Overcoming Fear

During the break, I went to California to skateboard and snowboard in Los Angeles and South Lake Tahoe, which caused me to keep my body active during most of the time. And something I pondered a lot was if there was anyway to overcome fear. As a snowboarder, you have to keep pushing yourself in order to learn and land new skills and tricks. However, how good you get only depends on how much you are willing to put your body at risk, and I came to realize that fear is the principal factor that ultimately impedes you to try new things. Fear of getting hurt or fracturing a bone. When I went snowboarding last year in Canada, I tried to overcome this fear as I tried to land new trick but ended up dislocating my left shoulder. And during this Winter break, I was afraid to get injured again, so I concluded that the more knowledge you build upon experiences, the greater your fear, since you're more aware of the consequences. Though to overcome this fear, you must be confident that you can make it.

Is your life yours to create?

This gets me everytime. Ms. Hunt had already talked about the idea of how well can brains study brains and also how we could be a brain in a jar somewhere that its being stimulated by someone or something. How can we measure how much of our own influence we can have over ourselves anyway? It is incredible how I spend so little time thinking about this, I feel pretty sure about how I make my own decisions about everything in my life, but now that I started thinking about it, I am not so sure anymore.

The concept of free will is probably what most people believe in. Isn't that the beauty of being a human though? To be able to make our own decisions and affect the whole course of the universe by doing whatever we want to do whenever we want to do it. I feel like I could choose not to this homework right now... But taking the idea of how everything we know including us and every atom in our bodies obeys the laws of physics then our whole lives are predetermined, therefore I did not choose to do this blog entry. I was going to do this anyway. Determinism is very confusing to me, and I cannot really make anything out of it, I guess it is very hard to imagine myself as a puppet that obeys the laws of physics and has a predetermined future, and there is nothing I can do to change it.

I have researched about the topic, and I still cannot find anything that makes me understand it so I can't make up my mind about if free will does exist or not. For quite some time in the last month I could not think about something else, and I felt really frustrated. But as said before, there is no way to prove the existence of freewill, and even though we might actually act like robots and not choose anything we do ever, it shouldn't really matter should it? If it does or does not exist we will still live our lives making our own choices about everything. We might be making them freely or we might have the illusion we are, but either way the we will have to wait to see what happens as we cannot predict the future.

Travel, a source of Knowledge

Here at graded we use the knowledge of cultures everyday. What you can and can’t say to some people what jokes you can make to certain people. I believe that this is a result of general knowledge but it is also acquired by travel. 

Travelling is something that I have been used to since very little my parents have taken me all around the globe. It is something that they loved and have taught me to love as well. When you travel you might go to someplace you have been before or you might also go to a place you have never seen at all. When I think of all the times that I have complained because of a place or because of a hike that was too long, I look back and I think of what all those moments have brought me (and I hope will continue bringing) in terms of knowledge of the world, of the numerous magical places there are on this earth and most importantly of all the various different culture that I then encountered again in my life. When you travel you always gain all this knowledge about different cultures and how they are different than you. It allows you to open your points of you and have a larger way of seeing things, instead of just seeing things how you want to see them. The knowledge that you can gain through experiencing is worth in my opinion so much more than the knowledge that you gain in books or on the internet. When you actually go to a place in the world you can see with your own eyes the way they choose to live and how. If you read these things you won’t gain the same kind of knowledge. You know how those experiences feel and you have been in the reality of them. You are directly in the source of where the knowledge that the people got to write that book or post that article online have been and you get their experiences and their knowledge gained on your own. 

A personal experience of gaining knowledge by travelling for me would be the trips that I have been doing around south america. They have helped me not only understand the country that I am living in better but also the countries around it. Many friends that I have met at Graded come from theses places all around Brazil and South America, which is why travelling to those places help me understand the people that I am surrounded with each day, better. Of course a lot of people at school have not kept these traditions from their countries as you can observe when you travel to those places but it helps you understand their background and their values. 

Sometimes you might even be surprised when as you return to a place you have been many times before you still learn things that you didn't know. There are an infinite number of things to learn. 

Spending Time with Family and Friends

In my vacation, I went to Bahia with my Grandma and cousins, to Riviera with my family and friends, and to Aspen with my family. What I really enjoyed was spending time with people I loved. When you are around people you love, everything just becomes different. Different people may have different cultures, but when it comes to spending time with people he/she loves, all of the feeling comes together. I had a wonderful time in Riviera, with the wonderful climate. New Years Eve was amazing, and I believe that this year will be great for all of us. In Aspen, I skied a lot. My greatest moment was when I went heliskiing. Even though I only ski once a year, my knowledge from the previous years still exist. Which is interesting, that teenagers and kids learn and capture knowledge easier than adults. For example, if my Dad was to start snowboarding, he would take longer to learn than I did (I learned in 2 days). I don't know if it is because the teenager brain is not fully developed yet (so it can capture new things easier), but I guess it is somewhat related to it.   

"Truth" in the movie "The Invention of Lying"

     During vacation i spent a good amount of my time inside because of bad weather. One of the most interesting things that i did inside was watch the movie "The Invention of Lying". For those who don't know, the movie is about a world where not only do people not lie, but lying in and of itself just does not exist. Everyone you meet and everything you see will always be 100% truthful, whether it is hurtful or not. The movie follows a man who "invents", but more reasonably discovers, lying and uses it to improve his life by lying to others since they do not know nor cannot know that he is lying.

     Last class, we spent some time talking about truths and a little bit about personal opinions and beliefs. This got me thinking about "The Invention of Lying". Since an opinion is something that we think as one person and is something that we do not share with everyone else in the world, we do not consider it fact, and some people go far enough to say that they are directly against someones opinion. But in the movie, people in the world cannot distinguish fact from fiction so if i had the ability to lie, i could just say, i am the sexiest man alive and i could instantly be with any women i wanted to be with, i could then go to the bank and withdraw a million dollars, because as long as i say i have a million dollars, they believe. This idea further pushes my question to something deeper; can an idea override and overpower biology? For example, let's say that one of my friends greatly dislikes orange juice. That is something that cannot really be changed, you cannot just flip a switch between liking something and not. But if i were to tell him, "You love orange juice, it is your favorite drink." would that instantly change him and his personality just because i said it. An even more extreme example of this would be if someone had a physical deformation or had permanent damage to their body like a bad leg that they had since birth and will always have. If i said,"Your leg is now completely cured and are able to walk completely normal for the rest of your life." would that person miraculously be cured of the bad leg?

     In the end, no one can really know and have any answers to these questions, but we do see some of these things on a much smaller scale. For example, i have been told that if i am feeling sick i should just tell myself that i am feeling fine and will no longer be sick. I have tried this and it has worked, whether it is a legitimate way of changing biology of not, i can't say.

Is it rational to instinctively reject something that will keep you alive?

I never read or heard anything regarding personal or shared knowledge; however, experiences  and over the last 17 years suggest that there were different categories of knowledge, and last week’s classes just confirmed it. After having a more solid comprehension of this concept, I started drawing connections that occurred to me during my break. 

I took my sister to a movie on a very busy avenue in Paris, and walking down, you could see hundreds of heads crossing by. If you decide to apply this new concept to this very complex system ahead of me, you could imagine that every single person on that avenue knew what we call “shared knowledge”, these are mainly instinctive skills. But as you start adding information transforming the system into a more complex one, that spectrum of shared knowledge would get narrower, and you will end with many categories, or circles of a few people that share the same specific information and knowledge. 

But the avenue was only the “mise-en-bouche”, this situation got even deeper when I entered a theater to watch a play with my little sister. It was a comedy show, and at a point in the show, the actors made a reference to the word “inertia”. At that point, what is considered shared knowledge by Mr. Cross and I, wasn’t the case for my little sister who is only entering 6th grade next week. We can’t forget that she is looking at the play from a different perspective, since her schema is still being build, and is at its early stages. How could I “share” my accumulation of several years of knowledge, what we call the exchange zone, in only a couple words for my sister to understand the reference and consequently understanding the show? I now believe that because my sister is still young, and has little shared knowledge, it limited her understanding, and was difficult to get the remaining of the show. Limited knowledge can lead you to barriers with society, and if you aren’t up to date with that knowledge, society will instinctively reject you, since it is afraid of change. But we all know that change is a particular skill that keeps us alive, we adapt to extreme conditions, that is the basis of natural selection. 

How could society reject something that is keeping it alive from its own destruction?

We would classify this act of rejection as irrational. But if we look back at the lexical choice of that last sentence, the fact that we used the word irrational, means that our society works on a rational, organised basis, where chaos and irrational situations is seen as a danger. Society then rejects different perspectives or different opinion because it fears the chaos that this new perspective will cause, so it decides to simply eliminate it.

A crucial point that I think we should distinguish is relative knowledge. By now, we think there is the share knowledge that every human shares, which are primarily instinctive skills, and the personal knowledge, which is unique for each soul on Earth. But and the living creatures who don’t share the “human shared” knowledge? For example a fish, or an elephant? Each one has its own circle of individuals who share the same information. But a human won’t have the same shared knowledge that an elephant, or a fish will have amongst its specie. 

*mise-en-bouche is a French term that is simply impossible to translate, as we saw in our previous unit of Language, I found it so adequate for this situation that I had to put it. It is an expression that signifies an initial appetisers that has as objective to stimulate your tasting nerves in your mouth and prepare the meal that will be served. 

Education and Knowledge

As the oldest of three siblings and two cousins I have been in close contact with quite a few babies in my lifetime. Also, I have a second cousin with an unknown mental disorder that makes her unable to speak among other daily duties and so she is completely dependent on other people. Although my cousin is far from a newborn, her abilities are pretty on par with those of a toddler and over the vacation I wondered so much about how much she knows that we don't know. There is so much unknown about what we know as babies or in this case, there is so much we don't know about brain damaged patients. It makes it seem impossible to know whether it really is nature or nurture that affects this capability of acquiring knowledge. There are, of course, theories that test this unknown, for example the concept of a Tabula Rasa, or blank slate. Historically a concept thought by Aristotle, this theory states that the mind is a completely blank slate at birth and that we know nothing until we learn. Although a somewhat valid idea, I personally have many questions that rebuttal this claim. For instance, how do we know how to breathe when we first come out of the womb? Or cry, or smile? How can he claim that we know absolutely nothing when that is impossible. Humans cannot live without knowledge, it is something that we acquire every second, no every millisecond of every day through the sensory information gathered by our fingers, lips, noses, etc. And so, in writing this I think that I have started to favor the nurture side of the nature versus nurture debate. I believe that education strengthens knowledge and learning new things, not only at school but through our surroundings and the people that we know and see is very influential to who we are as people. It is very plausible that someone who has a Harvard level education can get a much better score on the SAT than someone who lives in the slums and has had no contact with institutional education. But what really is knowledge and how can we justify our society's claims that standard education equals success?

We grow up, well the ones who are privileged enough to do so, with educations that start as early as three years old and graduate high schools and ivy league colleges with these 8 by 10 pieces of paper that allow us to get jobs at prestigious business offices and high end hospitals. But theres also this, "What if the cure for cancer is trapped in the mind of someone who can't afford an education?". An amazing quote that I found over the vacation that really made me think what if. What if it isn't about nurture and some of the world's greatest minds are trapped into child slavery in sweatshops in China or dealing drugs in the favelas of Brazil. What if. And although I like to keep the hypotheticals to a minimum, with knowledge, the what if's are infinite. What if our education system is complete bull and we are just wasting 20 years of our lives learning useless information. What if no one had education, would we be outcasts for knowing a nation's history of why they celebrate July 4th or the devastating events of the Nazi invasion in World War II and the Holocaust? What if slum children were given the opportunity to study, would it change their lives for the better or not at all? What if standardized testing is not what we should be doing; what if we  should be testing kids on their ability to think, to gain knowledge and to learn no based on what they can memorize what they have been taught in the 12+ years of school they attended? And what if we could find out what is really going through the minds of kids whose parents believe that there is no hope; the kids that are dropped off at institutions because of their handicaps and will never live up to their full potentials because no one believes in them. What if the cure to cancer, AIDS, the next big thing,  the meaning of life for God sakes, what if a brilliant mind can't offer the world what he was meant to offer because he is trapped in the vicious cycle of poverty. No one believes in the girl with severe brain damage who has to wear a diaper at age 19 and grunts inappropriately in public places. No one believes in the young boy selling cocaine on the favela alleyways to save money for the accidental baby he now has to take care of.

Education is important and I believe that. I cannot tell you the amount of things that I have learned over the years, mostly because I have conveniently forgotten the names of the types of clouds, but also because there is so much that I have learned and I don't take that for granted. But I do believe this. I believe that babies are incredibly smart creatures because they are the most curious and they see things in a way that no one else can. They see the world as something unknown; they no nothing so they know nothing can hurt them. I believe that communication is also a huge bridge of knowledge that can oftentimes sever the pathway. We cannot communicate with babies and so we do not know what they are thinking, how they are thinking or if they are even thinking anything at all. I mean, can they even form thoughts without a language; do they have a language that we as articulate human beings don't know about?  As for mentally handicapped children and adults, first of all I believe in them. I have started learning in psychology about types of disorders that sever language centers in the brain and memory loss that can cause the inability to learn new things or tasks but, I ultimately believe that every soul has the capability to make thoughts, either conscious or unconscious. And in those thoughts, knowledge is created, destroyed and adapted. So maybe it is nature or nurture of a combination of both. But the great unknown is what makes knowledge so fascinating. We use our brains to study brains and gain knowledge by learning about knowledge. We could we completely wrong about so many things that we know, but knowledge is flexible. I mean, not too long ago we did think the Earth was flat.  

Blind Kids in Aspen

During this summer break, I went to the beach and after to Aspen, Colorado to ski 14 days. Beautiful weather, great snow, and many great experiences, such as helliski and cat ski. However, something that caught my attention was when I was going down a regular blue run and I saw two young, small kids going down the mountain in about 80 km/hr. They had something different in them: a yellowish vest on, and they were going down as if they had already trained sometime: they did the same movements, went in the same tracks, everything the same. I began to look at that in amazement, it really did catch my attention. I began to follow them. When I got a few feet close to them, they did not look at me. However, one of them, the one that was last on the "trail", sort of felt my presence nearby, and quickly skied the other direction. Peculiar, yet strange to me. I began to look more carefully, the way they communicated, the way they looked, etc.. I then found out that they did not say anything: they communicated through sounds. I then remembered the last time I saw these people in yellowish vests: they were blinds. However, the others had an assistant with them. In this case, none of the boys had assistance. I began to wonder: how can these two blind boys ski without hitting anything? I then began to look at the things we learned in TOK. Maybe schema, language does apply to this. Memorisation as well. These blind kids had skied so many times in that run, that they memorised the steps or paths they had to take in order to ski without hitting anyone. They also might see some light, and have a certain schema that allows them to be able to know where people are. It was really strange. Also, blind people have good listening skills. They can hear you miles away. I am pretty certain that these kids could hear my skies going down the mountain a couple of miles away from them, and that is why they could change directions so easily to dodge from someone. After this incident, I began to ponder: do blind people live in different worlds? How are they able to ride safety if they live in different worlds? I do believe blind people live in different worlds, they have a different language and they adapt to their conditions. But these two kids had a different aspect to them. They did live in our world, but they also lived in their own blind world. In other words, they lived in two worlds. How is this even possible? 

O Alienista

Last year,  Dunder gave us a short story, O Alienista by Machado de Assis (Portuguese students will remember), to read for an in class analysis. Centred around a doctor named Dr. Bacamarte, a stoic and studious but peculiar man with peculiar habits (he chose his wife based on her physical ability to bear him strong and intellectual children), the book serves as a criticism towards the Scientistic movement (a movement where reason and science were the only means through which knowledge could be achieved).

In the story, Dr. Bacamarte, a studious man with various accolades and degrees and highly respected by all, settles down in his hometown and builds a mental institute, seeking to use the interns as experiments in order to find the origin of madness. There, he admitted those he deemed as “irrational”, “delusional”, and “crazy”, such as a superstitious bar owner, a vain barber, and an indecisive shopkeeper. Anyone who showed any instabilities or irrationalities in their actions or emotions would be forcefully admitted. Soon, though, more and more people were admitted for the smallest of reasons, such as a woman who had a fit of hysterics after she discovered she lost her baby, or the painter who painted the madhouse’s windows a ridiculous shade of bright blue. By the end of the year, half of the town had been locked inside the madhouse, even his wife, who was checked in after spending an entire night fretting over which dress she would wear for a ball. Enraged, the citizens got together, and rioted in front of the madhouse, demanding the release of their friends and family members. Soon, those protesters found themselves hauled and locked inside the madhouse as well, for acting violently and loudly, a true sign of madness for Dr. Bacamarte. After admitting almost every single person into his madhouse, he realised that not one person he knew lived in a purely scientific, logical, and rational matter as he did, and that what made people “sane" or “normal" was the very presence of these small irrationalities and anomalies in their behaviour. No one but himself, who behaved strictly according to logic and reason rather than emotion, was perfect, therefore he was the odd one out. In the end, after freeing all the patients, he locked himself in, never to be seen again. 

Written in the late 1800's, during the emergence of Scientism in Brazil, O Alienista is a brilliant piece, where Dr. Bacamarte’s town becomes a microcosm of Brazil, or even the entire western world. Using Dr. Bacamarte as a symbol of the scientistic thought, Machado de Assis’ references to movements within scientism, such as the explanation of why Dr. Bacamarte chose his wife (a reference to eugenism), transform this book into a harsh criticism towards the radical beliefs gaining popularity during that time. Scientism, centred around objectivity and rationality, rejecting anything related to empiricism, emotion, or faith and relying purely on science and logic, had become the fad of century. Much like what happened in Dr. Bacamarte’s town, O Alienista warned that the utter reliance on reason would never be enough to explain the world around us, nor would it be the cure to all its problems. Natural human behaviour, it argues, is irrational and many times, purely driven by emotions. It is something that cannot be explained or solved (if there is anything to solve) by science. Human nature is no disease, it’s what defines us. 

This book establishes strong connections with today's class’ introduction to reason as a way of knowing, for as both the book and the course suggest, reason is one of the various ways. O Alienista was written over 100 years ago, and the Scientistic movement has passed, but the messages and themes in this book are still extremely relevant. Even today, to many, science and logic are the equivalents to truth, and many seem to forget that even it has its own flaws. Although, technically, science can explain life, thought, emotion, and most things imaginable, it does so only in its own terms. The human experience is far too complex to be explained with words, thoughts, equations, diagrams, whatever. We (humans) are not purely rational creatures, nor should we be. <- knowledge claim, open to debate. 

Shantaram and The Tendancy Towards Complexity

During the break, I finished off a rather wonderful book called Shantaram, which I have now somewhat contentiously placed in my quadrifecta of favorite books (Atlas Shrugged, The Road, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and Shantaram). The book, which was based I presume rather loosely on the life of the author, captured that heady mixture of philosophy and action whose coexistence lends a great deal of credibility to both. Without delving into the greater landscape of the debate on the nature of good and evil which the book pertains, I will move to a particularly fascinating concept that was discussed; a sort of paradigm through which we can view good and evil, God and the malign, order and chaos, which the book termed the "Tendency Towards Complexity". 

The basic principal is this: in the beginning, during the singularity, all that existed did so in a condition of the purest possible simplicity. The singularity was incredibly hot and almost infinitely dense, leading to a massive expansion, the big bang. As the universe expanded and cooled, energy was transformed into the first subatomic particles, and eventually the first few elements as we know them. These atoms (principally hydrogen, helium, and lithium) formed massive clouds, which eventually, due to the attraction of gravity, coalesced into the first stars. Within these stars, the first of the more complex, heavier elements were synthesised. Even later, as the universe continued to cool (though at a slower and slower rate) solar systems were formed. Add billions of years, and (not to delve into the biology) life is born, through some nigh on miraculous combination of elements and amino acids. This is basic life, single cells, which grew more and more complex. Suddenly there are multicellular organisms, and eventually, the first homo sapiens walk. We construct a society that hails progress and technology, and here we are, with the potency of microprocessors increasing exponentially with each passing year, beginning to realize the amazing possibilities that lie ahead. 

Now, why list all these facts and occurrences, which I am sure you have all heard a thousand times before? It is because in all of them, there is one overwhelming trend: the simple becomes more and more complex. And so the book went on to qualify good and evil, in that good is what advances the complexity of the universe, and evil is what destroys it, reverts the process, creates chaos. This was particularly fascinating to me, because it made me realize that even random events can be considered good or evil, where previously, I had thought both to be purely human characteristics, which could only be the result of human actions. I will give an example. In the universe, though many would say it is probable we are not alone, we have little concrete evidence to that effect. For all we know, we could be all the life the universe has to offer. As such, that makes the human brain the most complex object in the universe. By the system I have just described, that also makes it the purest manifestation of good in existence. Aside from the rather obvious conclusion that murder, as it would essentially destroy the function of a complex being, is evil in any scenario (a sort of categorical imperative), this calls into question natural events. Death becomes pure evil, rather than a necessary force. And say that, at random, a hunk of rock hurtling through space collides with earth and destroys all life. That rock, and its trajectory, and perhaps even the previous collision that spawned it, is evil. 

Now, I am well aware that many physicists would disagree with this idea. After all, doesn't the second law of thermodynamics state that in an isolated system, entropy can only increase? If the universe is in fact hurtling towards heat death, then complexity becomes an agent of its own destruction. A sort of tragic hero of sorts, tragically flawed by nature. However, for the moment, in the timeframe we inhabit and what has come before, the concept holds, despite the inevitability of an end. Besides, every concept has its counterpoint.

Return to the idealisation of complexity as a final goal. It is here that the author draws the inevitable connection between the fundamentally good, the complex, and the concept we so often call God. I will make a more personal connection. I was in art class recently, sketching some anatomy (specifically the muscular system), and I could not help but marvel that this is the product of essentially random events and a process of selection. I remarked to the person sitting across the table from me: "How can this be? This sketch alone is the most compelling argument for the existence of God that there is." This from someone who is far from religious. But then again, perhaps that what makes this idea so monumental to me; it proposes God as an inevitable product of the universe, not the inverse. If God is complexity, its existence cannot be denied. However, its prevalence (or its inevitability, I suppose), as aforementioned, can be questioned. Rather than continue to write a dissertation on how murky the semantics can become, I'll force myself to an end here. I've been thinking for a long while on the nature of good and evil, and how far we are willing to draw the lines that divide the two. And on the subject of knowledge, what could be more fundamental? Ethics is one of the most difficult places to truly know an answer. Such a comprehensive one as this was too fascinating to pass up.

TL;DR - physical complexity = good, destruction = bad.

Knowledge is Power

During this vacation I started to feel a lot of pain on throat, it felt like a pressure, something I had never experienced before. I was immediately worried. First of all because I thought I might have vocal nodules and second of all because I’ve had problems with my thyroid and my dad had thyroid cancer. So I decided to get my throat checked on an ENT specialist, who told me everything was fine with my larynx and that it might be a stomach problem I already had that is triggering the pain. I was relieved but I still had one more exam to go though, an ultrasound of my neck region. I wasn’t really worried, there was close to zero chance of having any tumors or anything wrong at all with my thyroid but when the doctor came and sat down I started to doubt my certainty. Laying down and looking at the screen with the corner of my eye, I watched as the doctor marked certain areas and how serious his face was. I had no idea of what the screen was showing and that made me realize how powerful knowledge can be. At the end he said everything was fine which made me feel very relieved. But on my way back home, I started to reflect on what had happened. The doctor could have said things such as, “so far, so good” throughout the exam; he knew what he was looking at, yet he did not share the knowledge. Remaining silent gave him a lot of power, holding back his knowledge gave him a lot of control. Also at the same time, my lack of knowledge along with his lack of communication left me terrified. Knowledge holds a lot of power; if I had known what those images meant, I wouldn’t need him to tell me anything, nor would I have been worried. It really made me reflect on how much knowing something that someone else doesn’t know can give you an advantage over him/her, proving how knowledge is power.

Winter Break Enlightenment

Frederico Miguel

Block: 4

Winter Break Enlightenment

            During 2014’s Winter break I traveled to the U.S. with my family and friends. I have previously been in the country before, but this was the first time I went to one of the most beautiful and well-managed states in the American nation. Texas is for sure the best state I have visited so far. One of the great things about this state is the amount of freedom citizens have and how they behave even without many strict laws. One thing that intrigued me was that people could carry as many firearms they want to protect their self and property. For example, if someone tries to steal your car, you may shoot him or her. Indeed this might not seem as a great solution for some people but it is obvious that the thief will feel reluctant to try anything if they know they might be killed in the process.

            Since many people still hunt in Texas, many of the firearms are strictly used to practice this sport. Therefore, children are taught and educated so they can have a gun in the future. This process create a schema where people are familiar with firearms and know the dangers one can make to a living been.

            What really bothered me throughout my vacation was that I could not see the same system been implemented here in Brazil. Personally, I see in the newspaper a lot of thieves and “favela” leaders with all the firearms and the citizens are in the hands of an unprepared police. This is why the violence in this country is growing. We could be doing something if only our culture and laws were different. Less than 1% of the Brazilian population knows and carries firearms according to the military. In Texas, this number jumps to 35.9% according to the Washington Post. Here in São Paulo, the Newspaper Folha said that every 35 hours a person is kidnapped. Why doesn’t that happen in Texas? The reason might be on the education each individual receive and their means of protection. Even though one might say that guns increase the amount of violence, I say that guns don’t kill people, but people do.

Blog Post #1 - Thiago

Logic and the way it affects us in our day to day interactions is interesting to me. I've been hearing all my life the expressions "its only logical" or "use logic" or "logically, blah blah blah." So what has been occurring to me and what I've been thinking about is whether logic is simply a human ideal and an ingrained in the way our brain reasoning works, or if it is possible that if mankind followed a completely different course through the thousands of years of its existence, and if because of this, we evolved to have an entirely different "logical process," one that everyone agreed and considered "logical" today. Is it possible that maybe a completely illogical set of events that work with each other could sound logical in another way. It's hard to explain simply because all my life, being a "sane" human being, I have understood the logical process of events and how to use logic and reason in my dad to day life. What if chess, a widely known game of logic and using it to defeat your opponent was completely nonsensical in another reality. The way one wins or masters game was completely illogical and made no sense to the common human. But what if, hypothetically, a deemed insane person could function and play that game perfectly with his or her friend in a mental asylum. I may be pushing the last hypothesis a bit too far. But what I question is, why is it that if I say "use logic" and proceed to make assumptions about a certain set of events, my friend could easily follow the assumptions and steps to come to the same conclusion as I have, assuming the friend in question is not in fact insane. Our brains may be programmed to a certain system of logical methods that we deem correct, but another question I asked is what if just because us "logical people" are the majority that we are in fact those who use "logic" and correct. The minority, those who we deem crazy, or mad, are called these because we completely do not understand, but in fact they may have a completely different and opposite logical system that makes it so that we will never understand them or the other way around.

Snapshot 1

After class on the second day of the second semester, capture your thinking in a blog response. Discuss an insight, idea, connection, or question that you have had about knowledge, either something you were mulling over during the recent vacation or something that today's discussion sparked. Feel free to check out the tab on our site that details what makes a good blog response. Don't worry if your thought seems very esoteric or specific only to you. Whatever you've been thinking about has a knowledge element to it that you can explore.