First Week (A Week Later)

Yep, like many others in our class this is my first blog. Personally, I feel it a bit self-indulgent to have a page devoted to my own ramblings, but considering that it is merely a drop in the dumpster of junk that is the internet, I guess I can go right ahead. 

Anyways, I liked how we began our class discussion with the meaning of life and what it meant to each of us. One of my usual problems with this topic is the ego-centric manner that we humans approach this question; that self being our individual self or collectively as humans. 

Yes, Star Trek IV sums up my feelings quite nicely on this point. In the film, a probe is causing critical damage to the Earth, almost totally ionizing the atmosphere. Spock concludes that it must be a message from an intelligent race. McCoy asks if they are saying hello to humans, but Spock points out that human arrogance assumes the message must be meant for them.

Tragically, our perspective is inherently flawed by our own existence, objectivity is an illusion, but to accept this and move beyond it, is the only way to step back from a cliff for which awaits the free-fall of nihilism. I feel that we must understand that we have limited sphere of relevance, that is minute with respect to others, like the supra-organism that is Earth. 

Anyways, Erwin Schrödinger encapsulates much of the early discourse on the matter meaning, writing DEUS FACTUS SUM (I have become god), similar to the Vedantic axiom Atman=Brahman. I wonder whether he had Descartes in mind as well, because this gels nicely with his musings in the Second Meditation, in which he declares, "So after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind." (Med. 2, AT 7:25). So it follows that If we define our own existence, than we must define the meaning of that existence ourselves. It also kinda explains why we collectively and as individuals are unable to consistently think beyond ourselves


Examined Life
I found many of the thinkers featured to be pretentious and at times disconnected with society, but I found Dr. Appiah to be refreshing. He for the most part avoided intellectual jargon and abstractionism and heads straight for what I think is the crux of our problem, we have quickly expanded beyond social structure of small groups until relatively recently to these communities that have 300 million-1.5 billion members. I agree that the problem is that we now have obligations to individuals whom we have never even met, and that is a challenging task.

 I Have a Dream Foundation
 I am excited that programs like this exist, because I believe that influencing kids at this young and programmable, ahem excuse me, formative period, sets them up to more aggressively pursue interests outside of their immediate surroundings and have a perspective outside of there current environment. While we can talk about funding battles and the logistics of school, I strongly believe that if we plant a thirst for learning in a student's mind and a self-confidence to achieve we will have already won more than half the battle of getting "at-risk" kids into higher learning institutions without even coming near the mess of red tape that is the bureaucracy of our government.