And now it's time for...

...another ridiculous philosophical question! *ahem*

Let's say there exists a person who is an absolute expert on everything having to do with human eye vision. We'll call him...I dunno, Ray. When it comes to seeing, he knows ever single process and bit of interaction that occurs in the eye, between the eye and the brain, and in the brain itself. For example, he knows exactly what seeing the color red is like for every possible structure involved in it; every wavelength received, every interpretation, everything.
However, Ray is blind. He has never seen the color red, and he cannot conceive of experiencing the color since all he has ever known is black. Still, no one is more knowledgeable on the experience and the process of seeing red than he is. He's just never done it.
Then, by some miracle or scientific advancement, he gains the ability to see red. Does he learn anything new past what he already knows?

Merry Christmas!

(P.S. And just for fun, is it possible to be an absolute skeptic if you have unbreakable proof in your skepticism? Or is imperfect skepticism, or not knowing for sure if you are skeptical, the only way to be absolutely skeptic? hmmm...)

It just occurred to me...

Randomly, while watching a goofy show online...
Christmas is almost here!!!
Family and food and presents and all kinds of great stuff that I can't think of right now!
I can't wait!!

Though, I worry how my mind got from a hero defeating a fire-breathing ninja to Christmas at home. I bet I'll have weird dreams tonight.
hmmm....

Fast semester...

Whew, been a while since I last posted.
This semester has really flown by, especially with things being so busy her at the close. I swear I say this every year, but I just got used to writing 2008, and now we have to switch already!

The big thing this week was registering for my classes next semester. I had this great plan with interesting classes and plenty of down time, then everything collapsed when I learned that some of them had prerequisites. Plan B!
So, first I've got Elementary Spanish, which will be loads of fun to wake up to every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. I still remember the language pretty well from high school, so hopefully it wont be too much of a drag.
Next is History of Ethics, which is kind of a followup to this semester's Problems of Philosophy. This past week has been about ethics, starting with Aristotle's The Nature of Virtue (which I talk about later) which has been interesting and looks like it has some real life usefulness. 'Cuz to tell the truth, all of this semester's stuff has been extremely interesting, but it seems like most of it doesn't exist in the real world per se. Though, if nothing actually does exist (besides my mind), then that doesn't really matter much, huh?
Then (because my other class fell through) I have Environmental Ethics. I'm hoping this will different enough to stay interesting. Who knows, maybe when I come back home this summer I'll be the most ethically knowledgeable person in Lakeport. Need to know ancient Egyptian right of punishment for stealing sacred cats?! I'm your Mr. Ethics Person!
Last is Intro to Sociology, which should go well with the others. It was kind of a spur of the moment thing when my Lit class didn't work out. I think I remember Mom saying how much she enjoyed the class, and it sure looks like a thought-provoking subject. Yeah ok, it's true I knew basically nothing about it before looking it up online, but afterwords it looked good. Really!

Class-wise this semester, next week is going to be a hurricane of due dates and frantic, late studying. Hurricane Pomona. Foremost is a big paper and presentation due in Archaeology about the Viking influence in North America before Columbus's discovery of 'India.' It shouldn't be much of a problem; I know I can produce and deliver a quality PowerPoint, but I need to make sure I practice the speech enough. I still cringe over my first semester's presentation on Sir Kay.... Oh yeah! I got my second test back from that class, the one I thought I didn't do real well on, and it turns out I did better by about 10 points. It's tough to tell, but I think my grade is balancing between A/B there. All of those early papers weren't worth many points, unfortunately.
Speaking of tests, I just got the last one in Geology, which I was confident about. Despite the great potential for irony here, that one actually turned out as good as I had hoped, with like 97.5/100. I think that makes the grade there a high B, which the soon-to-be-due project and final should raise up.
Economics is coming along well. The A/B is going to ride on the final, but as of now I think it's like a 92 or so. All things considered, it should be alright. At the moment we're studying everything having to do with international trade. Tariffs, quotas, globalization, the whole deal. Interestingly, it appears that both tariffs and quotas, which we use all of the time in the US, tend to do more harm than good. Go figure.
Aristotle's views on what make a virtuous life are pretty interesting. He had a special word for the best life one can lead: Eudaimonia, which roughly means good spirits. It doesn't really have a good translation into English, and is often (wrongly) interpreted to mean happiness. Happiness is more of a psychological state of being, while Eudaimonia is a kind of permanent evaluation of life. According to Aristotle, the 3 best lives are those of pleasure, honor (fame), and money-making. This is hotly disputed, but generally makes sense with a little explanation. First off, pleasure is an end unto itself. You can ask why someone does anything they do, and there will be an underlying purpose of some kind; but asking why someone does something for the purpose of pleasure is a moot question, since the purpose of pleasure is self-evident. He assumes (justifiably in my opinion) that even the painful things a person does are meant to bring pleasure to oneself or others.
As for fame, he's not talking about critical acclaim so much as knowing that one is the best at what one does. This is where 'honor' comes in. It's more personal than others seeing you as the best in that your own desire can be completely independant of those around you. It's kind of like the Olympic competitors not recieving money professionally, if you take out all of the endorsements. It's not saying there's anything wrong with getting praise, only that it should not be the driving factor behind your honor.
Moneymaking didn't seem very convincing to me, and in truth this kind of life just leads to the other two; getting pleasure or knowing you're among the richest. Overall, all three are just meant to be lives of virtuous activity. I like this stuff since it more of what I can relate to personally, and I like thinking about what makes a 'perfect' life. I especially like the idea of living without needing the approval of others; we all strive for personal satisfaction, but few, if any, really do. I don't mean like indifference, more like...perfect self-confidence? I dunno.


Alright, onward to those crazy vikings. Odin protect me!
Talk to you all later.

Funny coincidence (?!)

I was studying for my Geology test coming up and I had to make an acronym to help me remember all the Periods of the geologic time scale. Here's the first thing I came up with:

(Periods) Acronym

(Cambrian) Can

(Ordovician) Our

(Silurian) States
(Devonian) Dig
(Carboniferous) Coal
(Mississippian) Mines
(Pennsylvanian) Permanently
(Permian) Providing
(Triassic) That
(Jurassic) Juries
(Cretaceous) Continue
(Tertiary) Treating
(Paleogene) Poor
(Quaternary) Quadrupeds
(Neogene) Negligently?

This college has burned environmentalism into my subconscious!

P.S. Sorry it's so hard to read. This dang blog program makes it hard to make separate lists...

Thoughts on the election.

Dad can attest as to how worried I was about the outcome of this election. While I did not think that it would decide the fate (or end) of the world, I definitely thought it could be a step in that direction.As to how it all turned out? Well, if you haven't been watching the election coverage, Sen. Obama won by a considerable margin (as of 9:40, 338 electoral votes to 156). I guess I feel happy, but now here comes the next big worry. Now, I know that no presidential candidate can complete every single thing they promise along the two-year campaign trail, but I really hope that Prez. Obama will follow through on his word. This is a tricky climate to enter into office to say the least.

Personally, I think think I did a fare job researching the candidates' policies, and I did my best to let their individual characters supplement, not decide, my decision. However, I do think I let some things affect me a lot, particularly how much attack media Sen. McCain released near the end of the stretch. This is not to say that Sen. Obama didn't release these ads as well, but the shear amount of McCain's, not to mention some of the claims made therein, definitely cinched my final vote.

This year's classes in Philosophy and Economics have made me a bit more knowledgeable in understanding the drives behind much of the pomp and process, and I guess this more than anything is what makes me a bit apprehensive towards the future. I just have to remind myself of some of the better things I've come to realize this year. Specifically, that I really believe this world is the best one that can be, and since it is foolish to try and predict the future beyond what I myself can know or change, I might as well not worry about it. Things go wrong all the time, but everything is a process based off of everything before it, so everything bad and evil today is the result of the way this world developed. I'm not saying one can't hope and try to make the world; in fact, I believe that the good we do is a result of natural processes too, and this gives me more hope for the future than anything can. Evil will never completely disappear, but neither will good. I'm not one to define what the definitions of 'good' and 'evil' are; most of things I can think think of have some kind of gray area of disputable worth (minus things like genocide, which I refuse the see any good in.) Still, I don't think that the goodness in humanity will ever be completely stamped out, in whatever form it comes in. Whatever happened here and whatever happens in the future, I can know that good will stay; all I have to worry about is what part I will play in building it up or destroying it.

Wow. Now THAT'S a monologue. Sorry everyone.

I would like to know what everyone else thought of the election if you don't mind sharing. I promise I wont get angry at your opinions, though I may call you a doodyhead. I can't guarantee anything there...

Descartes before des horse...

Whew. This afternoon was crazy. Morning was normal, but afternoon? Bonkers. Mad. Dotty. Gaga. Bananas, even.

The first Philosophy midterm. 75 minutes for two full essays and 10 short answer questions on everything from why God does(n't) exist to why we can('t) know anything for sure to whether (or not) anything exists outside of our perceptions. Erasers burned. Lead flew. Contact lenses dried out. Small fires started on several tests from pencil-friction.
Heh.
Melodramatic, much?!

For reals, I think it went well. I had done a pretty decent job studying last night and before. The only thing I'm worried about were the two essays. One of the prompts was pretty funny though:
"If Neo had read Descartes' Meditations while in the Matrix, to what extent could he prove that an external world (REAL world) exists? Imagine he finds them before meeting Trinity."

The other question was easier, about Locke's ideas of Primary and Secondary qualities of objects. This reading was pretty interesting. Locke argues that even though we can't be 100% certain of what we perceive, objects in the world still exist through their 'Primary qualities.' These are qualities that, even if we did not have the senses we do (sight, tough, etc) we would still be able to discover through some means. Like location, mass, dimensions, etc. He says what we perceive are 'secondary qualities' or qualities that the object creates in us, which some being without our senses would not be able to even conceive of, much less experience. Like, if a being who had never smelled anything saw a rose for the first time, he/she wouldn't try to find out how it smelled. Likewise, there are things humans can't see which others can ( like THE 6TH DIMENSION!!! oooOOOooo!), and which we can't even imagine would be like.
I still don't really buy the Primary quality things since it seems like everything about an object is something we perceive in it, and if there was a being that couldn't see and could pass through matter (like, I dunno, a ghost or something), how could it tell something's mass? Or dimensions?

And now for something completely different! Tonight in celebration of Oktoberfest, the dining halls served German food! I had a delicious (reeaaaally filling) dinner of knockwurst, bratwurst, speatzel, potatoes, and cabbage. It was prretty good, but nowhere near those dinners we had back over that side o' the world.
Oof...just realized, my breath must smell fantastic now. Time to go brush.

Talk to you all later!

First day off of Fall Break...

...actually turned out pretty good. Some weird, awesome things in class today.

In Archaeology, we were just assigned a short group project where each group examines an ancient African or Mesopotamian state. First of all, it was a surprise to me that ancient Africa even had states, but the professor said that Africa was once one of the most well organized continents in this respect, with states like Great Zimbabwe. What caught my eye though was a Mesopotamian culture called the Uruk, known for their clay tablets and (awesome) ziggurats. I can't help but think of the big ugly Uruk-hai Orcs from Lord of the Rings, and personally I think it's a conspiracy perpetrated by Tolkein to discredit ancient Sumerian cultures. Or something. I'm working on that one.

Next was a prettty average Economics lecture on aggregate demand, until the end of the class when we started talking about the history of money. We started with bartering, and moved to coins, fait dollars (like we have now), and checks. Then the professor asked what the moeny of the future was going to be, and someone said, "Electronic" which the professor agreed with but pointed out one important problem with. "Electronic money is, in reality, imaginary. Since you need not carry anything with you but a debit card, money as we know it wont exist. We could change the name of our money to...say...Unicorns, and you could pull out your Unicorn card to make transactions from the nearest Unicorn Bank!" We all cracked up at that, but he does have a point. I never actually saw any of the money I made this summer except on a bank statement and out of an ATM. It seems kind of dangerous to rely on nothing but electronic records to prove your entire monetary assets...

Anyways, after delicious tacos it was time for Philosophy where we kept talking about Descartes. The big thing there though was getting the paper I had written two weeks back and was so worried about. First of all, I have to say that my worry wasn't impractical; before the professor gave us the prompt, he told us a story of his professor's philosophy class getting their papers back. He said to them, "If philosophical writing was like math, you all literally would not know how to count." Needlesss to say I was a bit anxious, never having writen 'philosophically' before. That's why I was so happy when I got mine back with a B+! The prof. left a lot of good comments on what I had done well and what I should try to improve, but I still think he graded somewhat leniantly. Nice to have that not to stress over any more... I need that leftover stress to prepare for his midterm next week!

Let's try this again...

Hey everyone who still checks the blog after over a year of nothing!
I'm going to give this another go, and try to write a bit more about what's going on down here in lil' ole Pomona College. Instead of the great big posts I was doing before, these will probably just be little bits of whatever's going on recently in my life at the moment.
For example, talking to everyone on the phone tonight made me realize what a scumbag I am for not keeping up on this blog!
So, as soon as I'm not so exhausted from staying up too late, this will start to fill with all kinds of interesting stuff. All over the place too, like on philosophy, econ, archaeology, geology, and the importance of Guitar Hero in maintaining a healthy exercise regimen.
Goodnight, all.