Life is an iPod

As I was waiting for my class to start this morning, I was thinking about the iPod in my hands on which I was playing Solitaire. I have found that some of my most interesting thoughts come when I am playing on my iPod. I have further noticed that I usually do not remember these thoughts that I have, except today when I wrote down my thoughts before I ran off to class.

Sitting in the Geography and History building at the University of Salamanca, it occurred to me that I tend to think of life as an iPod on shuffle. Now just bear with me, as we have to make some changes to the iPod, but I think that this analogy is really cool, so I hope you find it equally impressive.

Like I said, my iPod was on shuffle and I was listening to music. I like to think that life follows a similar pattern. Perhaps it is not as random nor does it jump around as much as an iPod on shuffle does, but I think that life can get pretty random. We, the listener, do not know what song is going to follow the one that is currently playing, but the iPod sure does. We might be able to guess what song will come next, and we might guess correctly, but in the end the next song has been determined by the iPod, so only it knows. Now, you might disagree with me right here and say that not even the iPod knows what the next song is going to be, but I would like to argue that it does. If you find yourself thinking that the iPod could not possibly know, then you can stop reading right here. If you are following me and are intrigued, then continue reading, please.

The iPod knowing the song that is going to come on next, and that song being determined by the iPod are two interesting statements, especially when you think about them in relation to this life analogy I am trying to make. I believe that there is some entity that knows what is going to happen next, but that entity is not within this realm, this spaceo-temporal situation in which we humans find ourselves. I also think that the universe has been determined by this entity. At this point, some of you might be scared because if everything has already been determined, then that means that you do not have free will. If you do not have free will, then somehow you feel threatened as an individual, spontaneity ceases to exist, and an ultimate cause or purpose for you is diminished. I, however, do not feel threatened too much by this determinism. I am not sure how to convince you of why you also should not be threatened, but I will work on developing an argument. Ever since I watched The Butterfly Effect and have gained more experience of the world in which we find ourselves, I cannot help but think about how fragile life is, how our present situation is influenced by each and every single thought, movement, decision, and whim that we actualize (meaning bring to the fore, bring to fruition, complete, fulfil, etc.). Before moving on to other features of the iPod, I would like to make a few other observations/remarks. Now, as I said, the iPod is on shuffle, which means that we the listener does not know what is going to happen next, we have no idea what song we are going to hear. Despite this lack of knowledge, there is something that is going to happen next and there is a reason (although unbeknownst to us) for the order that the iPod has chosen. We might be able to explain some general patterns or demonstrate certain tendencies, but ultimately, we cannot (nor do I think we ought to) determine/describe the reason for the order. Accept that there exists one, and focus on the song playing right now.

As I turned over the iPod in my hand, continuing to listen to it on shufle, I examined it for other interesting analogies to life. As I was searching, a song that I was not in the mood for came on. I quickly turned the iPod to its face and hovered my thumb over the button that would bring me to the next song, but I did not press it. I realized in that moment that this was another analogy. Life, if we think that it is like an iPod on shuffle, is going to be random, without order, and you are never going to be able to control what is played. (I am realizing that this point is going to be complicated to analogize, so bear with me, and I apologize in advance if it does not make sense.) Whereas, with the iPod I can control what I listen to, I do not have the same control in life. If a song that I do not like or am not in the mood for comes on my iPod, I can simply skip it until I find a song that I am in the mood for. I do not think that this is the case with life. If something you do not like happens, something you are not in the mood for happens, you cannot simply fast forward to something that you do like or that you are in the mood for. You have to, as the expression goes (and thus to further complicate this analogy), play with the cards you have been dealt rather than exchange them, throw them away, or make a perfect hand. In life, there are going to be things that are tough, boring, or activities that you are less than excited for, but you have to do something about them. You cannot simply say you are not interested, not in the mood, or whatever other excuse you may devise; you have to confront the situation head-on, tackling it and doing something with it.... So with that in mind, I left the song I did not skip the song that I was not in the mood for, but rather kept it there until it passed.

Right. So I cannot know what song is going to come up next, but I did realize that if there was a song that was played earlier that I happened to like a lot, I can go back to that song and revisit it. Eventually, I am going to have to go forward, eventually the iPod is going to go on to another song, but I can temporarily visit the song again. This reminds me of memories and the past in life. In the present, in the here and now, you can look back at the things that have passed in your life and say that you really liked this or did not care for that. This is what we do every time we remember or reminisce. However, as I said, eventually you are going to have to move forward. Eventually things are going to move forward, whether you like it or not. If you decide, as you can with the iPod, to just keep pressing back and listening to that song one more time, reliving that memory just once more, you are going to miss out on everything that follows on the shuffle list. You have no idea what song is going to come next, so a song might come on that you love even more than the one that you are clinging to in the past. (As a very brief side note, I would like to comment on the power of music and say how many songs there are on my iPod and such that, when they are played, I immediately think back to some memory that I have of that song. An example would be any Chevelle song. I immediately think back to my senior year of high school and my time at the University of Minnesota. I think that this is also true for life. While things that happen in the present might transport your mind to the past, it is important to remember that you must move forward, that there are more songs, more events, to make memories of. In short, more memories, perhaps even more fond ones, await; so continue forward!)

Looking at the other buttons of my iPod, I realized that some of the buttons on the iPod can also teach us important things about life, even though there are no congruent buttons in real life. For example, on the iPod there is a menu button, taking you to the menu, where you can select whatever you may want to do: set an alarm, check your calendar, play solitaire (as I do), or (in the more modern iPods) do virtually anything else your heart may desire. In life, there is not menu button. There is no way you can get out of yourself and see what all you can do with your life. You cannot see the playlist which denotes the songs that have yet to play, nor those which have already played. As I was thinking about it, I think that the only entity that would have a menu button on their iPod would be the Supreme Entity, the Ground of Being, God. Humans cannot have this ability. Also important is the pause button on the iPod. With this, you can stop the music you are listening to in order to do something else, to simply take a break from the music. In life, there is no pause button. You cannot stop everyone, everything and just take a breather. You have to learn to breathe while you live because there is not way you can take a time-out to think about the big decision that you have to make, or whatever else you may want to do.

This sort of leads me to the headphones. After finishing the external examination of all the buttons and functions of the iPod, I thought about what the headphones could possibly represent when it comes to the analogy of life. As I sat there thinking about it, I thought about what the headphones do. They allow you to listen to the music that the iPod is emitting, making them perhaps the most important part of the entire operation. Having in mind that I currently have one of the older iPod models that does not play music out of its headphone jack, without a pair of headphones, you could not possibly listen to your iPod. Similarly in life, without something with which you can tune into life, you are not going to hear it, you are not going to experience it. You need to be connected to your life, just as the headphones need to be connected to your iPod in order to enjoy the experience. (This part of the analogy is perhaps the one with the most holes (and also the weirdest part), but I will try to work on it later.) So, when living life, just as when you want to listen to your iPod, you need some headphones, you need some tool that allows you to experience the iPod/life. You need to be connected to your iPod/life somehow, otherwise the entire experience is for nothing, it produces nothing.

This post got long in a hurry. I hope you enjoyed this weird but interesting analogy and were not too confused after reading it. I thought it was a neat analogy and found that my iPod has a lot of features that I think are analogous to my philosophy of life. If you disagreed with me, I apologize, but at least now you can tell other people that you started to read this one blog post this loony posted about how iPods are just like life.

Time Out

Time.

Do you have it? What time is it? There is not enough time in a day. When you get the time...

All of these expressions are fairly commonplace in our everyday English language. We use it all the time, and there are similar expressions that convey the same concepts in other languages as well, such as “¿Qué hora es? ¿Cuánto tiempo lleva? Si tuviera más tiempo...,” etc. So we, as human beings, have a sense of time, but I would like to offer some critical reflections on what time actually is, what is says about us, what use it may have, and any other random reflections that come to mind.

First of all, I think it is important to understand that time does not exist. I think that time was a measure, a device, a concept that we human beings came up with to describe and understand the world in which we find ourselves. There is not some universal, objective clock that exists, ticking away the time since “the beginning,” however you would like to define that. There is not going to be a time when this clock can not go any further or breaks or starts over. Time is something that humans conveniently created in order to communicate with others in relation to themselves.

This is the next important part. When we talk about time, it is always in relation to ourselves. It does not matter what you are talking about, you are always going to have a starting point that relates to your current position in time/space. Just look at all of the different periods or intervals of time that we commonly talk about that relates to our current configuration. The seasons (spring, summer, fall, winter) are all highly subjective to our current time and place. When it is summer in Minnesota and Ohio, it is winter in Argentina and Australia. When it is winter in Minnesota and Ohio, it is summer in Argentina and Australia. But you could say that there is some sort of continuity between places that are in the same hemisphere, for example when it is spring in Ohio, it is also spring in Bulgaria. So one could say that spring exists, it just is due to the configuration/tilt/position of the Earth within the solar system that determines seasonal differences on Earth. However, think about it this way: even within the same hemisphere spring comes at different times. I think this year is a perfect example. Spain and Minnesota/Iowa are in the same hemisphere, so technically it is the same season (spring), but there are still five feet of snow on the ground in Minnesota and nearing or below zero temperatures are common. Spain, on the other hand, has not seen snow since January and the current temperature (and the temperature that it has regularly reached since the beginning of March) is fifty degrees. I think this just goes to show how much time relates to and describes our current position than anything else.

(I am going to go on a lot of tangents here for a bit, but just take it all in and think about all of these different things I am going to say, despite the lack of a coherent argument.)

Years are relational to our current position. When you say yesterday, this means that you are talking about something before the current time, but that recently occurred. This is in contrast to the day before yesterday, which is farther in the past than yesterday. Last week comes before this, last month, last semester, last trimester, last quarter, last year, five years ago. It does not matter, all of these are in relation to the current here and now.

This whole matter gets even more complicated with the different ways in which humans measure time. I mentioned in the previous paragraph “yesterday” and “the day before yesterday.” But the problem arises in defining a day. How do you do it? In the West, we have divided a day into 24 hours, consisting of sixty minutes, and within those minutes we divide yet again into 60 seconds per minute. One could go further and deeper, getting much more specific (nanoseconds, milliseconds, etc.) but we can just stick to this basic division. Why are there 24 hours in a day? Who made this rule up? It seems pretty random, if you ask me. What about this whole 60 thing? Why do we not have 100 minutes in one hour and 100 seconds in a minute? Why 60? But then again, after thinking about it, why 100? What is so special about 100? (There is a historical explanation about Babylonians – or someone – using a mathematical system with a base of 60, so we adopted it, but then the question is why did they think in these terms?) Then there are differences in how we define when a day starts and when it ends. In the West, a day officially ends at 11:59:59pm, with the next second putting us in a new day, making 12:00:00am being a new day and this new day follows the same pattern, finishing its course at 11:59:59pm. If we do not like this idea and realize that these digital clocks are a very modern invention, we could go by the sun, saying that a day begins when the sun rises and the day ending when the sun sets. However, when does a sun officially rise and set? How do we know that it has risen? Does it bring a banner saying that the day has begun and wave goodbye at the end of the day? I do not think so. But this is just our own Western culture that measures times by the journey of the sun, as other traditions (such as Judaism) measure a day as beginning and ending by the moon, partially relying on the sun. A day in Judaism begins when the sun sets and ends when the sun rises, making it completely opposite that of Western civilization. How did they come up with this? Why do they follow this? (Again, there might be historical or cultural explanations, but I am not aware of them and am just asking rhetorically.) This gets even more complicated in the West with the creation of Daylight Savings Time. Why does it exist? How can we play with time like that? Doesn't it make sense that if we can "control" time like this, that there is no such thing as a universal, objective clock keeping track of time?

Related to this difference in how a day is measured is a further issue of how we measure years, as I noted in the paragraph before last that talking about something that happened five years ago is wholly in relation to the current year/time. Not the entire planet follows the same calendar, though, and so we measure the years differently. For us it is 2013 right now. For Jews it is the year 6,000 something. Muslims say it is only the year 1400 or so. But how can this be? Again, the answer is relational: we measure years in terms of important events. For Christians (we in the West), the year indicates how many years have passed since Jesus was crucified, for Jews it is since “the beginning of time,” and for Muslims it has been 1400 years since their Prophet Muhammad died. The bottom line between all of these is the fact that we measure years in terms of important events, making them relational to us and our culture rather than some objective clock on the wall that tells us what time it really is. This question of years and such has yet another interesting and mind-boggling manifestation. Think about when scientists talk about the years since the dinosaurs roamed, the time that has passed since humans as we know them today began to exist, how many years ago the Big Bang started the universe. The answer usually entails hundreds of thousands and hundreds of millions and tens of billions of years. It is almost inconceivable for someone to think about something so long ago. At least for me it is. Then the answer becomes how do we know this and how are we measuring this, which are two questions the answers to which I have no understanding/learning.

I discussed the difference between different cultures and how Jews measure time one one, Muslims another, and Christians yet another, so one might be willing to say that it is simply a matter of different cultures. This is the reason why we have different measures of time. However, even within the same culture we sometimes measure time differently. I mentioned “last month” in that list of references of time that always is in relation to us. The understanding of “last month” depends on which calendar you use to measure time. Within the Roman world (I believe) there existed a couple of different calendars. There was the Julian calendar and then the Gregorian calendar later. How can we change calendars and have different dates even within the same culture? If someone within the Julian calendar framework were to speak with someone of the Gregorian calendar and try to pick a date for a wedding (say July 16^th), one of them would be earlier than the other by about fifteen days (I think). So even within the same culture there are differences in how we measure time. This is further complicated by the number of days in a month. Some have 30, some have 31, one has 28. Why do we have these differences? Who decided that it would be important or helpful to have these differences? In the case of the month that only has 28, we decided that it would be cool every now and then (arbitrarily four years) to just add a day. I seriously think it is just for kicks and giggles, to make life more interesting, to confuse young children who are trying to learn the calendar. Honestly, ("scientific" explanations aside) it seems rather random and silly.

So I think that given all of these examples, it is fairly obvious that time is extremely subjective, that it does not really exist outside of humanity. There would be no sense of time without humans. Years would not exist, nor would days, hours seconds, months. I think this is astounding, but also might provide some advice or a different way of thinking. After being in Spain for nearly three months, maybe it is easy for me to say this, but I think that there are a lot of people that think about this in the States as well, and they have never been out of the country. I often hear or read about people reminding others to live in the present, because that is all we have. I think this is extremely valuable advice that many people ought to follow and seriously reflect upon, because we often think about where we have to be in two hours, where we were three months ago, where we would like to be in five years, but we forget about the seconds slipping past us right now. We forget that all we have immediate access to is right now. I recently watched a movie that discussed various philosophical themes and ideas and in one of them, a woman was talking about how right now, in this very instant, she is closer to death than she ever has before. We always think about what we are going to do in the future, how we will be able to do a lot more stuff, but in that future, you are even closer to death. I know this is a grim way of looking at how the world works and maybe it is something that just makes us fear that we are wasting the present even more. So we in turn get worried and start having lots of anxiety about that, but we need to simply realize this fact and then do something now, right here.

So go ahead, stop reading this, wasting what time you have, and get out there and do something before you are too close to death to really do anything.

P.S. Before you go (or if you already have, that is fine too - better, even), sorry for my excessive use of "quotation marks." I have included them because I am not entirely certain about a lot of the terms that I have used within them or I have included them because they are potentially controversial terms that I have provided my own opinions about, but that might offend someone else.

Language and Culture

A couple of things have been on my mind these past few days and both relate to Americans studying abroad. The first has to do with language while the other has to do with culture, so hopefully it makes sense.

The other day, Will asked me if he had a good Spanish accent. I have been told that I do not really speak with an accent (though there are some words and some times in which I speak with one, I will grant you that), but other Americans have trouble puring the Englishisms from their Spanish skills. I realized that there are a few things wrong with Will's question. First of all, he should not be asking me (a non-native Spanish speaker) whether his accent is good or not, because I have cannot judge at all. Spanish is not my native tongue, so ask someone who is a native whether your accent is good because I am going to be much more harsh than others. Also with this question, I realized that it seems to be the general case that English speakers (at least the American ones) have difficulty with a couple of aspects of Spanish pronunciation. First is the meshing together or melding of consonants. For example, the word “Cantabria” and the combination of “br” is difficult for English speakers to pronounce because in English we tend to separate consonants and give them each a little bit of a sound. In Spanish, on the other hand, natives meld the two together. I think that this double consonant example (along with a ton of other ones) has the pronunciation of the Spanish “R” as the root problem. In English, we have a very soft “R” sound, with the tongue of our mouth never touching the top of our mouths. However, in Spanish, when you pronounce the letter “R,” you always touch the tip of your tongue to the top of your mouth. I do not know if it is just a lack of effort on the part of Americans or whether it is truly difficult for most Americans to get over or pronounce, but I noticed that that was an issue for sure. Another issue is the pronunciation of vowels, since in English we have such a diverse variety of vowel sounds while Spanish as only five. Both languages have confusing and difficult dipthongs (combinations of vowels), but once you get it down, it is really not that difficult. I was talking to Sara today, my intercambio girl, and she said that Spanish pronunciation is really not that difficult at all (and I am 100% in agreement), so if you cannot get it down, you are not working hard enough at it, in my opinion (and I would imagine she would share this opinion). Finally is the stress of a word. In English there are no markers or rules as to what part of a word you should stress, while in Spanish there are fixed rules and the exceptions to the rules have it marked.

The second part of this post is about culture. Will has come home many days and said something definitive about Spanish culture. Rufi has not always been in agreement, which causes cognitive dissonance for Will: he does not know what to believe anymore. His teacher says one thing while his host mother says another. I think there are many things going on here. First and foremost is this issue of a foreigner saying something about a culture that is not their own, and saying it like it is true for everyone and everything. Will says that X is true about Spanish culture, but Rufi says that she does not agree with that, that this is not how it actually is. I do not know, but I feel like that is a bit pretentious for someone to say something like that. It would be like a foreigner coming to the U.S. and saying that some bad word is the worst ever and that you should never say, ever, no matter what. For example, the word “damn.” I think that most Americans could agree that it is not a word to use all the time and most people get a little uncomfortable when they hear that word in public, but it is not the worst word ever. I do not know if this makes sense at all, but I think the bottom line, the point to take away from this discussion is that I think it is a little pretentious to be a foreigner and think you know everything about a culture. I talked with Sara about this today and she said that your knowledge of cultural things, gestures, words, etc. is largely a function of your experience, your background, your upbringing. I would totally agree, so a cultural statement might be accurate, but it does not mean that it is universal and applies to everyone.

Las Águedas

Yesterday, February 5, was a festival typical of Salamanca that is La Fiesta de las Águedas. Without going too much into the history of the festival, I think that mostly what you need to know was that Águeda was a female Christian martyr and so the day of her feast is about women. I learned about this festival in my Spanish culture class during the month of January and Rufi told us about it when the date approached. When I learned about the festival, I realized that we do not really have a day like this in the United States, other than Mother's Day, but that mostly focuses on women who have children, but this day in the States does not even compare to the festival in Spain. On this day, women have power in the city of Salamanca (or whatever city they may find themselves in). As I understood it at the time, if a woman approached you and asked you to do anything (typically for some money), you were to comply. If you did not, your reputation was stained. Rufi told us that in the villages and towns surrounding Salamanca, such as the one in which she grew up, if a man did not give the woman what she asked for on this day, he lost his pants. And not just his pants, she told us, but he was required to strip to bare butt. The mental scene that was produced in my head as I listened to this story was a comical one, but when the day actually came I had a different reaction.

As I walked around the city, every woman I saw I viewed as a potential threat or a potential person who would ask me for money. I tried not to make eye contact with women and tried to just fly under the radar the entire day because I did not want to give them money nor did I want to lose my pants if I declined them money. I am not exaggerating when I say every woman, because as I walked I was not sure when a woman would approach me and demand that I do something.

Women (and a few men) during the festival of Águedas.

By the end of the day, I had managed to escape without being bothered by a woman, but I got to thinking about my way of thinking and my attitude toward the world. First, it must be remembered that the gender roles on this day are flipped, with women being in charge (one of them actually was bestowed the [albeit symbolic] power of the governor for the day) and men typically at their mercy. The way I thought and behaved yesterday seems to me to be the way that women behaved for a long period of time in history and how some cultures (including our own) treat women today. Really thinking about it, I think it makes sense. Women were supposed to be submissive, not speaking up, and were to do as the man said. They were second-class citizens and I would assume that if they were to be walking around the streets of the city, that they would be left completely to the mercy of any passing man and they could not protest whatsoever. I am completely hypothesizing this situation, but I do not think that a woman on the street being a man's property is completely unfounded or outrageous. I think it is actually quite truthful or representative of the situation that women faced for many years. 

For this reason, I gained a new appreciate for women yesterday. I realized the struggle that they faced for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years and that many still face to this day. I could not imagine living each day as I did yesterday, but many women do. I commend women everywhere for being brave, holding their head up high, and walking with the world and all of their dignity. It amazes me that women are able, despite all odds, to finally speak up for their bodies, their livelihood, their being. It would take a lot of courage, that is for sure. 

Women, thank you for being so great, for bearing with men's stupidity and violence, and also thank you for saying something, for speaking up, for telling us that what is happening is not right. For those women that are still living in these conditions, please have courage. Please talk about your situation and about how you are being maltreated. You are not second-class citizens. You are individual human beings with the same rights as every other human being. Nobody should treat you otherwise. Fight, women, fight.

Philosophical Phoundations

So. I was thinking about it a little bit the other day during my Spanish Culture class when we were learning about Dalí, a famous Spanish surrealist. In the handout that we received, the professor said that Dalí “discovered” some artistic school of thought or style. I thought it was funny wording, but then I got to thinking about what this implied. This means that everything is already in the world and that we just have to discover it, which means that nothing can be our own. There is nothing in the world that we can claim we created or invented. It was there the whole time for all of us to see, and you just so happen to be the one to stumble upon it and reveal it to the rest of the world. It therefore seems that nothing can be created in the world. Interesting.

I have no idea how I got to the next topic, but then I started thinking about how everything seems to have some philosophy. Literally everything. Philosophy permeates to the core of our world. I really got to thinking and stretching this idea a lot, and I came to some interesting points of discussion. So long as you accept my idea that philosophy underlies all of our existence, the question is is there anything before philosophy?

I suppose first I should back up and provide a rough definition of what I am meaning here by philosophy. What philosophy and philosophical ideas and language gives us is a vocabulary through which we can express what we experience. Philosophy is a certain way of talking about the world. So when you say that killing is morally wrong, there is some philosophical foundation to this claim. The case is the same for virtually anything we say about anything. So if we accept the idea that philosophy's job in the world is to help us explain the world and ultimately understand it, then everything is philosophical. As I am writing this, it seems that this idea is really obvious and I should probably not be spending my afternoon writing about it, but maybe it is not as obvious as I think it is.

It seems that in the modern world we tend to think that philosophy is a useless enterprise and generally toss it to the side, saying that there are more important things than philosophy. Already we have a general conception of what philosophy is and we have deemed it to be useless, or at least not as useful as other enterprises in life. Maybe it will help to think about this in terms of academic majors or studies. We have separate departments in schools (English, Spanish, History, Sociology, Art, Music, and Philosophy) which means we think that they are fundamentally different areas of study. When someone studies English, they are not studying philosophy, and if they want to study philosophy, they ought to go to that department.

So we have separated and divorced all academic pursuits from others, which blinds us from the fact that philosophy serves as a basis for everything. In some areas it is relatively easy to see. For example, there are philosophical traditions (and the traditions that they come from) that serve as their own foundation. Similarly, religion is pretty philosophically based as well, even if you think otherwise. There is no doubt that philosophy has a lot of influence in religion, especially in ethics, cosmologies, cosmogonies, and metaphysics.

After I thought about these two areas, I thought about what other academic areas could be philosophical. Since I started this with art, I can talk about how art is philosophical as well, which is an area that is perhaps not as overtly philosophical as the other areas. Whenever someone paints something, they generally are considered to be part of a school of thinking within the discipline of art. There are some of these areas that clearly have a philosophy when they paint. Impressionism, for example, has general characteristics that they adhere to when they paint. Cubism has some rules as well, as they try to depict the world in terms of cubes and geometric shapes. Even Dalí and surrealism has some rules, though rules that seem to have lots of inherent difficulties and inconsistencies. Surrealism says that there should be no rules, that they should break the rules of classical art and paint what they want, without there needing to be some reason or meaning to the piece. However, each and every artist is painting with a specific set of rules or guidelines in mind.

Something that one would say is far from philosophy is mathematics or any of the sciences. Typically people like to think of these as entirely distinct from philosophy, perhaps even transcending it. However, I would like to argue that even mathematics is philosophical. There are certain assumptions about the world that one must accept if one wishes to engage in mathematics. One must accept the concepts of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. You might argue that concepts are difficult to argue against since they can be demonstrated and proved so easily. This is definitely much tougher to get over, but it is not insurmountable, but we will hurdle over that later. First, sciences. I think the same could be said about science, that there are certain principles that must be accepted before doing science. One of these, which mathematics also adheres to, is empiricism. Who says that empiricism is the best and most accurate method? There are a lot of strong arguments, most which I tend to agree with, that state that empiricism is the closest thing we have to getting in touch with how things really are, but there are a lot of philosophical assumptions embedded in empiricism and science/mathematics.

This lead me to think about what, if anything, is prior to philosophy. I briefly considered language. I thought that language was totally unphilosophical and therefore was something that did not have a philosophical foundation. However, upon further reflection, I thought about how words try to convey reality to the rest of us. That is to say, that every word is philosophically charged. Every utterance, even onomatopoeias, are representative of the world and therefore they tell us something about how we view the world. If we first consider onomatopoeias, such as “boom,” “crash,” “clack,” “pow,” “quack,” “woof,” etc, we find that even though they are representative of sounds and are not words with a linguistic history they still tell us how we experience the world. They tell us that when we hear a dog bark it phonetically sounds like “woof.” When we say a word that has more linguistic history, such as the word auditorium, it tells us something about the function of that word. It comes from the Latin word “audire” which means to hear, and so what do you do in an auditorium? Hear. Or the word benevolent, which comes from two different Latin words: “bene,” meaning well, and “volent,” meaning they may be wished. What does benevolent mean? Well-wishing. Incredible, huh?

However, language is something that is philosophical in and of it self, as when we say auditorium we are labeling a certain thing that we associate with a certain experience. Maybe this does not make sense, and this post is getting incredibly long, so I will cut it short here and get to the point of all of this. First, I think that it is incredible to consider everything as being philosophically charged and nothing can divorce itself from philosophy no matter how much it wants to do that. Secondly, it is my own conviction that the world would not exist without us. We give meaning to the world and so therefore, if there were no human beings, there is no world. Similarly, if we as an individual did not exist, the world therefore does not exist. Wow, right? It takes a lot to accept this premise, but I really think it is the truth.

Caution: Provocative Thoughts

Disclaimer: I do not necessarily subscribe to these thoughts, I just think that they should be considered. Considering all view points and opinions on an issue make for a more informed person.

Not to dishonor the memory or the day of Martin Luther King, Jr., but after seeing all of the posts about him, I got to thinking. One of his most famous quotes is that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Which implies that we must get rid of injustices everywhere so that justice may reign. I would like to argue that we should not get rid of injustices, as they help us in many ways.

Yes, I would argue that we should not get rid of injustices in the world. I think there are many good reasons for not totally getting rid of injustice in the world.

I think it is important to remember that without a concept of injustice, we would not be able to think of or discuss justice or what is just. Maybe there are some who think that justice exists outside of our earthly realm and it transcends our existence, but it seems to me that all of our judgements about justice and injustice come from experience and interaction with others. If we were to not be involved in the world from a very young age and we truly lived alone, with no human contact whatsoever, I seriously doubt that we would, by ourselves, come up with this idea of justice. We would have to had previously experienced injustice to come to make judgements about justice. 

For example, we would not be able to consider stealing to be unjust without having already experienced the effects of stealing. Until we see a robbery, we are not going to know or understand why it should or should not continue to occur. We could not, in my opinion, even fathom the idea of stealing if we were secluded from the world and never experienced it for ourselves. The same could be said about killing: we could not make any judgements about it until we first experienced it. This experience does not have to be personal (I am not saying that we should kill someone or have someone we know be killed), but we should just be able to hear about it or see it in order to discuss whether it is ethical or not.

So experience is crucial to making judgements about justice, because without it we could say nothing. Embedded in this experience, if I have not already made it already clear, is the other side. We must experience, I think, both justice and injustice. How are we going to make judgements about one if we have nothing to compare it to? I think that for this reason, injustice is a necessary part of experience and life. If we were therefore to eradicate injustice totally from our human experience, then what would be just? Nothing would be considered just because there would be nothing unjust to contrast the justice.

If we totally got rid of stealing in our world, if there were no more thieves, how could we say that not stealing is just and the right thing to do? I do not think that we could. Maybe in this example we would find other things that could be just or unjust while not stealing would merely not be thought about. That is to say, the world would take for granted that there was not a stealing issue in society and so therefore would focus on other things rather than the fact that there is not stealing. 

However, imagine if we managed to get rid of all things we currently consider unjust. (Just imagine. I understand that this may be difficult, but just go with me on this.) If everyone was treated the same, there was no stealing, no killing, nothing vicious ((I use this word in the sense that it is a vice and therefore bad). What would be considered just any more? Nothing could be, because everything would simply be. There would be no more just/unjust, no more ethics, no more ethical decisions to be made. There would fail to be any moral judgements. If this were to occur, think of all the ramifications this would have on religious institutions, philosophical traditions and therefore our world as we currently know it. Imagine that these things did not matter any longer and how different our world would look. I know that I could not imagine it. I think it would be a lot less interesting. 

That was a long tangent, but I would like to make one more brief statement on why I think that injustice is beneficial to society. It is in the same vein of my previous statements. I think that in order to appreciate the good, the just, one must have some adversity, some bad stuff happen to them, some injustices done. Without experiencing the bad, how are we to become good, or at least better? How would people move forward without experiencing some injustices along the way to challenge them and propel them forward? I dunno, but I think that injustice might be an integral and necessary part of society and that its complete eradication would not necessarily be good. You cannot begin to understand the good until you have understood the bad.

One of my favorite bands, Rise Against, has some lyrics that are attached to this topic and that I think work nicely here. The song is called "Satellite" and is off of their newest album, Endgame. I think I have written about them before, but take a read and think for yourselves a little bit.

You can't feel the heat
Until you hold your hand
Over the flame
You have to cross the line
Just to remember
Where it lays
You won't know your worth now, son,
Until you take a hit

(chorus, and then later)

You can't fill your cup
Until you empty all it has
You can't understand
What lays ahead
Until you understand the past
You'll never learn to fly now 
Til you're standing at the cliff
You can't truly love
Until you've given up on it.

Language Pt. !!

I would like to follow up on a comment left on my last blog post, as I wanted to venture into a territory sort of like that, but it was too much to do in one post, I thought.

The comment concerned the fact that there are so many words to express different hues of the same primary color. For example, red. There is crimson, auburn, maroon, brick red, and burgundy. All describe different shades of red, but alter the red in either making it darker or lighter, with varying degrees of light and dark. It is astounding that there can be so many different names for the same idea. Why do we not just call everything the same? When we see the Minnesota Gophers' maroon, why can't we just call it red instead? I mean, the same idea is getting across, isn't it? Not entirely.

I am going to spit-ball many ideas with no real organization right now, so be prepared. I may or may not come back to organize it.

I think that one of the goals or objectives of language is to describe the world as we see it. Specificity in language means a more thorough and precise understanding of the world. I think that many people think that if we have a most precise vocabulary, that we will eventually or finally understand reality as it truly is. However, I would argue that there is no fundamental reality and that language is a testament to this fact. There is no common language, so there cannot be any common, objective Reality. Using the example of red, we see a fire truck and we see a Golden Gopher T-Shirt. When we see the first, we say that it is red (taking the stereotypical fire truck, of course) and when we see the t-shirt, we can say that it is also red. The red of the t-shirt, however, is not the same red as the fire truck, so we have to come up with a new way of expressing this new form of red. We could call it simply dark red and could move on with life. Then we would run into the following problem: we see the t-shirt and the truck but then a brick enters into our field of vision. We look at the brick and say that it is red. However, it is not the same red as the truck, as it appears to be a little bit darker than the truck. So we decide to call it dark red. By calling it dark red, we are then saying that it is the same red as that of the t-shirt, but we notice that this is not the case, as the hue of the shirt is darker than the hue of the brick. As the color of the brick is between that of the truck and the shirt, we could call the color medium red.

Ok. There we go, we have clarified this issue. But then a person enters the room. We notice that their hair is red, so we call it red. Upon further inspection, it turns out not to be actually red, as it seems to be a red darker than the red of the fire truck. So we agree that it is dark red. We look at this person some more and determine that it is not actually the dark red of the t-shirt, but is lighter in hue, so we call it medium red. We find that the hair is actually not the same color as the brick, as it seems to be darker than the medium red, but not as dark as the dark red. So what do we call it now? Medium-ish red? Medium-dark red? I suppose either of those names could work, but then when we have more objects in our mind, it becomes even further complicated because then we have to remember that medium red is like the brick, dark red is the shirt, red is the fire truck, and that this person's hair is medium-dark red. This seems, at least to me, to be quite confusing. This is part of the reason why we have so many different names for the different shades of red. We are trying to accurately convey how we see the world.

Sometimes (I would argue most of the time) these details are not important at all, as when we are told that something was crimson red, we do not make a very good distinction in our mind between crimson red and dark red or maroon or a shade close to crimson red. When someone says red or a color related to red, we think red regardless.

The same can go for video games, another example provided in a comment of the previous post. We have different names for different consoles so that we do not have to explain to a person that when we say "Pong" we do not mean the "Pong" of the 1970s, but rather the "Pong" of 2012, with the remote controls that are wireless, requiring nothing but a small sensor bar connected to the console and that is moved by your relation to the sensor (I tried to explain Wii here). So I think that having different words for distinct things is to provide precision and be efficient. As you can see, there was a lot of qualification to the second "Pong" that was necessary to distinguish it from its original. If we used the same word for both, then we would have to do a lot of talking, and humans are always trying to do more with less, right?

Language is beautiful for many reasons, but one of the most impressive things is that it can convey so much with so little. Each word has a very specific function and superfluous words are laid at the wayside. We no longer use Thee and Thou in common parlance, as we found a way to get around using these and instead just combined them into one word, "you."

I have always found Spanish to be a very efficient language, conveying many things in a single word. For example, the verb tenses of Spanish indicate (obviously) the meaning they are trying to get across, time (when the action occurred), person (I, You, He/She, etc.), number (singular or plural), and mood (something doubtful or unsure, or a command). Take, for example, the word "comí." By saying this we can find out so much about what the speaker or writer is trying to convey. We understand that it happened to the speaker, as it is in the "I" form, and so therefore this person was acting alone (number). We can understand that what the speaker was doing was eating (as this is the definition of the word). We can understand that there was no doubt about it, they were definitely participating in the act of eating. As well, we glean that it happened to them in the past. So, with one word, a Spanish speaker can say "I ate." This may not seem too bad, but note that the following does not happen as much in Spanish as it does in English: "I read" and "I read." The two are written exactly the same, but one indicates a time in the past while the other indicates the present. English would have to provide more context clues for a reader to fully understand and realize the original intention of the speaker whereas Spanish can do it with one word. Spanish words are powerful, providing a lot of information in four letters.

I think there was more, but my mind is tired. More later.