The radio program that we listened to, What Makes Us Good, talked about how our brains played a direct role in our moral/ethical decision making. I like the idea that religion is borne out of our biology – that religions are a projection of our want for moral codes. Matousek suggests that our morality [...]
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Some people have said that they don’t think human rights exist at all. I this may be taking it a little too far. Surely there are some concrete rights that we can acknowledge as existing. They may not exist everywhere or all the time but they do exist. If we are to take the [...] I think David raised a good point about the distinction between ethics and morals. The ethical schools of thought in the exercise seem to take into account emotion but are weighted mostly in reason. For example, the utilitarian approach seeks to give the greatest amount of good to the greatest amount of people. Following [...] 1. M 2. W 3. B 4. S 5. F I have chosen the man as the “best” and the friend as the “worst” people on my list. I have chosen the friend as the worst simply because, without the friend, all 4 of the other people would have gotten what they wanted and [...] With regards to bias and opinion, I think that we must try to distinguish between the two. They seem to be different words to me. I would consider bias an influenced viewpoint that deviates from fact or clouds the reader’s judgement of the truth. On the other hand, opinion is a personally held belief, [...] Today in TOK we talked about language and what constitutes a language. We decided that language is a kind of notational system. People discussed different kinds of language and how they are different. I thought what was more important was the common purpose of language to communicate or represent things, concepts and ideas. When [...] It was interesting to see all of the presentations that people did. Every presentation really got you thinking on different knowledge issues. However, many of the presentations didn’t seem to fully explore the possible interpretations and implications of their knowledge issue. One person who I though did a really good job of this was [...] Today in TOK we talked about math and how we can perceive it in different ways. To some people math can represent the purest form of knowledge, but to others it can be very subjective or seem irrelevant to real-life situations. I personally don’t like math. I see math as a mostly separate entity [...] Today in class we talked about storytelling as a way of knowing in the IB sense. Mr. MacKnight made the assertion that it was, in fact, the most important way of knowing. We discussed this further and I liked the idea that all of our interactions and even our whole lives can be expressed [...] Instead of naming the streets of my city with the names of all kinds of memorable people throughout history, I will focus on musicians. You could think of the city as split into districts that pay homage to musicians of different genres in music. In the oldest part of town (kind of like Suzhou’s [...] Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it – Santayana I chose this quote not because it is my favorite but because I disagree with it. Events that have happened throughout history are of infinite complexity and it goes without saying that no moment in the future will ever replicate perfectly [...] Mario Puzo’s claim that, “If our brains were simple, we would be too simple to understand them” is an interesting one. I would agree with his statement because, it is with our brains intricacy and complexity that we are capable of such introspective thinking. In recent years, lots of research has been done into [...] Today in class I discussed this with August. We decided that some of the purely geographical features we would think of when deciding where to live would include: -topography -climate -proximity to other civilization -population/population density of area -type of housing available And maybe some other general stuff like that. But personally, it would [...] Today we watched a kind of documentary about the nephew of Sigmund Freud, Edward Bernays. The documentary highlighted the way in which society (particularly that of America) changed over the past century. It noted that we have progressed to an individualist, consumerist society that cares more about their desires than needs. The documentary attributes [...] What caused you to become so interested in physics and the universe? In your presentation you talked about a lot of scientific advances that have been made in recent years. What greater implications do you think they could have on other areas of study? In your presentation you talked about the belief that for [...] If I were to receive the letter that we were given in class and it was a real life scenario I would have to agree with the author that umbrellaology could be classified as science. I believe this as his investigation appears to follow the scientific method and umbrellaology has all the classic markers [...] Today when we were discussing emotion in class I felt that the definition posted on the board was too reductionist. Sure there are chemical processes that occur across the synapses in our brain that work together to create emotions among other things. And we also can’t forget the role hormones play in our feelings [...] Induction seems to be a key part of our human nature. If we did not rely on induction it seems that there would be no constants in our life – we simply need to in order to avoid insanity. In actual fact, we can never fully rely on induction. While we may have lived [...] The last couple of TOK lessons we have talked a lot about perception, or more accurately, sense perception. It is an interesting notion that we are simply brains or trains of thought connected to the world solely through our senses – that our senses could be constantly playing tricks on us (as the TED [...] Yesterday we watched a powerpoint presentation about the english language, or rather, how the english language was a ‘bad’ one. I didn’t totally agree with some of the idioms that were used but I understand what the presentation intended to assert. I don’t think that English is such a bad language, although I am [...] While we were reading “Lies We Tell Kids” I thought that Graham raised some great points and listed valid reasons for why adults lie to children. Additionally, however, I found that Graham made some very insightful comments in general that seem to pertain to a life philosophy, rather than being limited to an explanation [...] When we first read Lindstrom’s article “You Love Your iPhone. Literally.” I didn’t think much of it. It seemed very similar to many articles that you see featured on the Internet that make some mildly scientific claim of a pop-culture nature. These articles typically use terminology similar to that of a proper scientific article [...] As we read ‘Thinking Literally’ I thought that it brought up some good points that really related to our conversation of how language affects thought on Monday. I may be misinterpreting this slightly but what I understood from ‘Thinking Literally’ is that what we know as language, is often, not solely language. Instead, language [...] While reading the article “Lost in Translation” I was intrigued by many of the different facts pertaining to different cultures and how their language seems to have an effect on how they think or perceive their environments. I thought the most fascinating piece of the article was where it mentioned a test that was [...] In “The Truman Show” we have now seen the construction of Truman’s life from the outside, how he is living in a movie set that lies in a giant dome over which Christof has full control. From our own reality, I think this makes us take for granted our free will. We have the [...] In what ways is Truman’s life fake? Truman’s whole environment is fake, he is trapped on an island in a utopian world where everything around him is a perfect construct. While this construct is completely controlled, it is actually extremely similar (if not identical) to the real world when the directors could have [...] This week in TOK we covered a lot of material and discussed many knowledge questions. I think that the TOK conference was a great start to TOK, not only because we got to miss school, but because it was an experience that allowed us all to understand TOK and get to know each other [...] I think what it means to know is unknown or at least impossible to define. Absolute surety of one’s own knowledge seems impossible to obtain. Alternatively it cannot be said that nobody knows anything at all or we would live in a super cynical society where nothing got done. Therefore, I would loosely define [...] |
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