Frankly Speaking

Man's Search for Meaning seems to me like a very interesting type of social experiment. Detestably the worst event of all time, the Holocaust, is fully experienced and understood by our author and psychologist, Viktor Frankl. The main theme of this experiment seems to be that a man can go through something as massively bad as the Holocaust and still understand that there still is meaning in life and he can also help other people find things in their life that is meaningful and worth living for. I think that its an interesting point to show that although Frankl has probably been through worse than all his patients, he can understand that "worse" is subjective and some people's simple troubles to them are horrible. I'm not trying to say that people's everyday stress and troubles are as bad as the Holocaust but to them, they've never experienced the Holocaust so these troubles are the worse they've seen. It's sort of like taking the ACT math section. You could know calculus and get a 36 and you could barely know precalculus and still get a 36. You get the same score but one of you is smarter in the field of math or in this case, experienced a worse event. In both cases the knowledge or the severity of events is different but the score you get or the impact of the events can be equal. I find it quite heart-warming that in Frankl's eyes, everyone can find meaning in life. I think it's great to think that no matter what someone has been through, there can still be importance to them.

Thankful

During Thanksgiving, there is so much to be thankful for. If I had to pick someone in my philosophy class to be thankful for it would be Tina. She has sat behind me this whole year. I didn't know her before this class but she is a very nice person. She greets me everyday with a hello and asks me how my day has been. She has the confidence to express her opinions and stays true to her beliefs. She makes some of the more strenuous activities more bearable I'm glad I sat in front of her because she is a wonderful person to know and I'm glad that I got to meet her. Without her I would probably just sit in the corner and not talk for the whole year. I also want to thank all my friends and family for making my day every day. Life is amazing! Happy Thanksgiving!

Election

Who would Camus vote for? If we assume Camus is not like Meursault in any way and he wrote The Stranger to show how nihilism is bad, Camus would vote for Obama because he would try to inform himself with all the candidates, understand that only a democrat or republican could win, realize Romney lies all the time, and vote for Obama. If Camus were like Meursault, he wouldn't vote because it wouldn't matter.
Voltaire would vote for Obama because in Candide, Voltaire explained why greed is bad. Romney wants to decrease taxes on the rich but studies have shown that this doesn't stimulate the economy but instead only helps the rich. The GOP has also gone out of their way to kill these studies showing the fraud in the system which Voltaire doesn't like either.

The meaning of life

There is only one thing we all share in life. Death. No matter what you do in life you are going to die. So does it matter what we do in life we are all going to die. I think so. It's the same reason while some people decide to end their life while they are suffering. It's a lot better to feel good then to feel bad. The only feelings we feel should be good since they are the only ones we will ever feel. The meaning of life is to sit at a meal with a bunch of friends and family and tell all the stories you have. To me this is the most fun because everyone you care about is laughing and have a good time. We should feel a need to propel our future children and their children. We should want everyone to have the best time on earth.

Crime and Punishment

           Does the punishment ever fit the crime? Is the punishment itself a disguised crime? What I want you to think about right now is the death penalty. Let's say you have a guy, Jimmy Joe Bob, who goes and kills someone. The cops, thinking that killing another human is wrong, go do their thing and arrest Jimmy Joe Bob for murder. Now at court, Jimmy Joe Bob is sentenced to penalty by death. Now let's go back to why you arrested Jimmy Joe Bob in the first place. You thought killing someone was wrong so now you are going to kill someone who killed someone. Are you doing it right? Is this a moral action? If you let Jimmy Joe Bob go then people will think you can just get away with killing anyone. If you kill Jimmy Joe Bob, you are acting against your own morals. Is there a system that can evenly balance out crime and punishment?
           Let's now take a look at Candide. Candide decides to go for a walk while in an army he was practically forced into and chooses the punishment of running the gauntlet thirty-six times. This seems to me like a case of ridiculous consequence for something not serious at all. Candide did something he didn't even know was wrong and was punished with almost death. It seems to me that all crime and punishment can be put onto a scale. In the middle of the scale we have what the crime was, the left we have no punishment, and the right we have the most severe punishment. If you tip too far left, people might perform unjust actions because they know the punishment isn't severe enough. If you go too far to the right then very minor offenses will be punished severely. If you are in the middle you are causing the same punishment to a man who committed a crime you thought was unjust.

What do we really know?

What do we really know? Suppose our life was just a bunch of frames like in a movie. Now let's assume that the arrow of time is encoded in each frame. Now let's say we scrambled these frames so that they no longer are in what we perceive to be an order. At each frame all you know is what you've just done according to the arrow of time and where you are about to go according to the same arrow. If we were then to play that scrambled movie, would we experience life in the same way? How would you know you haven't just done to a future frame and back if the only thing you can perceive is your current frame and its past experiences. The only thing we actually know for a fact is that we exist in a place. We could be in a computer game from some other location and dimension but all we know is what we can do inside our mind.

Unexamined Life

"The unexamined life is not worth living." So what makes life worth living? Is it finding truth or is only the search for it what matters? If this quote is wrong, should we still search for the truth knowing this is not it? Is truth just what we believe to be true or what all the facts point to? Do we even know if facts are indeed true unless we were at the exact event? Even if we were at the event, do our eyes deceive us? How do we know we aren't in a lucid dream from a higher dimensional multiverse, unable to wake because are view of the truth has been twisted by a brain that has to be even greater and more complex than the one we believe to have right now? I think Richard Dawkins puts it best when he says there will always be things in the universe that will be unprovable but that doesn't make them true. You can't disprove unicorns but that doesn't make them true. I think Dawkins is like the modern day Socrates. He basically wants people to question their beliefs mainly in god and creationism through books and debates. He says very explicitly that he doesn't care about what you believe he just cares passionately about the truth and we must take all the evidence we find to point us to the best possible conclusions because evidence is the only thing we should rely on.

Eulogy

Mark Waechter. What a guy. There are so many things to say about this man. Let's start with his most important rule. Never get mad. Mark understood that getting mad didn't solve anything. It was all about thinking logically to this guy. Being close-minded was not the answer. You can never reach conclusions while being close-minded. He always knew the best way to fix a problem was to listen to all the ideas, not think he was the only correct one. There is nothing as scary as a man who thinks he's right. Life to him was all about changing the world for the better. If we get a bunch of powerful enough together to help make a change, what does it matter if they are all closed-minded and think they are right? No work will get done because no one is willing to compromise because they are SURE that their way is the right one no matter how much evidence is stacked against them. That’s why Mark hated politics. The politicians no longer care about helping the citizens get better lives. They care about trying to implement their laws into the government to help their own lives and try to get elected again so they can get paid to get nothing done. This is the problem with the world. No one really seems to care about making the world better for the next generation. All we want is to be lazy because we don’t understand the amount of influence we have on being able to change the course of history.