4/30/12

With Darwin's idea of natural selection it is said that anyone that has a defect of any kind (mental or physical) would die because of the environment and that is natural selection at it's finest. In other words nature would weed them out, for example blind people would get hit by cars and handicap people wouldn't be able to get out of their houses and therefor they would die because they are not fit enough to live. They are only alive because of the people that are fit enough to take care of them and feel guilty enough to help them. In his theory he thinks that by us helping those that are not fit to live on their own that we are messing with the natural selection process and that is wrong. But there is a hiccup in this theory; no human can live on their own, we need help from one another to survive no matter how fit we are. Without someone taking care of us when we were born we would die within a couple hours. We're not like crocodiles who as soon as they are born they run from the nest because their mother sees them as a source of food. I would say that we're pretty luck in the sense that our mothers don't want to eat us as soon as we're born.  

4/26/12

Competition of resources causes us to battle for them, and by this nature selects who's the most fit. But by fitness I'm not talking about who is the strongest, ants can lift 100x's their weight, no human can do that but yet we can crush an ant and think nothing of it. There is also the example of dinosaurs who were one of the strongest and biggest animals on Earth. It is proven by their extinction that they weren't fit for their environment so they were killed off. Also fitness isn't shared genetically, just because your parents were smart doesn't mean that you are going to be just as smart. This is where Nature vs. Nurture comes in. Your parents might play the guitar, that doesn't mean automatically that you are going to love guitar, but because you have been around the guitar all your life you might pick up an intrest from your surroundings.  

4/25/12

Everyone has heard of survival of the fittest, at least anyone that has taken a biology class. It is the process of selecting an animal to survive based on who's most "fit". But philosophers argue what it means to be the most fit, does it mean that you are the most physically fit, or the smartest, or the animal that just has the best luck? Some would argue that it depends on the situation. We talked about in class how a snake would be able to crawl through a small hole to survive, yet even though we are smarter as humans and kill snakes all the time in that example the snake would be more fit. But if it came to be able to create a way to feed yourself for live and make the tools to make that skill easier humans would triumph any animal. I feel that we are all fit in different ways but it's just the environment that you are in and what danger you need to survive that makes all the difference. We might be one of the smartest animals on earth, but we defiantly aren't the most capable animals to survive.   

4/24/12

Something that really blew my mind was finding out that when George Bush was running for President the way that people morally chose between who they would vote for was thinking who they would more likely have a beer with. How can we as Americans think that is a rational way of thinking that is the way that we should make a decision as to who should run our country? As I said in my last post, we are responsible for the choices that we make, so how can we be so mad at George Bush when we are the ones that put him in office in the first place. I agree that he needs to take responsibility for the choices that he made to but I feel that it is a two way street. I also said in my last post that people having different morals make it hard to judge what is right and wrong, but there is also something known as common sense and I feel that should be considered something that we could judge if someone has it or not.

4/23/12

When talking about conforming, there are many different aspects to acting independently from everyone else. There is a difference between wanting to do something that everyone else is doing and mindlessly make a decision because of what everyone else is doing. For example stay at home mothers were often ridiculed by feminist for not wanting to be independent, but this isn't right because if you truly want to stay home with the kids there is nothing wrong with that, but if you are staying home because that is what you have been taught to think then are you not being radically free. Law sometimes make the decisions for us, not because of if they are right or wrong but because we don't want to go to jail. We are responsible for the decisions we make, but to judge someone based on their morals is impossible. No one can tell you that your morals are wrong if they are what you believe.  

4/20/12

How can we classify our nature? Marx would say human nature is classified as how we meet our basic needs. But what about biological nature? An example would be alcoholism, there is a level of choice that we have and we don't have. It is your choice to drink in the first place, but there is a line where it is no longer your choice, is that classified then as your human nature. We change based on the things that we need and how we meet those needs. Some of those things are a biological given, like taking care of your children. As a parent you change to provide and do whatever it takes for your children and that is just in your nature, we want to do what's best for our kids. I feel that there are some aspects of our nature that we can chose but then there are choices that we make that can change our nature into habits that we can not control and because of those choices we change our nature completely.

4/19/12

In our reading we are suppose to be answering the question what is means for us as humans to be "radically free". In Platos beliefs we are rational creatures that submit into our emotional feelings and when we do that we are acting more like animals. But the difference between us as conscious beings and objects is that we have intentions within our actions, objects don't. We are aware that there are things other than ourselves in the world, but most adolescences don't see it that way. When we are  younger we tend to have an egocentric predicament, meaning that we think that we are the center of the universe and that we are not intertwined in the world. When we get older we learn that we are embedded into the world and that we are very dependent on our surroundings. To be a conscious being you need to have the realization that there are things outside yourself that you didn't create.