Time travel

One of the most controversial subjects in science is the one of time travel. If time is the 4th dimension, ¿can we go back or forth in time?

There are many points of view about this that is hard where to start. Einstein states in his theory of relativity that travelling at the speed of light one perceives time different, slower. while for the rest of the people it is at the same rate.

However, other scientists have stated that, if time travel is possible, why isnt there any proof of any time-traveller? why hasnt anyone from the future come to us to tell us anything? this argument is similar to the paradox of "If im going to travel back in time tomorrow to say hi to myself today, why isnt there another me waving at me?".

I think that time travel is possible, however only to the future and in very tiny amounts of time. and if it is in very tiny amounts of time it seems useless to try. i think it is impossible to go back in time because if you alter the past then the conditions for us to travel back in time would make us not to exist (and on a side note, theres the theory that states that in this situation, we would be travelling to another past parallel universe, not our past universe, but thats another subject that goes into the realm of quantum physics and not philosophy)

Time

Time, like many subjects in this book, is a subject with many questions. I think this subject has more questions than any other subject. That is because even the physicists are trying to discover what is happening with time. If they can travel through time, wormholes and black holes are all theories. The fact that movement depends on time is a philosophical theory explained by Fernando Savater.

I think this is the most interesting subject in this chapter because Savater explains it in a great manner. He says time is something we will never catch up with. He explains this with the story of Achilles and the tortoise. Which I think it's a great story and a true thing. I think that time now, that is ahead of us, is something we will never catch. We can catch it physically but not make up for the time he has in advantage.

I think time is something important in our lives and something we just can't waste because it will happen like it happened to Achilles.

Beauty

The beauty is ,ironically, a very complex theme to talk about. how can we define what something is beatiful and what is not? for example, there´s Warhol famous Campbell painting, which is just a mere painting of a campbell can of soup. can this be considered art? can this be considered beatiful?

Another more extreme example of how can we define art is that in the medieval ages, being overweight was considered beatiful (this is proven in the painting by some artists) and being skinny was the ugliest thing ever in the existence of the planet. ¿is there something that can really be defined as "dogmatically beatiful"?

In my opinion, no. Human mind is way too influenced by external means that shape our definitions of some concepts. What we see today as beatiful might be tomorrow standard of uglyness.

Some people may argue that "dogmatically beatiful" things such as the sea, or a seashell, are beatiful because they arent created by man. In almost all cultures and periods these things have been considered as beatiful. However, Human mind can also be influenced to see these things as ugly. if we attach bad concepts to nature then we would consider it ugly. ¿But how can we consider these things ugly if nature gives us everything we need, and it seems so beatiful?

Im going to use the book Brave New World to exemplify this. This book main argument is a guess, in the form of science fiction, of what would happen to culture if people refused to think and just accepted what they were told to think. in the book, people are induced to hate nature by giving electric shocks whenever they smile or have pleasant thoughts when they are near nature. this process is repeated as many times as neccesary.

While this may be an extreme example, this exemplifies how we could be induced to think nature is bad and that solid grey buildings are the most beatiful form of art ever created. just my opinion.

Beauty

This is one of the most important subject for a human being. Every human needs the sense that he is beautiful or that they need to be surrounded by beauty. This is well explained by Savater and a great addition for this chapter is Kant. I agree with most of the things he says. For a example what I just said about beauty being a necessity. But in this chapter it is also explained that there is no purpose for beauty. So it is kind of contradictory, which is something confusing for most readers.

The animals don't need this thing of beauty, it is only a need for humans. Only humans know it and it is something very important for us. The example that Savater gives about a pyramid being beautiful from the outside. But when you see how it was constructed you start to see that it was built by slaves and a lot of deaths happened there. So it might not be beautiful because of how it was constructed. There is also something we talked in class about the rules of beauty. If we want to be beautiful we have to follow certain rules. I think this is wrong because people have different perspectives and something not be beautiful for them.

Going back to the statement of there is no purpose for something being beautiful, I think that is true. For example when someone invented the plate to eat or the glass to drink. They decorate it, for no reason. You can't drink more if it has decorations, or you can't have a better life if it's decorated. So it doesn't help a lot to have your plate beautiful.

Freedom

"Those who say that are free are the ones who less freedom have"

The concept of freedom fits perfectly in the statement "you dont know what you have until you lose it". have we ever thought of our liberty to move, to think, to go to some places, to want things?

In the initial phrase i put on this blog, i focus on the fact that those who say to themselves "im free, im not a sheep!" are those who may be even more sheep than the others. these people are the sheeps of the idea that they are not sheep. Freedom, like truth, is something we in life never appreciate completely. and like we saw in the videos about the ant and the organ donation, do we really make the decision or are we in an ilusion that we have the freedom of choice?

Have you ever thought of the ilusion of choice? Who are the real choicemakers? we or the people that present us the choices? are we really in control of the decision we make or everything is just a mere set-up? this topic really has more questions than answers. and like most concepts in philosophy only ourselves can answer them.

a great speech talking about this issue
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wewf3lQjCPQ

Freedom

The best thing that this life can give us is freedom. Yes I think that is the best thing that has been given to someone. Some people are free from the day they are born, but others are born as slaves. Here Savater talks of the free decisions that someone makes and if they are really free or they are being forced by the situation.

He gives an example of a captain in a ship and a storm comes. He is trapped and he releases some things from his boat to save his life. Here Savater tries to explain how he did it because of he had too. I have to say that he did it because he wanted to live, he is aware that if he doesn't release the cargo he is going to die. So he did it by his own choice and he wasn't forced.

This is a great point because being free means that you take your own decisions. For example when you move your hand you don't that you are going to move your hand. You just move it without thinking. This sometimes happens when you have a lot of good reflexes or you just don't have control of your hands. I think this chapter is great and it has a lot of points where debates can be taken because it has a wide variety of ideas.

The Universe

This chapter it's the most interesting I have found. Because it asks the hardest question for a philosopher. What is the universe? This question leads to more questions which makes it even more interesting. For example, if the world is infinite or is it finite because we don't know if it has an end. Then if we don't know if it has an end than we can say it is infinite.

It is very confusing but after you read deeply, you can understand all this statements by the philosophers. There is this story about the elephant with his back to a turtle, and the turtle over a spider and a spider over a lot of rocks. Bertrand Russell says this story in a different and an easier way to understand, he only says that a lot of turtles over more turtles. This story talks about how the universe is over many layers and many layers.

I didn't understand this part, but it is still interesting how you can say our universe is over many layers. I think it is infinite because we will never know if this has an end. So it means that the universe is infinite and that this chapter shouldn't have many confusing questions.

Finite and Infinite

This has been by far the most complicated chapter we have studied so far, the topics adressed on this chapter arent easy to understand.

Im going to focus on the topic of the universe and the definition of finite and infinite. Savater proposes uses 2 definitions of the universe, the light one ( the universe is the clearly OUTLINED totality, distinct for the sum of its different part) and a heavy one ( the universe is the name we give to the INDERTEMINED collection or sum of all that exists, a semantic abbreviation, a placeholder)

the light definition seems to be pretty digerible, however theres no way we can prove if the universe is outlined or not as we cannot prove the universe is indetermined or not.

as a friend told me once, humanity has a problem with the definition of finite and infinite things, if an object is finite, theres something outside of it, but what if that outside is part of it? what if the universe is finite, in the sense that what is outside the universe is also part of the universe? it would be like a country, where the land mass is the country but the sea close to it is also considered part of the country, even when is different from what makes up the land mass of the country ( and heres comes the &%$& questions, how to define whats the outside of something? and in my metaphor, what about the outside of the outside? what about the sea that isnt part of any country?)

if we define the universe as infinite, there are no arguments to claim this and it would be like trying to win a debate with no arguments. Why? because as we havent encouenter any infinite object( or whatever other word for it) we cant really know how it is. In the finite option, we at least can imagine a finite object ( we die, our limit is our body, the earth has an area of 510 072 000 km^2 etc) but have we encountered an infinite one? In order for something to be infinite, we would have to be infinite if we want to prove its infinity.

a theory to end this topic i heard is that the universe is in an cycle, where after x time, the universe gets "reseted" and starts over again. even when in this theory it would seem that the universe would be infinite as it never ends , now we must focus on the fact of if the cycle gets degraded or not If when reseted the universe is degraded by 0.000000000000001 of its whole, then it would be really loooong, but not eternal, the infinity of the universe in this theory would depend on another infinity, the infinity of the cycle

The human "animal"

In this chapter there is an interesting proposition about whats the role that mankind has on life, and it is that the life of mankind is open and has "no fixed seat". by this it means we are in control of our own destiny, as we can make wonders in life like no other animal can do.

However as this role is open we can either become the wildest of the beast or the most ilumminated of the group of virtous people. We are like water. we can be relaxing and peaceful ( a calm day in a beach) or become a mounstrosity and be a destructive beast( a tsunami for example).

In my opinion we are really open persons, but theres also behaviors that no other animals do (As far as i know there are no bears that become serial killers of their own specie or fish that get jealous of one fish mating with the female fish he wanted). It seems the price we pay for being the specie that can trascend more in this life is to be equilibrated by twisted minds that compared to rats the rats are virtous (abusers, serial killers, terrorists etc).

We arent more or less than animals, we are just an animal that can trascend to eternity or go down to be dominated by his most brutal desires.

Our Habitat

Now Savater is talking about how humans are like animals and all the similarities we have. You must be thinking that this guy is crazy, just like last time. But again i have to agree with him for the following reasons. He talks about how when Darwin wrote his book of the theory of evolution, all philosophers went crazy and started talking about it, and how we all accepted it that way, only religious people were having some trouble with that theory.

Savater also talks how there were three great discoveries, involving great people, like Copernicus, Darwin and Sigmun Freud. But I going straight to the hole just by talking about how we are greatly to animals. We do have a lot in common but how we have more similarities if looked deeply. Starting with the habitat of the animals, they all have their own place where they live. Unlike us human we can adapt and live wherever we want. Just like the theory of Darwin, he said that the primates evolved and ended up just like us.

If this theory is real then the primates that are in the wild or in the zoo are going to evolve in some thousand years and our going to look just like us. Maybe I am going too much into science but this is what Savater talks about and all of our animalistic features.

Me, Myself, and I

I'm starting to dislike this guy more and more.

Who am I? What am I? Where am I? What's happening? These are the kind of questions that come to your mind after reading Savater's third chapter called I Inside, I Outside.

According to our friend, there exists a possibility of not being human at all. We may be just a bunch of brains just flying around in some laboratory for researching purposes. Maybe our reality is just an illusion created by someone or something else. Well that would just suck. I don't like questioning my existence. But hey, this can't be an illusion because...I already know what an illusion is. I've seen it before, I might have felt it before. I know other people have had illusions before. There can't be an illusion inside of another illusion...can it?

"Cogito, ergo sum" - René Descartes

Yay! Now I am sure that I exist, and that I can't be possibly part of an illusion or some kind of computer program that is just creating everything and everyone that surrounds me.

Now hold it right there. What if I AM an illusion? What if whatever created me is making me THINK I'm thinking? What if I feel because I was created to make myself THINK I feel? What if whatever created me is making me feel like I exist? Am I just a bunch of bytes in an internal memory?

I rather not question myself about whether my life has been just a complete waste of time, because I must admit I'll never have an answer that completely satisfies me, and I know I'll keep making myself questions until I give it up. It kind of relates to the question "What's the meaning of life?" Since I don't have access to the creator of life, for now, I'm just gonna have to settle with this:

I know what I've done and felt in my life is real. If not, I'm sure I much rather spend my life actually LIVING it and doing something with it, than spend it surrounded of hypotheses that may never be solved and make a complete waste of time out of it.

The Truth

The truth is there is no absolute truth...but then again, I might be lying to you, right? I mean, after all, there is no absolute truth. :D Interesting points of view Savater has in his second chapter. He does make a very important statement, however. Fire can and WILL burn you, no matter how you call it. You might as well call it water, knowing that actual water doesn't burn you (unless it's boiling), and it will most definitely burn you.

So according to Savater, there may be an infinity of points of view and so called truths, but the final result, the "real thing", is supposed to be the same in every channel...no matter how you call it. So if there's an infinity of truths, one in each mind, who are we meant to trust? Is skepticism the way to go? Should we question every single person and law in the world, just to feel safer? Will it even do any good to question everything else, if you're gonna end up questioning yourself? It just goes on and on.

I say we should just trust ourselves; trust our own instincts. Yes, even if that leads us to mistakes, because human beings learn from mistakes. Well, most of them. Do whatever you think is right, but DO IT. Do whatever has worked best for you in the past. Nice and simple.

As we already know, the world is full of brains. Each brain with a very unique point of view. There are brains that are "right", brains that are "wrong", and brains that are just seeking benefits for themselves or want to harm you when it comes to asking their opinion.

A very simple example is asking for a street address. Remember, fire BURNS whether you call it fuego or feu. So in this case, you're gonna get DIRECTIONS, different kind of directions, but directions nonetheless. Not to be mistaken with the fact that you are going to end up in the same place with any kind of directions. Here's how it works:

Let's say you're in a city you don't really know much about. So you ask person number one. He tells you to go right on the first street, then walk 3 blocks, and left again. Person number 2 instead, tells you to walk 1 block, and then 3 blocks to the right. You're supposed to end up on the same location. 2 different truths, but with the same result. Person number 3  doesn't know what he/she is talking about and sends you in a whole different direction. Weird enough, there are more than one place that are known by the same name. So there are 3 different truths, but just 2 lead you where you want to go. Person number 4 feels like being funny and sends you to a whole different town. 4 different truths now. So like I said, you want to choose the safest, most reliable option, so you do what's always worked before. You take a taxi. :D

Myself

Savater says that I might be an illusion, or something like that. He also gives an example if we were just brains in a pool controlled by martians. So we could say that he is crazy, but that is not the thing. He is a philosopher and he is saying this for the following reasons.

He is saying that if the conscious exists than that means that we are real, it doesn't have to be physically real to know that we exist. "I think therefore I am" is the quote that explains all this chapter. Realizing that you are real and as I said before, with your conscious you are alive.

I have to say I like the point of view of Savater because it is like if you were dreaming. But when you dream you think its real. In this case it is like dreaming knowing that this is real and it is happening, because your conscious is alive. I'm not saying that just by having your brain, it means that you are real. We know we are real because our conscious exists, so you have to realize that you exist and that you are not just a rat in an experiment lab being tested. Savater explains this perfectly along with other things that concern "I think therefore I am".

The "I"

Who am I? who hasnt ever being busy in one task and all of the sudden ask yourself this question? W ho has answered this question? or even more complex, how to answer this question? How to know who am I?

As always we are here upon the Infinite-headed dragon that is philosophy (Hydra?). We must use the always-handy weapon called reason to answer this.

How to define who am I? Savater proposes us to define ourselves by the inside and the outside. In the inside by our thinking, our reasoning, our soul, what makes us ourselves. And the outside, by the body, by the body we control. My definition of who am I is "The soul which lives in this period of time within a body".

And here comes the dragon again, Are you in a body or a body? Well, this question is like an explosion (BLAM!) to everyone´s head. Savater talks about a theory called reductionism, where they propose that the soul is a mere "mode" of the body. And well, I reverse this situation and think "What if the body is a mere 'mode' of the soul?, a manifestation of the soul in this 4 dimensional universe we live in?". Its a nice theory to think that the soul is really trascendental and that this life is just one stage, one manisfestation of it.

Truth

"All I know is that I know nothing" Socrates

Here Socrates actually says one truth and that is that he knows nothing. I didn't know that until I read this chapter, which is actually confusing. But after you analyze the different "fields truth" you realize that as the term says, there are different types of truths.

Savater is right when he talks about skepticism, relativism and revelations. This are different types of truths. Like Ortega said that about ideas and beliefs that are very different things. Ideas are something we get by experience and knowledge and beliefs are our personal truths. I have to agree with this, first because this guy is a philosopher and second because he is saying the truth.

All I have to say is that after reading this chapter I can't agree with all things, but the're are a lot of reasonable statements that he makes.

Truths...

Knowledge, or at least the knowledge we think we know, is like the stock market. our knowledge of the world changes everydays, no one can predict it and nothing is really "safe knowledge".

While our visions of some points like Savater said ( Fire burns) wont ever change, most of our knowledge is not 100% reliable, times goes and things change.

So what to trust? in my opinion, we should trust our own experience. Our experience will tell us if eating certain things is good, or if skipping classes is worthy of it. However we wont probably know if Mount Everest is the highest mountain by experience. We must trust some sources in what our experience cant reach. The knowledge we get from another sources is the one we must question over and over.

For example, Ifa friend tells me that HP computers are the best of them. I may take his opinion if i want to buy a computer. However as this is knowledge not from my experience there are hundreds of factors that can affect it. ,Maybe he works for HP and for every hp computer sold he gets a commision, or maybe he really likes HP but hasnt tried other computers that could be even better. or maybe he isnt a real friend and knows that HP computers are bad but wants me to buy a bad computer. As you see there hundreds of factors, other person could tell me that HP computers are the worst and hundreds of factors affect it too.

So in my conclusion, trust your own experience, and hear what others say but always "filtering" this information

death

See this is exactly what I'm talking about when I say I rather not touch the subject of philosophizing, especially when it comes to a complex topic such as death. Death can have a million points of view and theories, so let's keep it simple.

First off, just like Savater points out, it IS going to happen sooner or later. However, I'm gonna have to question Epicurus on this one. Sure, he may have been a great philosopher in his time, and I'd love to hear more about his theories, but there's just one little statement I disagree with. Not fear death? How dare he? I think we have more than the right to fear it, especially when it might not be a very peaceful one. How can we not fear something we've never experienced?

Quite frankly, it scares the hell out of me. Not because it's something I've never experienced, although I'm sure everyone has had that kind of feeling, sort of like getting nervous about something new. It's more like I don't feel like finding out whether I'm gonna get eaten by maggots and just rot away, or come back as an insect or a piece of grass if I'm unlucky, or actually walk through the gates of Heaven or Hell as my spirit self.

I've read/heard a few death experiences. Most of them I believe were quite unpleasant. Some even claim to have seen "the light". Even if these experiences can be explained scientifically, aren't those people the ones we should ask if there IS actually something to fear? What should we believe and rely on? Religion? Science? Both?

I might not be the best catholic in the world, but I do know this:

It's better to die believing in God, or a higher force, and then find out there is no such thing, then to die not believing in anything like that, and find out there is a God.

Death

Death is something everyone thinks about, maybe they don't think all the time about death. But sometime in their lives they have to think about it. There are people who think about it all the time, maybe they don't like how their lives is and they think about how death is. Like I said in my last blog of how Socrates died, he was a philosopher who was thinking about death at that time. A lot of philosophers think about death and try to explain it their own way. Looking at different aspects, science, religion and logic. Like Epicurus said that we can't be scared of death because we haven't even experienced it. I think that is a great argument that can be discussed, because some people think they know how death is. Maybe because they've seen it in the movies or TV shows or other places, but they think they know how death is. There is also the religious point of view, which it says that you can go to an afterlife and exist there. So that is there point of viewing death and that is why most people are scared of it. I'm not saying I'm not scared of death, but i just think that Epicurus theory is well said.

The unavoidable death

"Life is pleasant, death is peaceful. its the transition thats troublesome."- Isaac Asimov

The problem with death is not that is it unavoidable, the problem is that nobody knows what happens next. Some people fear whats next, I consider myself in the group that fears the idea of a nothingness after death. Dont get me wrong, I know it is unavoidable. but the idea of an ending to everything you know is just scary. And that idea of a nothingness brought another question to my head that it is even harder to answer and to give a valid argument.What if there wasnt a big bang? what would there be instead? nothingness??

As we are philosophizing in this class, we must not do what the average sheep person does. the average person just ignores thsi question because of fear and continues its life as if nothing happened. Although his fear is justified his actions are not, as we must overcome that fear to live life, and not to survive life.


Accepting death is hard, I read somewhere that when you are an old person the challenge in life is to accept death. Even though we are always at the same distance from death, death is most likely to occur at an advanced age. but we must always be prepared to be face to face with it. As I stated earlier, living a life with fear is just surviving life, therefore we must overcome the fear of death to have a good life

intro

Ugh..philosophy. I usually try to avoid this kind of topics. This particular subject tends to mess a lot with my head, and makes me feel insecure; makes me feel unsure. It makes me want to find out more, learn more, know more. It makes me feel rather insignficant when being compared to so many things. The simple thought of the word "philosophy" is more than enough to drive me insane and never want to touch the subject again.

Don't get me wrong though, I love being caught up in deep thought! It's like tying up knots for me. I could go on all day long, and find it rather amusing, but it'll get annoying if i can't find my way out of those twists and turns and end up with a big tangled-up ball of ideas and problems that in the end leads me down the road of "to nowhere".

I'm more than positive that a few hundred pages are not going to be enough to make me fully understand the term of philosophy, and will more likely leave me with more questons. However, the simple introduction to the book "The Questions of Life" brings up a lot of interesting points of view that are worth checking out. Comparing and contrasting science with philosophy has never been easier. I'm looking forward to obtaining knowledge and wisdom from these pages, and will most definitely share them with you.

introdutction

So I didn’t understand a lot of this introduction, but it looked interesting. “Questions of life” is a great title to this book because there are a lot of questions asked in this introduction. A lot of philosophical questions that make you think every time you say them. Philosophy is all about that, asking questions of the unknown. Even questions beyond the unknown, it may sound weird but that is how philosophy is described in this introduction. Talking of questions, Socrates a Greek philosopher was well known for that, the Socratic Method. He asked a lot of questions to random people, and he was also a teacher. This introduction also explains the death of this great philosopher, the fatal hemlock he drank. He had an opportunity to escape but he wasn’t going to deny his teachings to the ignorant. Maybe this book is like these, they are teaching us things that are going against are religion or our costumes. But this book is of philosophy and as I said before, there is going to be a lot of questioning in this book. So far by reading this introduction, it gives me an impression that a lot of questions are going to be answered in my head, a lot of thinking is going to be done.

Have you ever been busy with trivial stuff in life when all of the sudden your head gets struck with questions like “What the **** am I doing in my life?” “Where are we going?” “How did I ended up here?” “Who am I?”

The sad truth is, when most people think of this they just ignore these questions because of fear of what they don’t understand. So then people keep living their life’s like if nothing had happened

But what happens to those people who think “**** this! What’s life!?”

Well for me, that’s philosophizing. That’s really using your brain to the stuff it was made for. When you realize you may be living your life with blindfolds, then you really start to think.

This is just the start of the journey called Philosophy. And let me tell you, it is a hell of a journey.

Unlike science there are no absolute answers, never ever. Unlike science, the most important judgments is not what Socrates or Plato once said, but what we think about something. Of course, you must make sure your thought is coherent and supported. But the point here is to think by yourself, be yourself.

We wont be able to give absolute answers, but we will give thoughts that will calm our curiosity and fear of what we don’t understand