How much control do you have over your own future?

Can people with different opinions be right?

What can a personal story tell us about the big issues?

In our discussion, wealth was considered an important factor in how much control we have over our future. The more money we have, the more opportunities we can create and the more hope we can buy. However, the majority of us would choose good health and spirit over infinite wealth.

I think that what makes us happy and having control over the future are separate. A lot of people want a stable, fairly simple future: a family, a house, maybe a car etc. Having a more secure grasp of our future would help us achieve this, but often the ultimate aim is to be secure and happy. 

The control we actually have over our own future is small. So many factors influence our future: politics, the economy, the weather, accidents, the people we meet etc. We often have a decent amount of choice in our actions and how we think, but sometimes even this is restricted in the bigger picture. When we meet someone from a different culture, the person is often strongly influenced by their surroundings and culture. It is a bit like the frog in the well: we can't actually have a perception without society's filters, so even in a 'free democratic' state, our decisions and future are guided by our influences and circumstances. It is not like we can't change our future, but I think a lot of luck is involved in destiny. 

Hoping for a better day ~Reflections on Israel and Palestine

This presentation made me reflect upon what is needed in conflict resolution.
The problems between the Israelis and Palestinians have made people suffer for a long time. While at first the problem began with a disagreement of beliefs and identity, because the conflict becomes political, it becomes impossible for anyone to live in Israel without having their day-to-day lives affected by this conflict.

"Maslow's hierarchy of needs"
I found Andrew Watson's reference to Maslow's hierarchy of needs interesting: the needs of people living in the conflict-affected areas are being less and less fulfilled,  bringing their level of fulfillment down to safety, and sometimes even to physiological. Their worries for tomorrow are so simple, yet due to a difference in identity, people cannot achieve these basic needs.

Problem solving is at the top of this hierarchy. To have the emotional capacity to be able to solve problems, reduce prejudice, accept and respect others, first the bottom needs need to be attained. The situation in which the people live in though, cannot address these needs. The longer the people are deprived of basic needs, the more the situation aggravates: an example being a change in attitude, where people begin to use definitive language and hold dogmatic views. The children grow up in this environment, and the views of their parents are passed on through the generation. The views begin to lose sight of the reason the conflict happened in the first place.

In this presentation the importance of education was justified, because respect for each other can be promoted, and a attitude towards conflict resolution can be created, especially because people have suffered enough hard times. Educating the younger generations can help create understanding of the problems that exist, and create a generation who know how to work towards conflict resolution.

10 Thousand Miles (film)
What did we see that surprised us?
The style of the movie and the plot were good, but not many of the elements in the movie actually ‘surprised’ me, because I have a father who travels often to these areas of the world, who’s told me about their situation, and I think their cultural background is more similar to that of Japan than that of the Western world.
What I felt was interesting was that the university students that appeared in the film that they mostly wanted just to have a family, and didn’t feel a great desire to travel. Most of them didn’t have the means to travel, but it was also that they didn’t have much motive to travel. In comparison to the allegory of ‘the frog in the well’, it seems that people are perfectly content staying ‘in the well’.

What was TOK about this?
The main idea of ‘the frog in the well’; having a limited perception/vision of the world, and going on a journey which stretches this perception was TOK. Each person came from a different background and experienced situations and saw what they had not known before. This gaining knowledge by aquaintance and learning about different ways of thinking is TOK. It was also interesting that Liam, the producer of the film, felt essentially that what the western media portrays of this part of the world, and what the ‘local’ Chinese media portrayed showed completely seperate images. From his first hand experience, he described as reality being somewhere in between, which I think is the case with most medias.

‘Politically Correct’
Political correctness is often mocked because of its extent that it becomes ludicrous. In the radio show that we listened to in class, the man mentioned ‘gaijin’, which means foreigner in Japanese. I think the separaration between what is and what is not is not always so clear, and the term ‘gaijin’ is a good example of this. It seems to me that in Japan because of the common use of this word, it is almost implanting a discrimatory notion in Japan, that people are either Japanese or not.

WOK: Emotion

Emotion vs Cognition
In this lecture, the justification for emotion as a way of knowing was that although emotion is a illogical, subjective, the existence of qualia (the physical reactions emotions produce) means that there is a stimulus passing through the mind, and although unconscious, it is not less subjective than perception eg. perceiving color is subjective. It involves information being processed before stimulus arrives at the perception. The emotion also has knowledge such as instincts which can be vital for survival.

Another argument was that emotion gives knowledge meaning. Logic follows an emotional reaction, and arousal is essential to all mental functions. Boredom is the lack of emotion, and knowledge has no meaning if it does not arouse emotion.

I feel this argument in a broader philosophical sense is valid, but in a practical sense, weak. If it is emotion that gives knowledge meaning, it would mean for example people who find maths boring, do not find meaning in knowing maths. This is not necessarily true. I have times when although I am not interested in something, but I know the importance of knowing it, so I learn it. There may be no immediate emotional arousal when the knowledge is acquired by individuals.
However it is true that if there was no emotion behind all the knowledge we have, knowledge probably would not have been created. We search for knowledge because we want to, because we need to, and those are emotional reactions.

Language II

Swearing

As a part of using language as a means of knowing, we looked at the implications of swearing. In the day-to-day life we use it normally as strong means of expressing. We also looked at the literal meanings of swear words in different languages:

English=sexual

French=sexual

Quebecois=religious

Dutch=disease

Swedish=religious+ sexual

Danish=Devil, Satan, Hell

Finnish=Devil, illness

Japanese=animal+ sexual

There seems to be a similarity, that most of these are sources of fear.

However I think  the word ‘swearing’ in itself already reflects the English language and culture, and trying to look at the different swear words in different languages already specifies what we mean by swearing. In French we would call these words ‘gros mots’, and in Japanese we would just call this type of language ‘dirty’. I agree that most languages will have ‘bad’ and ‘taboo’ words to express strong emotion, but especially as we get away from the European languages and look at languages of completely different origins, this doesn’t apply directly the way ‘swear words’ have a role in English.

Humor

Humor is strongly linked to language and culture. My personal experience about this is again from my origins, Japanese. There is a type of comedy (like stand-up comedy or ironic humor) that exists only in Japan, which consists of being silly going along with a joke, and someone else intervening and saying the ‘punch line’. This sounds really weird in any other language and is completely alien to even cultures closer to Japanese like Korea or China. There is also an expression, “Go get laughter even if it sacrifices yourself (physically)”,  which explains the Japanese TV shows where people do the craziest things. 

Language

For language we had lectures by three different teachers, who looked at different aspects of language in TOK: different languages and perception through language, how language is used to manipulate etc.

I feel that perception of the world through different languages is a really significant part of our lives (as students of an international school). Most of us are polyglots, and we have a feel for different registers, such as colloquial, academic etc. The school we are in is bilingual, and by speaking both English and French, we all have a feel for different cultures as well. I think understanding a language helps get an insight into the culture relating to the language, because there are expressions and notions in different languages which translation destroys. For example French is a very flowery expressive language compared to languages such as German, English, Spanish, because it was originally the language of the diplomats. This is really true (statement from experience), because a sentence in English could take twice as long in French.

There was also a really interesting example that links language and perception.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4b71rT9fU-I
This tribe has a different system for naming colors, which in fact allows them to distinguish colors that we can't easily. I also experience this when I talk Japanese and English: for example the word 悔しい(kuyashii) in Japanese describes an emotion between frustration and regret, which I don't know how to describe in English, and I actually feel most people that don't speak Japanese don't feel this exact emotion. It links to the quote, "If you can't say it, you don't know it".

Subjective knowledge

Today in TOK I came to realize how much the importance of different types of knowledge is subjective and personal. In an exercise where we were given the IB hexagon subjects and ranked them in order that we thought was closer to the Truth, my three top subjects were my Higher Level subjects: Maths, Physics, and Art. If I were to justify my reasons for each of them, I would find my personal views and preferences would interfere.

This was really interesting because, although for example maths is thought to be close to the truth by many people, personal taste could change this opinion. For a person who feels maths is less significant in their life, maths would seem further away from the truth.

Also, I honestly can agree with the quote by Louis Armstrong, "Man, if you have to ask what it is, you'll never know." I've been through personal experiences where whether or not a person 'feels it', or 'gets it' really changes their knowledge and perception. I think this is appears in most art forms; Personally I see this most in music, where I have a wide range of taste. If a person likes one genre but doesn't like another because he doesn't 'get it', he'll never know. When a picture paints a thousand words but an interviewer has to ask an artist why what he has done is good, the interviewer will never know. 

This relates to how personal opinion affects our perception, because a person may not be able to see the importance of something, due to 'not getting it' or 'not feeling it'. I think understanding this helps in trying to create compromise and enables people to empathize.