Consilience 11-12

Could one compare Transcendentalism and Empiricism with the MPC?

 Can Transcendentalism, being the rules given by someone greater, from the top down, be compared to those rules that a teacher gives in a classroom? With the students not doubting their origins?

And can Empiricism, being the rules created by humans themselves, from the bottom up, be compared to those rules that a group of students create? Like those at the MPC (rubrics)?

If we have Transcendentalism, no matter the advance on social sciences or science, can there still be consilience  of science and humanities? I do not think so, because Transcendentalism sees everything as having some divine nature, call it god or another deity. It wouldn't leave enough room for the sciences.

Transcendentalists and Empiricists  could have the same god. The only difference is that Transcendentalists believe that our morality and ethics originate from that god, and Empiricists believe that these comes from humans. But this doesn't mean that the Empiricists cant believe in some kind of god. Could this be the difference between believing in a god and having a religion?

Transcendentalism: it works because of the epigenetic rules to follow someone, to have a leader. But then, empiricism also could mean following a leader, just not a supernatural one.

We, all human beings, have a yearning to explain the unknown, mysticism. This could be one of the reasons that we have gods and why we want them to lead us. But then, if this were true, why could we have the capacity to go against the leader?

These pictures are of some of the maps we came up with during the discussion. 

Blind Christmas Drawing

So today was my morning meeting, and instead of watching videos I decided to do something fun that was related to christmas. I did two activities.
The first one was called Blind Christmas Drawing on the instructions were the following:
On the call of GO! everyone must put their book on their head and a blank piece of paper on top of that and draw the following: 4 stockings hanging on a fire place, then candy canes in a basket on the floor, then a christmas tree next to the fire place.
These were the results:

The next game was Christmas Object Drawing. Two people had to sit back to back. One had an object and the other a blank piece of paper. The person with the object had to try to explain what the object was, without naming it, and the other person had to try to draw it. 

These were the results:

                                             

So Far in Programming.....

Don Quijote 2

En el capitulo 6, se ejemplifica como Cervantes se presenta a si mismo. El juicio que emiten sobre los libros que el cura y el barbero consideran valiosos y los cuales no consideran valiosos. Es interesante que los libros que ellos consideran valiosos son los de Cervantes o los de sus amigos. 

La dama era la que iba a iluminar el camino del caballero. Por eso, sin en verdad  conocer a Aldonza, y sin ella fijarse en el, Don Quijote la idealiza y la convierte en Dulcinea. Es inconcebible un Quijote sin una Dulcinea. Todos los dolores, las alegrías y otros sentimientos, el Quijote las remite a Dulcinea. 

¿Para hacer todo lo que hizo el Quijote se necesita estar loco?

"Y así  del poco dormir y del mucho leer, se le seco el cerebro de manera que vino a perder el juicio". "En efecto, rematado ya su juicio, vino a dar en el mas extraño pensamiento que jamas dio loco en el mundo, y fue que le pareció concebible y necesario, así para el aumento de su honra como para el servicio de su república  hacerse caballero andante y irse por todo el mundo con sus armas y caballo a busca de las aventuras..."

¿Es necesario estar loco para tomar una decisión como esta? 

El Quijote nunca dice que fracaso, siempre dice que algo le salio mal, aunque siempre queda golpeado, pero nunca se rinde. 

En que medida es realismo y en que medida es irrealismo?

Don Quijote representa el irrealismo, y Sancho representa el Realismo. ¿Sera que por eso Cervantes los puso juntos?

The English Lesson

Let´s not get discouraged with Words and Rules, or with The Trivium. We are not the only ones.

THE ENGLISH LESSON

We'll begin with box, and the plural is boxes.
But the plural of ox should be oxen, not oxes.
Then one fowl is goose, but two are called geese.
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.
You may find a lone mouse or a whole lot of mice,
But the plural of house is houses, not hice.
If the plural of man is always called men,
When couldn't the plural of pan be called pen?

The cow in the plural may be cows or kine,
But the plural of vow is vows, not vine.
And I speak of a foot, and you show me your feet,
But I give a boot - would a pair be called beet?

If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,
Why shouldn't the plural of booth be called beeth?
If the singular is this and plural is these,
Why shouldn't the plural of kiss be nicknamed kese?

Then one may be that, and three may be those,
Yet the plural of hat would never be hose.
We speak of a brother, and also of brethren,
But though we say mother, we never say methren.

The masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
But imagine the feminine she, shis, and shim!
So our English, I think you will all agree,
Is the trickiest language you ever did see.

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you
On hiccough, thorough, slough, and through?
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.

And dead; it's said like bed, not bead;
For goodness sake, don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat,
(they rhyme with suite and straight and debt).

A moth is not a moth in mother.
Nor both in bother, broth in brother.
And here is not a match for there.
And dear and fear for bear and pear.

And then there's dose and rose and lose --
Just look them up -- and goose and choose.
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword.

And do and go, then thwart and cart.
Come, come, I've hardly made a start.
A dreadful language? Why, man alive,
I'd learned to talk it when I was five.

And yet to write it, the more I tried,
I hadn't learned it at fifty-five!

By: T.S. Watt

Hope for Humanity

Today was Majo´s morning meeting. This was a very patriotic morning meeting. She showed us some videos of this campaign in Guatemala trying to bring out the best of all of the Guatemalan. This campaign is called Accion MOB. I really found it interesting, because apparently there are a lot of people participating in this campaign and are really taking it seriously. I think Guatemala needs more things like these. But the most striking thing of this morning meeting was the videos that people showed afterwards. Isa showed us a video of a chain of kind actions. This video really moved me, I guess that there is still hope for humanity.  

Self-Reliance 7

Always be yourself and stay true to yourself. The important thing is the consistency about being ourselves. As long as one is being genuine to one self, one can have one opinion today and change it to another the next day. This is what Emerson means when he talks about honor, to be your true self. By doing genuine things, having honor, helps us live life day by day.

“We worship to-day because it is not of today.” We worship someone today because of all of his past actions. But, does Emerson tell us to judge by our past actions or by our present actions? We shouldn’t take the result of the actions; we should take the actions as being consistent with one self.

“Every true man is a cause, a country, an age; requires in finite spaces and number and time to fully accomplish his design.” 

Consilience 9-10

We discussed how social sciences are far away from consilience with the natural sciences. How biology and culture don’t coincide: some people just study biology and others just social sciences. Wilson says that there should also be consilience between the two.

Another topic we discussed was epigenetic rules:

• “Epigenetic rules will allow the understanding of the human mind, and thus reach consilience.” Why is it that epigenetic rules leave an array of options?Because by law, we don’t have to follow the rules?Why do they leave options for us? Is it for mere experimentation? Sometimes, especially in complex societies these epigenetic rules no longer contribute to the health and well-being of the community, meaning that these epigenetic rules don’t do us good and don’t work. Which has to mean that something has changed. Does this mean we can change the human disposition to follow, believe and want an authority? To become a system more like the MPC?

• We have things in our genes, epigenetic rules, that tell us how to do certain things (survival most of all). This creates a culture and evolves. From this culture we also learn to behave a certain way, although we can choose or move around more freely (like choosing religion).

• Is there an epigenetic rule that guides us to do art?“It follows that even the greatest work of art might be understood fundamentally with knowledge of the biologically evolves epigenetic rules that guided them.”Art is not an epigenetic rule itself, but the are other things that guide us to create are, other epigenetic rules. Could creativity be an epigenetic rule? I believe it is because everyone has creativity, not in the same level, and not in the same area or way (not just paintings). 

Bert´s not so morning meeting

Since Bert wasn’t able to join us today, he sent us a quote and we had to analyze it.

“…(As a public school teacher) I teach the lesson of dependency.  Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do.  This is the most important lesson of all, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meaning of our lives… We've built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they don’t know any other way.” 

We separated into groups and discussed what we thought the meaning of this quote was. With my group (Carmen and Mabe) we agreed that the author is being ironic, in the sense that he is telling us something that is true in order to try and do different; to see the mistakes that this causes. We also agreed that this is the opposite of what we are trying to do at the MPC. 

Words and Rules 1-6

• Rationalism: a set of rules, mathematically set, so that the language might work (manipulation of symbols by rules)
• Empirism: associations between sensory qualities.

Why is Chomsky so important?

Because Chomsky´s rules are based on phonology, while other linguists before him base themselves on the esthetic of the words.

Theories:

• Chomsky and Halle´s Generative Phonology:

Rationalism

• Rumelhart and McClelland´s Connectionism:

Empirism.

• Prince and Pinker´s Words and Rules:

A mixture of generative phonology (for regulars) and connectionism (for irregulars). This theory takes both rationalism and empirism. 

Things I Know To Be True

Todays morning meeting was led by Alejo, and Ive got to say.... it was cool. To summarize it, Ill just post a picture. 

Apology 3

Claim: not only is Socrates devoted to the gods, but his devotion has left him in poverty. This is the argument that Socrates uses against his accusation of being an atheist. Because of this accusation Socrates asked Euthyphro about piety, in order to get the answer of what it was that he revered and why. Socrates says that those accusing him don't have the knowledge to actually accuse him.

Socrates would rather  teach philosophy than to leave with the warning to never preach philosophy or else it would mean his death. He decides he want to still teach philosophy, even after this sentence, so he knows he is going to his death. He shall obey the gods rather than the athenians.

Who is Socrates´ god?
He does not define his gods specifically, but he does talk about the way to be true to the gods. To care about the greatest improvement of the soul we need virtue; virtue is doing what is right, to be faithful to and uphold what one reveres (which for socrates is wisdom and philosophy). So here, he is not defining virtue as a god, but as the way to be true to them.

How can socrates believe in a soul but not believe in the gods?
This is the claim that Socrates uses against Meletus´ accusation. By improving ones soul, one pleases the gods, and one improves ones soul by wisdom.
Socrates believes in cause and effect, even if he does not know what the cause is. He is wise enough to admit this. Therefore proving that he believes in the gods as a cause to all of the effects that happen on earth. He believes in divine and spiritual acts (in other words, improving the soul and searching for wisdom).

Liar Liar, Pants on Fire.

Today was Javier Parellada´s morning meeting. We played 2 games. One was kind of like duck duck goose, we would all close our eyes and Javier would walk around us and tap  someone on the shoulder.  We had to try to guess who got tapped just by observing. He did this twice, and to our surprise, the first time he hadn't actually tapped anyone, and  the second time he had actually tapped everyone. It was very interesting though, because on the second round you could tell people were getting more and more nervous.

The second game we played was also very fun. One person had to step out of the room while the rest had to moo. The whole point of this game was that one person inside the room was going to moo in a different way, or louder than the rest. Once the person outside of the room came in, they had to try to find the awkward cow. This game was more of a joke than an actual game, we were trying to prank Bert, by making him moo all alone. Well, this didn't really work out, but we still laughed a lot.

Don Quijote 1

In just four chapters this book has moved most of the class, all the way from love, to laughter and tears. Cervantes is known as the prince of ingenuity, although he was a failure in his life and he did not stand out. He was very poor and was in jail a couple of times.

Cervantes begins the book with a scenario a place in La Mancha, a region of Spain. But were was Don Quixote born? Cervantes only tells us that he lived in La Mancha but doesn’t really specify in a town. It is very important that Cervantes did not give Don Quixote an actual birth place. Could we know were Don Quixote was from just by guessing, since we have Sancho´s and Dulcinea´s birthplace? We can’t, because Cervantes only says that Sancho and Dulcinea lived in a town close to the one Don Quixote was from, so he could be from a number of towns around the area. 

Thinking Fast & Slow 9-10

Today was Dylan´s last day of the year with us, but nonetheless we had a great dialogue.

Dylan opened the dialogue by asking us how fast do we think fast is and how slow do we think slow is. We all agreed that fast is about one tenth of a second and slow is minutes.  He later explained to us that there is another part of the brain that takes longer than a few minutes; it is in our conscious, in the back of our heads.

Out of this dialogue I learned the following:

• Sustaining doubt is harder that reaching certainty. There are a lot of people who don’t like uncertainty and get really agitated when they don’t have an answer to something, and they will get it at any cost, even if they are not 100% sure of it. There are also another group of people (way smaller) that are the other way around, they don’t like reaching certainty and like to ponder a lot.

• Patterns: system 1 recognizes patters everywhere, on order to try to make sense out of things. There are two types of error that we commit: the mistake of seeing patterns, and the mistake of not seeing patterns. Most of the time our brain recognizes more full positive, meaning that we see more patterns than there are.

• Luck is pure randomness. The is no correlation. 

Tasting Things With Your Eyes Closed

Lucia´s morning meeting was definitely awesome! She had two activities planned for us and they were both great. To start out, she made up pair up with another classmate. Then she gave us each a piece of paper with an emotion written down on it and we were supposed to transmit this emotion just by using our eyes, the other person was supposed to guess. So I teamed up with Carmen and she tried to guess my emotion, which was jealousy (a very hard emotion to interpret with my eyes). Carmen didn’t guess my emotion right. So then it was her turn to interpret her emotion, I got it right away, it was worry. I guess there are some emotions that are harder to interpret only with your eyes.

Her next activity was that one person in each group had to be blindfolded and given food to taste. So, I covered Carmen´s eyes and started feeding her. She tried leche condensada, an oreo, strawberry yougurt, passion fruit and olive oil.  She guessed all of them right.

Consilience 7 & 8

Epigenetic rules, are they environment or culture or genes?Epigenetic rules are not mutually exclusive of the three, although most of all culture and genes affect it the most.

During the whole dialogue we were trying to find out the true meaning of epigenetic rules, we went from the internet all the way to its Greek roots (epi meaning over or on).

To know the true meaning of epigenetic rules, we asked ourselves why Wilson even talks about epigenetic rules. We agreed that we talked about them to describe the human nature.

Epigenetic rules are predispositions that we have, or inclinations that we are born with. I believe that epigenetics are prescribed by our genes and that culture is a result from our epigenetic rules. They guide behavior. These epigenetic rules aren’t really set and they can evolve and change.

We have also inherited epigenetic rules that go against our health and our well-being as humans 

Words and Rules 3 & 4.5

Instead of a discussion, we watched a video that practically summarized what Pinker talks about in the first few chapters. The name of this videos is Linguistics As a Window to Understanding the Brain. While we watched the video we had to write down the questions that we thought Pinker was providing the answer for. These are the questions I came up with:

• What is language?
• What is the miracle of language?
• Why is language important to humans?
• What does linguistics study?
• What topics can you divide language into?
• What is the main puzzle in language?
• What are Chomsky´s contributions to the science of language?
• Why should language have rules?
• What are the rules of language?
• What is the evidence that kids are born with grammar?
• What is phonology and what does it govern?
• What is the process of speech comprehension?
• What are the principles of pragmatics?
• Why study linguistics?
•  

“Every sentence one speaks is a unique sentence never mentiones before in history.” Pinker 

Self Reliance 6

Is not necessary to look at our past?
Our memories can still teach us, but they are a dead thing. We can only transform them and learn from them. "But to bring the past for judgement into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day."
We give our own meaning to our memories.

"Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment". We believe that only by our public actions we show who we are, but we forget all the small details also represent who we are and our character; even the way we move, how we dress, etcetera. (we have to value those tiny little moments.)

Do the Best You Can

Today was Marcela´s morning meeting. She showed us a video (better said... an audio) about this motivational speaker called Jim Rohn. In this speech he gave he talked about how we are supposed to be or try to be the best we can be in everything, all the way since getting up in the morning. I can say that this video was good, but I dont know why it didnt really get to me. I didnt really feel motivated after I saw it, I felt like I had before I had seen it. Maybe its because of something I have said before. It is not the same thing to listen to audio than to watch a video, I tend to get more distracted just listening to the audio.

No Morning Meeting

Our morning meeting facilitator did not arrive today.... This shows the lack of commitment that people have and what their priorities in life are. It is not fair for the rest of us to actually have to be responsible when people aren't. But hey, life isn't fair.

APOLOGY 2

Socrates claims he is in court because he posseses a certain kind of wisdom. While his prosecutors think he is in court because he is currputing the young with new and false gods. 

Is socrates reflecting humility or is he boasting? Does he actually believe he is superior to other poeple or is he saying that he is not? According to the Oracle story, Socrates himself does not think he is the wisest of all or superior to the rest, but the oracle does believe he is, so this is the reason for his quest of searching people who are wiser than him. He is trying to make people stop thinking about him in a divine way, by saying that we are all human.

He never claims himself that he is wise, but he also mentions that he is a little wiser than the rest because he knows nothing. He mentions that the slight advantage he has over the rest  is that he knows that he knows nothing.

Relating socrates with jesus: they both died for what they believed in and they didn't really give lectures, they both let people learn implicitly (asking questions, and letting people figure stuff out for themselves. 

Now I understand why benjamin franklin describes humility as imitating Socrates and Jesus.