FlatBox

Today was Alejo´s morning meeting.  He has been participating in many entrepreneurship competitions and in this morning meeting he introduced us to one of his projects. This project was the one he and 5 other people developed at a competition called Start Up Weekend, where they won second place. I thought his idea was very interesting and very useful, I mean it would be something that I would buy. Even though his idea was great, the thing that astonished me the most was the fact that Alejo, apart from doing all of the work at the MPC, is also working on various side projects. I had always known that he liked entrepreneurship, but I hadn’t really given it much thought, and with this presentation he just blew my mind. I started thinking that he was actually really good at all of this, and he is definitively going somewhere in the future. 

Consilience 4 & 5

To discuss these two chapters we went back to the basics of the book by talking about the main theme of the book and these are some of the conclusions we reached.

What is Wilson trying to do?

He wants to find a way to link the sciences and the humanities, and to find out how this linkage is important to human welfare.

Wilson is trying for us to return to the values and principles of the Enlightenment in order to solve the metaquestion of the book. These are some of the values that we went over during the discussion:

• Humans can always be perfected.
• Progress is inevitable.
• We should be driven by the thrill of discovery.
• Power of science.

A question that came up during the conversation that I found interesting was this one: Will we learn from the attempt to link sciences from humanities or will we learn from the actual linkage? This was one question we didn’t have the answer to, but I hope I will be able to once we read more of the book. 

Music For The Soul

Mabe led todays morning meeting, and let me tell you something. It was AWESOME! She divided the morning meeting in half. For the first part she required four volunteers, so of course I volunteered. We each got a piece of paper with an emotion on it and we all had to make a sound representing that emotion and the rest of the class had to guess what emotion it was, but there was a catch, we had to do it with our backs to them so that they couldn’t see our faces. The first emotion was played by Javier Tabush  and it was nostalgia, the seconds by Isa and it was sadness, mine was anger and  the last one was made by Javier Parellada and it was happiness. It is really interesting because all of our classmates figured what the noises represented.

The second part of her morning meeting was the best one. She gave all of us a piece of paper and she played seven songs, on the piece of paper we had to write the emotions or anything that came to our mind while a specific song was playing. After we had heard all seven songs we discussed one by one what we had written down. I loved how sometimes everyone got the same emotion from a song (being love, anger, etcetera) and sometimes there where groups of total opposite emotions. Here is the list of songs that Mabe played for us:

• Melancholy by Poulenc
• Cello Concerto by Eldar
• Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky
• Saeglopur by Sigur Ros
• Winter by Vivaldi
• Silentium by Arvo Part
• Symphony 10  by Mozart

           

  

Bert´s Morning Meeting!

I kind of thought it was weird at first, because he didn’t really start it out, the rest of the students did. He showed us a video called A Conversation by Steven Pinker and Ian McEwan.

 . I actually enjoyed the video; I had seen part of it yesterday while talking with Bert. Although it was entertaining for me, I found a lot of my classmates bored and distracted. I think the cause of this was that the video wasn’t actually a video, it was just the audio. At the beginning I found it hard to concentrate. I guess it is harder to listen to something without a visual image, my eyes tended to get distracted very easily. This is what might have happened to my classmates.  

                            

Euthyphro Part 2

Answers that Euthyphro gives about piety:

1. To do what I am doing now (Euthyphro), prosecuting the wrong.
2. What is dear to the gods is pious and what is not is impious.
3. The pious is what all the gods love, and the opposite, what the gods hate is the impious.
4. The godly and the pious is the part of the just that is concerned with the care of the gods.
5. Pious is knowledge of how to sacrifice and pray.
6. What is dear to the gods. (it goes back to the second one)

These are some of the ideas that we discussed:

• Gods are like a universal moral standard (what is good and what is bad). Universal moral standard as an objective view on what is good and what is bad, or as an institution and the rules that they consider good or bad.
• This relates to our rules of ethics at the MPC, this is what we are aiming at in this program. The aim is not the right, but those who don’t have an action to do wrong. Our values won’t let us choose wrong. We strive to get to the point at which we don’t even think about things, we don’t even choose, being good is already a part of us, an authentic part of us. Just like Euthyphro said at the beginning “pious is to do what I am doing now”.  

Euthyphro Part 1

Basic story of Euthyphro: two men meet outside of the court. They are each going somewhere; Socrates is going to his own prosecution and Euthyphro to prosecute his father. They both join in conversation.

What do they talk about: Piety. Socrates is trying to understand what piety is and trying to get Euthyphro to explain it to him. By knowing what piety is, Socrates thinks he can make a case against his prosecution. They also talk about the structure of Euthyphros´s claim and use syllogisms to do this.

Background: this is the trial that sends Socrates to his death. He is trialed because Meletus thought that Socrates was innovating the gods instead of following the old gods.

There are two ways to interpret Socrates: 1) like if he knows everything, he is cynical and manipulative. 2) He has intellectual humility and integrity. He is honest in not knowing certain things.

Answers to what piety is:

1) What us dear to the gods is pious, what is not is impious.

2) What is concerned with the care of the gods.

2) What is pleasing to the gods.

In this dialogue, I got really annoyted because I had read a quote trying to give an explanation for what piety was and then someone else said it again and everyone related to that one. It was like if no one listened to what I had said before.  

Optical Illusions

In todays morning meeting Isa presented us some optical illusions. She told us that she wanted us to do this because of the book we are reading, Thinking Fast and Slow. I really enjoyed it, and was amazed at mi mind because I saw the illusions very easily, while others didn't.
Here are some of the illusions: