CLASSIFICATION

Today in our TOK class we talked about classification. Classification was explained to us as arranging a group of people or things in classes with shared qualities or characteristics. So this class made me think, Why do we feel de need to classify?. According to the lecture we classify because it is our instinct, however i personally think that sometimes classification ourselves can help us find people that we can relate with, either because we come from the same culture, or we are part of the same gender, or we like the same things, but if we have something in common that can put us in the same place after being classify this would mean that in some way we are equals and we can relate. But, where do we get our classification standards from?, personally i think that this standards of classification are passed on, so most of the times they are influence in our surroundings, our cultures, and our ways of living. Is it correct to classify people? Even though i think most of the people that classify don't do it on purpose or its becoming so normal that some times we don't even think about it, classification can lead to a lot of problems. Racism, Homophobic, sexism are just some of the examples of what could happen because of classification. A good example of this is the Holocaust, it is one of the biggest examples of classification in the history of the wold and however it was a terrible massacre. I don't think classification is bad however we have to learn how to us it with out affecting other peoples feeling or rights, we have to think that at the end we all fit in a very big category, we are all human beings.

Here we have an entry in a blog that talks about how the Nazis used to classify the "undesired people" during the Holocaust.
http://andrejkoymasky.com/mem/holocaust/ho03.html

EMOTION

Today we talked about emotions in our tok class and even though we talked about it in a very big range of topics the one that caught my attention the most was emotion vs reason. When is it correct to relay on your emotions and not on your reasoning and your senses. Or what if that end both reason and emotion are based on senses? whats the real difference between them? at first i thought that there was no gap between the two, for me they were completely related until the teachers started to talk about Phineas Gage. He suffer from an accident that affected his brain, after the accident he wasn't the same trustworthy and honest person but after the accident according to the doctors his ability to make rational decisions was imparted, and this, according to Demasio, was because his emotional abilities were damaged. This made me think that even though their are related their are not the same thing. As human beings every time we make a decision there is always a little reasoning and a little emotion too. For Phineas Gage there was no emotion so his reasoning was a lot more accurate since it didn't have to fight the inexact and bias human feelings. However thats exactly what makes us humans, we make mistakes and we have inductive reasoning cause we have feelings, and even though sometimes we involve our feelings and emotions more than we should, sometimes they help us too. After all when Phineas Gage lost the "emotion" part of the brains he became a machine of rational decisions but he stopped being trust worthy, he wasn't the same good man anymore. 

Here we have a BBC articles that relates more clearly the story of Phineas Gage and what he went through after loosing his emotions. 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-12649555

REASON

Today in our TOK lecture we talked about reason. In this we talk about inductive reasoning and how we use it in our daily life. They explained inductive reasoning as what we actually see. Specific instances to a general conclusion. With inductive reasoning you can't never active absolute certainty since generalization is always made from the observed to the unobserved, this causes stereotypes. This made me think a lot in all the stereotypes we make everyday with out even considering that maybe we are wrong. A good example of this is when we are in a class at school learning new things, everybody might seem paying attention and concentrated, the teacher might even ask questions to some of the students to see if their getting it but not to all of the, if they get the questions right  the teacher would assume that everybody understands the topic that is being discuss. Finally he would put a test or quiz to the students and can easily found out that he was wrong, because a third of the class failed the quiz. Seeing that part of the class got it the teacher assumed that all the students understood the topic when in reality it wasn't like that. Creating stereotypes we can hurt people with out even noticing it, we might say someone is really fat because he eats a lot and maybe they just have a disease and by not knowing it and making assumptions with our inductive reasoning we might be hurting them. We have to learn how to control our reasoning because if we don't learn how to handle our reasoning we can make lots of mistakes that will get us to some uncomfortable moments.

Here we have a video that shows how sometimes we assume things just because we see them from a different perspective, and this can bring troubles.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3h-T3KQNxU&feature=related

"This is just the latest in a whole raft of research showing how we can be manipulated into believing that we have control over chance outcomes, simply by presenting information differently, or giving cues which imply that skill had a role to play."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/03/bad-science-manipulate-mind-causality