TOK Presentation

The aim of our presentation was to prove the relation between art (as an area of knowledge) and language (as a way of knowing) . In order to explore fully explore the relation between the two a range of experiments were carried out within the group. Our team was divided into different groups that carried experiments in each of the arts considered by the IB program (music, visual arts, cinematography and dance) in order to involve the audience and shoe them real examples of how art and language are related. From the feedback that the group had it was clear that the interaction with the crowd wasn't sufficient and that the experiments weren't as creative. However the relation between art and language was clearly expressed and understood by most of the members of the audience, making the presentation a success. 

The group worked in different teams in order to fully address each type of art. In general this idea worked perfectly to fully explain the relation  between or area of knowledge and way of knowing by presenting sufficient and optimum information. However each group had lots of information for which the final presentation was  too long, affecting the final outcome. The team also lacked organization since some of the members uploaded their information at last minute, delaying the conclusion of the group as a whole.

If I could do this experiment again we would need to improve the organization of the team. Having all the information on time would have given us the opportunity to practice the presentation and fully arrange the amount of time that each group needed to address their ideas. Hence making our presentation much more clear, optimum and complete.

One of the  learnings that I got from this experience was how much patience  and respect is needed when working within a team with different ideas, cultures and believes. I learned that the context of the persons affects the way in which they see and understand a piece of art. However we have to take into consideration that as a society we have set some parameters that make people unconsciously see and express art in certain ways such as the ones presented ( cinematography, music, visual arts and dance) 

HISTORY

When we started talking about history in our TOK class i was pretty surprise because i always thought of history as a "science", a subject with clear facts and no discussion at all. However getting to know more about it, t got pretty clear why were we talking about it. The history of the world is what makes it what it is today, we couldn't fully understand the world today if we didn't study were we come from, but what happens if what is told that happened is not actually what happened? Our task for today was to think weather rewriting history should happen or not. This topic completely changed my idea of history being an exact science, this is because we will ever really know if what we think that happened is what really happened. Weather or not history should be rewritten is a pretty controversial topic since every country that wants to do it has different reasons. In my opinion is impossible to do decide if it is correct or not, i personally believe that it has to depend on the different situations of each country. Some country have being harshly affected by others in the past, and these type of success sometime need to be forgotten in order for the country to move on and progress. However if the country has the power of getting up after being suffering attacks from other countries I think people should be proud of it and it should be something to remember. As well as if a nation did something wrong, for example the nazis in Germany, this was one of the most terrible acts humanity has seen and many believe that it needs to be left in the past by rewriting what happened, however i don't think it should be possible. For me this situations even though they emphasize the bad stuff of the country it also shows how there are good people too, that there is many people that differ with that kind of massacre and that at the end thats the people who won against this murderess. 

SCIENCE AS A WAY OF KNOWING

Today in class we saw a video from Ted talks, talking about how useful is Science as a way of knowing. The guy doing the presentation though that science could be successfully as a way of thinking because of what we know about emotions and the brain. This made me think that maybe some day we would be able to know for sore what is morally good and what is not. This might happen because we know which parts of the brain relate to which emotion. There are electronics devices that can tell us which part of the brain reacts according different situations.  However I think that this is impossible; yes we are all equal physically, but not mentally. All of us have being through different situations that might have change our way of feeling and seeing life.

 I think there is not an actual way to prove that all humans react the same to different stations. I personally believe that even though science works as a way of knowing in many aspects, it helps us understand the tangible things of world, moral and feelings, in the other hand cant be determined by it. 

We are too much humans in this world, we all live in different ecosystems, and have to interact with different people, this sometimes causes diseases or alterations of the human body that make us different to others. If these alterations occur in our body, why cant it happen in our mind and in the way we react to emotions as well.

Here we have an article about a scientist called Edward Teller. The article talks about how science can be used as way of knowing, giving proves that morality, even though it seams impossible, might be easier than we think.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/280/5367/1200.full

PERSUASION AND PROPAGANDA

We started our last tok lesson by talking about what is a propaganda and how is it used, and how persuasion is used in propaganda. We defined persuasion as to induce someone to do or believe something thorough reasoning arguments. Propaganda was defined as information used to promote political cause or point of view.

This lesson had me thinking that in our daily life we see propagandas everyday, all day and sometimes we are not even aware of it. I got scared when I started thinking that maybe I think the way I do because somebody wanted me to, somebody induce me to do it. It is true that we think the way we do because or parents taught us to do it, but they were induced by propaganda too. Our last tok class made me think a lot of weather the decisions that we make are truly our own or someone choose them for us. Deciding to have babes, deciding what food to eat, what cloths to wear, everything is influenced by either someone else or organizations such as the government. This made me realize that propaganda is not only used to advertise products or politic views, it made me realize that even we are creating our own propagandas all the time. We share our ideas and our ways of being with the world all the time. This ideas and ways of being might influence someones actions of decisions as well creating a chain reaction.

There is propaganda in the music we listen, schools, the books we read, movies, articles, everything, but who decides what to make public and what should people keep for themselves? But then who controls this? is the government actually controlling everything? or is it just part of human interaction?.

Here is an article that i found about human persuasion. This article teaches how to persuade people into thinking or believing in what you want them to believe. The writer gives advices that according to him will lead you to success.

Human persuasion leads to success


If techniques like this are using day by day by massive organizations human rights are being violated. Me might not be as free as we think we are.

TRUTH

The past weeks we have being talking about truth in our tok lessons. Until the day that we started discussing this topic the term truth sounded so simple to mw, however now after our discussions i can't actually know how to decide what is true and whats not, or even the simple fact defining truth sound pretty complicated to me. We started talking about something as simple as that, What is truth? after discussing for a while what truth meant to everyone i started to understand how complex it is to explain this term since we all have different perspectives about the thrush and about was good and whats bad. We were all giving different propositions of what we consider truth and weather we though it was completely necessary to say to or it was more of a personal choice. 

However we did found out in class that there are different types of truth, we have analytic truth and we have synthetic truth. Some things such as science or math are based on analytic proofs, we all know that they are true because there are laws that sate that, however in topics such as religion, believes, ways of being taking the decision of what was good and whats not is not as easy since there is nothing that can be proven as wrong. 

Correspondence theory of truth is when a persons truth is what eh actually sees, however this may cause discussions as well. Taking int o account that we all see our worlds according to our senses and perceptions it is clear that all our perspectives are different so, would this mean that truth is difficult to everyone? that we don't have an absolute truth?

I personally came to the conclusion that there is no absolute truth because it is based on each individuals ideas, ways being, ways of knowing, senses, emotions and perceptions. We can also se that truth varies with age, culture, language and stereotypes. Taking all this factors into consideration i can ensure that there is no absolute truth in the world, however there has to yes such a thing as a personal truth. For me there is no absolute truth but thats my perspective, thats my truth, meanwhile some people may think directly because thats their truth, thats watch they see, and thats what the believe in 

Here we have an article where H. P. Blavadsky shows his perspective if the meaning of truth, even though he has evidences an explains his ideas very precisely, some people will simply disagree with it because of the perspective that they have of the world that we live in. 

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

SENSES

Our first TOK class started with a really interesting question, How was the weather this weekend? For us this question sounded a little obvious so we were very confident with our answers but this lead us to a surprisingly very interesting questions, Should we actually depend in our senses for knowledge like how was the weather? or, Why are we so comfortable depending on the facts that we get from our senses? After trying to answer this questions with things like, that’s what it was taught to use since we were born or, our senses are our direct interaction to the world. Later on the teacher showed us a picture by Pablo Picasso for about 20 seconds. After seen the picture for a while she asked 10 questions about the picture to which we all responded in completely different ways .Considering that everybody saw the picture in different ways and got interesting and concentrated in different parts of the painting brought ideas like “just because we all see the same signals doesn’t mean that the knowledge we get from them is the same” or how our environment and our past or even sometimes our perspectives can change the meaning of signals given by our senses. By the end of the class the whole idea of senses changed a lot for me Personally it made me think, if everything is actually as we see it or just as the picture form Pablo Picasso we are just seeing the world in our own perspective, getting the signals of the world each of us in a different way.

Here we have a Beau Lotto showing us some optical illusions. With this optical illusions he is showing us how we can't or we should always relay in our senses. 


http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/beau_lotto_optical_illusions_show_how_we_see.html

LANGUAGE

Language started when people started needing to communicate among each other. LAnguage is not only speaking, it can also be for example sing language, we can say things through mimic, or by music. But is it impossible to communicate with someone who doesn't talk the same language as we do? This was the main topic of our last tok class and it made me think a lot. In my opinion if we want to communicate with someone we will find the way to do it. It you really think it through, when humanity first started there was no actual language, this started by the need of communication and sharing of ideas, so if this happens to us with a person who speaks a different language or uses sing language i really think that our instincts will come out and we would find that way to communicate with each other.

 

Swearing

Todays TOK lesson was really unexpected. The teacher stared by yelling a swear word at us, from which we were pretty amused and confused. The topic for this lesson was swearing. The lesson really made me think about where do this words come from?, why are they consider so bad for our society?, Could we lie with out swear words? Are they necessary to fully express ourselves?. For started we read an article by Bill Brysoris that talk about different swear words being use around the world, and how old some of this words are. It is pretty fascinating to think how simple words like "cow" are considered an insult in some parts of the world while in others is not more than an actual animal. An interesting idea that came in to my mind when talking about this in class was, could we actually live without using swear words? And yes maybe we can but it is so much easier to use them, they can help us describe emotions in a pretty much easier, simple an quicker way, for example if you get hurt is much more easier to describe this pain by yelling something like "fuck" than screaming " I just hit myself and it hurts a lot", also the fact of using the swear word helps you to express the intensity of what your feeling. . Are we always join to need these words to fully express ourselves? Are they really an important part of our vocabulary?

Here we have an article from the BBC that talks about the difference between cultures, (the british and the germans) and how something considered son normal in culture, for example little talks, can be consider rude in other cultures. 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13545386