Here are your preliminary suggestions:
1. Fate/Karma
2. True Love
3. Death (including a manditory fieldtrip to a morgue)
4. Trust
5. Etymology
6. _______________ (your suggestion here)
As I mentioned recently, I'd like our investigations to become more focused, and so I'm going to require that each suggestion/topic evolve into a specific question, such as (but not limited to):
Q1: Are we fated to make the decisions we do?
Q2: What are the essentials that constitute 'true' love?
Q3: How does the fact of death affect the way we live our lives?
Q4: What is the role that trust plays in community?
Q5: Is there a thing such as a perfect language, devoid of inconsistencies/redundancies?
Q6: _______________ (your question here)
YOU suggest; YOU decide...
5 comments:
I vote for death!
What would life be like if we were immortal? Would it still be "living", or because there was nothing to distinguish between "death" and "life", would we just exist? Would anyone have any motivation to do anything if they knew they had forever to do it? Is that the purpose that death serve?
Why do humans find it so hard to accept death? It seems like all the trappings that we add (cemeteries, funerals, burials, cremations, millions of different religious beliefs) can be comared to how an addict. could delude themselves into thinking that drugs won't be bad for them, as long as they manage it right. Why do we convince ourselves that as long as we do well, death will be a good thing, when all have as evidence of this is what someone told us?
Then again, the above question could be biased by the fact that I'm young so I'm not yet very worried about death. Maybe when I'm older, my perspective will change. But still, you can't really prove an afterlife (can you?), and if philosophy is finding truth through reason, then why is the idea still out there?
But if humans all just decided that, 'okay, there is no afterlife', would that have just as profound an effect on our society as if we were all immortal?
chq-
Wow, you broke that topic wide open! Wiiiiiiiide-open!
Anyone up for the challenge of making an equally provocative case/pitch for a different suggestion?
I want death also... well i dont want death well you know what i mean, vote for it.. not only because i want to go to the morgue but because i think its something everyone experiences but no one really understands.. and if we think we understand it.. we probably arent understanding it right well actually i shouldnt say that because i dont know what the definition of right is and i also dont know how to interpert death. but yea i think its something we can talk about and learn something from if good questions are asked.
I vote death.
I want to know why death only affects the people who were personally connected to the person who died. I mean we hear about death every single day and it doesn't phase us, but yet when we hear of a death of somebody we know about, maybe not necessarily care about, we tend to be affected in a mournful manner. Do we mourn the death of those we know because that's what we were taught? Or do we mourn because we personally are affected by the loss.
I mean obviously we mourn loved ones, but I'm talking about the ones who we don't love, see, or talk to. For example, a couple years ago there was a death in the high school from a car accident, Margret Cook for those of you who remember. Nobody in my class even knew she existed but yet everyone was acting like she was their best friend.
It's not that they knew her, but that they can imagine themselves in her place. If nobody knew her, then it might be assumed she was lonely. Everyone can imagine what it's like to be lonely, in pain, to have their dreams cut short. People might've felt bad they never talked to her when she was alive, and feel the need to cover it up. But because everyone can imagine (to varying degrees of accuracy) what they thought she'd been through, everyone felt sorrow.
With death, I think it's all your proximity to the person. Some people in class today openly said they didn't care about the people in the obituary. They probably would have cared more if they sat down and talked with the loved ones that person left behind. More still if that person had lived in their neighborhood, even if they weren't close. The closer you are, the easier it is to imagine yourself in the person or someone affected by the person's death's situation.
It can also be a biological thing. We started out as a tribal species. A death of a young one can mean one less person to do work for the community's survival, one less person to reproduce with. The reproduction thing might be why we tend to feel more sympathy towards a young person who dies than an old one. By making us feel bad about the loss of a potential mate or the lessening of the chance's of the tribes survival, our brain is making sure that we try to stop others from dying. That is why death in our own community affects us more than death in someone else's.
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