Sunday, October 25, 2009

Have you ever thought how many times you tell to some one that you did not expect him/her to behave in a ceirtain manner?



It is very difficult for me to think that things or beings do not change over their life. I still can not find a concrete example of something that never changes.  Besides, if something does not change implies that it is eternal. So far, the only things that I know as ‘eternal’, according to some people, are soul, God or other metaphysical things from which, I think, we do not have existing evidence to prove their existence.
Now, coming back to my main question, do we consider people as beings that never change, as eternal beings having always the same personality (to use the word identity will bring us into another topic ) and doing the same actions or, at least, following the same patron on their behaviour? If we think that things change over their life, we will be contradicting our selves by expecting our friends to behave always in a certain manner depending on the situation.
 Many times, we tend to anticipate how our friends would react to something because we think we know them enough. However, at least I am not sure how well I can know some one when I even know that I am in a constant change. 
Should we claim that we do not expect someone to do something when it depends on his/her voluntary action? I think we should not. It seems something insignificant but we might ignore the fact that we live in a constant process by believing that we could make that claim.  For example, how many times do we tell to someone how disappointed we are with that person because s/he done something that we did not expect without taking into consideration his/her own ‘desires’ or tendency to change.
If we think we have the right to claim when we do no expect one of our friends to do something, we could imply that there is a promise between us. And, if that is the case, it could also imply that our friendship is a kind of economical relationship where each of us gets a benefit from it.  
To tell our friends what we are expecting from them it could even be a way to control them. Perhaps yes, perhaps no, perhaps sometimes. Kant said that people never think that they are going to die since they take it for grounded.
May be we never think that we are always changing; therefore, we forget that the rest of people also changes.

Saturday, October 17, 2009

I do not know. It is something that I can not explain, like, like, like those things. You know, do you?





Today I was talking with one friend about our Theory of Knowledge presentation. She was telling me that, apparently, the IB was thinking to consider Intuition as another way of knowledge. How can that be possible? How can you explain that you know something trough intuition? Can you say, for instance, I just felt it? The problem with saying that is that you would be even able to skip the responsibility of your actions because it was something that you just felt that doing it. Besides, saying that you know something through intuition it might imply that there is something metaphysical or, at least, beyond to what we can know just by experience . For example, if we learn something through sense perception it is because the way in which our senses reacted with an external element or in the case of language it can be because we learned it and it helped us to understand and to perceive reality from this point. For the fact that language is imposed, in a certain extent, we can justify and argue how and why we know or we understand something trough it. How can we know what a person knows trough intuition? It is something that is based on him/her, however we can find the same problem with the rest ways of knowing. So what would make intuition different knowledge, language, reason or sense perception? For example, Kant said that we structure our minds according to time and space which are part of our intuition. He said that those basic concepts help us in the understanding of other things. He also said that these things turn as things in themselves once we had experience them. In this case, intuition does not constitute our knowledge but just the initial part of it. Therefore, can we say that we KNOW something trough intuition rather than its base as being aware of its existence?