Mentality

This post brought to you by The Spark of Inspiration, now in Enlightenment, Revelation, Epiphany, and Raspberry.

No summary due to being shorter than average.

Recently, another student spoke about how Reason and Passion are balanced, and mentioned that Passion is like a measuring stick, while Reason provided a baseline. This immediately interested me, because I know from psychology of cases where people have been rendered emotionally inert, and lost all ability to assign value - they could still logically conclude results, and what would happen, but found themselves incapable of determining whether those results were good or bad.

I started to think about how these pairs matched up, and wrote them down in notes as...

Reason + Passion

Logic + Emotion

However, seeing them stacked up like that, and having just spoken about the measuring stick/baseline comparisons, I began to think about whether it would be possible to use different pairs, as long as you had A baseline and A way to measure outcomes. So, of course, that would look like...

Reason + Logic

Passion + Emotion

Oddly enough, they make perfect sense - both as pairs, and as to why they are rarely considered. Using your passion and emotion together is somewhat like the feeling of being 'part of the crowd' and acting along with a mob even in ways you wouldn't normally - because your check is now Passion instead of Logic, and in a large crowd, passions can run high, in unexpected directions. The other pair, Reason as a baseline with Logic as a measuring stick, is the ideal scientific method; use Reason to determine what makes sense, and Logic (along with experiments) to confirm that your baseline is accurate.

Quite interesting, in the end.

Comments: Please, comment! I'd love to know if you can think of any other combinations of thought in this vein, too...
Relevant Trope: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EmotionsVsStoicism Of course!
WARNING! TvTropes can be an addictive experience!
WARNING! The trope listed was not used in the creation of this post - if you read it expecting a continuation, you may be deservedly disappointed.

Expectations

Summary is, as always, near the bottom.

To begin this post, here is an interesting idea: In older time periods, being a scribe - or knowing how to read and write at all - was considered an adult occupation, one that might well require a lengthy apprenticeship and which was a rare, extremely difficult task. Now, however, we expect each and every ten year old to read and write at least competently. Even with available training, learning to be a scribe was a long process fit only for the most skilled.
What is the difference between literacy as the rare province of extremely skilled adults, and literacy as a requirement for young children? The only two are the amount of time they can spend learning and expectations - and scribes got more time to learn, since it was an apprenticeship!

Expectations shape our lives, including mine; growing up as part of the family that has had historically good education and a love of reading has given me an inclination towards the same. On a more embarrassing note, I enjoy puns because I couldn't get away from them - and some of them were actually pretty good. And as an even less orthodox example, it was implicitly assumed that I would avoid Swarthmore because members of my family have gone there - but as I looked at it more, I've decided to apply vigorously.

Expectations fit in well with the Nature vs. Nurture debates - consider that we've discovered many genes that appear to influence traits in other animals, and to some extent in humans. Those can't be said to be expectations in the normal sense, since they're determined more or less randomly; people may choose to marry for good traits, but the chaotic mess of genes in even one person is extremely unlikely to be a perfect indicator for any single trait.
In contrast to that, we have the above example - is it likely that in that short amount of time, our entire gene pool has somehow changed to make us much smarter (and, note, very little else) - which should preclude geniuses spread throughout history, but instead indicate a steadily increasing number. Despite that, we have such people as Leonardo Da Vinci, who falls before that jump.

For the summary; Expectations shape our lives. They are not the sole determinants of our fate, but they light a path for us - it is possible, but much less likely, that we charge off into the darkness, especially if the lit path is one we like.

Comments: Please do! I feel this post to be a bit lacking.
No tropes today.

On the Nature of Beauty in Nature

Note: Sorry about the pretentious title, but i'm a sucker for puns.

Note: As always, summary at the bottom.

Beauty.
It seems difficult to define, except perhaps by example, and even then, one person may be moved by the Mona Lisa - and another may see nothing special about it. I personally think it is technically good, but not as 'inspired' as I hear so often, a good example of a middle ground.

So, the nature of beauty is subjective; can we determine where it might come from? Well, there are four main options that I see -
The religious one, that we admire the work of Creation due to an inherent touch of deific majesty. The counter to this might be that this would render atheists incapable of appreciating beauty - something clearly false.
The derivative one, that we consider beauty beautiful because it *is*, and if we were to think of it otherwise, we would run into the same problem of trying to define something logically that did not happen except by chance. Essentially, the idea that beauty is chance - but if that is so, then why should beauty be so universal in many cases? Rather than having another culture's beauty 'dulled' to us by different standards, it should be incomprehensible, a mess. (Note that if you apply the 'we see it because we observe it' idea to the universe, you get the anthropic principle: We can wonder at how unlikely it was to get intelligent life in the universe because we are intelligent life, and without us such an improbability would simply be unnoticed.)
The communicative one - this one is starting to get good - that beauty, like language, is a way in which we convey meaning between people. If we enjoy a tree, and someone else does, we can consider ourselves to have a slight insight into another person's mind. Society merely turns these connections into a semi-codified method of transmission across civilization. The problem is that beauty has such appeal, again, across cultures, even if it is dulled slightly in translation.
The one to which I give the most credence is the evolutionary idea. We, as mammals, like things that indicate a good place to live. A love of green forests and fertile plains; of light rains but also sun; of other mammals that already confirm an area as habitable. In short, we consider beauty to be life, and life to be beautiful.

Even this last, the evolutionary idea, has a fundamental weakness, however. Look out upon the deserts of the American Southwest, for instance, and you will see many beautiful sights made up simply of great spires of multicolored rock - perhaps with not a single green plant of roving animal in sight. Shouldn't the sight of such a technically barren place repel us? By the same token, how could we admire the grace of a tiger - we should abhor it as competition, as a predator. Perhaps you could explain the second as proving that high predators can live best in places rich in life, but why can we admire a barren place for its beauty? Why should a sunset, heralding a night in which danger lurks, be such an evocative picture of emotions other than fear? Indeed, why should we feel any emotion more complex than Good/Bad? Perhaps it simply comes with the larger brains; even so, look at art made up of purely geometric shapes. There can still be intense beauty in those.

The most powerful aspect of beauty seems not to be any of these four schools of thought, but merely thought itself: We see beauty in things which are more. More full of life, more colorful, more sublimely proportioned, more regular. Anything which rises above the ordinary, even if horrible, has a certain beauty - terrible beauty, perhaps, but beauty nonetheless. Such pictures are the experiences that rise above a simple daily slog, and prove that life is worth living to see things beyond the ordinary.

For the obligatory little summary;

There are four common views of beauty.
Religious.
Derivative/Anthropic.
Communicative.
Evolutionary.

The truth of beauty is that we love things which are not 'more of the same' - Whether barren or vibrant with life, nothing seems to cause such sorrow for us as unchanging boredom.

Comments: Please, comment! I don't think I need any restrictions on this one. It's pretty nonoffensive, I hope.

Relevant Trope: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main.FertileFeet I find it rather interesting that natural beauty is seen as downright saintly.
WARNING! TvTropes can be an addictive experience!
WARNING! The trope listed was not used in the creation of this post - if you read it expecting a continuation, you may be deservedly disappointed.

Outdoor Education

For everyone who was at Outdoor Ed. with me!

For any Cabin kids:
Welcome to my blog; please do check with your parents to insure that it's okay for you to read here. If it's okay... leave a comment or two!

For any Cabin Leaders:
Welcome to my blog; if you're of a philosophical turn of mind, add some comments.

For any Naturalists:
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For anyone:
Feel free to suggest a topic or two!