HAPPY BIRTHDAY JARED!

posted by Tae-Yeoun Keum   [2:22 PM]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY AIMEE!

posted by Tae-Yeoun Keum   [9:59 PM]

"We think by feeling, what is there to know?"
--Theodore Rothke

that said

Do we all believe in human irrationality and rationality?
um. maybe. They both have their places. People become increasingly rational when they remove themselves from the thought process. People are irrational as they become more subjective. That does not mean that our 'reason' ever becomes fully rational, and there is always, always logic when a person thinks--its just that personal logic often operates without accounting for all available information and thus produces 'irrational' results. Irrational thought is just incomplete thought; be it a fear of the dark or a paranoid schizophrenic delusion.
Try this out for size:
1. Given its life history and biology, an animal will always do what it believes to be best in a given situation; that is to operate in the most logical fashion.
2. All life histories contain strong biases, and all biologies great flaws
3. Therefore no animal will ever operate in a completely logical fashion.
We can imagine pure reason or feel powerfully about something that we don't understand completely, but these things are not wholly irrational.

Emotion is hardwired logic applied to behavior given the phenotypes typical ancestral environment and selective conditions. Feelings become problematic for modern people because we have not existed in our current environment long enough for productive changes to take place (usually only 7 deaths in 2000 years will matter—if they are the very last phenotypes bearing a mild variation of a trait which then absolutely has left the population).

So behavior often seems irrational; the sociology experiments were a subject will sacrifice 1 real dollar to keep a hypothetical opponent from gaining 20 imaginary dollars in an unfair exchange, or choosing not to attempt something with 50:50 odds because the potential feeling of losing outweighs the potential joy of victory, but these behaviors are not irrational given the subjective nature of a person. As a social animal, personally losing one dollar to teach another person not to cheat or be unfair has greater utility for the species, and under the draconian nature of natural selection 50:50 odds are not good enough, therefore losing should feel worse than winning good (otherwise you'd take more risks and fail more often).

You say "God" represents something irrational in human thinking? um, in a way, but based on the sheer frequency with which people generate gods and myths and rituals, and the similarities among geoculturally separate populations lends to the idea that there are hidden psychological motives for these behaviors. I don't have the time or energy to elaborate fully, but a guy named Woods wrote a very good treatise on how evolution created god in the thinking of man. For me, whether or not I believe it or don't believe it is irrelevant, the fact that I can't knock his argument down means that I must let it stand.

A clear truth can be discovered not by making evidence fit an established scenario, but in generating a scenario that is not harmed by any evidence presentable. If you want me to abandon evolution, bring me evidence that can be reproduced that will invalidate it, and demonstrate how.

What do you mean by "framework of irrationality"
To argue within such a framework is preposterous because there is no reason why one argument leads to another. This is why debates based on 'incomplete' positions collapse when explored; they always amount to "this is my position and I will not accept evidence against it..."

Why don't we all accept that the first woman was a Cassowary who's skin was stolen by the first man? Or that man has hunger as a punishment from the gods because of the unequal division of a sacrificial Ox into the bones and the meat?

All myths are the same because none will tolerate evidence.
My creation myth can move, so if sufficient evidence pointed to archaic lake chad 12 million years ago as the site for the origin of Bipedalism, I would abandon the rift valley of 7 mya (albeit reluctantly since I am human), yet my roommate Dan would never abandon the Eden of 6,000 years ago, despite the fact that an age like that would mean that radioactive decay and sedimentation are irrational processes (which he says are theoretically true processes (?? i don't know how he thinks??) ). It's a position that you can't understand, but merely have to "believe."

On another note, the SOB's ritually killed the Neophytes last week, and I suppose that we'll be reborn as immortals tomorrow. For the last week, I've been "Hemolytic Jaundice" and ignored by the immortals (upperclassmen) who just say "what is that smell" if I pass to closely. ave. I think they are going to cover us in food.

posted by Adrian   [10:22 PM]

How can you stop at 15 minutes? Tae-Yeoun, you are the epitome of self-discipline.

posted by Eunice   [10:26 AM]

May I ask something... and please when you read this, read it twice and actually think about what I'm trying to say before allowing yourself to respond...

I think that we all have agreed that humans have rationality and irrationality. I expressed concern about trying to look at irrationality through the lenses of rationality, because the essense of the confusion of irrationality (and hence, emotions) lies within its inability to be, as Tae-Yeoun says, expressed in the medium of rationality, whether that be language or visual art or sound... And when I expressed this concern, I didn't mean to be criticizing the way we were approaching it; I simply felt that it was interesting paradox of our attempt to further our understanding. I didn't actually think that there would be any alternate way. However, after Eunice brought up the question of how else can we approach emotions or irrationality, I began thinking that maybe there actually was another way of approaching this. After all, we as humans do possess the two capacities of rationality and irrationality. Can irrationality also be a way for us to process information?
At this point, I believe that many of us would agree... yes, irrationality allows us to process information, but not in any legitimate way. After all, we react with emotions (an product of an irrational process) but does emotions can't be used for anything... can they?
I would like to ask... why is it that it is so important for us to place value upon the idea of rationality over irrationality? How come we never even challenge ourselves to perform an Emotion-experimente but we perform Thought-experimentes all the time? I realize that we as society, we as believers in the scientific method, stress logic - but the scope of logic must be limited to those of logical natures. Otherwise, we would have been able to come out with an answer for things of illogical natures by now... like God.
And yet, we - well... some of us - still believe in God - almost with the same certainity and sometimes even more so than those things that are logical true. Why? Somewhere... the irrational processes have just as much validity within our human spiritual beliefs. Emotions are an intrinsic aspect to the religious experience... so we shouldn't toss out irrationality as a ways to analyzing things.

How then... might we be able to analyze irrationality in the framework of irrationality? I'm going to propose that we toss out our logic - as difficult as that might be - and focus upon how we feel. We shouldn't try to surmise why we feel a certain way lest we know not with our brains but with our hearts why we feel a certain way. What that is going to do is give us raw data of irrational products and give us a place upon which we can try to see why we believe in things or beings like God, why we have a need for society, for each other. I don't believe the answers are as simple as evolution, because we have irrational beliefs that we need that don't fit into this scheme like God. The more abstract the irrational belief, the harder it is to draw the connections back to evolution. I'm not saying that evolution is wrong - only that we shouldn't start a discussion thinking that we already know the answer and end the discussion thinking that we have achieved all that there is to know. Once we start doing that, the evolution of human thought might as well be stagnant.

posted by Bryan Lee   [10:31 PM]

well, i suppose it's my turn to initiate the lull.
so here's my contribution to the emotion-creations/irrational-rational discussion.

On the first day of seventh grade Art our teacher wanted us to define art. The result was of course a loud fray very much like the one we had on the same subject at TASP. Someone, I remember, stated the following:

"To express something!"

"Express what?" the teacher asked.

The answer he gave after some hesitation was "emotion."

If we entertain this seventh grader's definition, exactly what is involved in the creation of art, then in the viewing/listening/reading/performing (etc.) of art? The actual feeling of emotion is confined to the individual person. I can tell you that I'm sad beyond belief, and the only way you can imagine how I'd be feeling is to recreate the emotion you feel when you say you're sad beyond belief. Emotions are, as Eunice points out, irrational. The rational, then, belongs in the realm of the expressible.

Back to art - if the purpose of art has a communicative aspect to it (Creation with capital C), then this communication - the 'expression' - involves the translation of the inexpressible, irrational idea (a thought, an emotion, a mood) to the expressible, upon which the connections between the components of the idea are lost and you are left with art: words on a page, shapes and colors on canvas, individual chords played in progression. This we call the creative process.

The task of the viewer/listener/reader/performer (etc.) is to reverse this translation process, like breaking a code, by recreating this process in trying to assemble these rational components of an irrational whole together. When it comes to emotion and other ineffable creatures, we are ultimately isolated, separate entities, contained within ourselves; our chemicals, so to speak, are our own. The connections in between, we have to make ourselves as individuals. Somehow it works, sometimes.

I would ramble more but I have to watch my daily 15-minute dose of Harold and Maude. :)

posted by Tae-Yeoun Keum   [9:11 PM]

apparently the chemistry TAs at yale talk about adrian behind his back. he's known as "the fecal kid" because he (i) often says the word 'fecal' aloud and (ii) has the word written all over his problem sets.

the much-talked-of fecal kid:

posted by Tae-Yeoun Keum   [1:12 PM]

i met some girl who goes to yale and she was like, oh adrian... the kid with really poofy hair?
hahhahahha

posted by Bryan Lee   [12:18 PM]

Do I just leave bad posts or something? It seems like everytime I write there comes a lull in the blog. ...ave.

alright me maties, drink up. drink up me maties har har!

posted by Adrian   [10:49 PM]

Stromberg, Peter. "Elvis Alive?: The Ideology of American Consumerism." In Journal of Popular Cultures, vol 24 no 3, Winter 1990, pp11-20.

Such a good article.

Another article that deals with the nature of formal relationships and poop;

Graeber, David. "Manners, deference, and Private Property in Early Modern Europe." Comparative Studies in society and history. 1997 v39 4:694-728. (The beging part is the one that deals with social relationships)--this explains why you will tell close friends about eating and pooping, but in formal situations you steer clear of activities that make the human body discontinuous with the external environment.


Bryan, you say that joy is something more than chemical, and I can agree with that (because as a Naturalist I feel that the whole has characters different than the parts), but if you've ever "caused" joy with substances (cannabis, psilocybin,) you realize that different parts of that emotion (joy) can be created through of all things poison. Joy feels really good on a subjective level, and very intense emotions may fool one into believing that life is something special--and in many ways it is--but there need be no extra agent for its inspiration. There is some pleasure that has to do with the quenching of appetites, and there is other pleasure that has to do with the suppression of desire. While a plethora of names can be used, I challenge you to give me an experience that falls outside of these to poles; both of which can be traced back to rational organ processes, which in turn can be traced to the last 3 1/2 billion years of animal development on this world.

Love may seem special, and unique for a person in that it can be displaced onto a work of art or institution, but realize that this displacement is a result of our species' extraordinary ability to abstractify ideas, while the pathways themselves developed as a method to keep a pair bond oriented around each other and their common offspring for roughly 7 years so the baby could be left with the mother (to forage in the salt marsh). ha.

I love birds and neoclassical painting, but this is because I'm built to love a woman and our children, I simply am in a limnal period where these pathways are used but on objects other than their targets.

What emotion, do you feel, is biologically inexplicable?

posted by Adrian   [5:52 AM]

That's what concerns me. Those who are biologically incapacitated to experience emotion--that is, to experience the irrational (not just fear)--are also impaired in rational judgement. I would expect science to support the completely cerebral approach to rational judgement, but these case studies suggest otherwise. Moreover, you say we are analyzing emotion in rational terms, but how else can we approach emotion? Is it truly possible to separate the rational from the irrational? When we say someone is sensible, is it a rational or irrational element of that person that causes him/her to favor action through rational deliberation over emotional impulse?

posted by Eunice   [8:10 AM]

It's easy to attribute one quality of emotion - but emotion as a whole Emotion is distinctly difficult to trace to origins of (if there is such a thing) and why it exists. The Darwinist perspective is interesting and noteworthy, but I have yet to be convinced that Emotion itself arises from the need to survive. Fear is simply one subset within Emotion and that in itself is easy to speculate an answer for, but what about love or happiness in the abstract? (shall we call that joy or a state of grace?) Things as these are harder to consider in the evolutionary framework.

It disturbs me slightly that we are trying to analyze Emotion. Why is it so hard to understand...? Perhaps because of its irrational nature...? If one were to trace back our understanding of modern emotions, the ancient Greeks viewed emotions to be the appetites and reason logos. Separate in their definitions by the very nature of being rational and irrational. How then is it possible to examine the irrational part of ourselves through the rational lens?

posted by Bryan Lee   [4:34 PM]

Seminars in Writing in the Social Sciences
The Art and Science of Creativity
This course looks at creativity from a psychological standpoint, exploring questions such as the following: What is creativity? How is it assessed? What are external and internal factors that foster or inhibit it? Our psychological study will be based upon a broad range of readings: short stories, novellas, and novels such as Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Artist of the Beautiful," Thomas Mann's Tonio Kroger, and Carolyn See's The Handyman; nonfiction such as Camus' "creating Dangerously,"; and selections by distinguished psychological researchers and theorists of creativity. WR150 J2 Tue, Thu 12:30pm-2:00pm Landman

I'd consider taking this, but then I'd get hopelessly nostalgic

posted by Adam   [11:37 PM]

Biologically there is great logic in emotion.
1) No animal can possibly be aware of its entire environment
2) No animal can realistically process all of the information that it is aware of
3) Hesitation is often fatal.

Thus emotions are ways that our minds have been shaped into functioning. For our ancestors, being afraid rather than curious of something really fast or bright or unfamiliar would have been the difference between life and death, while the ability to size up the health of another animal might have meant the difference between reproductive success and a disease. Our emotion are simply the most logical actions for some less derived animal make permanent; they only seem irrational now that we’ve taken them completely out of context.

Labes.

There was this great reading assigned in Anthropology about why the Myth of Elvis being alive has lasted so long in American Culture. It basically said that Consumerism has become the American Religion; Citizens believe that there are two worlds, a mundane everyday world, and a second more beautiful and more perfect existence everything is attractive, sexier, easier, and more exciting, and that you can bring yourself towards this salvation through purchases. People are every day subjected to ads making claims about this magical existence, and celebrities show the public that this god-like status is attainable, while their falls show the public that the Gods are petty and fallible.

I don’t think I can even express how great this reading was, but I’ll try and do a better job when I’m not so tired.

Bacchanal was great. How are all of you?
Goodnight friends.

posted by Adrian   [9:24 PM]

two more sips, or mommy's going to get mad

posted by Kelsey   [6:52 PM]

Why are some in the Midwest simple? And why are some on the east coast such subtle sophists? In the article on Bill Frist's latest exertion against judicial independence (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/16/politics/16judges.html?), the New York Times quoted Tony Perkins, president of the socially conservative Family Research Council (your writer is on their mailing list). Mr. Perkins bewailed the disarray of our morals and judiciary, saying, "For years activist courts, aided by liberal interest groups like the A.C.L.U., have been working under the veil of the judiciary, like thieves in the night, to rob us of our Christian heritage and our religious freedoms."
I was disappointed to see how Mr. Perkins' self-evidently true position, instead of being aided by his usual eloquence, was confounded by the simile 'like thieves in the night'. It seems to be an allusion to 1 Thessalonians which warns, "the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night." It is hard to believe that this defender of 'Christian heritage' would misquote the Bible he works so hard to defend and, sola scriptura, accepts as the only foundation for his faith. I can't believe that he thinks Jesus, like some wicked anti-Santa will come only to take away our heritage and freedoms. That would be blasphemy. However, it seems that things have not deteriorated so far that he does not have the right to misquote God's inspired, inerrant word.
In fact, Perkins does well in capturing the eschatological urgency felt in the current Senate debate. However, as a Christian I must object to his coded comparison of liberal (read: godless) judges and the coming Christ. Most of you, as secularists, should do so as well (He did, after all, use religious language in the public sphere!). If, as I suspect, he is not a fool, this Perkins seems to be an enemy both of Christian conservatives and of liberal secularists, a sort of liberal-loving mackerel snacker. Tony Perkins: a false religious righter in need of an outing.

posted by Matthew Schmitz   [2:28 PM]

Eunice... You know me well enough that this is something that I for one would believe to be impossible but it's a point worth thinking about. Shall we consider that in our studies of how the human body works and if by some miracle we were able to advance our knowledge so much that we were able to reproduce exactly those chemical processes that happen within our body - so much so that it would indistinguishable from man, is this creation man or robot? If our emotions and our irrational abilities were able to reproduced, would our creation no longer be considered a robot simply from the fact that we were able to give something akin to free choice? Wherein lies the essence of being human?

posted by Bryan Lee   [8:41 AM]

HAPPY BITRHDAY JAMIE!

posted by Tae-Yeoun Keum   [6:54 AM]

During my seminar, our professor told us about a woman who had developed a rare gene mutation that resulted in the accumulation of calcium in her right and left amygdala. The result? Incapacity to experience fear. Moreover, they found that she also exhibited difficulties in reading other people's responses, in understanding other emotions, and in making logical decisions...It's strange; most of the time we say that our emotions get in the way of making rational decisions and actions, yet case studies like this one showed that people with biological inability to experience emotions were actually impaired in making these decisions. Machines are capable of the switch on-and-switch off binary system we use in logic, but what about emotions? In "machines take over the world" stories, human emotion is sometimes played as a weakness in rational action, or as a strength in the "some-irrational-event-saves-the-human-race- because-of-love" ending. But, doesn't this mean that if machines are incapable of experiencing emotions, their systems of logic, however complex, will never override our logic combined with emotion? Of course, you could argue that machines could be programmed to respond in certain physical ways to specific chemicals, and simulate the effects of each emotion. But, that's only after dispelling the idea that machines will overtake the human race without some artifical system of emotions.

posted by Eunice   [7:30 AM]

this idea came up in a class of mine recently and I started to wonder what makes midwesterners so different / stupid.

Even for those who disagree with the idea that we're just really really complex machines, it's still any easy idea to grasp I think. But the very idea of grasping it repulsed everyone in my class besides me. It was so antithetical to everything they believed in that no one was willing to even argue it. It was a quite creepy experience because the teacher was trying to at least get someone to admit how they could see it would be possible, but no one would.

posted by john owens-ream   [12:17 AM]

adrian... the question isn't whether our creations will exceed us... but rather, will our creations ever be able to tap into the mystery of creativity? (wry smile)

posted by Bryan Lee   [8:32 PM]

mm. yes, the mind is the body. I don't see why it should matter that humans are machines? We obviously are, but should still be held responsible for our actions (to a degree) and should not cause suffering to others even if they are just 'other machines.' The terms of debate may change, but what is being debated has been the same organ the entire time.

p.s. Our creations will oneday exceed us. Don't worry though.

posted by Adrian   [10:53 AM]

microraptor! Best lecture ever this morning. Fecal everywhere. Beautiful ensight into the origins of feathers. 

posted by Adrian   [11:43 PM]

Hey feeks!

Dude not only was I semi-cognizant during your presentation, but I think I tried to edit your paper. Alright everyone, that said, I just want to stress how important feces is. I mean fecal. ...well, what I meant to say was Labes. Labes! Laaaabbbbiiiiiiaaaa.
Sorry. Haven't touched a drop tonight, I'm just stupid.

Everyone look up Microraptor and notice the FOUR WINGS! love friends. love.


PURPLE. this will be wonderful. We should all robot dance in honor of this occasion.

posted by Adrian   [11:36 PM]

Tae-Yeoun, I'm sure I speak for all of us when I say: "PICTURE."

posted by Eunice   [9:40 AM]

hey adrian,
lol - wasn't listening during my final presentation foo! i kill you. it's okay... you were probably reciting kubla khan in your head while dreaming of waaay too hot weather.

posted by Bryan Lee   [6:27 PM]

I came back to my room just now to see that my roommate had left me a little present:



Looks like Monica's wish will be fulfilled this weekend: my hair's going purple.

posted by Tae-Yeoun Keum   [12:25 PM]

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