Philosophy & Death

 After first reading the article I would have to say that I found some of the views quite different from my personal views on life and death. Socrates views death as, from my understandings, a good thing. Although he does not agree with the notion of suicide. One of the arguments brought up was, if death is what you strive for then shouldn't suicide be a good thing? To counter this argument he brings up the notion of a relationship between a farmer and their cattle, to yourself and god. Ultimately you are God's possession, so ending your life prior to when god intends is destroying gods possession. I don't share the view points as being someones possession, however, I do not think that suicide should be glorified. I do not believe that death should be better than life, unlike Socrates philosophical view. 

Another philosophical view that Socrates has regarding death is that one spends their whole entire life to ultimately detach from their body. So when you die you reach this goal of separation. Something that I thought quite strange was how Socrates viewed living as essentially a burden. How one despises all of the things that have to do with the body and to only focus on the soul. I personally do not agree with this. I believe that feeding our body nutrients isn't a negative thing. Socrates focuses on how death is better than living, but in my own views I believe that we should live, or at least try to live every day to its fullest. That we should focus on the present and not on the glorification of our soul, wherever that may lead us after death. 

At least for me, I do not know what the future holds. Socrates seems to know that when he leaves this life he will have a new one with just as good company. For me, I don't agree with this because I have no idea what will come after I am dead, and frankly I don't think I will ever have an answer until that time in fact comes. Overall I would say I do not agree with Socrates philosophical view on death, on how you're really only living four you souls detachment from your body. I do not believe in rejecting experiences, nor do I agree with Socrates views on how we should focus on our mind/thoughts apart from pleasures. I think that we should focus on the present because who really knows whats to come. 

-Lauryn

Should Racial Reparations Be Paid?

    For starters I think the timing of this article is perfect due to the current divide in our nation. This ultimately shows that actions from the past still effect the present day, especially when we dive into the topics of racial injustice. The history teaching regarding Brown v Board of Education, Jim Crow laws, and slavery are shrinking every year. I believe that this is vital knowledge that everyone should be learning about. Even if people don't think this effects them or that this is just information from the past- it is beyond clear that the effects of racial injustice still exist today, and therefore reparations should be made. 

    I am not sure how I would go about reparations being paid, I think that having to trace your lineage to prove your relatives were slaves in order to receive the much needed reparations is a bit extreme. I personally believe that there is nothing that can be done to make up for what has happened in the past. Something I believe that should be done is for the history of what has happened to be displayed and put out in a manner where people can see and really comprehend what happened and how this is still effecting people today. It is no secret that people still believe that African Americans are inferior to whites, and I believe some of this stems from the previous history of America. 

    Darby makes an interesting point referencing the disagreements on how reparations should be given, whether to go back to the root cause or treat it as a whole. As I mentioned before, much of the history regarding racial injustice is not taught or been recorded so I think it is quite impossible to go all the way back to a specific event. Besides, I think as Darby mentioned the best way to go about these needed reparations is to focus on self development and freedom. We do need to focus on the current issues effecting lives today, but that doesn't mean we can just forget the past. Overall I would say I agree with Darby, he brings up key issues that our society is facing regarding racial injustice and ways to improve, but I also feel that the past needs to be known to all. This I believe is truly the only way that we can "move on", we need to stop pretending like this injustice doesn't still exists and face the facts and try to improve.

Who Should Pay the Reparations?

    We are still living with the repercussions of past events, and who are the people paying for the reparations they have cause? I'll tell you who isn't paying, the people that caused them. From the article Caney focused on the historical issue of anthropogenic climate change, but some of that ideology can be used when discussing other historical issues, like slavery. Both issues have caused a damaging affect on society, and frankly have caused irreversible damage. 

    Climate change has been happening for over a century. Whether pollution is caused by a factory, hazardous waste, or even just a standard automobile. Each one of these has contributed to the damaging effects of climate change. Unfortunately the majority of the damage has been caused by people that are no longer here, so now who pays for the reparations? Just like the majority of the people who used to keep slaves are no longer living, so how can they pay for their reparations? Something is wrong with society, when we were a kid it was drilled into our brains that we pay for our mistake, but no one is paying for the damaging mistakes that they have cause-actually the people that are paying for the effect of climate change are those of future generations.  

    It just doesn't make any sense, the people who had slaves, at least to the best of my knowledge, never paid for their wrongdoings. The people that paid for them were the slaves themselves, having to live with that horrible quality of life. Once slavery was abolished it's not like their lives got much easier, I mean we can still see racial injustice today. Overall, someone needs to pay for these mistakes, Caney has spelled out the causation for climate change, and we know the causation for slavery. The ultimate question is, how do we move forward? Caney mentioned the casual account and the beneficiary account, but both in my opinion don't work. Taking the causal account route would mean that the people who caused the damage would pay, which theoretically sounds good but most of those people are no longer here. When we look at the Beneficiary account would mean putting the reparations on someone associate with that individual which I don't think is fair. If they weren't part of the reasoning to cause the harm in the first place then why should the be paying? I think both of these accounts mean well but I just don't think this is how justice should be served, and frankly I don't see a better option at this time either. 

Can Time Be Defined?

 After constantly rereading this article, I would have to say that I am still a bit confused on the notion of time and how it is defined. With that being said, it is clear that a second is defined as a fixed unit, with taking into account frequencies as well as electromagnetic radiation. As the articles states, most individual's agree that the caesium transition is used to define a second, but another ideology that was brought up in the article is that keeping specifications the same, all caesiun atoms have the same frequency. After redefining the second from the solar day, now "the second has been defined as the duration of exactly 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to a hyperfine transition of caesium-133 in the ground state". Although from my understanding this really is only stable/equal depending on the position of the atom, and from what I gather, if it is not always stable how can this be an accurate depiction? Along with that I learned that clocks measure these frequencies that involve caesium/atomic transitions. For example, there are a number of atomic clocks world wide which measure frequencies like the ones measuring atoms. Because these clocks have to be at a specific setup there is, although small, room for error. Which is why is it important that we look at hundreds of clocks around the world to get the most accurate measurement of time. By taking the weighted average of the different clocks is how they're able to get such a precise measurement.    

    Something I have always wondered was what did people use before the invention of the clock? During my research, something that I found interesting was that depending on where you were in the world, each standard of time was unique. Some examples were the decimal time system, which invented the ephemeris second. Shortly after came the invention of an atomic clock which ultimately stated that every year we lose approximately .6 of a second of time. Which personally I don't quite understand this ideology but I find it fascinating all of these different measurements before there was a universal definition of time.  

-Lauryn 

Physics to Explain Time

 Despite the article we read last week, my questions regarding if time exists, or not, were still unclear. I am a person who likes factual evidence to back up any claims, so the articles we read this week really transformed my previous conclusions. I understood relativity of simultaneity as basically it depending on you perspective to help determine time. For example, they mentioned how when you're standing at the midpoint of a surface, the flashes occurred at the same time, but that was only in your perspective. To a person who is in motion would say the opposite, that one came before the other. So my take on all of this initially, was that it is hard to comprehend two events happening at the same time, but also them not occurring simultaneously. After I finally started to grasp how that was possible my conclusion regarding time is that it does in fact exists, despite other things I have read from McTaggart. I believe that the Einstein article's were showing that we'll each see different "events" depending on our frame of reference. 

What simultaneity is not, is referring to it based on appearances, meaning that you would need to actually take that into affect when coming to your conclusion. The article used the example of a person seeing a lightning strike and then hearing thunder, their conclusion was that it happened at the same time. Although the observe who was of greater distance away from where the strike happened, claimed one happened before the other. This example I am still a bit confused on, so I am interested to see how you interpreted that. Nonetheless, I believe that time does in-fact exists, although it will be different for-everyone depending on you frame of reference. 

-Lauryn

Does Time Actually Exist?

I personally have never thought much about the nature of time. It has always seemed like something that you just knew existed but couldn't explain it. Being able to ask myself if I thought time was real or unreal, just ended up being a long list of unanswered questions. While reading McTaggart's article, I have to say, at first read I was extremely frustrated. Every time I thought I understood what he was saying, I'd read the next paragraph and be completely lost again. I found it confusing to keep together the different aspects of the A and B series, to the point where I had to take a break from reading it and comeback. 

With that being said, once I actually had a slight idea of the different perspectives he gave regarding the answer to time, I would have to say I understood the A series the most. For me it only made since that if time was real there had to be a change that occurred at one point or another. Which is why I agree with McTaggart's statement that the A series rejects the B series. The B series claimed that events were permanent and there was no change. But how could that possibly be? Change is essential to explaining time, otherwise how do you explain events happening now from events from the past or future?

After I understood that point in his argument, that the A series discredits the B, I started to believe that the A series was the answer. I was wrong. The A series had two faults, it claims that each event had to be different, meaning that one would be in the past, the next in the future, and so on. But the problem is saying an event is at one place in time contradicts the idea that an event can be at all three stages. For instance when you wake up in the morning and eat breakfast. When you wake up breakfast is a future event, but then it becomes present, and when you're finished it is in the past. Therefore breakfast is actually all three point is time, but the A series says that can't be because each can only be one place in time, not all three. Because of this the A series is rejected which would mean time is in-fact unreal.

I would have to say by the end of the article I was a bit surprised and confused. I was expecting to receive a definitive view point regarding if time is real or not, but instead he left it open ended. Series B was rejected because of A, series A was reject because of its contradictions, but then he proposed the idea of the C series. The C series to me exists but also doesn't, if that makes sense. In reality it exists, and there are no contradictions to disprove, but the issue is how can time be real if the C series doesn't really have a definitive direction? McTaggart said that for time to be real there needs to be change and direction. He used the examples of the letters in the alphabet, and the numbers, to show that they could either be read forward or backwards. But doesn't it have to be one or the other? To be honest I am not quite sure and he doesn't give a real answer to if time is unreal or not, but from my perspective I would say at this time I couldn't give a definitive answer either. I think we would need to look in other areas like physics to help solve this issue. 

-Lauryn

Who is Responsible?

 In this day an age I hear climate change pop up almost everyday in the news, and it just seems like things are getting worse and worse. I have rarely seen and "good" regarding it. We see mostly all of the west coast is currently in flames; there are people dying and hundreds of thousands of homes are being destroyed. Saying that we could have prevented this, I don't know, but I choose to believe that our actions have not helped the problem in any way shape or form. 

 With that being said, the questions regarding who is responsible seems to be a touchy subject. I believe that we should all be responsible for our own actions. As a child growing up we learn this concept, it is drilled into our brains, so why not apply it to this? If a child punches someone and that person now gets a black eye, the person who threw the punch is responsible. Why should that be any different for our actions regarding climate change? We should be able to apply this ideology to our own actions, whether good or bad, we are responsible for them. The article also brought up the point of what about previous generations, who is responsible? In the article it is clear that the Industrial Revolution caused serious negative effects on our environment, but we wouldn't be where we are today, for example technology wise, without it. Also, one can't change the past, so I believe that the only way to move forward is to start making better decisions now. 

I don't think it is right to place the burden of previous generations on those today to try and makeup for all the bad that was caused. I think of that as saying your relative stole an object, they now pass and you find said object and now you're facing the consequences that your relative would have faced. To me that would just make no sense. You didn't commit the crime so why should you have to pay for someone else's mistakes. 

Earlier I mentioned how we should all be responsible for our own actions, with that being said is it now our job to have duties to protect future people, and if not whose is it? I think that we should all try and do our part to better our environment, regardless of future people (I mean who knows if they'll even exists). The article mentions the idea of "polluters pay", and I agree with this. In a perfect society this makes sense, but trying to implement this into the society that we live in today just doesn't seem realistic. Unless some punishment or law is made for people who don't oblige then I can't see this ever happening. The article mentioned that the wealthy should pay because they're in a better position to do so. I agree and at the same time don't agree with this statement. Those who are of lower class or say homeless, most definitely shouldn't have to take on the burden of others, but I don't know if it is necessarily fair to say that the burden should be put on the advantage. Saying that would make me a hypocrite because earlier I mentioned how we should all be responsible for our own, and just our own actions. I don't have an exact answer on who should take on others burdens, but if we can figure out a way to minimize that potential burden by all doing our part-I would say that would be my first step. 

-Lauryn