Cremisi's blog

It’s very hard to document change because to see it, you almost always need to leave the observed subject alone for a little while—to get out of its aura, the strange influence it has over the world—before one feels as though one is far enough away to not be bias and that one is able to adopt a true demeanor of objectivity. In fact, I’d say that we can really only see growth and evolution when we have something else to compare it to. The English ivy spindles higher upon the tulip tree than it did a month ago, so I know that it has grown. My leonine, Oreo-colored darling only changes when I see pictures of him as a kitten, and I realize that the white hairs around his eyes weren’t always there.

   The issue of free will is something I often struggle with. Partly because I do not feel as though I have enough background knowledge and understanding of concepts directly applicable to it, and partly because, as philosophers and scientists have been arguing about it for nearly two millennia, it is simply an unsolvable problem. This essay is a small venture to help further my own understanding about free will. I will begin by attempting to trace my current understandings of free will, the issues and problems that I have with it, and the general questions that I still posses about it.

    Though this is a bit delayed, (I've finally learned how to post the video I wanted to post) I wanted to have a quick discussion on the Ouroboros. I've been rather curious about it even since we briefly discussed it in class earlier. When I think of the ouroboros, the ouroboros seems like an ominous symbol used by cults where the members, shrouded in dark cloaks, stand around a pit of fire and chant songs in Latin. I've become especially interested in the history of the ouroboros to see where it came from and what it even means. 

         Any lover of books can relate to the disturbance and slight disgust one feels when a favorite piece of literature is adapted into a movie. As we have discussed in “The Stories of Evolution and the Evolution of Stories”, when a viewer sees a beloved story adapted into a film, the initial reaction is that the tale has either been whittled down, shaven, or catastrophically ruined by the cinema. The majority of the people in class agreed that there is a certain “mindlessness”--a sluggish feeling of less processing and activity in the mind--when it came to viewing a film.

 After I had asked whether the words “ain’t” or “snuck” were actually words, my third grade teacher told me to look them up in the dictionary. She said that if I found them, they were words. If not, then they were improper. Simple as that. Is this, however, an incorrect way at viewing words? Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755, was the very first comprehensive (as comprehensive as we are aware of) compilation of words in the English language. The commencement of the dictionary helped to shape the world of literature, professional publications, and writing. The dictionary, upon its every-decade renewal, deems words as useful and true if they are included within its published and meticulously edited pages.