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hannahpayne's picture

Summary for Last Week

Last week we talked about if a universe can exist without you in it. This topic brought us back to the idea of the tree falling in the forest and whether or not it made a sound if no one was there to hear it. Because what we experience is a function of our bodies it is very difficult to imagine a world without ourselves in it. 
Paul suggested we wath Woody Allen's movie, "Everything You Want to Know About Sex."

Then we discussed how people experience somthing that is seemingly the same in different ways. (ex. How do we experience Paul?) We all experienced Paul differently because we came up with different words to describe him from our unconcious. But when we tried to conciously describe him we all said mostly the same thing. What we concluded from this was that concious description is more similar and unconcious description is more varied. One explanation that we came up for this is that we have been taught to express ourselves in way others can understand easily. It was suggested that maybe this is the reason we have trouble writing our essays about what we talk about in class because its what we think people want us to say. We also said that the discussion helps us come up with new ideas and build off of our ideas which is why its more interesting than our papers.

We decided that you cannot experience exactly what another person is experiencing becasue no two brains or previous experiences are the same. But then the idea of twins through a wrench into this thinking. Some twins can supposedly feel each other's pain and share the same experience exactly. We thought that this could be a result of their upbringing, being thought of as one person instead of two. But we coudn't really figure out an answer to the twin question.

So... what we learned from this week was that to experience someone else's experience we would need to have their body and mentality. The concious reflects the unconcious. If someone does somegthing without knowing why they are doing it unconciously. 

Also, somthing kinda fun... a lot of people saw pictures instead of words when doing word association. Does this mean that the unconcious understands pictures better than words?

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