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ktan's picture

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Because so many ideas were discussed in lab today (from dropping out of school to purpose of education, to free will and  the prevalence of biology, from the social construct of morals to falling in and out of love), we found it very hard to articulate in clear, concise terms our varied opinions or to get it all "less wrong."

One of the models we looked at involved dots of red and green that changed color randomly and took on a "pattern" of movement. We observed the red and green dots eventually aligned themselves in particular arrangements, that we, as humans with a highly complex and developed brain, perceive as a pattern. "Patterns" seem to exist only because of the individual's power of perception and imagination. This is what leads us to believe a random alignment of colored dots is actually the emergence of a pattern. Humans impart meaning on situations that don't necessarily have meaning, because we tend to interpret alternate scales along our own. In other words, randomness and pattern are both constrcuts of the human brain, and this could also be responsible for why different people perceive the same occurence/phenomenon in different ways, why people observe different "patterns" among the same entity.

Another model we looked at involved choosing (maybe guessing?) between three doors to win a $5 prize. After playing with this application for a while, we observed we would figure out the "right" door and get the "wrong" door with a random probability. Because no set "pattern" was observed, we believe that there are some things beyond the capacity of the human brain, or beyond the comprehensability of science, as we understand it. We believe we can apply this same theory to beyond just the observance of patterns (or lack of?) to things on a much larger scale, such as abstract concepts of religion, love, morality, ethics etc (as discussed in class).

--Claire, Jesse, Krystel, Paoli, Emily, Yashaswini

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