Week 14--Finale!

Hm... my presentation was just a bunch of notes- but I'll summarize here!  Emily and I decided to look at evolution from two different points of view... I put a picture from the Hubble Space telescope up on the screen, that showed a whole bunch of different galaxies, the furthest we've ever been able to see into space, and asked the class what they thought was beyond what we know...whether we'd even be able to identify life out there, if it exists, or if our standards and measurements for life would be so far off that we wouldn't be able to even recognize it...  Emily brought us "back to Earth", showing a clip from Planet Earth of a bird with..unusual habits, and played the clip without sound, having us create our own stories (I thought the bird was dancing), and then played the clip with sound and narration, where the bird was actually doing a mating dance/cleaning... we talked about evolution a little and made our own stories, shared (gave candy!), and thought about our small planet, and all that has evolved that we don't even know about, and thought about all the possibilties that could be out there. http://motivate.maths.org/conferences/conf86/Images/Hubble_large.jpg (the telescope picture)

Evan, Lavinia and I presented on Generalizations and Morality.

We played a clip from Dave Chappelle’s “Killin Me Softly” DVD. The video clip consisted of a comedian, Dave Chappell, making cultural joke about how humans interact.

Now…What does this joke represent about how we as humans make decisions in our every day lives?

What Dave Chappell is either indirectly or directly conveying is that humans interact with one another and make crucial everyday decisions through creating generalizations and using those generalizations to predict the outcomes of certain behaviors and actions.

As U.S. citizens we generalize that all people wearing a blue or black uniform with a matching cap, a badge, and a gun are police officers. We not only generalize about their looks for identification, but we also generalize about their behavior. We generalize that if a police officer sees that we need help, he or she will try to help us. We therefore, use these generalizations to make predictions about how they will behave if we call for help. On a specific case by case not every police officer will help us, but that doesn’t mean that the generalizations we make are not useful.

In fact, every interaction we have with another human, involves the interpretation of a generalization we created in our head. We write our papers a certain way, because we predict through generalization that our professor likes certain types of writing. What about the Patriot Act?

Many social theorists such Max Weber, Emile Derkheim argue some extent that our ability need to generalize to make assumptions about ones behavior lead to the creation of social norms, which in turn lead to the creation of communal laws.

Ultimately our ability to interpret behavior to make generalizations has greatly increased our ability to survive as a species. With out it we would not be able to function. It is clear that the characteristic of making generalizations and using them to our decision making advantage was evolutionarily selected for. We are now biologically wired to make generalizations about everything, either consciously, or unconsciously.

However, we have come to a point in our civilization where making certain generalizations, including those associated with race, ethnicity or gender are morally unacceptable. Even if it is our natural tendency to make generalizations, it is also our natural tendency to make moral decisions.

Morality, like generalizing, also has a selective advantage. The two major theories about how morality evolved in humans suggest that morality either allowed groups to work well together, group selection, or that morality gave individuals a selective advantage by enticing them to help others in need, and in turn receiving necessary help when they needed it. Either way, morality evolved just as generalizing, giving us humans a selective advantage over other species.

So now we presented two characteristics, generalizing and morality, that are both very important to our survival as evolution has dictated, are now conflicting with one another.

So what is next? For the rest of our civilization, will humans have to repress the desire to generalize in certain situations? If so, what will be the repercussions of doing so? Will this create sociopaths or other psychological issues? It seems to us that morality is wining this war, but is this the right thing for humans as a society? As a species?

We wanted to portray that as humans it is inevitable that we make generalizations, even if they are negative. Unfortunately, making generalizations can conflict with morality, therefore which will win out or will we just suppress the negative generalizations. From class we could clearly see that individuals today are just suppressing negative generalizations to keep from conflict and to be “morally” correct. The important thing that did not seem to get emphasized in class is that we all make negative generalizations, it might not seem as blatantly negative to us such as assuming a woman dressed in a short skirt wants attention, however any generalization we make could offend someone and could be considered immoral. Who is to decide which generalizations are immoral or are all generalizations immoral?

I also do not understand the comments made about the Patriot Act. How is it ok to generalize/stereotype towards people that are not US citizens? Wouldn’t that just be as immoral as generalizing/stereotyping US citizens? Where are these boundaries drawn? Why can we not just understand that it is our human nature to generalize which in turn helps us survive, and that at times making negative generalizations does increase our chances of survival. It does not mean it is morally right, but it still happens.

My group played both on the ideas of mindwanderings and truth. We did this in a way so that it all relates to art. Shannon made a song, I made a movie, Kristin wrote a diary entry, and Katie made a photo journal. Shannon took the simple story about truth we were given in class and turned it into her own story, one of a pop song. I took the story and decided to give it an evolutionary past and made a movie of the creation of the story. Kristin molded the story into how it relates into her own world, evolving into a diary. And Katie took the story and transformed it into photographic art. We showed that there were multiple ways that one story can evolve.

May 1, 2007

A spoken word performance by

Becky Farber

Hayley Reed

Jasmine Shafagh

Followed by an interactive group activity

Reality

Realidad

Realite

Somewhere out there we have

the truth:

An untouchable entity

we will never fully grasp.

That which happens

really does happen.

The sandwich has been eaten. The crumbs have fallen.

Yet if the details are emitted from our story,

are they emitted

from our reality?

You see what I see and know what I don’t know but what I know isn’t what you know and do we know what we know at all?

 But who’s to decide which version of the story is the most complete

 Most accurate

 Most appealing?

 All those details go lost

 all these vantage points combined will never fully add up

Add up.

 Truth is an unreachable landmark,

 a destination not even Columbus could broach.

 Here we all are,

 sharing the same experience

 Yet forming different stories of our different realities

 Infinite

 Multiple

 Boundless

 Options for interpretation of reality

 No limits.

 Science’s goal is observing reality

 Reality is unattainable.

 Science is an account that gets it less wrong.

 Less wrong.

 Less wrong.

 Less wrong.

Less wrong.

 The observations of science

 are based on the crack of subjectivity:

 Seeing what we choose to see,

 interpreting it how we choose to interpret,

 and then calling it fact.

 So will we ever understand

 Ever know?

 We are all just sound vibrations

 in an orchestra we can’t fully hear.

 Just pieces of the story.

I am reality.

I am truth.

I am the complete story.

And I am the story teller, getting closer and closer yet never quite touching.

 So why do we bother constructing reality?

 Why we do recount

 Narrate

 Unfold

 stories that may not ever mirror what actually happened

 It’s the pragmatic way of life

 The only way to accept knowing you go through life

 not fully knowing

A flower. Before us.

 I see growth.

 I see life.

 I see the

We agree to disagree.

 Our different interpretations of reality are uniting forces

 in our quest for truth.

 If we realize that every individual truth has merit

 we will accept each other’s ideas.

 Only connect over variations of what can be seen.

 Reality.

 Beyond us.

 Yet we come closer.

With our stories.