philosophy paper

I'm sorry I wasn't in class today. I wasn't feeling well today. I did e-mail you my paper at the e-mail address linked to your blogs, but I'm not sure if that's an active one or not. I also mentioned in there that Sarah's paper is in your mailbox, because she was worried about weather conditions making it dangerous for her to drive home tonight.

Hopefully you will read this today, but if not, I hope you at least appreciate the effort I've made to get you my paper.

I promise that this is 7 pages plus works cited at 12 pt Times New Roman, double spaced. However, I'm sure you can just copy paste it yourself, though you shouldn't have to if my e-mail got through

Briget Stanley

Goal of Life paper

13 Oct 2007

Mark Achtermann

The goal of life is what a person strives to achieve through their entire existence. It is the thing that each person wants to do before they die. But what is a goal? And what is life? What things make a person’s goal in life worth it? What things does nearly every person strive to accomplish and keep a society together?

According to Dictionary.com, a goal is “the result or achievement toward which effort is directed; aim; end.” This same website has nearly thirty different definitions for the word “life,” which indicates to me that life is something that society is still struggling to define that word sufficiently.

While Dictionary.com has legitimate definitions akin to those found in, say, the Oxford Dictionary or Webster’s, Urbandictionary.com has a system to allow anyone who is a member of that site submit definitions to words, both real (like dog, cat, or rain), and slang, both web and spoken (like pwn, glomp, or ph34r), and upon looking up the word “life” in Urbandictionary.com, I came across several interesting definitions submitted by users.

The user Garabaldi defined life as “A terminal disease contracted during birth and has a 100% mortality rate.” Another user, j, defined life as

The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it? A death! What's that, a bonus?!? I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, get it out of the way. The you go live in an old age home. You get kicked out for being too healthy, go collect your pension, then, when you start work, you get a gold watch on your first day. You work forty years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You drink alcohol, you party, and you get ready for High School. You go to primary school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become a little boy(girl), you go back, you spend your last 9 months floating with luxuries like central heating, spa, room service on tap, then you finish off as an orgasm!!

Uff... Now that's what life should be!!

And then the user Galen Deepingten defined life as “The only thing you’ve got, in the end. Have fun.”

While I realize that these definitions are far from traditional, I believe that they embrace some key elements of what society as a whole has been trying to come to terms with so far as defining the word “life.” There are twenty-four pages of user submitted definitions of the word “life” on this website. Twenty-four pages of unique individuals taking their time to define what they believe life is, albeit some in rather snarky ways. For instance, famous-ramos defined life as “[Life] is now. quit wasting it. i mean come on! your looking up the definition for life. so lame. go do something! "see i just wasted like 3 seconds of your life. haha so lame"”. But these are people’s genuine opinions on what life is and what they think life should be. In some ways, these are these people’s opinions on what the goal of life is.

My personal definition of life, for this purpose in any case, is a thing possesses life if it is physically and mentally aware of itself and its surroundings. By my definition of life, not only are humans included, but also nearly all organic life.

The “goal of life”, as it were, can be seen as something as simple as surviving, reproducing, and dying. But that does not seem to give credit to the complex thing that the question “What is the goal of life?” For some beings, yes, surviving, reproducing, and dying are all that they might accomplish in their lives, but if one looks at human society, that is an example of an organization of beings that long outgrew the standard quo of reproduction and survival. People strive for so much more than that today. Humans look to understand why they live on this plane of existence. They strive to find out if there is other intelligent life in the universe. They make some attempt to define themselves and their place in this world, and some wonder if this is the only life a person gets, while others are so dead certain that there is something beyond this that they are obsessed with that “great beyond.”

When one looks at the goal of life from a purely aesthetic point of view, it’s very difficult to decide what that goal is. A book I recently started to read, a novel called Uglies by Scott Westerfield, is set in the semi-distant future and centers around a universe where looking normal is considered ugly. The world has “evolved” to the point when a person turns sixteen, he or she undergoes an operation which makes them “pretty.” This operation makes them biologically perfect, and they are then shipped off from “Uglyville” to “New Pretty Town.”

While I have only just started this book, there are already some flaws that have been presented in their universe. The logic behind being turned into a Pretty is that it is supposed to stop prejudice and racism and to create perfect people and offer perfect people to mate with.

However, while in theory that makes sense, at the same time, it only makes the Uglies, who, from what I have gathered so far, is everyone under 16, though it seems that until a person is about ten years old they are called “Littlies”, wish to be Pretty. And the New Pretties are so concerned with their own prettiness and all the pretty, biologically perfect people around them that they forget about the Uglies, even if some of those Uglies used to be their best friend. It seems wrong to me for a society to be built purely on the aesthetics.

However, while I don’t agree with the Uglies universe, I can understand why Westerfield has created it. He has pulled society’s obsession with beauty and taken it to such an extreme that it becomes ridiculous. It seems like he is trying to give a warning about the future. To me it seems unlikely that a future like that of Uglies will come about, but I can not be sure that society will not become that eventually. At this point our society in general is so obsessed with pretty people. People like Audrey Hepburn, Princess Grace, Marilyn Monroe, Carey Grant, and Humphrey Bogart still set a standard of beauty despite the fact that they are all long dead. But what has made them beautiful? Why are they the pretty ones? This is one of many questions I struggle to answer in my life.

Beauty is a difficult thing to comprehend. There are so many things that can be considered beautiful. The current exhibit being set up in the school gallery, “What Is Beauty?” is an excellent example of that. Each of those pieces represents a different person’s idea of what is aesthetically pleasing to them. And the examples being put in the gallery are only a handful of those submitted.

The goal of life so far as beauty is concerned could be anything. It could be just to make oneself pretty, in order to attract a mate, among other things, because the fact of the matter is that is just something that is hardwired into the human brain: to make ourselves attractive to others. However, one could also take beauty into their goal in life to study nature, to study their surroundings, to study anything and find the beauty in it. Perhaps a person may spend their whole life simply trying to figure out what beauty really is to them. A person could devote their entire life just trying to answer that question.

So far as the goal of life in terms of ethics, I believe that a person should work their hardest to maintain what have become the social norms and what is currently defined as morally upright behavior. If a person sees something wrong in society, I believe that that person should at least suggest their idea for reform. Morally upright behavior is not necessarily defined by society, but it is reinforced by society. Ethics is a difficult subject to pin down. Not as difficult as, perhaps, beauty, however, it does present its own problems in a clear definition, standard dictionary definition aside.

It is not impossible for a person to be morally upright if they are not a part of society, but I believe it is much more difficult. If a person has no standards to hold their own behavior up to, how can that person justify their actions? However, I do not believe a person can say that they know absolutely the goal of life even if they are always morally upright and making ethical decisions, because ethical behavior is not a set standard. It is constantly changing. What was appropriate fifty years ago might not be okay today. Or what is considered morally upright behavior today might just be unheard of or impractical fifty years ago.

Morally upright behavior is very dependent on society. It is one of the few things in philosophy that I believe can not be fully explored on one’s own. It is something a person needs constant reference to validate. The goal of life in terms of ethics and morality overall, I believe, is to understand society, or to at least pay close attention to it, because without paying attention to society, one can not truthfully say that one has completely morally upright behavior.

Metaphysically speaking, the goal of life and the reason life exists, I believe, are one in the same. A person can devote their entire life trying to figure out why they exist, why they feel anything, where everything came from. That in itself encompasses the idea of aesthetics and ethics, because that study of life and existence would also take those previous two topics into account.

For instance, if one accepts that there is a God, and only one God and creator, then even though that person has come up with a reasonable theory for how things got here, the whys are still up in the air. Why is one person pretty and one person ugly? Why was it not acceptable for girls to wear pants two hundred years ago when now it is the norm? There are millions of these whys to answer and that can become the goal of life.

These brief overviews of what I personally think can be applied to general society as a goal of life do not, however, encompass everything. Each individual has his or her own goals, and those goals are not necessarily philosophical in nature, at least not from the point of view of the most of the world. For instance, if a person declares his or her goal of life to be that he or she simply wants to raise a family, society will accept that answer and move on. People tend not to dwell too much on the future of another person unless it pertains to them personally.

However, now that I have given that example, it could be looked at as a morally upright choice in a goal of life, because raising a family is a choice that continues the human race and gives society another reason to continue evolving and attempting to better itself, simply because there is the promise of more humans in the future to continue this society. One might even argue that those close to the children make an extra effort in the their moral behavior in order to impress their beliefs on the children.

A further example of raising a family being part of the philosophical debate for maintaining upright moral behavior would be a person who declared their goal in life to be to rape and murder small children. There is not a society in the world I can think of that would actually accept that sort of behavior, save a society made up of serial rapists and killers. That aside, however, the majority rules that those people do not possess morally upright behavior, and therefore must be stopped by any means.

My final opinion on this topic is that the goal of life is too big a thing to focus on. I could have spent hours upon hours quoting and studying other people’s definitions of life according to Urban Dictionary, or reading and applying Uglies to this idea of the goal of life, and for Uglies more specifically the goal of life and aesthetics. The goal of life is something each individual takes differently, and I believe the goal of life to be to try to understand beauty, to add my piece to society and moral behavior, and to make some attempt to figure out why I am here. Those are fairly generic things to focus on, but it is a start.

Sources Cited

"goal." Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Random House, Inc. 11 Dec. 2007. < href="http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/goal">http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/goal >.

"life." Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Random House, Inc. 11 Dec. 2007. < href="http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/life">http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/life >.

"Urban Dictionary: Life." Urban Dictionary. 2007. 11 Dec. 2007 < term="life">.

Westerfield, Scott. Uglies. Simon Pulse. New York, NY: 2005.

Time

What exactly is time anyway? Why is a day only 24 hours? Why not 25? What is an hour? Who came up with that anyway?

It seems entirely arbitrary what time is and who decided these measurements for it. And why is it that when someone's really excited for something to happen, it takes forever (like falling asleep on Christmas Eve when you're a kid) but when something you're really dreading starts coming up, time can't move quickly enough? It's bizarre.

When time zones were invented, did they know when they started that they'd need an International Date Line? Or was that just something they realized along the way?

Time is a funny thing. Sometimes it drags on and on...and then sometimes it just goes too quickly. I think I'll think about this a little bit more.

*sigh*

I've never understood the point of blogs. The only ones I'm genuinely interested in following are art blogs, and those hardly count as blogs in the first place. At least not in the sense that this is a blog. This is a lot of words and thoughts and things that instead of writing down in a diary for contemplating on their own, people assume other people really want to know how their day went and exactly what happened and read their little anecdotes of the day.

And that completely baffles me.

I don't particularly care about the everyday exploits of complete strangers. Or really of people I do know. I figure if they want me to know, they'll just tell me to my face and not expect me to follow their internet public diary.

However, I guess it's those people's opinions to believe that people want to keep blogs. Or that they really want to read blogs. I just find the idea a little hard to grasp. It's not a forum, it's not a community, it's just a single person posting their opinions on things and if they so choose, ignoring any of the comments they receive.

While you can do that on a forum too, at least on a forum you are actually entering into a conversation and/or argument, generally with the intention of looking at the other people's reaction to a topic.

And being forced to start something I don't want to do in the first place, and have never really wanted to do, doesn't really inspire me to just run with it. Really it just makes me forget about it. And when I remember makes me roll my eyes because I just don't want to do it.

But here I am and here I sit, writing in this anyway.

What's the philosophical value of this? Probably none. This is just rambling in general.

I suppose to put some philosophical value in this post I'll just add something that I've been thinking about on and off for about a year.

I kind of wonder if people have really gotten smarter over the years. I know at some point thousands of years ago humans really were dumber than they are today, but in the last two thousand years or so, probably longer, have humans really gotten smarter? Or have there just been those selected few who notice that 2 and 2 make 4? In a manner of speaking, anyway. Like the invention of the cotton gin, the light bulb, paper, the printing press. Are those really signs of all mankind moving forward or just a few people noticing a few things and learning little things and making little connections to make it seem like society is moving forward?

Because I'm not so sure that they are signs of humanity getting smarter. I think people are, for the most part, the same as they were 2000 years ago. We just have more gadgets now.

Rawr

Right. I guess I should really do something to update this thing. I just keep forgetting about it. Not because I don't think it's interesting (really I think it's very interesting, I'm just lazy and I have slightly too much on my plate. It's really easy for me to overlook this when I'm doing so many other things.

I suppoooose I should actually touch on something that was assigned to us, but then I might go off on my own thing because I'm weird like that.

So. Where are facts?

Facts are everywhere.

I'm on a PC laptop computer. That's a fact. I like PCs better than Macs. That's also a fact. It's my opinion, but for me personally it's a fact. Now if I said that everyone likes PCs better than Macs, that's an opinion, and a wrong one. Because I know that several of my friends (Sarah, Maggie, Jordan, a lot of people at PCAD) like Macs more.

Other facts. It's 1:09 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. In England right now it's 6:09. In France it's 7:09.

But those facts are different from the fact that I'm on a computer. Those facts are ideas. They're based on the fact that the earth turns on an axis, creating night and day, and night and day happen at different times in different parts of the world, but whoever decided that the east coast of North and South America is five hours behind Great Britain and Ireland made that idea a fact. They backed it up with other facts, but it's still a floating idea that has come to be accepted as fact.

Some facts are in people's heads (like time) and some facts are physical things (like this computer). I didn't make up this computer, but I believe in the idea of time, like most people. I also believe in daylight savings time, and I think it's useful. I like having longer summer days and shorter winter days. But the fact that it's useful is debatable, since there are many countries throughout the world who no longer use/have never used DLS.

I like it though. I think it's cool.

I also wonder a lot about why people can be so horrible. Like how people can kill other people, and how people can abuse children so badly. What did any little boy or girl do to be raped or whatever? What kind of adult would think that's okay? What kind of person really thinks that it's okay to murder? Because there's obviously some kind of switch in those people's heads that's broken. It's disgusting and I hate it.

But anyway. I don't really feel like dwelling on that. It'll only make me more angry. And when I get mad about something I'm really bad at figuring out the right words.

Something I'm really curious about it why people can think that dinosaurs weren't real. When I was about 10, the school board of the Elizabethtown Area School District (EASD) actually voted to put stamps in the biology books on any pages referring to dinosaurs or evolution that said that dinosaurs and evolution weren't necessarily real.

Now, this might just be me, but for a public school district, that seems just a little wrong. Isn't the separation of church and state supposed to extend to the public schools? And EASD actually did it. And when I got to 7th grade, my parents refused to let me use the school's biology books until they were allowed to cover up the stamps. Because they worked long and hard to keep that from happening, and they sure as hell weren't going to let their values be overrun by E-town's conservative Christian views. And they won that small battle and put stickers in my book and I was allowed to use it again.

But really. I understand that religion is important to people, and I understand that not everything taught in a public school will correspond with those beliefs, but still. A public school education isn't supposed to favor any one ideology. If my school had offered a philosophy course, and the idea of dinosaurs not existing came up, that would be one thing, but my school didn't (and doesn't) offer philosophy. And instead, they higher ups were trying to push those ideas into a science class, where facts and logic should reign supreme.

Basically my school was run by idiots. Now it's run by fewer idiots. But still idiots.

Why do some people feel the need to force their beliefs on other people? Why do
some people feel that their beliefs are just better than everyone else's, and not equal to them. Ann Coulter is an excellent example of someone who forces their beliefs on everyone else and doesn't think for even a second that she's in the wrong. The other day on the show "The Big Idea", hosted by Donny Deutsch, she actually said that "Jews need to be perfected," and continued to argue that she didn't see anything wrong with what she said (Fox News, 8 Oct 2007). How can ANYONE AT ALL think that's okay. Seriously. I'm an agnostic, and I know that because I grew up in Elizabethtown, which is an extremely conservative area, even for Lancaster County, I have a less than tolerant view of Christianity, but at least I acknowledge that. I don't think Ann Coulter should be shot or anything, but I do think that she needs a good slap across the face, and anyone who thinks that she's right deserves exactly the same thing.

I try to get along with people. I really do. But there are just people out there who grind my nerves so badly with their outright disdain for the opinions, lifestyles, and beliefs of others that I want to wring their necks.

I guess I should probably stop ranting about that now.

And I think I'm done with this for now.

Source Cited:

Coulter, Ann. Interview with Donny Deutsch. Fox News. 8 Oct. 2007. 16 Oct. 2007 .

So...Facts

Facts are decided by a group. Like how the Academie Francaise (sorry for the lack of accents, I know they're missing but I can't figure it out on my Mac) decides on what is actually part of the French language. A group of people together decide what words go into the dictionary and what are official French words.

Facts are facts because a group of people decide that something is true.

For instance, the fact that orange is orange came up a long time ago and someone assigned those sounds to the a bright color that's a mixture of red and yellow, and then later applied that group of sounds to a round fruit of the same color as its namesake.

A fact becomes a fact and not an opinion when it becomes the common belief instead of the belief of a few. Often times the opinion becomes a fact because someone is providing solid evidence of this fact, like the idea that fire is hot and ice is cold.

If I think of anything else I'll probably change this.

ZOMG

Lawls. I'm a blogger.