Connection and Reflection (4)

       My connection to the universe this fine Tuesday evening comes from my favorite animated series ever to exist. Avatar the Last Airbender is FYI: the best thing ever!!! My love for its amazingness is, alas, not quite so philosophical (well now that I think about it, I suppose I could write a blog on it, but I need to go deeper) but the content is. There are many philosophical references in the show, many from Uncle Iroh, but one specific episode caught my attention. It's called "The Swamp" and its in the second book. The basic plot goes that the crew is flying over a swamp when they get sucked in by a random tornado. This could actually be seen as another fate v.s free will thing, but hold up. So basically the crew gets separated and they are left of explore the swamp with their own wits, all of them have visions. Katara and Sokka saw people who they lost while Aang saw someone he never met before. They all chase their visions and end up in the center in the swamp where they get attacked by a giant seaweed monster who happens to be a hippie type philosopher.Once they clear up the whole attacking bit, the kids meet Huu (the guy inside the seaweed who was bending the water in the plants) who tells them some interesting things. Here's a quote: 

       ":Huu: See, this whole swamp is actually just one tree spread out over miles. Branches spread, then sink and take root, and then spread some more. One big living organism; just like the entire world.                             Aang: I get how the tree is one big thing, but the whole world?                                                                     Huu: Sure. You think you're any different from me or your friends or this tree? If you listen hard enough, you can hear every living thing breathing together. You can feel everything growing. We're all living together, even if most folks don't act like it. We all have the same roots and we are all branches of the same tree."                                                      So this is quite an interesting philosophy. Everything is one and together. From a social science standpoint, we were all raised diffently, and therefore, are quite different people because our environment and culture has effected us differently. But thinking about how we evolved, the tree is a perfect metaphor because even though we are different from a cultural perspective, we do have the same roots. The episode also explained the reason for their visions was that "time is an illusion, and so is death." This is a very hard one to wrap your mind around. In an era that looks at things chronologically, this is strange to think about. Huu cuts things down to its absolute basic substance. Spending an hour in APUSH sure takes longer than only a mere hour at Ceder Point or something. Humans all come from the same roots, and maybe so does time.

       

       In Sophie's World, everything is getting trippy.I'm going to get straight to what I want to write about, the fact that Alberto said that Alberto was writing a story about them for his daughter's amusement. There are a few reason why this can't be true, first off: cop-out! Secondly, why would Alberto call Sophie Hilde, and also,  what a ridiculous story to read to your daughter! But after thinking about it, its like a never-ending extension. So Hilde is reading a story on Alberto and Sopie, and we are then reading a story about a girl named Hilde who is reading a story about Alberto and Sophie, but maybe we're just a marble like in Men in Black and someone's reading a book about us reading a book about Hilde reading a book about Sophie and Alberto who are reading about philosophy. Oh goodness. What a mind boggling theory, the idea that everything is infinity bigger. I wonder if it has any actual limits. Like being small has an eventual limit, but I don't think the same restraint applies to being bigger, sense there's always that +1 you can add to a number. Going back to Descartes, there will always be doubt, and I guess we can never know for sure, but goodness, I really hope the ending changes from his theory because it seems like such a cop-out and they never predict the right theory in books, well besides Harry Potter 7. That concludes my fourth bloggy type thing.