My connection this week comes from a series of books that I haven't read in a while but still love. They are called Pendragon and the story line is pretty complicated so let me just get to the philosophy. In the fourth book, Bobby Pendragon goes to a "parallel universe" type thing called Veelox. Veelox is a broken territory (meaning parallel universe in book terms) and is under many problems. In Veelox everyone is hooked to a machine that makes all of their fantasies and whatever they can imagine become true. The ultimate happiness. There are only a few people who actually work and feed the people in the machines. They are on a food shortage, and basically no one is taking responsibility. Familiar? I hereby connect this to what we have learned. That one guy who said if there was a machine that was just for pleasure, we would face that instead of reality. In the end of the book, Bobby shuts the thing down and people wake up and see the mess going on. The bad guy transforms into a woman secretary of something or other and tells everyone that there was a technical difficulty and that the machines are back and running again. No one stayed to even ponder what the right thing to do was, they just hooked up to their machines again and began to let the world rot around them. I have to sadly agree with this statement. Only extremely strong people would be get out of it and face reality. It sounds pessimistic about the human race, but we've seen stuff to not as much extent still have an impact. Our attention spans are shrinking because of the speed of the internet. Would you rather be on Facebook or doing APUSH? Or I could use the example that kids are pending very little time outside by their own choice because watching t.v and playing video games is much more appealing than reality.
I've sort of given up on trying to figure out what the heck is going on, so I'll discuss Kant. He isn't exactly easy to understand either, but I just Kant deal with the plot line right now (be prepared from more Kant puns, its the reason I'm writing about him). After looking at a simplified version of Kant's ideas, he miraculously makes sense. I actually really like this guy. I Kant say that I agree with everything that comes out of his intellectual mouth, but the jist of it makes sense. He has the idea that rational idea come from a process in order. First you have senses. You can sense anything and everything that's around you, but add more focus to a specific sense and it become perception. Example: I don't usually notice gravity pushing down on me, that would make it a sense, but when I pretend that I'm Super Man and jump off something, expecting to soar through the skies, gravity suddenly becomes my perception as I realize that the power of flight is not in my reach...yet. See what I did there? From my perception of gravity, I was able to make a conception or an idea. This is only one aspect of Kant's many complex theories that take quite a bit of perception to figure out. Kant also really liked mathematics and thought that science and math were things that were set in place and couldn't change no matter what experiences happen. 3+3=6 no matter what. Yet, as Socrates said, "The only thing I really know is that I know nothing." Kant has a the same sort of theory for religion, but I'll always wonder about everything else. Our senses can deceive us and do we truly ever know if what we're in is the reality we think we are? Probably not, but that's why we've got philosophy.
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