Intelligence Quotient

I was reading "A Song for Selma" by Kurt Vonnegut the other day where a group of school teachers discover that a certain pupil is a genius and so encourage him to do better, while another dumb pudgy boy is criticized for his stupidity. In my previous blog posts, I've discussed how nature and nurture shapes us into the individuals that we are today and will become in the future. So this brings us to the question of what is intelligence? 

Granted that we have all heard of the IQ test and how it determines how smart a person is but we have to keep in mind that the test itself was created by a group of human beings who are prone to bias and would think in a certain way. There is the very clear distinction between Arts and Science but a person skilled in the Science discipline maybe bad at art and vice versa. So if you were to judge him from an Arts perspective he wouldn't be brilliant whereas from a Science perspective he could be a genius. We only know the I.Q of the most brilliant minds in the field of Science, Stephen Hawking for example. But does that go to say that someone like Michael Angelo was not very intelligent? Today paintings that look like they could have been done by a 3 year old seem to sell for millions of dollars because the buyer sees it as a genius' work. 


Survey's have shown that teachers expect a child who is physically more attractive to perform better and will be biased towards that child and push him/her to perform better. So if nurture does play a bigger part than nature, then that means that subconsciously we are hindering the performance of a child just because "he does not seem to be the type that does well" etc. So not having a clear distinction then leads to the Theory of Multiple Intelligences. Proposed by Howard Gardner, it consists of 8 abilities that a certain individual could be categorized into. Again, humans and our need to categorize...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences

So really there is no way to tell if an individual is actually intelligent or how intelligent he is. Everybody is in their own way some form of intelligent, the idea is to find and nurture that ability. Find something you like and are good at and stick with it.

The famous Albert Einstein quote comes to mind; "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid".

Meaning of Life - Part 2

When pondering over the meaning of something we are clearly searching for evidences that lead us to conclude that that something is meaningful or holds meaning. If so, then we are actually asking if life is meaningful. Which means that for life to be meaningful there has to be a certain criteria but once again like all things that are of a philosophical nature, there are no set rules, no set criteria. What determines the meaningfulness of life? Go to school, study well, get a job, be successful, have lots of money. Does that mean your life is meaningful? or would you rather be free, own a farm out in the countryside and live off the land? Being human beings we tend to think of only ourselves. We have to realize that life is in every single living being. It isn't just us who live is it?

The animals that live their lives, they hunt, they mate, reproduce, fight for their territory. What would make their life meaningful? Of course there is the fact that they do not comprehend philosophy and would not think as much as we humans do. But truth of the matter is that they also have lives and when talking about the meaning of life, then we should also be considering the meaning of life as a whole; not just meaning of life pertaining to human beings. They live because they are alive, not for any other reason. Only humans try to lead a life that means anything or try to find meaning in living. In many ways that becomes our hubris.
Many a times, we tend to confuse the meaning of life with the purpose of life. Meaning is the value that we associate with life while purpose is what we do unto others or ourselves that in turn makes our life hold a value. So then, let us take that approach; let's try and find the meaning of life through the purpose of life.

 If you have read some of my previous posts, there is one named "Happiness". The purpose of every man in life is to attain a state of happiness, there could be different ways of obtaining it but the crux of all that we do boils down to happiness. We help others because that makes us happy, we buy an item of luxury that makes us happy and so on. So if the purpose of life for all of us is to be happy; then can that mean that the value of somebody's life be measured in the amount of happiness that they possess. But that again raises some problems does it not? Firstly, there is no measurement of happiness as such. We can't really gauge how happy a person is. Secondly, there is the problem of when exactly are we measuring the happiness of an individual. There are so many stages in life and if the only thing that is common to us in life is being born and dying, then that means that the only time that we could ever measure the meaningfulness of life of an individual is when he is dead because obviously a new born does not yet understand life or for that matter anything that is happening around him.

That which unites us all becomes the factor that determines the meaning of life. When we are all staring at the face of death, we are united and we look back to think whether we have fulfilled the purpose of life; whether we are truly happy. And when in my mind, if I think I am happy and have fulfilled the purpose of life; then I alone for that moment am the man with the most meaningful life in the world and would gladly accept death.

The Apple of Eden Part 2

Earlier, I spoke about knowledge and how we acquire it.  We are surrounded by new ideas, and some of them are thrown right at us. Are these ideas actually what we want to see, or are they what we are made to see though?

Some of us if not most of us are aware that facts are usually manipulated a little before it is shown to the public eye. Or, they're just not shown. Movies, video games, books and all kinds of media and information sources are restricted from being let out into society. Some restrictions or bans maybe implemented due to offensive material, but what about the rest? Society controls what we read and watch and along with it, gives us a (what we seem to see as a) very good reason to do so. Most of us blindly accept things as they come to us ( me being one of them). Why? That's because we are either scared or just lazy to bother finding out more. See the contradiction, we are know for being eager beings, we want to find out more and yet we hold back, we only explore more into areas that we are allowed to explore into.

Along with this society even uses techniques that influence our decisions. One very common technique that is used in the Black and White choice. In this method, you are offered two extreme choices, and one of them would be a choice that favours what the person wants and the other will be one that you will not choose. To better explain this here is an example, "Are you going to fight me, or run away like a coward?"  The choice that is made by most people would be to obviously fight the aggressor, mainly because the other choice is sort of derogatory. This is a more microscopic example but apply this to the type of messages that you may or may not see around you.

I got these ideas from an article that I read (http://www.cracked.com/article_16656_6-brainwashing-techniques-theyre-using-you-right-now.html), rather eye opening. What I mean to say from all this is that, just because some words are thrown in that may antagonize us or make it seem like the wrong thing to do (this doesn't apply to anti-drug campaigns, drugs are bad and always will be), the choice is entirely up to you to go out and explore the world around you. Understand the situation completely before blindly following what is shown. We are humans, not sheep.

  

Double Rainbow

Imagination allows us to create new ideas, it is believed that our imagination is strongest during our formative years i.e when we're kids. It's not surprising either because that's the time we learn the most; we are inquisitive creatures by nature. We're always willing to learn more about things we're interested in. Though, why is it that most of us lose our curiosity as we grow older and thus limiting our imagination?

Here is a theory to why our imagination narrows down:

When we are kids, we are usually given the freedom to try out whatever we want; from touching things, to hiding them and eventually receiving a reward, usually in the form of a scolding from those above us (literally). Either way we aren't stopped from being curious, we are just told not to do something if it's bad for us. We learnt things in this manner; by trial and error. We were truly free at that point, free to think, free to behave the way we wanted without the fear of being judged. 

As we grow older, we certainly learn more, but our scope of learning is rather restricted once we're sent out into the world. The things we learn, the way behave are all dependent on those around us. At this point we do sort of lose our freedom of thought. This may be a factor that affects our capability to create new, original ideas.
Again this may not be true in all cases, there are people (adults) who are able to think and express freely. We see them; artists, writers, musicians, scientists and chefs who come up with new ideas all the time. In conclusion, nothing can actually stop us from imagining or thinking out loud. It's up to us to create new ideas, everyone is innovative in their own ways. It may not be an 'in your face idea' it may be masked or hidden in something that you saw, heard or felt. So go out, explore, and idea might stare you in the face and you probably won'
t even realize it. Stay young.   

Everything is in continuum

There are distinctions in whatever we see and do. From people to actions; we have either been taught these distinctions or have drawn the line at some point saying "Okay if this object has this characteristics then this must belong to a certain group" and so on. We have races, religion, gender, age and so much more dividing us all. But what we don't seem to realize is that these are merely distinctions that we as humans have created and have placed in society to stand apart from each other. If we look for scientific proof, the genes in our DNA suggest that we are very close in terms of our genes and how they are structured. Therefore there is a continuum within us despite the fact that we all seem different from one another.

When we take this principle and apply it to everything around us we see that it can be proven that everything is in continuum. Time is a perfect example to show this as it is always moving and never stopping, it is continuous. Movement of people is continuous because even if we stop while walking we are still moving due to the rotation and revolution of the Earth around its orbit. Our bodies are always pumping fluid in the form of blood or hormones etc and so they're always moving. Your daily business being dumped into the soil will serve as nutrients to plants one day that will then be eaten by animals and then eaten by you again and therefore there is a continuous cycle. Nothing ever stops. Take the two most distinct things or categories you know and you'll always find a link between them somewhere at some point in history. We are all connected and moving at all times. Ever since the Big Bang, nothing has ever ceased to exit. It is always converted to some form or the other that will exist in the world and universe as we know it. Even the distinction between living and dead is blurred; when exactly do we say a person is dead? There are so many answers to this. When the blood stops pumping from the heart? When the brain no longer functions? When the flow of fluids stop? When the cells eventually die? 

All the answer that we have created to answer our questions have come from definitions we as humans have created and put in place for hundreds of years and therefore have become facts. This is what psychologists call categorical thinking, where we form categories into which all that we have knowledge of will fit into. These are just mere linguistic divisions we form to help us think better. This is when you realize that we as humans who are very inquisitive and always questioning what's happening to satisfy our curiosities have never gotten the complete answer. We see that our questions that were asked have never been truly answered for the entire span of human history and will never be truly answered ever. We will never stop asking questions even though there is never a perfect answer to the questions we ask...