Humans As Machines

I tend to think of humans as machines, it is strange as machines are actually designed after humans. A photographic camera, for example, is an imitation of the human eye. Nevertheless, I think it is a really successful way of understanding how humans "work". When I think about inductive reasoning this image comes to my mind:

Classification

Classification is defined as the arrangement of a group of things in classes that share some specific characteristics. We, humans, tend to instinctively classify everything around us, but why do we do it? I think the main reason for this to happen is that we are naturally curious, we have a need of knowing everything around us, and classification is an useful element we have been provided with to understand the world. So when we come across something new, we are able to have some sort of instinctive knowledge of it. For example, if we come across an unknown animal, we could have some sort of knowledge about it just by classifying it as an animal. However, there is a problem with classification, and it is that we assume it provides reliable previous knowledge that led us to prejudices and making stereotypes in the same way inductive knowledge does. An example could be when being introduced to a person we have never seen before. Even if it is in a subconscious way, we will classify this person and probably be induced to make some judgements that are not necessarily true before we even get to know the person.

During our Friday seminary on this topic, we were divided into groups consisting of either girls or boys. Each group was given some post-its and we were asked to write down adjectives describing men and women separately. Then we all pasted our descriptions on the board and we discussed them. I personally, thought that we were definitely not going to be able to successfully describe men and women. When my group was working, I really did not know what to write down, it is not that easy to classify such big groups as men and women are, there are too many of them and each is different from another, there is always an exception to the rule. At the end I think we all just wrote down what stereotypes had defined for each gender: women being nice, teary, caring, 'soft', hypocrite; and men being strong, brusque, athletic, funny. I did not feel identified with many of the characteristics my group wrote down nor with the ones written by my classmates, and I think, several of them thought the same I did. 

At the end of the lesson, we all concluded that the classification we had made was nothing else but pure stereotyping. So here is the problem with classification, it can led us to judge incorrectly someone or something without enough evidence and it can facilitate the creation of stereotypes.

Reason

There are two main types of reasoning, these are deductive and inductive reasoning. The first one is based on the logical validity of three premises (A is B. B is C. Then A is C), the second one is based in the gathering of evidence to arrive to a generalization. Both of them are used in our daily lives and both of them are necessary for use to understand the world, but they have several failures. The problem with deductive reasoning is that no matter how logical an argument can be, it could still be false. We can say:

a) Caterpillars have legs.

b) I have legs.

c) Then, I'm a caterpillar.

This argument is logical, but it is not true.

The problem with inductive reasoning, is that no matter how much evidence we gather, there will always be missing evidence. There is always the chance that our generalization is not correct. Also, there is the problem that this reasoning tends to predict something involving the future. For example: We have observed for a 'long' period of time that the sun comes out everyday, then we could assume that it will continue to come out tomorrow and the day after that. But the thing is there is no way to be sure of our predictions until it happens, and so the evidence will never be complete. Finally, there is another problem with inductive reasoning and it is its tendency of causing the creation of stereotypes. Nevertheless, I believe this is the more reliable type of reasoning. We just have to take into account that we will never reach absolute certainty of anything through this method and that we should not make hasty generalizations.

Swearing

When we entered the classroom to receive this TOK lesson, we heard our teacher using a word I think none of us would ever expect to hear from him during school time. Words are just sound combinations, someone, somewhere mixed up some phonemes and gave the resulting mixture a meaning that others decided to accept. They have the meaning we chose to give them, so it seems curious to me how people react to words. Our teacher said one simple word consisting of four letters: fuck, and that was enough to make silence in the room and cause us to stare at him unbelievingly.

When he explained we were going to have a class on swearing everything made more sense and we were able to relax and think of how funny our reaction had been towards the mention of a simple word. During class, we took turns to read aloud a text about the origins of swearing, the text obviously contained several swear words and it stroke me as rather strange the fact that some people found funny hearing these words being said out loud, as their functions is to allow people to express their frustration or to insult others. I also thought it was weird to see how people acted when they had to read a swear word, some began to laugh and others blushed.

I know that words affect us as much as they do because of society, we have learned their meaning and we have grown up seeing how others react towards sound combinations, but it is still strange to think that people, having the power of giving words their meaning, have decided to provide our vocabulary with words that make them so uneasy, what was their purpose with it? Why do we need swear words? If we want to express frustration or anger we have a vast extension of words to do so without using these, but then, what makes them different? If there are other words that mean the same things why do these ones make people feel so uneasy?

Emotions

Most of us have once wished to get rid of any type of feeling, thinking that losing our emotions would be a fair price to avoid ever being sad or disgraceful again or with the idea that losing them would make us wiser. But if this became true, we would not only lose our capability of being happy or sad, feelings are more complex than that. Getting rid of them would also have a negative effect in our relations with other people and a part of us would be forever gone. Plato once said wisdom and passion were two horses pulling a chariot in different directions, but he seemed to be quite wrong. They are not as separated as some of use believe them to be and we, definitely, cannot choose only one of them. Recent discoveries have shown that our reasoning is greatly affected by our emotions.

During this TOK lesson, we learned about the case of a man, Phineas Gage, who had had an accident when working in a mine and his frontal lobe had been greatly damaged. His memory and reasoning capabilities had not been affected in any way, but he lost all type of emotion. According to the ones who knew him, even though his rational part was unaffected, he stopped being the same person. His personality had changed drastically and his way of acting towards people was completely different. The lack of emotion prevented him from knowing how a person would react to whatever he said or did. Apparently, emotions are crucial to access rational decisions and without them it is impossible for us to entirely understand the world.

I had never thought of any of this before, I knew that if someone lost his/her emotional capabilities they would change in some way, but before this lesson, I had always overlooked emotions. I thought they were important, though not as important as reason is.