And Now for Something Completely Different

I think the internet and my lack of attentiveness might be destroying my son...

Heavy statement I know, but seriously:

So I've been letting my 6 year-old use the iPad to watch Netflix - "Just for Kids," in the early morning hours for about 3 months now. I thought the whole arrangement was amazing -- I get to sleep, while he is entertained, I can see him from my bed because of the way our rooms are connected so I know he's safe, and I'm thinking that the "Just for Kids" feature is fantastic because he can't see anything potentially harmful or scary.  Ha!

About three weeks ago, the account was changed so that when we logged in, we had to select a person who was watching.  Just about a week ago, the smart little bastard selected another user and watched a Goosebumps episode when I was asleep.  I had no idea this had happened, but that night he woke up around 3 am and did not go back to sleep until about 5 or 6, getting up every 5 minutes because he was scared of something.  I had to have him sleep on the floor next to the bed.  It was godawful.  I had been wondering what had spooked him so much, and then, lo and behold! I logged on to the other user on the account last night and saw it in the "Recently Watched," section.

Needless to say, I feel super guilty.  For some reason I didn't think of the possibility that he would watch something scary by himself on purpose. Just the intro to that show is kind of creepy for my son. He's pretty sensitive, and I can't imagine how scared that stupid show made him.  If not for my laziness and desire to sleep in, he might not have come across the show alone and made that decision. He was obviously embarrassed about being scared, but what kid wouldn't be scared by that crap?! It's creepy.  Anyway, like I said, I feel extremely guilty for letting that happen. I know how I've come to rely on internet-based entertainment for my kid, and I'm kind of ashamed.  I'm the only one to be blamed.

So now I am insisting that I be present whenever he's watching Netflix, or playing games (however, the good thing about the XBOX is that I can set good parental controls). Welp. Back to being super vigilant crazy paranoid sleep-deprived mom (yay!).

I mean, the worst part about this is that when he gets up in the morning, he doesn't want to do anything. He doesn't want to eat or play games really, aside from Minecraft and such. So it's back to being stuck just sitting on the couch watching dumb shows instead of sleeping... SAD FACE.

/Something Completely Different 

Thoughts on Academic Philosophy and Unifying Theories

One of the biggest problems with "doing philosophy," academically is that students go into it thinking that they will study great thinkers and then write original material after they study, and then realize that there are so many thinkers, so many movements, so many revolutions in thought, and so many schools of thought, that they never get to the original stuff.

This problem stems, in part, from the fact that academic philosophy programs insist on endless commentary of old thought. (I mean honestly, how much is there left to say about Plato for god's sake?)  In one of his writings, Karl Rahner, the 20th century Jesuit theologian, discusses the sheer amount of information that is in the world to digest, and how we are never really going to be able to process all of it. Specialization within specialized fields has already developed (inevitable especially in historical studies), but this may be a double-edged sword, so to speak. Rahner agrees with me here (or I agree with Rahner? Yeah, that).  It is fascinating to analyze the various facets of our lives - sociological, biological, psychological, religious, theological, linguistic - but do we lose sight of the whole? I think we do. Rahner here would say we're losing sight of the whole that is our life in God.  I say we're losing sight of the whole as a unified existence.

I don't claim to know enough to even begin to describe some sort of unified theory of everything, but I do think that individual specialization is hindering different groups of specialists from collaborating to  investigate unifying aspects of their work and how they relate to the universe as a whole.

This relates back to just the study of philosophy; in that philosophy, at its inception, was the study of universal education. In India, philosophical discussion sought to explain the universe.  In Greece, philosophical discourse was born out of de-mythologizing the universe. We have deviated from that. Of course this was inevitable, and indeed necessary for the evolution of humanity. But if the existentialist movement has taught us nothing about universal truth, it has taught us to be true to our own nature. And that tendency to unify experience, to unify our lives within the greater universe itself seems (at least to me) to be a part of human nature. (And if Kant has taught us anything about metaphysical truth, it's that even if it's impossible to discern, our minds still desire to brazenly declare that we know it, just based on our own tendency to universalize everything - we jump from experience to metaphysics because that is what we think we should do).

Many people still believe that the mind and body are separate, or that one has more power than the other. Philosophers and theologians and medical doctors all want to have claim over one speciality or another. Theologians claim the soul/mind, doctors claim the body, psychiatrists claim the mind, and neuroscientists claim the brain. My point is that if they each claim difference, humanity will never move forward. Further relating humans to the rest of the universe will be even more difficult, but I think is something that academicians should be working on together, and be accepting new theories, new writings, without worrying about merely commenting and dissecting earlier philosophical writings.

[I'd like to forgo proper grammar and put the following in brackets: My desire for academic philosophy to change its standard operating procedure is not to be confused with academic scientific research's tradition of utilizing established scientific theories for reference. Although I of course think that many breakthroughs in science happen because some dare to break tradition, I understand that in a field such as physics, it would be flat out stupid to just discount the last hundred years of discoveries and just start making crap up.]

All of that said and considered, I understand why philosophers find the need to explicate old thought for new generations and I don't have a problem with that, necessarily. I just think that there is a lack of creativity in academic philosophy programs and that is precisely why some of these programs are being cut from universities - because there are deemed wholly impractical or useless. (While I of course disagree with these conclusions, I still think creativity is desperately needed to save the programs and the art of philosophizing altogether). 

The Future of Useless Passions

I am back! (I was only here for one post! But still!) It's been so long since I blogged or did much of the internet at all, that it kind of feels weird, but I've made a decision to actually post on at least a monthly basis. There's a bunch of crap swirling around in my cranium, so I might as well get it out there for people to pick over, munch on, and eventually crap on. Here goes...


I have been out of grad school (MA in philosophy) for about a year now. Oh, uh, I quit, just to clarify. I don't have an MAPhil. I've been thinking a lot, and I realized I'm kind of bitter about academia... So, what better way than to look back at something I'd written a few months ago? (This writing will appear in the next post).

Long story short: Despite my bitterness at my academic training being for nought at this point in my life (it really did teach me a lot, I'm just being hyperbolic), I am indeed concerned for the future of academic studies in fields other than Math and the Sciences. I worry because fields such as philosophy don't really appear "useful." I have a bachelor's in history, and many people feel that that, too, isn't very useful. It's true, it hasn't really made potential employers throw jobs at me, but the research and analytical skills I cultivated are really valuable. (I try to explain this on job applications, but no one seems to care lollol!)

Long story:
Anyway, I fear that as a civilization, we're kind of forgetting where we come from as we explore new territory in technology and the way we attach ourselves so adamantly to such technology. (It's kind of ridiculous how addicted I am to playing dumb games on my tablet.) Aside from things like iPads, however, lies the real and omnipresent digitalization of our lives in ways that I think we forget about. We forget about them because the technology, and the demand for the maintenance of it has become so deeply entangled in the way that we do everything. (I mean, for a good example, I'm writing on a blog that no one reads on the internet instead of writing an editorial in the newspaper... Not that people still don't do that, but they all tend to be much older than I). The touch screen technology that rules our lives right now won't save us from ourselves, is what I'm saying.

I think about the digitalization of archives and historical records, especially personal accounts such as diaries all the time.  A former politics professor of mine back in 2009 actually raised this point as he was researching for a biography he was writing on a cardinal. I believe he said something to the effect of, "How are you going to do your historical research if the person you're researching hasn't physically written anything down?" And it's so true. On the one hand, it simply means that we will develop new research guidelines and techniques utilizing the internet. (Even though the verity of the documentation is going to be much more difficult to determine based on the changeable nature of the internet, etc.) On the other hand, though, I ask myself the question: "What happens if the internet goes kaput?" Seriously!

What do we do then? How do we know things? In more than many ways, the internet is an amazing and wondrous tool. However, what happens when something really bad happens and things go horribly wrong and we don't have it anymore? Can that ever happen? I'm not sure, but I think the recent trends in education that rely so heavily on the internet are slightly dangerous. I'm also worried, because, as I mentioned above, fields that teach critical thinking and analysis (such as philosophy, history, and literature), are getting less funding and are shoved to the back burner for more important things - such as computer science, for example. I was told in a grad school seminar that getting a job after our graduation was going to be incredibly difficult because more and more schools were actually shutting down entire philosophy departments. We're not talking like, you can't major in it anymore. I'm saying, they're closing the departments. No more philosophy classes at all. Poor Socrates.

I seriously hope no one reading this thinks that I'm not a proponent of mathematics and science research. Because I heart NASA so much.

Anyway, in all seriousness, I do hope that love of education for education's sake does not go down the tube. And I don't mean the YouTube.

On that note, my next post will deal more along the lines of why I am bitter towards academic philosophy and how it's kind of ruining the spirit of inquiry and understanding...

TTFN