Words and Rules Dialogue 5? And some Debriefing – D59

We were supposed to have a dialogue on Words and Rules, and I say suppose because only Chacho, Kata, Carmen, and Mabe (although not completely) read, and the rest of us didn’t read so the “dialogue” was more of a time of silence. Only a few comments were produced by Chacho, Carmen, and Kata, so after Pablito dropped his Coca-Cola (great ice-breaker though), Bert made us realize that the ones that didn’t read should go to the outer circle and so we did. Still the dialogue was weak and little interesting. I admit part of the fault. After it, Bert told us something important of Pinker’s theory, which we are going to revise later, but I think nobody understood him because of the language.

The debriefing was ok, we talked about the Convivio and other stuff I don’t quite remember. 

Euclid’s Last Class for the Semester – D59

This was our last class of Euclid. We started working in our small groups and in mine, we decided to first set our goals and dates to work on vacations. We are going to get together next week on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday in order to review and learn all the first 30 propositions. This way we are going to be able to fulfill the general goal of reaching to demonstrate these propositions by February 4^th. We are meeting at Isa’s house.

Dialogue between Edward Wilson and Socrates? Chacho’s Morning Meeting – D59

For this morning meeting, we did something unusual. Chacho’s activity consisted in stating some conditions and then writing a dialogue about it. The conditions were that the dialogue must be between Edward O. Wilson and Socrates, in the moon, during Christmas season, and they would talk about the Rubrics of the MPC’ers. It was a great way to start the day with some creativity and imagination. We only had 10 minutes although it was more like 15 minutes, but anyways I didn’t finish it. I would eventually finish it because it was a very good exercise. 

Here is with what I came up with…

HTML Fail and Debriefing… kind of – D58

So, we (with Isa) are done with our web app but we wanted to code some HTML to put it nicely decorated. To our misfortune, we fail terrible doing the HTML code and now the app doesn’t run (we can reverse it to the original, simple one). We are figuring it out how to code HTML in Cloud9, but it’s kind of difficult, nevertheless I’ll tell you when it’s nice and pretty and working.

During debriefing, everybody appeared to be brain dead so it was not so interesting. We talked a little about the day, also about the organizations of the Convivio, and of the last day of this semester.

“Self-Reliance”, Emerson, Dialogue 6 – D58

There are few things better to do at the MPC than read Emerson in the Jardín Ayau, sitting on the grass and reading it aloud. Instead of doing performing arts, we decided to keep reading Self-Reliance by Emerson. In this dialogue we discussed the things we value, the nature of observation, the scientific ethics, and materialism. The most important quotes we talked about were the followings:

“Yet they (material things) all are his, suitors for his notice, petitioners to his faculties that they will come out and take possession. The picture waits for my verdict: it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claims to praise.”

• Things related to this quote: “value what you value”, nature of observation, Polanyi: “Science has a moral dimension.”. 

“…it (the popular fable of the sot and the duke) symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason, and finds himself a true prince.”

• There are people, like Socrates, who we think of them as “gods”, but we forget they were once humans who have awaken. 

“Who is the Trustee? What is the aboriginal Self, on which universal reliance may be grounded? What is the nature and power of that science-baffling star, without parallax, without calculable elements, which shoots a ray of beauty even into trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of independence appear?”

• Here, Emerson puts in question materialism; something that we are still questioning in the 21^st century. 

“Apology”, Plato, Dialogue 4 – D58

At 9:30 a.m. we continued reading The Apology by Plato. It was an interesting dialogue where we discussed the true meaning of humility and whether or not and why was Socrates humble. We also talked about the meaning of death.

Here are my notes of the dialogue and also some intriguing questions:

Dialogue 4 (10/12/12)

• Fear of death
• When we consider death there are a set of assumptions that don’t have justification.
• The only thing we can say is that we don’t know what death is.
• What is death?
• Risk aversion
• Does correlation tell us causality?
• If the future, by definition, is unpredictable, why don’t we live in fear?
• Pablito: We maintain a structure of beliefs, expectations, and imperfect information.
• Your actions are based on faith, well or not well founded.

• Socrates’ claim
• He doesn’t know, but he hasn’t made a claim that we cannot know.
• The notion of the scientific ethic is that of constant doubt, an openness of refutation.
• Religion is the only aspect where there are absolute truths.

• Wilson sees the universe as something of the same matter in which we can study all as the same
• Contrary to human action, anti-Austrian.

• Socrates the gadfly
• His teaching is annoying to the state.
• Jesus is another example.

• What is humility?
• Understanding that you don’t know everything.
• Capacity to recognize our errors and mistakes.
• Openness to learning. It doesn’t mean you don’t have expectations.
• Was Jesus open to learning?
• Teaching by questions and parables.

• Socrates: Do you have the right to judge me before judging yourself?

Kata’s Morning Meeting – D58

Kata’s morning meeting consisted of two parts. The first one was that we must draw a fireplace, four Christmas stockings above the fireplace, a Christmas tree, and a basket full of candy canes. All of these must be drawn in a paper on top of our heads. You really don’t want to see how that went… The second part of was to get into pairs, back to back, and one was in charge of describing a Christmas object Kata gave us and the other must draw it, and vice versa. That didn’t went that bad. Cool activity!