Nostalgia, Nostalgia

It's amazing how difficult things become when you're unused to them. I can remember things being VERY easy, or seemingly easy, when I was younger, but now that I try them as I've gotten older, it seems that they're much harder. I don't know if it's the simplicity, or the different outlook as an older person, but it just seems that old things are more difficult to deal with than newer things.

Take video games, for example. I can remember playing something when I was only seven or eight years old, say Super Mario, and it being really fun, engaging, and easy to do. I got so used to playing Super Mario that it was no longer difficult. It represented the best video game of the time, and since it was cutting edge, it was very easy to become engrossed in the game. I'd find myself playing the game over and over, perfecting my skills, and eventually I got to the point where I was quite good.

Trying to play Super Mario now that I'm older, however, seems to be much more difficult. The graphics are horrible, the controls are unresponsive, and it's very hard to even like the game, let alone find the time to be good at it. Modern video games are infinitely more complex and challenging than the first games, but it seems that I've become so accustomed to them that their complexity becomes easier to handle. What was once simple and enjoyable as a boy is now difficult to engage with, even for the sake of nostalgia.

I think this is true of many things that we may do for nostalgia's sake. We can usually think of things that were downright AMAZING in our youth, but now that we're older, they don't hold the same appeal. Nostalgia is a funny beast in this regard; it makes us want to do things that we know and love, but once we start to do them, we realize how much we've forsaken our "old" ways in favor of what's new and exciting.

To Torture, or Not to Torture?

I was reading an article the other day for my AP training class aptly titled "A Case for Torture". While the irony of reading the article on the last day of a professional development class wasn't lost on me, the article itself was enough to rouse my interest.

The crux of the article's entire argument was that in times where the needs of the many outweigh that of a single individual, it is morally justifiable, even required, to torture the individual if it will save the many from harm. A terrorist, for example, has set up a bomb to explode in four hours, and in order to stop the explosion the authorities should torture the terrorist to find the location of the bomb. The author was basically arguing that any amount of pain/harm that was committed to this one person was worth the lives that would be saved by the disarming of the bomb.

The argument within the article was, for me, basically crap. The author resorted to a ton of charged epithets that were meant to evoke our inner American, and because of that his argument pretty well fell apart. The argument itself, however, wasn't what interested me. What became interesting as I read was how ubiquitous utilitarianism has become in our society. Utilitarianism is, in case you didn't know, the ethical philosophy that states that the right course of action is the one that maximizes the amount of "good" that comes out of a situation, i.e., you should always kill one person in order to save a hundred, etc., etc. This was sort of the central tenet of the argument the author was making, and it was interesting to see how many times it was appealed to within the article without the author seemingly knowing that he was doing so.


For the most part, it made me think about how much certain things disseminate within society without us even knowing. Many of our assumptions, if not all of them, have been passed to us through generations without our knowledge. Things that we take for granted on many issues, ethical or not, are often the product of the time we're raised in.

So, next time you're making a seemingly unqualified decision about something, stop and think about why you're really doing so. The answer just may surprise you.

Is There Really Any Order?

So, bear with me here. While I was in college, there were these "litmus tests" that were in some of our books to see if a person's "critical thinking" skills were good enough to operate on the level of some of the material. One of these tests was based on the understanding of one of Plato's dialogues, "The Euthyphro". In it, the question of piety was raised, i.e., is something pious because God loves it, or does God love something because there's already some inherent quality within the object that makes it "pious". This got me thinking about these exercises, and I've made a few of them in the same vein that I thought were interesting. Here's one.

If something is random, that means that it's able to become anything. When we think of randomness, it often evokes the idea of out-of-order, or mixed up; there's usually no symmetry in the things we consider random. By definition, however, if something is completely random, that assumes that it could also be symmetrical. For example, if ten numbers were placed in a hat, and each was drawn once for an infinite number of times, eventually the sequence of 1-10 in numerical order would be drawn, even though the numbers are taken at random. Following from this, it seems that any amount of order could come out of randomness. Take the image of a puzzle; if 50 puzzle pieces were thrown on the floor in a pile, very few, most probably none of them, would land close to their mate pieces. IF, however, that puzzle was thrown on the ground an infinite number of times, it seems that eventually the entire puzzle would fall in such a way as to be completely formed.

By logical extension it would seem, therefore, that one could make the argument that any sense of order within the universe is just randomness expressing itself to us as order through an ad infinitum repetition. Any order that exists in our world is just randomness manifested as order; it's just the roll of the dice wherein all five landed showing sixes. The things that we consider to have any amount of order, the human body, the life-cycle, etc., etc., could possibly just be completely random happening that appear ordered. This would mean that the word "order" would be invalid; nothing would have order, and the idea of order would be abolished in favor "things that appear ordered".

I know the rabbit-hole goes pretty deep on this one, but it's a thought-provoking idea to me nonetheless. I understand that it has to do with a function of language, word-meaning, our idea of the word "order", etc., but at the same time it's something that I like to think about. It makes sense to me, but maybe that's only because someone, somewhere, just rolled a Yahtzee.