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Love you all, MJ

This term has passed so fast - it's just three weeks to term break now. I've been rushing my projects and assignments the past few weeks. Recently I'd also found time to attend Karen's and Kai Xin's harmonica band concert and Elijah's play.

The first week of school was comparatively less hectic than I'd expected, although the new timetable is making everyone bleary-eyed. Having four days of 8am classes and one at 10am can be a killer. Especially when the projects start tumbling in or when I live on the other side of the island. I end in the evening on most days too, so I'll just have to jostle with the peak hour crowd on the trains.

On the bright side, my new modules are generally interesting. I found PPS (Philosophy, Psychology and Society) and SD (Scriptwriting for Drama & Sitcom) particularly interesting. I know I've said I might be better in journalism, but I'm having second thoughts now. My journalism module's pretty dry. Hopefully, it'll only get better from here. Anyway, PPS is fun. I'm not sure how usual philosophy lecturers look like, but I certainly did not expect such a cheery, young twenty-something lecturer like ours. Everyone was surprised.

For our first Philosophy lesson, we had to draw out our life's philosophy with a caption under it. I wasn't sure what I ought to draw in those few minutes given. My finished product was a rough drawing of Winnie the Pooh, accompanied by a large pot of 'hunny'. 

Honey is sweet. It's tasty. It's also Pooh's favourite snack. But it could suffocate flies. When you leave honey out, flies might land on it and get stuck in the agonisingly sweet honey. It's quicksand to them. There's also an episode of Winnie the Pooh, when his head gets stuck in a pot of honey. He got too greedy. Since we had to explain our 'philosophies' in front of the class, I just came up with quite a lame reasoning. Something along the line of "life is deceptively sweet and we get stuck by our own doing sometimes due to greed". I think it was something about 'balance'. To be honest, I doubt my explanation was good enough. 

Anyway, we dealt with the question of reality for the rest of the lesson. Do we really exist? Have we been dreaming all along and there's an alternate reality which we don't know about? There was also the 'brains in vats' theory which I find slightly disturbing. I agree with Plato's Allegory of the Cave though. That we are all prisoners and what we know of the world are just 'shadows' based on our sense. It's a pretty abstract video but the link above supplies an accurate explanation of the allegory. What we perceive as reality are just our senses - what we see, hear, feel, smell and say. Whereas the 'real world' is made up of our different ideas.

Mark gave the example of the cat. He asked us to draw a cat in 30 seconds and all our drawings were different. Some were fat, some had stripes, some were anorexic, some had no whiskers. But they were all cats based on what we seen, heard or know of cats in general. It doesn't make any of our cats fake - they are cats even if they look nothing like each other. Our drawings are like the shadows the prisoners saw, and the 'real cat' is something we cannot see as our sense are bombarded by our experiences with cats.

It's a pretty abstract idea, isn't it?