Imagination

Is it our greatest asset or our downfall?

Some say imagination is humans true downfall, that it creates fear inside of us, fear that is irrational and worse than what actually occurs. Personally I feel that this imagination can get us through tough times, and help humans prosper but it acts a double edged sword. Though imagination can help create things in ones mind it also can destroy, distort and devastate ones mentality on a situation or outlook on life.

I say that there are more up sides to imagination in life, I would guess many agree. Why must the mind make fear and madness reign supreme at times also? Ultimately, which do you think is stronger, positive aspects of imagination or the fearful madness of imagination?

When is somebody okay?

When are you okay? Are you okay right now? How do you deem being okay? Truly this is different in everybody's mind and different for their situation. When is somebody okay though? Is it when they are happy? When people are content? When people are alive? When is somebody "Okay"?

Words have such different meanings behind them depending on how they are used and how the user intended to use them.

Worth

When is it worth your time?

At what point does something become worth your time? Some people say that a job is worth your time when you are learning something, or getting a substantial monetary amount for the work you are completing. Also another perspective is that something is worth your time when you are enjoying yourself and having fun. I completely agree with all three of these statements which together make a lifestyle that people strive to achieve. In the eye of the beholder something fun may seem worth while, but from an onlooker viewing the overall picture it may not seem that way. Who deems these things "worth while?" Is it someone who is successful at time management? Someone who knows how to have fun? Someone who is wealthy? The person who is doing the activity? Who has the ultimate power to deem something worth while?

In what sense it is worth while completely determines the outcome of every question I have asked, so for this scenario the activity would be one that influence your overall well being, however vague that is.

Treatment

People treat others differently depending on their relationship with said person. This is completely acceptable in the fact if you talked with your boss the way you speak with your best friend you would most likely be fired in some cases. My question is, At what point do people start to treat others differently? I know the general basis of progressing relationships with people, but at what point do you hold people in higher regard, or expect more out of them? Just food for thought if anyone is hungry.

Sleep

Sleep is essential to the body for rest and rejuvenation. Though what if the human body stopped needing sleep and functioned continuously flawlessly. Though this subject may not be truly possible, at least in our life time, would you choose to not sleep? Being considered that the choice of sleeping or not sleeping would not be detrimental to your overall health, mental abilities, or wellness. Would you choose to sleep when you preferred? Or would you just chuck the whole idea and never sleep?

This came to me while thinking about a quote of whom I do not remember said,  "I'll sleep when I'm dead." Personally I would rather not have to sleep, I feel though it may be important to the body to have those hours resting, I feel that I would rather continuously function and not miss out on the world.

My question to the Diploma Candidates: What would you choose if you had the ability, to sleep or to no sleep? That is the question.

And now I will retire to my sleeping chambers and proceed to nap for a good six hours.

How much do we really know?

Everyone only knows what they are told, and what they experience, and you can count belief into the mix also. I can not help but think about the Borg, well since my mom was watching Star Trek earlier, and their collective. This presence of a for modern day terminology "the cloud" stores all of their data within their central base, the Unicomplex, not unlike the apple cloud technology which stores data in a designated sight with the ability to access it from anywhere. I was wondering what if the humans had a system like that hardwired into our brains? That would be pretty nice, though I feel the power may be abused. So at what point can humans handle a large amount of power, though it may correct some, others can become heroes.

At what point does one person have too much power?

Views of school

I know people view school in different ways, from the mundane work, to exhilarating new learning experiences every day. I will truthfully say some days I feel like there is some mundane work involved in school, but there is also some in life. When I look at work as being mundane and useless, I think back to what my dad has always drilled into my mind, if you are being forced to do something or it is a necessity to do the task you might as well do your best and try and learn as much as you possibly can from the experience.
How does everyone else view/deal with the "mundane" tasks in life? Someones mundane could be another person's life long goal.

Rumors

I know this is an age old topic of don't start rumors, and they always end in bad things. What I want to get at is where in truth a rumor comes from. Or if someone created a good rumor and tried to spread it about someone would it be viral in the same sense as a bad rumor is spread. I just would kind of like to try and do something with the diploma candidates to see if we can do this social experiment, just for a fun project.

So the question of today is, How is the best way to spread a rumor?  

IB

So most of the class has heard the discussion that happened today, in which I saw IB and maybe others did too, to be catering to people who knew how to jump through the most hoops. That may be a misconception or an over generalization but I feel that IB rewards those who do the easiest papers in general for each area. Taking the easy road to focus on more pressing things this may be a good skill to learn in life, but when I joined the IB diploma program I felt that it was supposed to be a rigorous course in which I saw the diploma candidates as people who took the higher road, taking the more difficult tasks and completing them while juggling everything else in their lives. Though I will not denounce the rigors of the IB diploma and everything that is learned and gained, it is a little ridiculous that it does create the easier path and rewards the ones who take it. For instance with the Extended Essays, with people shying away from the topics of lab reports and the area of math all together all because "They don't score well" I think it is ridiculous how they have the same rubric for every subject. Though a general one may be a good idea, I feel that they should have a small variation for each different area, at least in the science and math areas. There are other aspects but for now I'll put the subject to rest.

What do you all think about this thought of the IB diploma program and all its glory?

People group unrelated things

Today while talking to a friend I expressed that I had this very odd entity around me today that completely and utterly royally pissed me off for no apparent reason, though I got over this and think I found the root of the problem that is not the focus. This along with another of the IB dipcans being upset about something or having "snappy" feelings and remarks back to people today caused my friend to say, "It seems all the dipcans are pissed off today" Which I looked back and saw that 2/16 seems to be a small percentage to constitute "all" . I would like to pose the question: When is the point where a few turn into all?

In essence from who you are will completely change this because people use the term more loosely then others. This statement in total just threw me for a loop because I knew, well it seemed that most of the Dipcans today were in a fairly decent mood.

Einstein's dream

While thinking today, texting and talking with a few of my friends. I started to think, When is one truly happy? In one of the chapters of Einstein's dream that we read for Tok there was a village that was trapped in a single bubble of time where everything was frozen still. The people in this town were living in a single moment of time where they were not moving forward or on with their lives they were in this moment of time trapped.

I was thinking at what point are we truly happy? Would someone be accepting and happy if they were trapped in a happy moment of time? Would they be able to not move on?

I would like to ask to the diploma candidates, Would you individually be accepting of being trapped in this bubble of time of pure happiness?

I personally would need to be ever progressing, I would prefer to be happy while doing this but I need to be ever evolving in myself as a person.

Ohhhh blogging

While talking with my friend Andy over Skype. While doing some homework we started discussing what I should blog about, because frankly I am out of ideas for today. So we came upon the issue of breaking somebody's trust in their knowledge.

When a person believes that something is fact or true it goes unquestioned until challenged by another. When this other person challenges this knowledge some immediately reconsider what they know based on the background of the knowledge and their way of knowing this knowledge. To what standard of knowledge or how "smart" does someone have to be for an individual to change their mind on something they believed to be fact? What qualifications does this person have to make this person question themselves? Does the other person even play into this effect, or does the only persuasion come from the insecurity of the person? Or in total is this just in some ways misinterpreted when the person is just striving to learn the correct knowledge?

So lots of questions about my question I am just curious on a personal level why some act the way they do.

Perspectives

While working on my personal narrative tonight I fell in the awkward spot of not remembering the exact words of what my parents told me when they were getting divorced. I eventually got these details but it was interesting, to my mom it seemed as if she was more emotionally detached from the event then was my father who it is still on his mind to this day.

How do your thoughts, past, emotions can cause a person to perceive a moment in time differently than another who witnessed it.

Though I can see how this happens every day to small and large events alike I was just curious to see some situations, from anyone who reads this that a very strange perception was made of an event or object that you saw/felt and nobody else did. I don't want to be prying or anything I'm just curious for those situations where when looking at an abstract picture or listening to a song in which the lyrics sound like "A bathroom on the right" and the actual sequence is "A bad moon on the rise". So this is just a little spot to show those funny moments of miss perception or individuals perceiving an event differently than others.

Lack of questioning for a lack of a better term

After dinner at my dad's house today he sat me down for a chat. It seemed pretty serious with the "I want to talk to you" and the concerned tone in his voice. Turns out he had nothing to worry about, there were just some misconceptions relayed to him from my mother.

My mom was helping me brainstorm topics for my personal narrative and caught some negative comments about my brother (or so she felt they were negative) come from me. They were only meant as a frustration of not wanting to write about my brother because he is not a significant event, he is a significant person which has changed before and after but he is not a specific event that caused that change.

My father on the other hand was told that I was frustrated with my brother and didn't like that everything led back to him. This was the interpretation of my comments from my mom. My father sat me down and told me that some people when told a subject that is concerning or thought intriguing about another will let it fester in their minds instead of questing the individual on this matter. Or something to that extent, but we are all wired differently in the mind. Why do some wonder and act, and why do others wonder and keep wondering?

Why not question?

I just wonder why people don't question or peruse things that concern them. Are they afraid of the answer, don't care, or just simply lack the drive to question further on the subject? Or is it just how they were taught and know no other way of dealing with the situation? Just a curiosity about the daily acts of human beings.

Doors Doors Doors

When you think back on certain events do you see the symbolism in them?

Today while hanging out at a friends house doing history homework I for the greater purpose unknown to all mankind randomly decided to walk through three consecutive doors. The first of these doors lead our of the room, the second into the bathroom, the third back into the room in question that was just exited by myself. I thank proceeded to sit back exactly where I was seated with a bewildered look and unbroken stare from my friend studying history with me.

With the following expected question of "What in the world did you do that for?" I calmly and honestly replied "I truthfully have no Idea." I then proceeded to look at it from a taken aback viewpoint of almost another entity in my mind. I saw that by walking through those doors I was changing the entire mindset in the room for myself, almost a small break if you will from studying to get back on task. Then my mind of TOK started to work on the thought that truly the other person assumed I walked through all three doors. But the flaw in that is they never saw it happen. For greater purposes it is impossible to my knowledge to go through walls or pass though objects without making contact. This assumption was pretty acceptable as fact.

I then pondered a question. What do other people think about such events in their life?

The random events that people see happening, or see them as random acts of others or themselves. Do they actually analyze them, or just write them off in their head as a random occurrence and an odd event? I was just stuck in a perpetual wheel of "What do people think?". What do the the people who have not had such experiences of TOK and other classes akin to it think about such events? I would love for people to post on these thoughts as outsides form TOK but unfortunately we are all the crazies of the IB diploma who have had these such experiences.

Then just now I started to experience another realization about these doors in question were the doors in my mind between my ways of thinking. From looking at a situation as random, to getting past that into another mindset of symbolism, into the next mindset of curiosity of the world around me, and finally back into the realization everybody is different.

There are so many aspects of life that can continue to boggle the mind and aspects of the mind that can boggle the mind itself. In essence the mind has a complexity that is endless and creative. Though I could keep going I have a slight headache from history notes, I'll continue this personal discussion later.

Views of everyone

Today while I was talking to my dad about writing my personal narrative he started to suggest some things that came to his mind that maybe I could write about that seemed like experiences that were predominant and life changing that we had shared. We got on the topic of our Europe trip that we took with the high school band. He was speaking of all the great experiences that I had while I was over in Austria, Germany, and Italy. He spoke of how specific moments where I didn't realize he saw some in the light he did were important to him. For instance all of the different ways of living we saw in the different towns he saw it as an early look on life in a different country. I saw it as another stop on the trip though interesting, not as superb as his views on it. This went on for some time. Then I started to process how, I really wish I could have been on that trip now, it would have been a completely different experience.

For my father his experience consisted of riding on a bus alone with people he had never met so he could accompany his son to a different continent for his first time. He had traveled before so he knew the little ins and outs of the world. He saw it as a great father son trip and he was extremely glad to go on it with me. On the other hand I saw it as a trip with my friends also to spend with my dad but it just didn't appeal to me because I couldn't have the freedom to do something outside of the schedule. I just found it interesting how the same moment has such a different impact on different people even my father and myself who are very close.