Thought Experiment #1

Definitions

A thought experiment. Not your typical type of paper and so this will not be what most papers for English classes are expected to be. Experiment is exactly the right word. This is the way I would prefer it to be anyways because I don’t typically like conventions and/or doing things a certain way because “that’s how it’s supposed to be done.” I feel that convention is actually a limiter more often than we would like to think. There are many examples in history of convention vs. invention, of items and/or ideas. For example there is always the example of Galileo and how he came up with the idea that the Earth revolves around the sun, not the other way around. He was met with fierce resistance simply because “that isn’t how it was always taught.”

I feel like this applies also to parasites. “Parasites” has such a negative connotation to it simply because it has always been taught that getting parasites is gross and bad in every way and will kill you. This is untrue. Sure there are of course parasites that will kill you if you get them, or only take and don’t give anything back. But a lot of the parasites that we hate out of principle actually benefit us in many ways as well as taking from us. A symbiotic relationship. Sure some parasites may take some food from your gut without you being any the wiser, but they also help fight many of the diseases that are very dangerous to us. They can help with allergies ("Radiolab: Parasites"), colon cancer, and a number of other things that can cause huge problems.

Also, when we really think about it, are we really so different than parasites? Aren’t we parasites as well, in our own way? For example we take milk from cows, eggs from chickens, and many different animals’ skins to make our clothes. (Serres)How is this a symbiotic relationship? We strictly parasitize these animals and justify it in any way that we can. “We need to survive,” or “It relieves cows to be milked,” are among the most common of our justifications. I can accept that it relieves cows to be milked, but what about skinning animals and wearing the skin to help us live, eating them to survive, taking what we want from them, when we want it, without a thought of giving back. How are we not parasites?

It seems to be that our main problem when it comes to this classification is with our definition of the word “parasite.” We always think of the creepy, crawly things that get inside of us and parasitize off of us, which is a normal reaction, but what makes us so different in the end? We do the same thing with the word “animal.” If I were to say I saw an animal today, not a single person, including myself, would ever think of a human first and foremost. The typical idea of animals would be an eagle, or a bear, or a dog. But nobody seems to think that humans are animals when there is no real difference between us. We as a species seem to do this out of sheer arrogance and a feeling of superiority.

For example, we see cats as primitive “animals” that do things purely out of instinct and because they want to, not because they have a complex thought process that leads to them doing it. Well the tomcat Murr would tend to disagree with this claim. We, as humans, do not understand why cats cry so loudly at night and we tell them to shut up because they are making an awful racket. I tend to think, when I hear a cat crying out loudly in the middle of the night, that they are just being annoying because they can. Well Murr’s love Kitty said to him at one point when she heard him singing, “Is that you singing so beautifully, dear Murr?” (Hoffmann, Bell, and Adler) He tends to put a definition to what cats normally do in everyday life that we see as weird and unintelligent, that makes everything seem so clear and normal that we don’t normally see when we are just hearing cats screeching outside of our windows.. It is all in our difference in meaning for every little action, thought, word that we use. They have a meaning for “singing” so loudly (and terribly in my opinion I might add) that seems to escape our grasp every time because it is not the same sense of music or singing as we know it, and so it is just racket.

This leads me to ask “What other words and ideas do we have a hard time expressing?” The biggest one that I can think of is “life”. What is life? What defines it? Some would say that it is the ability to think and survive. Others would say it is having a biological “body” as well as some other qualifications. This has been a big part of the argument for and against abortion. When does life start for a baby? Is it when they are born or when they are conceived or some time after conception but before birth? For me this applies in even more instances. For example, a computer virus meets all of the major decided upon qualifications for life, but it isn’t considered life because it isn’t biological. Or if we were to create a robot that acted in every way with its own personality and decision making factors, we would not consider it life simply because it is not biological.

This talk of technology leads to another idea of mine. This is about the idea of “temes” brought on by Susan Blackmore. I understand what she is saying about their being a third reproducer now, technology. She has a sort of truth to it, but I feel that “temes” are really just a way for us to reproduce. We talked about it a bit in class, how we don’t need technology that we get at first, but as we get to putting them to use, they become necessary for survival. For example, our farming technology is all a way for us to further our survival. At first they were a convenience, but eventually this convenience turned into a necessity for life. With populations growing the way they are, without our newest and best farming technology, we would all be dead in a very short time because we wouldn’t be able to provide enough food for the masses. So I see “temes” ("Susan Blackmore: Memes and "temes"") as more of a way for us to reproduce our genes. Really we use “temes” as a way for us to survive. So I don’t see them as their own category, I see them as a way for us to reproduce and create offspring and grow as a species. I know that she says a lot of them can reproduce on their own, and maybe they do. But all we have to do is shut off the power. I mean we don’t see different people as different levels of reproducers even thought the only way we can truly control how much they reproduce is by doing something drastic like castration, or killing them (shutting off their power). I see it as saying our blood is a different level of reproducer when our blood does reproduce itself without our telling it to, but we still need it in order to survive and pass on our offspring. We need it to reproduce to do this, and so I don’t see “temes” as their own level of reproduction, just an extension of us trying to reproduce.

Even today we talked about the possible implications of increasing technology. We talked watched another Ted Talk that brought up the things that we have been able to reproduce using this new technology. For example, eyes to implant into a blind person so they can see, ear implants, turning skin cells into stem cells. All of this will benefit mankind in the way that it will keep us alive for longer individually. That is a good thing, but as a species it may not be such a great think to overshoot our population cap by a large margin, which almost guaranteed to happen in such a case. This technology not only furthers our genes, and reduces parasitism in some of the ways that Serres sees it. In his book “The Parasite” he has an example of a “crippled” man suggesting to ride on the back of a blind man so that they could both move, and the “crippled” person directing the blind man with his eyes. This would remove these situations for humans to parasitize on other humans in that way. Of course it would most likely open up other ways for us to parasitize each other, because that is what we do as humans, parasitize. (Serres)

So I would say that I am sympathetic to parasites and how they live out their lives and the negative stigma they have. But this doesn’t mean that if a leech latches on to me I’m just going to let it suck my blood by any means. I would rather just know how they work and how to live alongside them, but that doesn’t mean I want to sacrifice my own energy and health (in many cases) in order for them to live. And that is the selfish attitude that has kept many organisms alive and not extinct for as long as they have been. We touched on it in class and I don’t see it as a bad thing to be selfish in those situations. Just what is sometimes needed to stay alive. Everything does it to some extent, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be done to another species. For example a lion may eat the young of another male’s simply to increase the proportions of his genes floating around in the population.

Bibliography

"Radiolab: Parasites." WNYC. Web. 29 Apr 2010.
.
Serres, Michel. The parasite. 1st ed. Minneapolis, MN: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2007. Print. Hoffmann, Ernst, Anthea Bell, and Jeremy Adler. The life and opinions of the Tomcat Murr. Penguin Classics, 1999. Print. "Susan Blackmore: Memes and "temes"." Youtube. Web. 28
Apr 2010.

Thoughts and Experiments

I wrote my thought experiment, and I felt that it was extremely beneficial to me as a writer. In my opinion it is a much more efficient way to come up with ideas and hash them out in my opinion. It is also much more enjoyable. It feels like it gives the me more freedom as a writer to do what I want to do, not try and figure out what the professor wants. I feel like that is how most classes are and that isn't an efficient way to learn in my opinion. Yes it teaches the conventional style of writing, but it helps very little for actual thought formation and the ability to think things through. All I feel like most English teachers are looking for is that you "understood the material" which can be total BS because for a lot of these classes I could have just gone to lecture and we would have talked about what the material meant and I wouldn't have had to read a word. I could have just typed what I thought the teacher wanted, scrounged around in the book for some quotes that were talked about in class, and moved on with at least a decent grade. The most difficult thing about doing that would be to write in a style that your teacher wants you to. And to have proper grammar. And spelling. I believe these are all the same level of difficulty once you have been in a class for a few weeks. For the last two you have a function in Microsoft Word that will check your grammar and spelling for you. This makes spelling and grammar incredibly easy, which doesn't say much about the difficulty of writing to the professor. We all have done it, whether we want to admit it or not. We like to think that a lot of our really good grades are because we have proved to the teacher that we understand the material extremely well. This is true to a degree, but we all still (I know I do anyways) tend to write to the professor in the tone that we believe they want. This is how I typically write my papers because that is how convention does it. But in this case I feel like I was writing more how I wanted to. this was good and bad. It is good that I had an extremely good time developing my ideas how I wanted to and in the order I wanted to. The bad is that I have never done that before and so I'm not sure what kind of a grade it will get or if I missed the point of the assignment entirely. But then again all of this could be me reliving all of my old ideas for how to write by "writing for the teacher" and not for the assignment.

I guess this blog has turned into a rant about my faults with the education system, and I'm not exactly sure how, but let's keep this train going! Alright, my biggest complaint about education has to be the lack of the teaching of logic in school before college. Schools teach how to copy ideas, but they don't teach how to come up with your own or how to think effectively, just how to imitate it. I feel like one of the most important things a person can learn is how to think effectively, which is why I love that we have logic classes here. They are exactly what I've been craving from school and more or less what I feel school should be like. It's kind of like the saying "Give a man a fish and feed him for a day, teach him how to fish and feed him for a lifetime" idea. What is the point of being given all of these ideas from the greatest minds, but not giving the students the tools to take them to the next level? I feel like if we as students we were given the option of logic classes before college, a lot more students would make it to college in the first place. Because it seems like a large portion of our population doesn't have a very developed ability to use logic because it doesn't seem to be one of our priorities. I feel like this is a major loss and something that we need to focus on if we are to continue to survive as a species.

I believe I am done ranting about my problems with education in America because I am say what I want but the major other problem I have with schools, their lack of interest in the students' needs, kind of gets in the way. It is true that Western does a lot to help and seems to care about their students more than most other schools. But if you go to UW, you are treated like a number. And here I go ranting again. So it is about time I end this blog.

Parasitic. Symbiotic. Electronic.

I have never written a blog before and never had the inclination and so don't be surprised by the crude and amateur way in which I write this. I have decided to treat it almost as just a running list of thoughts that I have kind of like an extremely long plurk post.

Parasites: the title of this class. A title which, before showing up to class, confused me as to what we were supposed to be doing in an English class titled "Parasites". I didn't know if we would be writing papers about parasites and learning about them biologically, or if it was a metaphor for something that would be determined in class. At this point my opinion is only slightly more informed, but I am inclined to say both in weird ways.

We walk into class on our first and second days, and we watch a movie about parasites called "Shivers". At first I didn't know what to think about the movie while we were watching. Later on I got much humor from it as well as a good discussion in class another day about its social implications. But what I was really spending time thinking about was the positive and negative repercussions of having parasites. For example, some parasites do indeed feed off of us, but they also give us things in return. So it is a type of symbiotic relationship with a lot of parasites, not all, and we have many already in us that we don't know about or think about. A major portion of what helps us digest food in our stomachs is with the help of bacteria and their contributions due to having evolved to break certain things down, and take things that we don't need but they do. They then release the things that they don't need, but contribute to our survival and we use them. We have co-evolved in a way that allows us to live together and contribute to the other one's survival.

There are also many parasites that do do us damage in one way, but they also protect us from other dangers. One example would be Helminth (a.k.a. parasitic worm) infections. http://nutritionwonderland.com/2009/02/parasitic-worms/. They do eat and steal our nutrients as well as sometimes our bodily tissues, but some of the things that they produce in order to exist within us can actually help with other diseases that we are capable of contracting such as Type 1 Diabetes. They don't even cause any symptoms other than a little itching sometimes.

But i have also thought about this in application to society and social behavior. For example, one could view marriage as a type of parasitism. It is a mutual parasitism and symbiotic in most cases, but parasitism it still is. There are many ways to look at it, financially you are combining accounts (typically but not always) and living off of each others earnings, you live withing the same household (site) and share food, sometimes you will even provide the other with food that you have made. Even our children display parasitic behavior towards their parents. They obtain food, shelter, clothing, and many other things from their parents while hardly having to anything besides school.

We as a society tend to look down on parasites as "cheaters" (to quote the radio lab) because they don't obtain their own food, but who really does? We not only take nutrients from other animals and plants, but we kill them in the process. Most parasites tend to keep their host alive and just siphon off enough to survive because without their host, they will die. In some ways they are more generous than us I suppose. We do not use use the suns rays that it puts off as a way to create our own energy, we break it down from other living creatures in order to survive, so we are no better on a basic level than most of the parasites we hate and proclaim as "cheaters".

The point of "Shivers" was to take a parasite and use it in a way that would "benefit" humanity (in the professor's eyes at least). He figured that humans thought too much and didn't have enough "guts". And so he created a parasite that would relive us of this "problem" and just let us enjoy ourselves by having sex because we could, with no social restraints whatsoever. The social repercussions of this seemed to be overlooked however, such as too high of a growth rate, STD's, neglect for necessary tasks for survival, etc.

Honestly I speak for the parasites out there. It doesn't mean that I would like to get a tapeworm or anything like that, but I don't hate them for how they evolved. Many co-evolved alongside us and we need them more than we think for survival. This is why scientists are currently entertaining the idea that we are becoming "too clean", meaning we are trying so hard to clean ourselves, and make ourselves healthy, that we are removing many of the things on and/or in us that help make us being healthy possible. This may be the oils on our face that we get which protect us from outside infection which we regularly wash off because it can cause pimples, to e-coli, which can be found in the lower intestine of many animals. We remove them because they can cause us to get sick, but we need them as an essential part of digestion. They are completely harmless, and only helpful, when in the correct part of the body. It is when they are introduced into an area of the body that they should not be that the problem occurs, as it is with most things.