Week 8 Assignments

Newton’s Three Laws and me

I feel that there is a beauty and simplicity in Newton’s three laws.  It is also fascinating  to realize that these three simple laws are very much responsible for the modern industrial revolution and technological advancements in virtually all areas of our lives.  I look forward to the day we come up with such simple and beautiful laws for the whole universe and life itself. 

Our “Energy Efficient” Culture

To be efficient is to efficient towards a certain goal.  I feel like our culture today is very efficient at achieving various goals that it sets its mind to.  However whether these goals are inherently valuable or not is much less examined.  What I believe is the case is that often many of these goals can contradict each other on many levels.   For instance short terms goals may contradict long term goals. Goals of different levels such as individual, family, company, province, nation, world, environment and etc. might also contradict either other.  And when this happens the efficiency of achieving one goal  can make the achievement of a contradictory and perhaps even more important goal at a different level that much more difficult.  One of the most clear examples is the super efficiency that we achieve in exploiting natural resources and mass producing various products makes protecting our environment that much harder.  What this means is that even though we might be energy efficient at achieving individual goals we might be very energy inefficient overall.

Descartes has a lot to answer for!

Descartes is indeed an advocate of reductionism and a mechanistic model of the universe.  However to blame Descartes on our adoption of his theories is perhaps unfair.  A more useful approach might be to ask what factors bring our cultures and ourselves into adopting reductionism and a mechanistic model of the universe.  What are the reasons that the teachings of other schools of thoughts have not been accepted by us and brought into the mainstream.  Eventually we might realize that Descartes may only be a spokes person for the mistaken assumptions and illusions that we long hold dear.