Habits

One of the things that i have learned in TOK (yes, I have actually learned something!!) is that, in order to answer tok-ish questions it is often helpful to start from defining the key term which, in this case, is habit.

Habit (according to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary):a. a behavior or pattern acquired by frequent repetition or physiologic exposure that shows itself in regularity or increased facility of performance; b: an acquired mode of behavior that has become nearly or completely involuntary habit> c: addiction habit>

Generalising, a habit is something that is done in a regular way.

Every animal has some kind of habit, but whether these are related to mating or to hunting a prey, the main goal is always survival. For an animal, a habit will be the thing that worked the best in ensuring its survival or the survival of its offsprings.

For human beings, an habit is usually more related to the psychological, often irrational, part of our mind / brain / ego sub- semi- consciousness.

I think we do consider a habit everything that it is done automatically. It can refer to very different things. I regard as an habit the road i take to go from home to the station in Zaandam: i am so used to it that i don't even have to think about it while I ride the bike: my sub-conscious is taking care of it.

Coffee, smoking, even sex sometimes are considered habit when it becomes "routine".

In science terms, a habit can be seen as a "dose": taking a dose of medicinals, bacause of the addictive power that many medical drugs have, is pretty much comparable as something seen as a "bad"habit like smoking.

In religion, habits are really important for faith's purposes. For many people nowdays, going to the Mess on Sunday has become a routine more than a meaningfull ceremony. In the pasts especially, habits related to religion were also really important to schedule the daily lifes of the peasants and citizens.

I think that another difference between animal and human habits is that "habit"is a word that can be applied only to animals, while to describes human beings' ones you have a broader choice of words such as "routine", "addiction", "ritual". That might be related to the fact that there is only one purpose in animals' habits, survival, while humans' have more that one aim: Humans' habits are not that essential to survival, in some cases (smoking) they are actually decreasing our chance of living a long healthy life and to have healthy, strong offspring.

Both for animals and for humans, Emotions and instincts more than reason is behind the need for habits; especially for humans, constantly on the search for meaning and order in a world that can seem so wide, chaotic and incomprehensible, habits set firm points in their lifes, giving them a sense of control over their own life, making them feel like they have the power, and the freedom, to choose.

soft sciences vs. hard sciences

Blog Assignment of the week: Are the soft sciences harder than the hard sciences? For this blog, read the article by Jared Diamond on pages 283-285. Do you think he has a case? Can you explain why we often think that the hard sciences, such as physics, are better at truth seeking?


I agree with Jared Diamond. People often think hard sciences are better at truth seeking because they are more controlled. They fit into tests, their variables can be controlled. But what is truth anyway? is it just numbers and decimal places? or is it everything that surrounds us? ANd not only the empirical perception, but also memories of the past... These are things that hard science are unlikely to explain.
Jared diamond argues that soft science are often harder than hard science because you have to deal with human mind. The study of human sciences often requires a deep understanding of human nature, pulses and desires.
For example, history looks for causes and consequences and tries to give an interpretation of a truth that is really hard to fully understand, because we can never be sure 100% -it's a science, after all!-. But it is so important to know the little that we know because it helps being better human beings and it helps explain human nature..
In soft science, You can do predictions, but they are hard to confirm of disprove. Does this mean that soft sciences are less certain than hard sciences? yes. Does this involve that hard sciences are better at truth seeking? not exactly. They are better at looking at a part of the truth,the truth that can be controlled in variables and expressed in numbers, measured and operationalized.. But that is not all there is. Soft sciences should be respected just as hard sciences are.

The jelly Belly experiment

How scientific was the Jelly Belly experiment? In your blog you should introduce the Jelly Belly experiment and its hypothesis: Does prior knowledge of flavors influence taste? Go through the inductivism and the characteristics of good experiments: controlability, measureability, repeatability.

The Jelly Belly experiment was actually kind of fun.

There was a design in the experiment: there were 4 groups, in 2 of them the "taster" was blinded and in the other 2 he-she was allowed to see what she was eating. The Jelly Beans were given in a order unknown to the taster, who however was allowed to be read the names of the tastes he had to recognise. The final comparison between the results of the groups whose taster was blinded and the ones whose taster was allowed to see gave the clear verdict that prior knowledge influence taste.

However. i'm not sure whether it can be considered a scientific experiment. The experiment was not completely controlled, because same variables should have been taken into consideration and instead they were just random, such as the characteristic of the taster (smoker-non smoker, ecc); for what concern the measurability, somevariables were measurables, such as the number of jelly beans and their type, but others such as drinking water after eaten the jelly bean was not constant, just random. The experiment could be repeated by other people, but as the taster is a person, the results may not be the same. I think that when you have to deal with experiments on animals, the Harvard law of animal behavoiur always apply: "in carefully controlled laboratory conditions animals do what they damned well please". And animals are humans, after all.

will science one day solve everything

In this blog assignment, we ask ourselves if science will one day solve everything. Will we one day have a theory that explains everything? What is there left to discover that could change our current Darwin/Newton paradigm?

My answer in this case is really brief: WHO KNOWS? and who cares anyway? it's not like i'll be alive the day that this would eventually happen...

what makes pseudo-science pseudo?

In this blog, explain what the differences are between pseudo-sciences and hard sciences by analyzing a few. You can explore the differences between astronomy and astrology, crystology and geology, feng shui and...(whatever).

The main difference between science and pseudo-science is that scientific hypotheses are testable, whereas pseudo-scientific ones are not. There are 2 reasons for which pseudo-scientific hypothesis can't be tested:

1- vagueness: if a statement is vague enough it'simpossible to be proven right or wrong. A scientific statement is instead more precise, it uses words which meanings are defined and it usually gives a reference to a certain period of time.

2 - Ad hoc exceptions: it is an exception made especially for the case you want to prove. A good scientifc hypothesis is one that is general in nature and does not keep making exceptions, but it tries to improve and learn from the mistakes.

If you take astronomy and astrology you can see that astronomy is a rational and careful study of the stars and their movements; you have to deal with mathematics, with the law of physics, and struggle with your perception and you'll never be 100% sure, however if you design an experiment, other people will be able to understand your studies and eventually disprove your theory and predictions. ON THE OTHER HAND, astrology is just a bunch of people giving random meanings to the planets and their movements and pretending to apply these meanings to your personal life; in order to do so, they are extremely vague and so there is no way to prove them right or wrong because their predictions are evaluated on a very personal level and therefore not really scientific because there are no laws that says, for example, that lions are bossy.

Are mathematicians smarter than us?

The blog assignment of the week asks us if mathematical insight translates into smarts. Why is it that Mathematicians are seen as hyper-intelligent? Here you should take the formalist approach to mathematics into account, where 2+2=4 is only another way of saying (1+1)+(1+1)=(1+1+1+1). Here we are only unpacking numbers, which is doable if your short term memory is really good. Do mathematicians simply have a better short term memory than the rest of us?

I think that the correlation between short term memory and mathematicians is not correct. Maths is not about memorising stuff. Mathematics is about understanding concepts and being able to apply them to different situations. This gives a mathematician a certain kind of "mental elasticity" that allows him/her to being able to immediatly detect a method to solve a problem. I guess it is for this reason that mathematicians are seen as "hyper-intelligent".
It could be that "all mathematicians are intelligent"because they train their brain with calculations and finding solutions to problems, but it's not that if you don't have mathematical insight you're stupid. Maths is not the only discipline in which you have to look at deeper meaning or methods: reading and understanding a poem is also something challenging for the brain, maybe even more than maths, where there are no deeper meaning and most of the things are on the surface.
In conclusion, I think that mathematical insight can be seen as a sign of intelligence, but it's not the only characteristic a so-called ïntelligent"person should have.

Maths

Is maths discovered or invented?

On the topic of mathematics, Albert Einstein once stated that "as far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." The link between reality and mathematics is, for some people a discriminant in answering the question "is maths discovered or invented?". 

Some believes that maths has no connection with reality, that you can't find it in nature, and therefore it wasn't discovered, but invented by some Greek who had nothing better to do in his life than making up rules about numbers.

Some argue that the rules of maths do not apply in some cases in nature: for example, if you have two drops of water and you add them together, you will have one bigger drop of water, so 1+1=2 wouldn't be true. But actually, if you think about it, you still have 1 + 1 drops of water, so you have 2 drops of water that eventually, combined together, form one bigger drop. 

Also, a molecule of water is made of 2 atoms of hydrogen and 1 atom of oxygen. If you analyse 2 molecules of water, you'll find 4 atoms of hydrogen and 2 atoms of oxygen (btw, i'm so hoping i'm making sense, otherwise mr poeser will tease me forever), so how can you say that maths does not apply to nature? Moreover, sciences like physics, biology, chemistry, astronomy, economics, all need maths. Leonardo da Vinci once said that No human investigation can be called real science if it cannot be demonstrated mathematically.

No doubt that some of the things in maths are invented, like the 0: there is really not such thing like 0 in reality. But it's useful, so we use it. 

However, some other things are just there... you can measure every circumference on Earth and you'll find out that the relationship between the circumference and the radius of the circle is C=2πr. And every existent right angle is 90°. 

If for maths we mean the language in how to express real, existing principle, I would say that it is invented. However, some things are just out there and mathematicians have discovered them and translated into the universal language of maths.

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty —a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.

• Bertrand Russell