Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Of the options given in the Final Q; I would classify time, the number three, patriotism, god, morality, science, market capitalism, and war as entirely human constructions. I decided to put these all in this category because I believe them all to be purely human constructed ideas. Only humans have the ideals of time, morality, god, market capitalism and patriotism, and only humans use the number three and science to delineate amounts and describe things. Finally war is a purely human creation because no other species engages in war as we use it. They will defend their territory against invaders but they will not turn invaders themselves as humans do.

Those things only partly humanly constructed would be in my eyes music, the color red, the electron and apples. Personally I think that music is mostly not a human construction because it is there in the world and we merely define what’s there and create our own at times. Red is not something we created we just named it when we started the concept of named colors; therefore it is only vaguely a human construct. The same is true with electrons and apples. These things existed before we discovered and named them. We have since manipulated them to our uses but we did not create them.

This leaves nothing in the entirely not human constructions category. This does make a measure of sense to me because in a manner everything is at least somewhat a human construction because we have defined and named all those things which we interact with in our lives even if we did not actually create them.

1 comment:

Kyle said...

This is really interesting Leanne! Do you think that by naming things, giving them a name, we almost limit them? Does it benefit or detract from our experience as humans by labeling?

I want to hear more of your thoughts (although I think this was for a class). I like hearing the inner workings of Leanne.