Steven+Egeler

=__Steven Egeler__=

//**__Answer to a quotation from "Waking Life"__** 12/03/2009 //
//"Did you ever have a job that you hated and worked real hard at? A long, hard day of work. Finally you get to go home, get in bed, close your eyes and immediately you wake up and realize... that the whole day at work had been a dream. It's bad enough that you sell your waking life for minimum wage, but now they get your dreams for free." , by Guy Forsyth

To me especially the last part of the quotation has a large meaning. " //It's bad enough that you sell your waking life for minimum wage, but now they get your dreams for free." I think that Guy Forsyth wanted to refer this quotation to nowadays society. Hating your job and working really hard usually means that you get paid way less than you deserve. "It's bad enough that you sell your waking life for minimum wage..." means that your employer found a cheap and industrious worker in you. There is a large difference between his benefit and yours. In my point of view, "...but now they get your dreams for free" means that you don't really have time for yourself anymore, if you have a job like that. The job and the place you hate the most even appears in your dreams and robs the space you had for nicer dreams. This is good, Steven, I hadn't really understood that quote, but now I think you are right. He is talking about the way in which a soul-destroying job does just that: destroys your soul.


 * Assignment 4**

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__//**Is it possible to think without language? How does language facilitate, extend, direct or limit thinking?**//__ **Thinking without language is, in my opinion, almost impossible. As I mentioned in my last assignment, people have a certain imagination or picture of a word, for example an apple. Whenever a person talks about an apple, the person has an apple in his/her mind. Even those pictures are a language. It's the language that we all speak since we are born. We don't have the same words for each picture, but everybody knows how an apple looks like, and as we learned in class, words are only symbols for things that are already there. Of course there are theories of thinking without language, for example thinking with sounds. If you hear a bird singing, you know it's a bird without even looking at it, but that is because you know what a bird is, you have seen a bird before and you know what a bird does because someone taught you or you taught yourself. All this includes language, whether it is English or German or some other language.**======

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//__What is lost in translation from one language to another and why?__//
 * Summing up, I would say thinking without language is not possible, because the human brain would not work without language. People constantly talk to themselves when they think, whether it is at work or at soccer for instance.**======

Lost in translation from one language to another is when you get confused between similar words from each language that do not mean the same. For example: I __WILL__ be there. (ENGLISH) and Ich __WILL__ da sein. (GERMAN) In English it means: "I am going to be there.", while in German it is "I want to be there." People call these cases "False friends" because you think that you translated it right, but in reality you were completely wrong.

= __Assignment 3__ =
 * __//To what extent do our senses give us knowledge of the world as it really is?//__

People's knowledge is based on their own experiences. How and why do we have those experiences though? In my opinion the the human senses are our greatest gift. Imagine living without our senses, which is probably not even possible. Eating a Pizza for example: How would you know the taste of Pizza if you couldn't even taste it? It would taste like everything else. Every person has the same senses and that's why everyone knows exactly how Pizza tastes like. People on the news tell you things that happen in foreign countries. How do they know they even happen? Exactly, they can see it with their own eyes. Let's say everyone is blind. We, as a large community, would never experience things the way we do as non-blind persons. In other words: In my point of view, our senses affect our communication, even more than words do. If someone is talking about an apple, you know exactly what he or she is talking about, because you have a specific picture, in this case an apple, in your mind. That is, because you know how an apple looks like. I do not believe in the theory of "Being born with ideas present in our mind", because people would be born with different ideas, I think.

In conclusion, we can say that our senses make our world how it is. We need our senses to identify things in our everyday-life. I wish there would be a possibility to live a life without senses for one day, to see how it would be like and to prove and show critics that it would be impossible.**


 * //__What possibilities for knowledge are opened to us by our senses as they are? What limitations?__//

There are many possibilities for knowledge opened to us by our senses. People always talk about our general knowledge, but what about love and friendship? How would you get to know the love of your life if you could not even see or talk to the person. Same thing with your best friend. Of course general knowledge plays a huge role in our everyday life. That is why we think of it in first place, but we easily forget about other important things as mentioned earlier. In my opinion, there are no limitations for knowledge by our senses. The only similar thing, that I can think of is, that we sometimes have to see things that we do not want to see, such as violance.

I think it is probably true that without our physical senses we could not know anything. We cannot know this for sure because we do not know what someone without physical senses thinks. It is theoretically possible that someone who is not able to connect physically to the world could still have thoughts, but we would have no way of knowing what they are. So it certainly seems to us that our physical senses are the starting point for our ideas. But are our physical senses all we need for a complete set of thoughts? Take your example of pizza, the senses let you experience it, but what lets you form an opinion about it? You like it. What enables you to know you like it? The senses are not enough to give you this knowledge, you need emotion too. And how do you know you will like the next pizza? You need to be able to reason that things that are materially the same will give you the same experience, and you must have a sense of personhood i.e. that you will be essentially the same person with this pizza as you were with one before. We understand the concept of personhood not through our senses but through our reason. So you can see, that the physical senses are not enough to explain all the ideas that we have, there are limits to what they can tell us. And these are just a few examples...... **

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