Today was yet another monday, but this monday was a different monday from all the other usual mondays before. Today, two new students were posted into my class. That brings the class total to 22 people, of which 5 are girls, not a bad ratio i would say. Also, today was the slackest monday ever. We had a long long founder's day rehersal, followed by a non-existent chinese lesson, cause everyone was slacking, followed by econs which was just a revision and quite slack, followed by break AND break, followed by a fun TOK lesson which i did not manage to express my thoughts properly but was still praised for o_O (o how a simple comment can make someone's day (maybe it's just me and my lack of getting praised so i value each and every good comment i receive (okay now i'm sounding sad and pitiful and emo-ey))), followed by a fun EngB lesson, followed by a fun non-existent EE period. Yay what a fun way to begin the week, now it's just 1 down 4 more to go.
The subject for today's TOK lesson was emotions as a way of knowing. As far as i know, the four main ways of knowing are language, reason, perception, and emotion. Out of these 4, it is clear how each of the first three are ways of knowing, but what about emotion? If this thought was never introduced to me, i would probably never think of it - emotion as a distinct separate way of knowing similar to the other 3. Emotions also refer to the physical changes of the body when a person gets a certain input (mainly visual); when we see a car coming at us, we feel frightened and our body drowns itself in adrenaline. So for today's lesson, i took the stand that emotion is an equal to the other three ways of knowing. Many people say emotion cannot be trusted, for people feel differently when observing the same thing, like in the case of two people reading a poem, one feels sad and another feels happy after reading the same poem. I would say this ambiguity would also apply to the other three ways of knowing too, so the problem is not with emotion alone. OKAY, that was a very very bad and one-sided argument, you can forget about that. I'm too lazy to backspace everything, so i'll just leave it there. In the meantime, here's a story about the emotionless boy
The Emotionless Boy
There was once a boy, who was born without emotions. He had this tumor in the middle of his brain, which affected him in no way except to rob him of his emotions. There was over a billion to one chance that this would happen, and it so happened that he was the unlucky billionth boy. The boy was without emotions, but to make up for it he was exceedingly intelligent and understanding. He was perceptive, and his reasoning and language skills were of the highest standard. However, many have said that no one can live without emotions, and though one can try, it would be hard, and painful, not only to the person himself, but to all around him.
The boy was an only child, and when he was young, his parents showered him with love. They found out of his condition, but still that did not stop them from loving him with all their heart. The parents were hoping that maybe if they worked hard enough, and tried hard enough, their child may get better and will finally be able to feel emotions. The child understood the amount of care that his parents had for him, but he could not return the love. He was not unkind; he just could not love them back. He would hold his parent’s hands when going out, show concern about the well-being of mother and father, and kiss them goodnight every night. But these actions carried no emotion with them. The child meant well, but by his inability to love, he greatly hurt his parents until they could take no more.
One fine spring day, when the boy was no older than twelve years of age, his parents wrote their last wishes on a piece of paper, stuck it on the fridge, and jumped to their deaths. The boy awoke an hour later, and he immediately knew something was amiss. He got up, brushed his teeth, and went to the kitchen to get some cereal for morning breakfast. He saw the note, and calmly he took the note and read it, instantly realizing that his parents were gone for good. He walked over to the window and looked down, seeing the sprawled figures of the two adults in the concrete floor far far below. Thoughts ran through the boy’s mind, thoughts of the all the interesting moments that he had with his parents over the course of his short life, thoughts of how those interesting moments can never be repeated again, and how he will never see the living faces of his parents again. The boy reasoned that his parents have made their choice, and because of their choice they are now departed into the next world. The boy went to the telephone, and called the police to take away the bodies of his parents that were still lying on the ground. His parents should not traumatize other people with their actions.
The boy need not worry about finances, for his loving parents had taken care of that for him. They saved enough money and stored it in a bank account under the boy’s name, enough to send the boy through till university level. Their house was already paid for, and knowing their child’s character, he was matured enough to live by himself. The boy felt alone without his parents around, not that he could feel any emotion of course, but he just felt this lack of close people around him. To make use of the excess of free time that the boy now had, he started reading extensively. He loved fantasy stories of heroes slaying dragons, of mere humans wielding great magic over expansive lands. To make up for the lack of an adult to answer his many difficult questions, he bought himself a computer and started reading up encyclopedias online. Through all these, the boy read about emotions, he studied emotions, but still he could not understand them. Why would a rational and intelligent prince forgo everything he has just to rescue a princess in a faraway land whose picture he glanced once over? Why would the story of dead people coming back from the afterlife to haunt the living create a sensation of fear in other people? The more he read, the more the boy started to view emotions as a negative aspect of humans. If the world can be more like me, he thought, and then maybe there will be less irrational behaviour in this world.
By now, the boy had encountered one of the most troubling aspects of his emotional deficiency; he could not make choices quickly. He thought of an ingenious way to solve this problem, if by the first few seconds he could not see an obvious choice, he would leave the matter of deciding by chance. He would mentally flip a coin, assigning random values to the strength at which he flipped the coin and the amount of spin on the coin, after which he would calculate which side the coin would land on.
The boy slowly matured into this genius of a young man, and he applied and was accepted into the most prestigious of universities in his country. There, he found other geniuses, some of them savants, whom he could have lengthy conversations and discussions with. He soon found out that everyone else automatically attaches emotions to everything they perceive and think about, something he is incapable of doing. As such, other people’s arguments may be personal to them, as they feel greatly about the matter, but the boy constantly remains slightly detached to his viewpoints. This results in the boy having always the most objective viewpoints, and his arguments were superior to his peers’ more often than not.
News of this genius emotionless boy soon spread around, and countless researchers came to interview and experiment on the boy. The shared their findings and results with the boy, and he understood everything presented to him. As for the researchers, they were disturbed, for at times the boy without emotion seemed inhuman. He reminded some of them of a computer program, a very well written computer program, able to make inferences and come to conclusions in the blink of an eye, yet has no human feeling. The boy sensed their dislike towards him, their fear of him, their amazement of him, yet he felt nothing, for what these people think had nothing to do with him.
The boy saw his peers socialize, saw them get girlfriends and wives. He was in all other aspects a normal human being also, and he wanted to get a girlfriend. He saw really pretty girls, and not so attractive ones, yet he felt the same towards all of them. By logic and reason he knew the pretty girls were more pleasant to look at, yet he felt nothing looking at them. To him, all female humans were basically the same, with a head, a body, and four limbs. To a normal person, the phrase “beauty is only skin deep” would refer to how one should not look solely at physical attributes when choosing a partner, but also to trust his instincts and emotions. But to the boy, the same phrase would have little meaning as he could not judge beauty well. The boy, when faced with choosing one of a few girls, had no choice but to resort to tossing his mental coin, and seeing which side comes up. In this way, the boy often made bad choices in his love life, which lead to short relationships with multiple girls, and he never had a proper girlfriend.
As time went on, the boy went on to become a professor. He could present highly convincing arguments to the masses of students, and he was respected by everyone. He gave lectures overseas, in different continents, and different cultures. He traveled far and wide, teaching as he went, learning as he went. Yet on another fine spring day, not unlike the one when his parents died, his life changed again. His plane was flying from one side of America to the other when it malfunctioned and fell from the sky. Everyone in the plane panicked, but the boy felt no emotion, and he carefully fastened his seat belt and braced himself for the crash. The plane crash landed just outside a small town, sliding and breaking into multiple pieces, bursting into flames. The boy, though in the best possible position for a passenger in a plane that is crash landing, struck his head hard on the seat in front of him. Dark acrid smoke filled the plane aisles, and the boy somehow remained conscious, and not panicking, he stayed low and followed the lighted pathway out of the plane. No sooner did the boy roll out of the plane when the plane exploded, and the boy, thoroughly exhausted and badly injured, lost consciousness.
The doctors who attended to the boy found him with cuts and bruises all over his body, fractures and broken bones all over. However, the part worst damaged was his head, especially his brain. Broken bones can be mended, wounds can be healed, but a head injury is often for life. It was ironic that a boy without emotion, who made the best choices during the crash landing, which made him the sole survivor of the plane crash, had to injure his brain in the process. The boy’s brain was so badly damaged, the doctors had to remove a significant part of it, and as they did so, they also removed the tumor that accompanied the boy since his childhood. When they were done with the surgery, the boy fell into a coma.
A week later, the boy awoke. The first thoughts of the boy were simple – Who am I? Where am I? Why am I here? I am the emotionless boy, and I am in a hospital because I was involved in a horrific plane crash. As the boy tried to think harder about the details and about his past, he found that he could not think properly. As a portion of his brain was removed, his ability to think and reason, to use language properly, to perceive the world, was severely diminished. He tried to say something, to find an outlet to express himself, but his mind could not come up with any words. He opened his mouth, and stuttered, and closed his mouth. Was the great professor reduced to being a stuttering fool? The extent of his disability was a great shock to the boy, and he became overwhelmed with emotion. The years and years of pent-up emotions, of love that could not be expressed, of fear that would not rise up in his heart, of feelings that had no explanation, overcame the boy, and a single tear slid from his right eye. Another one followed from his left eye, and soon he was sobbing uncontrollably. So this is what it is like to feel emotions, to be a normal human being, subject to indescribable feelings called emotions.
After a while, everyone forgot about the emotionless boy. As for the former emotionless boy, he was transferred to a home for the mentally challenged, where he spent the rest of his life living there. Everyday, during mealtime, he would be given a choice of eating either an apple or an orange after his meal. He would smile to himself, and after many hours of deliberation, a caretaker would decide for him, and he would smile and accept the choice, mumbling to himself.
In his mind, he would assign random values to the strength of the toss and spin of the coin, and toss it into the air, then seeing which side it landed on. It landed on heads. That can’t be right, a heads means I have to eat the apple, but I would like to eat the orange, I thought it would land on tails, let me flip again. It landed on heads again, I bet this coin is rigged; I should flip it again to see if it is. Now it landed on tails, what should I do? I should just flip the coin again to see which side it will land on. Heads. Tails. Tails. Tails. Heads… …
The End. Why did the story have to end like this?
The subject for today's TOK lesson was emotions as a way of knowing. As far as i know, the four main ways of knowing are language, reason, perception, and emotion. Out of these 4, it is clear how each of the first three are ways of knowing, but what about emotion? If this thought was never introduced to me, i would probably never think of it - emotion as a distinct separate way of knowing similar to the other 3. Emotions also refer to the physical changes of the body when a person gets a certain input (mainly visual); when we see a car coming at us, we feel frightened and our body drowns itself in adrenaline. So for today's lesson, i took the stand that emotion is an equal to the other three ways of knowing. Many people say emotion cannot be trusted, for people feel differently when observing the same thing, like in the case of two people reading a poem, one feels sad and another feels happy after reading the same poem. I would say this ambiguity would also apply to the other three ways of knowing too, so the problem is not with emotion alone. OKAY, that was a very very bad and one-sided argument, you can forget about that. I'm too lazy to backspace everything, so i'll just leave it there. In the meantime, here's a story about the emotionless boy
The Emotionless Boy
There was once a boy, who was born without emotions. He had this tumor in the middle of his brain, which affected him in no way except to rob him of his emotions. There was over a billion to one chance that this would happen, and it so happened that he was the unlucky billionth boy. The boy was without emotions, but to make up for it he was exceedingly intelligent and understanding. He was perceptive, and his reasoning and language skills were of the highest standard. However, many have said that no one can live without emotions, and though one can try, it would be hard, and painful, not only to the person himself, but to all around him.
The boy was an only child, and when he was young, his parents showered him with love. They found out of his condition, but still that did not stop them from loving him with all their heart. The parents were hoping that maybe if they worked hard enough, and tried hard enough, their child may get better and will finally be able to feel emotions. The child understood the amount of care that his parents had for him, but he could not return the love. He was not unkind; he just could not love them back. He would hold his parent’s hands when going out, show concern about the well-being of mother and father, and kiss them goodnight every night. But these actions carried no emotion with them. The child meant well, but by his inability to love, he greatly hurt his parents until they could take no more.
One fine spring day, when the boy was no older than twelve years of age, his parents wrote their last wishes on a piece of paper, stuck it on the fridge, and jumped to their deaths. The boy awoke an hour later, and he immediately knew something was amiss. He got up, brushed his teeth, and went to the kitchen to get some cereal for morning breakfast. He saw the note, and calmly he took the note and read it, instantly realizing that his parents were gone for good. He walked over to the window and looked down, seeing the sprawled figures of the two adults in the concrete floor far far below. Thoughts ran through the boy’s mind, thoughts of the all the interesting moments that he had with his parents over the course of his short life, thoughts of how those interesting moments can never be repeated again, and how he will never see the living faces of his parents again. The boy reasoned that his parents have made their choice, and because of their choice they are now departed into the next world. The boy went to the telephone, and called the police to take away the bodies of his parents that were still lying on the ground. His parents should not traumatize other people with their actions.
The boy need not worry about finances, for his loving parents had taken care of that for him. They saved enough money and stored it in a bank account under the boy’s name, enough to send the boy through till university level. Their house was already paid for, and knowing their child’s character, he was matured enough to live by himself. The boy felt alone without his parents around, not that he could feel any emotion of course, but he just felt this lack of close people around him. To make use of the excess of free time that the boy now had, he started reading extensively. He loved fantasy stories of heroes slaying dragons, of mere humans wielding great magic over expansive lands. To make up for the lack of an adult to answer his many difficult questions, he bought himself a computer and started reading up encyclopedias online. Through all these, the boy read about emotions, he studied emotions, but still he could not understand them. Why would a rational and intelligent prince forgo everything he has just to rescue a princess in a faraway land whose picture he glanced once over? Why would the story of dead people coming back from the afterlife to haunt the living create a sensation of fear in other people? The more he read, the more the boy started to view emotions as a negative aspect of humans. If the world can be more like me, he thought, and then maybe there will be less irrational behaviour in this world.
By now, the boy had encountered one of the most troubling aspects of his emotional deficiency; he could not make choices quickly. He thought of an ingenious way to solve this problem, if by the first few seconds he could not see an obvious choice, he would leave the matter of deciding by chance. He would mentally flip a coin, assigning random values to the strength at which he flipped the coin and the amount of spin on the coin, after which he would calculate which side the coin would land on.
The boy slowly matured into this genius of a young man, and he applied and was accepted into the most prestigious of universities in his country. There, he found other geniuses, some of them savants, whom he could have lengthy conversations and discussions with. He soon found out that everyone else automatically attaches emotions to everything they perceive and think about, something he is incapable of doing. As such, other people’s arguments may be personal to them, as they feel greatly about the matter, but the boy constantly remains slightly detached to his viewpoints. This results in the boy having always the most objective viewpoints, and his arguments were superior to his peers’ more often than not.
News of this genius emotionless boy soon spread around, and countless researchers came to interview and experiment on the boy. The shared their findings and results with the boy, and he understood everything presented to him. As for the researchers, they were disturbed, for at times the boy without emotion seemed inhuman. He reminded some of them of a computer program, a very well written computer program, able to make inferences and come to conclusions in the blink of an eye, yet has no human feeling. The boy sensed their dislike towards him, their fear of him, their amazement of him, yet he felt nothing, for what these people think had nothing to do with him.
The boy saw his peers socialize, saw them get girlfriends and wives. He was in all other aspects a normal human being also, and he wanted to get a girlfriend. He saw really pretty girls, and not so attractive ones, yet he felt the same towards all of them. By logic and reason he knew the pretty girls were more pleasant to look at, yet he felt nothing looking at them. To him, all female humans were basically the same, with a head, a body, and four limbs. To a normal person, the phrase “beauty is only skin deep” would refer to how one should not look solely at physical attributes when choosing a partner, but also to trust his instincts and emotions. But to the boy, the same phrase would have little meaning as he could not judge beauty well. The boy, when faced with choosing one of a few girls, had no choice but to resort to tossing his mental coin, and seeing which side comes up. In this way, the boy often made bad choices in his love life, which lead to short relationships with multiple girls, and he never had a proper girlfriend.
As time went on, the boy went on to become a professor. He could present highly convincing arguments to the masses of students, and he was respected by everyone. He gave lectures overseas, in different continents, and different cultures. He traveled far and wide, teaching as he went, learning as he went. Yet on another fine spring day, not unlike the one when his parents died, his life changed again. His plane was flying from one side of America to the other when it malfunctioned and fell from the sky. Everyone in the plane panicked, but the boy felt no emotion, and he carefully fastened his seat belt and braced himself for the crash. The plane crash landed just outside a small town, sliding and breaking into multiple pieces, bursting into flames. The boy, though in the best possible position for a passenger in a plane that is crash landing, struck his head hard on the seat in front of him. Dark acrid smoke filled the plane aisles, and the boy somehow remained conscious, and not panicking, he stayed low and followed the lighted pathway out of the plane. No sooner did the boy roll out of the plane when the plane exploded, and the boy, thoroughly exhausted and badly injured, lost consciousness.
The doctors who attended to the boy found him with cuts and bruises all over his body, fractures and broken bones all over. However, the part worst damaged was his head, especially his brain. Broken bones can be mended, wounds can be healed, but a head injury is often for life. It was ironic that a boy without emotion, who made the best choices during the crash landing, which made him the sole survivor of the plane crash, had to injure his brain in the process. The boy’s brain was so badly damaged, the doctors had to remove a significant part of it, and as they did so, they also removed the tumor that accompanied the boy since his childhood. When they were done with the surgery, the boy fell into a coma.
A week later, the boy awoke. The first thoughts of the boy were simple – Who am I? Where am I? Why am I here? I am the emotionless boy, and I am in a hospital because I was involved in a horrific plane crash. As the boy tried to think harder about the details and about his past, he found that he could not think properly. As a portion of his brain was removed, his ability to think and reason, to use language properly, to perceive the world, was severely diminished. He tried to say something, to find an outlet to express himself, but his mind could not come up with any words. He opened his mouth, and stuttered, and closed his mouth. Was the great professor reduced to being a stuttering fool? The extent of his disability was a great shock to the boy, and he became overwhelmed with emotion. The years and years of pent-up emotions, of love that could not be expressed, of fear that would not rise up in his heart, of feelings that had no explanation, overcame the boy, and a single tear slid from his right eye. Another one followed from his left eye, and soon he was sobbing uncontrollably. So this is what it is like to feel emotions, to be a normal human being, subject to indescribable feelings called emotions.
After a while, everyone forgot about the emotionless boy. As for the former emotionless boy, he was transferred to a home for the mentally challenged, where he spent the rest of his life living there. Everyday, during mealtime, he would be given a choice of eating either an apple or an orange after his meal. He would smile to himself, and after many hours of deliberation, a caretaker would decide for him, and he would smile and accept the choice, mumbling to himself.
In his mind, he would assign random values to the strength of the toss and spin of the coin, and toss it into the air, then seeing which side it landed on. It landed on heads. That can’t be right, a heads means I have to eat the apple, but I would like to eat the orange, I thought it would land on tails, let me flip again. It landed on heads again, I bet this coin is rigged; I should flip it again to see if it is. Now it landed on tails, what should I do? I should just flip the coin again to see which side it will land on. Heads. Tails. Tails. Tails. Heads… …
The End. Why did the story have to end like this?
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