The Art of Living a Meaningless Existence: Ideas from Philosophy That Change the Way You Think by Robert Pantano

 

Different Races To Run

In a recent therapy session, my therapist enlightened me to the fact that my wife and I have had different races to run.

Intuitively, I understood this. But it was her follow-up that my wife's childhood nutrition may have been so different from mine, that it radically shapes the life-races we've had to run, which really drove the point into my body.

I can remember being hungry as a kid and waking up in the house and seeing my breath it was so cold. I vaguely remember powdered milk. Disgusting.

So with this in my mind germinating, my wife sends me this:

https://www.brownalumnimagazine.com/articles/2023-01-09/conservative-voice-glenn-loury-and-poet-ravi-shankar

Which is really about an overcoming ethos in which there are no "systemic" hurdles, only individual shortcomings (especially willpower). I'm generalizing but I genuinely feel this is the rhetorical endpoint. 

Also rumbling around up there was a chord progression I really liked. So I did some song freewriting:

Was denken Sie? (What do you think?)

CHORUS

It’s not as simple as you make it out to be

It’s not as clear-cut to me

It’s not as easy as one, two, three

Why don’t you believe me?

It’s almost as if you can’t see me (or feel me)

VERSE I

Who’s to say who overcomes? Who bends the world and gets the good things done? When we’ve got different races to run Please don’t mistake my question As a justification We’ve had different races to run

VERSE II

Maybe it depends, from where you begun Maybe all the babies have a damn good reason Maybe baby, we’ve got different races to run Please don’t mistake my question As a justification We’ve had different races to run

VERSE III

(one or two chord stops)

They might tell you there’s no system (pronounced sys-TUM)

Only veiled machination

They might tell you the hero overcomes

While forgetting no man is an island (pronounced eye-LUND)

They might tell you not to question
They might tell you it’s an illusion

An excuse masquerading as a delusion But trust me, we’ve had different races to run

That's Alright René

Inspired by Scott Hershovitz' Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Adventures in Philosophy with My Kids, I wrote a song about Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy and Dualism. I hope you like it. Fun Fact: The two guitars on the outro solo are my cheeky little version of dualism - one in the right speaker, one in the left; one playing single-note lines, the other octaves. Fun huh?

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Back To Akron - Out Now!

 

The RiffRaff

shannon.gordon.scott · RiffRaff

Enjoy the guitar and vocals of yours truly. 

General Psychology Chapter 8 - Emotion - Postscript

 

Chapter 8 Emotion Postscript

Greetings all,

As you think about Chapter 8 on Emotion and how distinctly emotion is tied to our psychological lives, I want to share a couple of brief videos that can hopefully drive home the point that we are emotional beings.

This is just a recent Toyota commercial but notice that in a mere 30 seconds the commercial captures emotional themes that resonate and likely, produce emotions in you. And this is while they're trying to sell you something.

The emotional power of images and voices and music all brought together in 30 seconds.

This is a short clip from the animated movie Wall-E. Watch the clip.

And now begin to ask yourself why you see the robots as possessing eyes or faces. There is no good reason to think they have (human) eyes or faces, let alone, anger or concern on those "faces."

Yet we do. Why?

Some psychologists in the Evolutionary approach will tell you that evolution has hard-wired facial and emotion detection software into our species. Detecting eyes and emotion has helped our species survive and reproduce. And if some robots like Wall-E and Eve, trip our facial/emotion detection software, we'll recognize their eyes and emotions.

Now watch the clip again and ask why you see Wall-E, who doesn't really have a "head" to speak of, possesses eyes.