Fuel

Friday February 10, 2006 - 4:12AM EDT

So I read this article about Ford and GM wanting to promote ethanol and of course recent state of the union mention about alternative fuels. Does everyone miss the point? Sure foriegn oil dependence is bad. But that is merely a faux problem to mask the real issue of energy consumption. Oil is a finite resource whether we get it here or somewhere else.  Petroleum products also pollutes the environment a lot in ways that are detrimental to human health. It is an effeciency issue. I read an article on how tackling effeciency would ultamitely be the smarter move than simply going to another source of energy but using it just as ineffeciently. So-called long term thinking nowadays is restricted to the lifetime of a person, not even. If the founding fathers of our country thought about everything they did in terms of their own lifetimes this country would be a complete disaster. But they didn't, they did take the time to consider longer term effects for some things. Where am I going with this?  Oh yeah alternative fuels. It is an effecieny thing. Simply switching fuel sources solves no problems. It just makes you feel better because you aren't getting oil from those "arabs".  We are still on the same freaking planet. Population of the earth and globalization won't allow us to live in seperate little fiefdoms like we did for most of our development.

When I listen to people sometimes and am able to see how their thought process works I am utterly disgusted.  It makes me think  more and more about Hawkins brain function theories. Piecemeal discrete logical thinking doesn't seem to be the natural way that humans' minds work. It is something that must be learned and taught. Some have a better prediliction for it than others. But surely that kind of thinking has to be the most adavantageous way for a person to be in today's society and the future. Hawkins mentioned something about learning being the creation of analogies from experienced stimuli onto other seemingly unrelated things. We are not like computers the idea of discreteness in the way our brain works does not seem to hold water. The only thing that is discrete is the physical structure. An idea, concept or a thought is not a singular thing in our brain. It is a amalgam of many things that vary by person. Although we may seem to have higher concepts we agree on the underlying components of these things would varying almost infinitely by person. I am not even talking about abstract thoughts but something like an apple. We can all agree what an apple is but to think that to form the concept of an apple in our minds would be done exactly the same way for each person is unfathomable. Where was I. Oh yeah, teaching logical thinking. That must be done to a much greater extent or we are not going to progress much further as a human race. Sure the small percentage who do have the ability to advance humanity through sound logic will always be around. But I'd like to imagine a world in which everyone was like that. People just make these massive leaps of logic through analogies that they have no business creating. Hawkins briefly went over how if we learn through analogies then there are going to be a whole lot of false analogies that just aren't going to help you in the end. I think there is something to that. Especially when I see people moronic turns of logic. I am not talking about the obvious ones, but the everyday ones. The ones that have simply become the status quo. The rise of opinion to signify strength of character runs rampant with bad analogies. People are proded for opinion but rarely asked to study it. I remember how it worked in school. It used to be that all you got was someone dogma and never asked for opinion. Then people wanted to be heard and opinion became key. But still it has not been integrated into learning well enough. I remember in school discussing things and various people would present opinions. Discourse among other people is a good learning tool but it will not shape the perfect person. I just remember having to give opinions on things that I really had very little information on. I go back to that Conucious quote my Chinese teacher used to say all the time. "Studying without thinking is foolish, thinking without studying is dangerous." I don't think human society as a whole has found that balance between studying and thinking. In that quote I'd like to take studying to mean something more than just reading a book or going to class or something. Studying is attentive scrutiny, the pursuit of knowledge through observation. We've finally I think gotten the thinking part down. That is opinion. Studying is still lacking. We form these opinions but have very little to work with when forming them.

Dare I say that we should always be in school. It seems that once we finish our prescribed secondary or post-secondary education study is all but forgotten by most people. Sure you pick up things as you grow old and experience stuff. But for most never in their life again do they study and acquire knowledge like they did in school. While this cannot be said of everyone, I would wager it encompasses the majority of people. We should always be learning at the rate we did when we were in school. Modern mandatory schooling was a response to child labor. Our country and most who have such things are immensely better for it and probably couldn't imagine children not being required to go to school. So while maybe we don't need something structured like school for adults, but we need to have our minds working like being in school as a kid. People exit school, form their own little groups of whatever and their minds rot into nothing. Again this is not something that I would say applies to everybody but a good majority. It is the structure of human society. There is nothing after school for most, for their minds. That has to be changed.