So, at ULearn07
[www.ulearn07.org.nz | previous post], I had the great pleasure of being introduced to JK. We had marvellous conversations regarding philosophy, learning and education. OK, "philosophy" is a pretty broad term, so I want to share with you just one tidbit. :)We discussed how people make decisions and how is it that some people seem to live in a cycle of poor decisions and/or cannot seem to see the alternatives they have to change their lives. I proposed my idea (look, if someone else already did this, I didn't know!) of what "ingredients" are required for a decision to be made. They are:
- The past - that's knowledge, facts, advice from people, experience, etc. There is only a certain amount you can find out or know at any given space in time. It could be considered finite relative to the nature of (3).
- The present - your values
- The future - one cannot directly access the future, but one does have the capacity to imagine. Imagination is key to expanding our options for our decisions.
No doubt, you could also lump those into "self" (2 and 3) and "non-self" (1) and each category is related to one another and affects one another.
Anyway, JK suggested that it is important for human beings to be able to imagine themselves for sake of identity. Our conversation developed so that we took personal identity as being important for self to become aware of self and then to become aware of the nature of non-self and to respect it. She said that perhaps people perhaps couldn't make "better" decisions for their lack of ability to imagine oneself. I think I then took a leap there and said perhaps if they cannot imagine themselves, they are missing the third (3) component of decision-making and they are *just* left with their present and past - thereby, more likely to undergo repeated cycles of "mistake", never deviating from them or learning to improve. For if you cannot imagine yourself to be better or different, how would you change your values? We are all selfish (neutral) in the end and always will ask - how does this apply to me? Therefore, we must be able to imagine ourselves in different light, behaving in different ways.
So, how many different ways can or have you imagined yourself? Will you allow yourself such "indulgence"? Do we inhibit these fantasies as we age, because we think there is not much time left? But how do we know? It should be the opposite! The less time you think you have left, the more imagination should go into your decisions and actions. None of us really know how long we are here for.
Depending on how closely we're looking or from what perspective - we're all singularities. Small and taking up only a tiny bit of the universe. But still significant.
