Dwaipayan Chakraborty

Intellectual Indulgence of An Observer

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Top 5 Things to Pick up from Purposeful: Are You a Manager or a Movement Starter? by Jennifer Dulski

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Imagine, its Monday evening and after the first grueling, boring day at work, in a semi pissed off state you go to this Hyper retail store to buy some eggs for your quick sad little dinner.

Walking through the maze of aisles of products, you reach your destination. Had it been a normal day, You would have bowed down to the almighty product rack and picked up your Organic Free range eggs like always (assuming your store chain earns less from free range stuff, hence its not kept at eye level)

But today, its The Monday …. And you are Semi pissed off after all, And this subjugation adds the final push, therefore you …

Now as crazy, stupid as this hypothetical situation may sound, if you just be patient enough to put your self into it and ask, what would you do here ?–

Would you just, mumble begrudgingly and take your eggs and go stand in queue to pay

Or would you be crazy enough to start a movement to have your Eggs on top of the aisle at eye level so that many others like you, do not have to bow down in front of this food dispensing totem of modern world

I think, if you choose the later, the book is perfect for you, that is you decide whether to Manage the situation or Change it.

If you are still here, and you are interested, then i would like to give you a mild spoilers warning as i will now try to Listi-size this 272 page dissertation into just 5 points from my understanding. if you want to go ahead

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Modern day Monks – Emergence of a New Generation shunning Extrovert Social Media

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Imagine its 3 am, and you are standing in front of a Forest. You Hear nothing, not even an insect, as if the night has enveloped everything with a canopy of eerie silence, nothing stirs, completely Dead.

But that does not mean, it is true. Life is in every corner, some hiding, some lurking.

Present Day internet is some what turning into a similar state and its leading to a new generation of users who are “hiding” or choosing to abstain from the “predators” or to correctly put, the Loud, the Extroverts, and the populists.

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How knowledge can keep you from knowledge?

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Knowledge conceptBefore we go, actually, I go into this intellectual indulgence, lets ponder What Is Knowledge? And Why the Feck do we care

Knowledge is the awareness and understanding of aspects of reality. It is the clear, lucid information gained through the process of reason applied to reality.

An understanding of knowledge requires some grasp of its relationship to information.

In everyday language, it has long been the practice to distinguish between information — data arranged in meaningful patterns — and knowledge — which has historically been regarded as something that is believed, that is true (for pragmatic knowledge, that works) and that is reliable.

Now the lemony part comes around the term “reliable”.

  • According to Evidentialism, what makes a belief reliable or justified is the possession of evidence – a belief is justified to the extent that it fits a person’s evidence.
  • Again another school of thought suggests that either:
    • reliably-produced true belief; or  any reliable cognitive process (e.g. vision) is sufficient justification.
  • Yet another school, Infallibilism, holds that a belief must not only be true and justified, but that the justification of the belief must necessitate its truth, so that the justification for the belief must be infallible.

 

Now imagine Suppose that the clock on campus (which keeps accurate time and is well maintained) stopped working at 11:56pm last night, and has yet to be repaired. On my way to your noon class, exactly twelve hours later, you saw the clock and form the belief that the time is 11:56.

Your belief is true, of course, since the time is indeed 11:56. And your belief is justified, as you have no reason to doubt that the clock is working, and you cannot be blamed for basing beliefs about the time on what the clock says, Nonetheless, it seems evident that you do not know that the time is 11:56. After all, if you had walked past the clock a bit earlier or a bit later, you would have ended up with a false belief rather than a true one.

So why Do we Care of some convoluted intellectual over indulgence, we just get fine…right? we know “Stuff”

But we do care about this topic whether we “know” it or not. A bit of reflection exposes just how important having a solid view of knowledge is and spending some focused time thinking more deeply about knowledge can help us get better at knowing.

Really, knowledge is the root of many (dare I say most) challenges we face in a given day. Once you get past basic survival (though even things as basic as finding enough food and shelter involves challenges related to knowledge), we’re confronted with knowledge issues on almost every front. Knowledge questions range from larger, more weighty questions like figuring out who our real friends are, what to do with our career, or how to spend our time, what politician to vote for, how to spend or invest our money, should we be religious or not, to more mundane ones like which gear to buy for our hobby, how to solve a dispute between the kids, where to go for dinner, or which book to read in your free time. We make knowledge decisions all day, every day and some of those decisions deeply impact our lives and the lives of those around us

In assessing attempts to define knowledge it can be helpful to remember that the human mind has often been capable of two kinds of knowledge — the rational and the intuitive.

And we can safely assume, that till the day we are willing to keep that “mind” open, we can keep assimilating both rational and intuitive knowledge by experience.

What really makes information or a series of data or anything as of matter knowledge, is how we perceive it, and perception is relative to the then socio economic political scenario, hence completely situational thus nullifying Absolutism

The moment we close ourselves with the idea, that we have The Knowledge, It will stop us from knowledge.

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How twitter can teach us about Absolutism

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But before we go into that, What the heck is Absolutism?

Absolutism is a theory where unlimited, complete power is held by a centralized sovereign individual, with no checks or balances from any other part or person what so ever

The word Absolutism came from From Latin absolutum: which means detached, independent, and completed.

There are basically 2 types, religion where the doctrine that one’s salvation is predestined and determined solely by the will of God, uninfluenced by causes such as one’s deeds or intentions; more commonly called the doctrine of predestination.

And politics where the doctrine that a sovereign or government ought to possess absolute power over individuals and society; an older and less common term for totalitarianism.

The ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle believed in a kind of Absolutism or Universalism, opposing the Moral Relativism of the Sophists.

Immanuel Kant was a prominent promoter of Moral Absolutism, and his formulation of the deontological theory of the Categorical Imperative was essentially absolutist in nature.

Moral Absolutism has been favoured historically largely because it makes the creation of laws and the upholding of the judicial system much simpler and manifested itself in outdated concepts such as the Divine Right of Kings

The most common idea of Absolutism comes in a form of monarchs who had ‘the divine right of kings,’ which derived from medieval ideas of kingship.

This claimed that monarchs held their authority directly from God, that the king in his kingdom was as God in his creation, thus giving them an extra layer of legitimacy,

In modern day we can see a specific flavour of absolutism – The Moral Absolutism

In this extrovert age of Social media, we are always Judging everyone on some standard of ethical belief and whenever there is an Ethical belief, there comes absolute standards against which moral questions can be judged, and that certain actions are right or wrong, regardless of the context of the act.

Thus, actions are inherently moral or immoral, regardless of the beliefs and goals of the individual, society or culture that engages in the actions. It holds that morals are inherent in the laws of the universe, the nature of humanity, the will of God or some other fundamental source.

The inherent problem of this so called moral judgment, though how much moral might it seems, any form of absolutism will always bring in intolerance as there will always be strong disagreements about which moral principles are correct and which are incorrect.

Reality is a dynamic, ever changing set of precepts, concepts and forms that are based on a sound and enduring set of universal principles or what can be called the structure upon which all bodies, minds and lives are formed and live.

Or in other words…

In reality, there is nothing absolute or relative for that matter.  All things are the seeds for the new things which grow from them.  And, this dynamic process continues until the end of this cycle of life and then becomes the seeds for the next new cycle of life…

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