A Sweet Story

Happy Friday! Here’s a poem I wrote for my relatives for their 50th marriage anniversary. Being together (and happy) for fifty years is truly incredible, and their love story immensely amazes me! I hope you enjoy it, let me know in the comments below.

We fall in love
Hoping to share a life together
With someone special
Who will be there forever
 
An emotional bond
Where the hearts get paired
Where the bliss is shared
As well as each despair
 
Enduring life
The thicks and thins
The joys and sorrows
The losses and wins
 
To stick together
Through uphill climbs
And sharing laughter
In happy times
 
Love brings you sunshine
When all you see is rain
Love makes you smile
When all you feel is pain
 
Fifty years of togetherness
Bring out a meaning today
You both have truly shown us
That love can find a way

⁃ SaaniaSparkle 🧚🏻‍♀️

Let’s Spread our Sparkles!

Here is a poem about letting out our inner sparkles! (And today is my birthday!🎂)

Let’s spread our sparkles
Wherever we are
Like the effulgent moon
And the scintillating star
 
The world isn’t fair
It doesn’t always listen
But let us be grateful
For the life we’re given
 
The daunting diseases
The cataclysmic wars
Take hundreds of lives
But we still have ours
 
The ability to wake up
The opportunity to live,
To start another day with
The power to dream big
 
It’s easy to hate,
To be a scoundrel and a snide
Let’s retrieve the kindness
Found deep inside
 
Let’s flash our lights
When it’s so dark
For it’s time for us
To ignite our spark
 
The anger we spew
The fears we feel
The problems around us
Only love can heal
 
We refuse to be kind
And unfurl love along the way
But when we open our eyes and see
It’s what this Earth needs today
 
It may go unseen
It may go unheard
But it’s these tiny bits of love
That will overwhelm our world…
 

⁃ SaaniaSparkle 🧚🏻‍♀️

Mary’s Room

The Australian philosopher Frank Jackson devised a thought experiment to represent a Knowledge Argument in 1982.

Mary is extremely smart, she is educated on neuroscience to the point where she is an expert on the subject. Mary has read about everything there is to know about the perception of colour in the brain as well as the physical facts about how light works in order to create the different wavelengths and colours and about how the brain processes visual stimuli. She knows every scientific fact about what happens when we see colour.

Except, Mary herself has never seen a coloured object. A red strawberry, a brown chocolate, colourful m&m’s, the blue ocean, the yellow sun… Mary has never seen any of these!

Mary has lived her entire life in a black and white room. Her books are black and white, her hair is black, her T.V is black and white, and even her clothes. She has never directly experienced or seen anything in colour, all she knows about colour is given in her textbooks.

But one day, the door opens to the outside world. Suddenly, she sees what she has been researching for all these years – colour! The question is, even though she knows everything about what should happen inside her brain now, does she learn anything new? Does she learn anything new by seeing a green tree or a red apple that she couldn’t get out of reading textbooks?

If she does, we’ll have to conclude that mental states like seeing colour cannot be perfectly explained by physical facts. There has to be more to it, something that’s dependent on conscious experience.

If she doesn’t learn anything new, we’ll have to go with the idea that knowing physical facts is identical to experiencing something.

I think that there are some non-physical properties and attainable knowledge that can only be discovered through conscious experience. A tiny bit like love – we have read about it and most of us even know the hormones like dopamine and serotonin involved. But when we actually experience love for the first time, it feels like something completely out of the world!

Is the way in which we experience the world more than just simple biochemical processes in the brain? Is our mind more than our brain? What do you think?

⁃ SaaniaSparkle 🧚🏻‍♀️

The Highest Form of Knowledge

As we go through our lives, one of the most important things we learn is how to connect with people. No wonder we, humans, are known to be “social animals.”

Feeling heard is a human need, and all of us want to feel understood.

Often when I would have an argument with someone, I would almost find myself preparing my response instead of genuinely trying to listen to them. But I now realise that people don’t want to hear your “logic” all the time. Sometimes, they just want to be understood. Like we all do. Empathy is something that helps us get in touch with our feelings and hence gives us an emotional understanding of others around us.

Or at school, I would always want to be seen as the ‘smartest’ amongst my friends. And so I would brag about my grades, step on the feelings of others, and be just so full of myself. I now realise that people don’t care about that. We would all rather want to be around people who understand us, people who have the ability to be happy for us, and people who can connect with us emotionally. It is not always about being the best and the most ‘perfect’ person in the group, it is so much about being a kind person who is always ready to help others, be there for others, and appreciate others with a big smile on our face.

We should be kind because it makes us feel good about ourselves. I can think about the days I do good things for other people. Helping them with the maths homework we get in school or simply listening to their troubles in life. These make me feel warm. I feel like I have accomplished something. I feel like I have a purpose in life. I may have hundreds of dreams to fulfil but nothing makes my heart happier than knowing that I make a difference in someone’s life.

Empathy works so well because it doesn’t require a solution. It requires understanding – when we step outside our own emotions to view things from the perspective of others. By thinking outside ourselves and feeling others, we develop a medicine this world needs.

⁃ SaaniaSparkle🧚🏻‍♀️

The Trolly Problem

Let’s imagine that a madman has tied five innocent people to a trolley track, and they are unable to move. A trolley car that is out of control is hurtling towards them, and is only a few seconds away from running them over. Luckily, we can pull a lever that will divert the trolley to another track. The only problem with doing this is that the madman has tied a single person to this other track too. Considering these circumstances, should we pull the lever? This is the Trolley Problem, created by philosopher Philippa Foot, which is one of the most famous thought experiments in the field of ethics. The question is, should we:

1. Simply stand there and allow the trolley to kill these five people tied on the main track?

2. Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person? Should we kill one person to save five?

What is the right thing to do?

From a utilitarian point of view, the obvious decision is for us to pull the lever, saving the five people and only killing one. But there is another view that would state that in pulling the lever we become complicit in what is clearly an immoral act, as we will still be responsible for the death of that one person. Other people argue that just our mere presence in the situation is a reason good enough for us to act, and that to do absolutely nothing about the situation would be equally immoral.

I think there is no wholly moral action at this point. Many philosophers have used the trolley problem as an example of the ways that real world situations often force individuals to compromise their own moral codes, and that there are times when there is no totally moral course of action. What do you think?

– SaaniaSparkle 🧚🏻‍♀️

The Drowning Child

Peter Singer is an Australian philosopher who created a thought experiment called The Drowning Child, in 2009.

In this thought experiment, we imagine ourselves walking down the street. Suddenly, we notice a girl drowning in a lake. We have the ability to swim, and we are also close enough to save her life if we take action immediately. However, doing so will ruin our expensive shoes. Do we still have an obligation to save her?

Peter’s answer to this question is yes. We do have a responsibility to save the life of a drowning child and price is no object. If we agree with him on this statement, it leads us to a salient thought-provoking question: If we are obligated to save the life of a child in need, is there a fundamental difference between saving one who is right in front of us and one on the other side of the world?

In his book, The Life You Can Save, Peter argues that there is no moral difference between a child drowning in front of you and one starving in some far off land. The cost of the ruined shoes in saving a drowning child is analogous to the cost of a donation in saving a starving child. And if the value of our shoes is irrelevant to us, the price of the charity should be irrelevant too. If we save the nearby child, we have to save the distant one too. He, in fact, even put his money where his mouth is, and started a program to make people donate to charities across the world.

There are definitely some arguments against this thought experiment. Most of them rely on the idea that a drowning child is in a different type of situation than a child who is starving in another part of the world, and that they require different solutions which impose different obligations.

Most of us would innately rescue a child drowning in front of us – it would be rather monstrous to compare a child’s life to a pair of shoes! But how many of us really pay attention to charities? How many of us actually donate to charities? How many of us take a second to sympathise a child who is starving in a city overwhelmed with poverty? What is the difference?

⁃ SaaniaSparkle 🧚🏻‍♀️

Is happiness more than just pleasure?

Hedonism is the philosophy that pleasure is the most important pursuit of mankind and the proper aim of human life. Talking about pleasure, I came across another stimulating thought experiment. This one is called, “The Experience Machine”.

The Experience Machine is a special device that can give us any experience we would like to endure. For example, if I were to choose something, perhaps it would be: Becoming a famous writer, entering a candy world, being around hundreds of adorable animals, or meditating at the top of a mountain. The experience machine would make me believe that these scenarios are actually happening, while in reality, I’m floating in a tank with electrodes attached to my brain. The question now, is, would I want to be plugged into this machine for the rest of my life? If yes, my life would be preprogrammed to maximise my pleasure. I would be able to live my fondest dreams “from the inside”, and experience what it’s like to live a perfect life. While being plugged into this machine, I would think it’s all real.

The purpose of this experiment is to make us wonder: What is happiness? We all know that this simply structured question isn’t the easiest to answer, in fact philosophers have been debating upon it for years – whether happiness is more than just pleasure.

While reading and putting ourselves into the experiment, I think for some of us it seems as if pleasure might be sufficient for happiness (meaning, we believe in hedonism). But The Experience Machine can actually challenge this idea. If pleasure was enough, I would plug myself into the machine without thinking twice. But most of us would be hesitant. According to Robert Nozick, the American philosopher who created this thought experiment, this is because we want more in life. We all have projects, tasks, activities, and life goals we wish to achieve. And, being plugged into this machine and living a fake life is not a way to fulfil those. This seems to suggest that hedonism is wrong. What do you think?

– SaaniaSparkle 🧚🏻‍♀️

The Brain in a Jar

There is a rather nutty theory in Science and Philosophy known as the Brain in a Vat or the Brain in a Jar theory. In this thought experiment, we imagine a mad scientist creating a machine into which he can place a human brain. This machine is called a “brain vat”. The brain vat keeps the brain alive, and it also allows the scientist to create virtual stimuli and feed these into the brain. Hence, the brain kept inside can experience these stimuli in the same way in which a normal human sensory system does. Doing this, the scientist can create an entirely fictitious world that feels completely normal to the brain held captive. This sounds eminently creepy to me!

But the idea of the Brain in a Vat (or the Brain in a Jar) theory is that no brain could ever know whether it is affixed inside a skull, or kept inside a vat. Therefore theoretically, it could never know whether everything it experiences is real or simply an illusion. It tells us that we cannot confirm the existence of anything except for our own consciousness. This theory may sound familiar since it is the basic plot of the movie “The Matrix” (which also includes some elements of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” theory).

This thought experiment was proposed by René Descartes, a French philosopher, back in 1641. (You may find it interesting how his experiment initially used an evil demon instead of a vat – that’s scary!) The vat was only proposed later by Gilbert Harlan, in 1973 to update the experiment.

This experiment puzzled philosophers ever since, it definitely puzzles me too. On that note, have a lovely week ahead- even if it’s all an illusion!

– SaaniaSparkle 🧚🏻‍♀️

What defines us?

I have often marvelled over what actually defines me. I came across an interesting paradox while reading the book Philosophy 101 by Paul Kleinman. Explaining the metaphysics of identity, the ship of Theseus paradox first appeared in the writings of the Ancient Greek philosopher Plutarch. He wrote about Theseus (the founder-king of Athens) returning from a long voyage at sea. During this voyage, the old and decayed planks of wood the ship was made of was replaced by brand new and strong planks of wood. So by the end of the voyage, every piece of wood the ship was made of initially, had been replaced. The philosophical idea generated from this scenario is: is this ship still the same ship that Theseus started his voyage on? Or, if the ship Theseus began his journey on is A, and the ship Theseus ended his journey on is B, then does A=B?

This paradox surely goes beyond a problem about ships. It leads us to thinking about identity and what makes us the people that we are. I am going to change as I grow older, and parts of me are going to change as years are going to go by. But even when I turn sixty, I’m still going to call myself Saania- I’ll still consider myself to be the very same person.

Is identity related to my structure and the way I am made? If this is the case, I wouldn’t be me if I were to shave all my hair off. Some philosophers say that “we are our body”. But as we grow older, a lot of changes take place in our bodies. As teenagers, we may change our looks, our style when it comes to clothing, our hairstyles, and so much more. And as we grow even older, we get gray hair and wrinkles by our eyes. We may even develop health troubles or we may modify the food we take into our body. So many of our cells keep replacing themselves too, and some even die. So our body is definitely not a permanent fixture.

Is identity related to my mind and my feelings? If this is the case, I wouldn’t be me if I ever replaced my heart, or lost my memory. Many philosophers say that our mind is what gives us our identity. Yet, our outlook on life changes over time. I am starting to think differently as I am growing older, as compared to the things I believe in when I was much younger. I may gain a lot of knowledge. I may change my beliefs. I may find religion, or lose it. This change is inevitable, and so very constant.

I believe there is no right or wrong answer for these mind-boggling questions. What this paradox does tell us, however, is that although we see identity as a fixed and solid structure, it is actually very thin, malleable, and ever-changing. The ship of Theseus and its implications about what identity really is are still discussed today. It does, indeed, leave me with quite a lot of food for thought…

– SaaniaSparkle🧚🏻‍♀️