Difficult to pick words in this time and place. I feel that speaking about my thoughts like I did in recent posts is irrelevant in light of how other people’s lives are and will be devastated. I am not scared for myself or my future – no matter what happens, and (sadly!) not due to my actions, my life will not be hit as badly as the lives of so many people. I feel lucky, but I wish someone else received my share of luck and opportunities.
I am overwhelmed and speechless, but I don’t want to isolate myself from what is happening. I find that staying calm and positive in such times is either the product of an exceptionally stable mind, or of an aggressive (to the point of looking inhuman) filter on inputs. I struggle talking about this, as strong emotions and projections make the discussion derail, leaving me more confused than before.
For a long time, humanity only dreamed of flying. I had the chance to grow up in a time where flying was possible, even if only as a luxury, and later witnessed the popularisation of flying. I definitely enjoy the current convenience of taking a plane to quickly crunch a few thousands kilometers and visit friends and family with much less planning than for a earth-bound trip, but I have been brought to think that the fascination of flying is pretty much gone.
As a passenger, I’m sad to have only minimal contact with the pilots. I consider that flying a plane remains a challenging task, no matter how much technology increasingly assists it. I barely get to know their names, for sure not before boarding the plane. When I see the crew of a plane, in uniform, walking with their luggage in the airport halls or on the tarmac, I get a sudden feeling of sympathy and respect, but what I see is that most people nearby barely take notice. When I fly, I try to guess the pilots’ actions at takeoff and landing. These moments are for me interesting and unique, and I give them all my attention. I love to see the flaps being moved one by one during taxing or right before takeoff, it makes me imagine the plane as a huge bird who checks if all its feathers are OK before flight. And videos like this one, recorded during storm Xavier, make me remember how all flying machines, including the larger ones, are at the mercy of bad weather conditions, and only a great combination of pilot’s skills and equipment solidity can ensure safe flights. I shiver every time I notice how the whole plane bends under the wind gusts and dangerously bounces on the runway.
It is easy to get comfortable in my bubble, sleeping, eating, reading, watching a movie, and forget that I am flying over the Earth, over cities, mountains and lakes. I giggle when people eagerly scan the landscape from their window, then point to something, getting suddenly excited for recognising a place they always see from the ground. Too bad that I notice that less and less often! I remember keeping my friend Madi awake for almost a whole 12-hour flight, especially when we passed over Iceland and Canada. During the longest and most magnificent sunset I ever saw, we flew over ice-bergs, broken pack, firm immaculate ice-shelves, sea, and sometimes, tiny as a toy, a cargo ship. How could we sleep when there was such a view?
I smile when I see kids enjoying the flight as a proper adventure. I try to keep that view myself, and refuse to board a plane as unimpressed as I would board a bus. Humanity has always dreamed about flying! Commercial planes are offering me the most accessible pair of wings that I can currently get, let me keep celebrating it 🙂
Two days ago I watched this film at the cinema. A friend told me that it is widely available online, but I preferred to go to the cinema, for its setting and rituals: comfortable seats, great audio and video, planned timing and breaks. It is a situation where I have to decide very little and I can concentrate fully on the film.
I have been enchanted by the colours, all along the film. Camera angles were a treat in practically every scene (I thought that the film could be stopped almost anytime and printed out on a large canvas, with wonderful results). But maybe I enjoyed the careful, slow unwinding of the characters’ stories even more than everything else. It seemed to me that some moments were not acted at all, they seemed so alive and real. I enjoyed the sensation of having enoughtime to understand what the characters thought, what they felt, instead of having to pick clues or devices put in place to signify an emotion, but in a way that saves film-time. I felt there was no plot, no planned outcome, and this made me feel relaxed – otherwise, when I know that the plot has to follow certain steps, I end up fixing my attention to it, afraid of missing a clue, but missing a whole bunch of other information.
It was great to watch the movie together with many other people. We chuckled, paid close attention, smiled, laughed and sighed together. It was precious to hear the buzz of conversations started right out of the doors, people flowing out in pairs or small groups, all starting a discussion about some particular scene or their impressions. There were people who didn’t like the film, and it didn’t bother me, even if I loved it a lot. There are many factors that need to be there to make you enjoy an artistic creation like a movie, not all under our control; maybe they were tired or worried about something and could not focus; maybe they didn’t like the story. Some films and books clicked for me only when I saw them again much later, with a different mindset.
For this movie, I liked the large space that the creators reserved to the spectator, to be filled with personal interpretations and empathy. There are very little hints of the opinion of the creators on the complex net of relationships among the characters, and their lives’ difficult turns. I felt that they offered that story to me, as it was, without trying to make sense of it themselves.
I’m curious to see more movies like this, and I am open to suggestions! Let me know in the comments.
The second day of the winter school was split in two tracks, one focused on philosophical matters, the other on practical applications. I chose to attend the philosophical track, where we talked at first about definitions of ethics, morality, judgment, and so on.
The discussion was not easy, especially for me as a newbie of the field (except for some memories of high school’s philosophy class). In these discussions, words are sharp weapons – I felt that every sentence needed to be composed with care, in order to minimise misunderstanding or ambiguity (the fact that we discussed in English and that it was not the most fluent language for most participants did not help). This reminded me of Quantum Psychology and its aim of making English less dangerous when talking about ethical principles and everyday facts.
We talked about standard ethics exercises (trolley problems), but the reasoning got quickly overridden by emotions. It is not surprising, as the trolley problem is a way of putting a lot of pressure to make the “right” decision about other people’s lives. I personally could not really get into the mindset of that experiment, because lots of variables were missing or were unrealistic (the people on the tracks were all equal and unknown to me, the trolley could not be stopped in any way, I was the only one able to do something, etc…). That left space to a lot of “moral noise” and to amusingly absurd ideas.
During the session, I thought that it is theoretically possible to separate ethics from emotions, but ethics would become inhumane. I moreover thought that the effectiveness of emotion-aware ethics lies in the ability to emotionally connect with the involved parties in a given situation. Of course a more detailed knowledge of every possible influence of an action would make its outcome mathematically more positive, but it would take longer to compute and it would be dependent of an objective evaluation of everything, that is often impossible.
Nevertheless, I understand the questions raised by philosophers about the nature, origins and utility of ethics. It enables people to understand what is going on within them instead of acting solely on emotional bursts. I still value emotional input as much as reasoning, because I consider that emotions have been fundamental for the survival of our species (and maybe others too, but it’s hard to prove without doubt or bias), by shaping our decisions in conflictual situations. What I see is that modern humans are challenged on problems that are so huge and complex that our emotions, that helped us solve local, small group problems, are sometimes inaccurate or problematic. So I think that studying ethics and morality in theory is a way of better understanding our decision-making processes, and help us make more informed decisions.
I just came home after the last session of this Winter School, organised by the Berlin School of Mind and Brain. As I am not a neuroscientist nor a philosopher, I feared I would end up understanding as much as this:
… while I actually managed to follow all discussions quite well 🙂
I attended the philosophical track, that consisted of presentations and discussion around morals and ethics from various angles: philosophical, emotional, cultural and neurological. I find especially interesting to map a lot of connections among these domains. It was sometimes hard to accept that our moral views can be influenced in ways and extents we can’t imagine, but even if I feel that my convinctions are somewhat not as bomb-proof as before, I prefer to be aware of their weaknesses – just like knowing the potential shortcomings of computer programming made me trust them less, but in a more informed way.
I plan to write down a summary of the contents of each session and some of my comments in separate posts. Stay tuned! I will be happy to continue discussing about those themes in the comments.
aghisla draws 