Isolation Amidst Connection

As "Operation Collaboration" surges on in the form of a joint presentation scheduled for early January, I'm beginning to notice a certain (maybe, but not necessarily, deliberate) tracing of larger themes throughout our projects. In my last post, I talked a little bit about Frankenstein and the "journey of an intellectual." Although, as I mentioned, it often feels like a lonely one, I've learned through my classmates and coordinators' recent journals that it surely needn't be so. The first piece that really sparked this train of thought was probably Alex's latest journal on the appreciation of human life. If you haven't yet taken some time to look at this, I strongly recommend you do. It is extremely well written and amazingly insightful in a most necessary manner. When I first read this post, I immediately took note of it's fundamental nature. The most basic reason any of us can study anything at all - from a topic sometimes taken for granted such as comedy to one regarded with more apprehension such as ethical robots - is because we have that appreciation of life. It is because we recognize our human sentience, consciousness, and unique thoughts, that we endeavor to understand these things and to observe the beautiful complexity that exists within our beings. Had we all not, even if just for a fleeting moment, recognized the mystery of being alive, it would have been a most scarce and lacking probability for us to perhaps pursue that which we are after - to understand. Now, while Alex's project certainly lends itself to an analysis of human thought and why we exist the way that we do, I began to notice the same practice being done by other peers also. Take a look at Llewellyn's last two posts - one where she talks about the argumentative appeals of pathos, logos, and ethos and another where she discusses different people's reactions to a certain superman comic. Sure, Llewellyn is most certainly exploring the current state of immigration, but would it be completely crazy of me to contend that at a more general level, she is also studying the manner in which we perceive things? How do we perceive people that come from different places? How do we deal with methods of argumentation? Do we respond better to pathos? Do we deliver ethos more effectively? Just in these last two journals, Llewellyn has moved past the integral substance of immigration to a larger idea that involves preconceptions and the economy of human interactions. What I find most intriguing though, is that in the process of doing so, Llewellyn has not strayed even the slightest bit from her project's central idea.

Many people, in a variety of situations favor compartmentalization - the practice of dividing a complex idea or practice or thing into it's relevant subcategories without letting these subcategories intermingle. At times, this makes for a more clear way to think about something but ultimately, each subcategory eventually interacts with the others to form a complete idea and that's kind of what I see happening in each one of our emc projects. We start out with these super complex notions - glial cell morphology, dream effects, sibling order, the education system, what have you, and we take them apart. Through rigorous research and questioning, we destroy any preconceptions about these subjects and we gradually rebuild a structure of thought that is informed and without a doubt, standing on the strongest of foundations. To think, however, that the structure I construct is completely isolated from, say, Tima's project on women in computer science, is to disregard the fact that we may be utilizing the same exact tools to build these edifices. This is an analogy, and thus imperfect, but what I'm trying to say is that on the surface, everybody's journey may look entirely disparate from one another, however, upon compartmentalization - upon taking each topic apart - we find ourselves at none other than the most intricate and baroque of crossroads. Does it have to do with the fact that we are all humans and that we are all studying things that affect humans? Absolutely. But I can't help thinking that surely, this crossroads runs far deeper and stretches far wider than the type of mammal we all are. Perhaps, what I am seeing is the effect of unrestrained curiosity being unleashed from a group of passionate individuals, but I think I'm just getting ahead of myself now.

Let us press on. The next clue that I happened upon then, was Mikayla's journal on the task of defining something as "ethical." While it is clear in her writing that Mikayla is regarding this widely applicable term in the lens of consumerism, as a reader, I could almost immediately draw a parallel to Ved's latest journal on the ethical dilemmas involved in the world of robotics. Without a doubt, by reading each of these separate journals, it was crystal clear to me the topic each one of my peers was studying, but at the same time, I could see, just as clearly, that below the different surfaces of robotics and consumerism, was common ethical ground. Furthermore, if you look at Taniya's exploration of family structure, and Silma's questioning of how dreams affect a person's waking hours, we can see that while they have distinct fronts, motivations, and intentions, they are in essence, both studying the science of interactions - Taniya's inquiries remaining within the nuclear family and Silma's sustaining a hold on larger populations. As you can probably tell, I spent some time identifying common ground between certain projects and tracing these themes throughout. Maybe it's just the timing of things and the way many are beginning to synthesize ideas at this stage of the year that has shown a common development across projects, but it wasn't really until I read Ben's journal on his topic change that I really began to piece some of this together.

In this journal, Ben discusses how for a long time, he was nominally doing a project on climate change but it was actually a collection of work towards developing a theory of being human. And I won't speak for his path with this, because I can't, but in the journal, I saw a peculiar shift to an attempt at tying everything together. Sometimes, it feels like a lot of what we do in this class is based upon originality in the sense that my project's progression is going to be vastly different than every other person's progression. But when I read Ben's journal, in conjunction to everyone else's writing, I think I really started to understand that the fact of each person's originality and individual set of project goals is what unites us all. Obviously, I'm nowhere near figuring out the common spark that ignites us to pursue the common goal of understanding something - I'll leave that to Ben since it seems the remainder of his whole project will surround this. But over the past few days, it's been incredible to observe and see crucial points of development as everyone is thinking about the collaboration project and reaching a point where information gathering is coming to a general summation.

You may be wondering, as Ben asked me when I shared these observations with him the other day, what am I going to do with this information? Although at first, I thought I was already participating in this collateral theme building, I'm definitely starting to wonder, what does one do with all of this? It's important to remember also, that just like everyone else, I must remain grounded in the specific discipline and substance of my project. It would certainly be a major misstep on my part to think that these commonalities came about because they were forcibly included by each person. A large part of these valuable connections and what makes them so is the fact that we've all stumbled upon these larger themes and ideas through each distinct exploration - not pre-positioned them within our work. But I still have not answered the question - what will I do with these notes and observations? It's almost anticlimactic that this journal and entire thought process in and of itself hasn't led to a more profound insight, but I guess the answer I've come to is that I must keep on keeping on. Yes, it is true that the journey of an intellectual doesn't have to be a lonely one, but that doesn't eliminate the personal struggle that leads to motivations for one's own pursuit of knowledge. Before I can collaborate with others and bring glial cells to them, I need to fight and strive towards goals of my own. The key here though, is that we must remain mindful and keep our eyes open. You do your thing without losing sight of your surroundings. So yes, I can get angry that misfolding proteins have too much physiological power, I can continually wrestle with the frustration of being a poor communicator, I can struggle against my inability to write a picture book, and I can grapple with my currently resurfacing and utterly destructive test-taking anxiety, but at the same time, I must always remember that my struggle is not so different than Jonah's or Julia's or anyone else's - we are all connected by the strife we willingly pursue.