RAISING DIGITAL AWARENESS

In general, the purpose of posting content online is sharing it with others--getting it seen. If no one is visiting a site, then its curator's ideas remain undiscovered by the rest of the world, leading to a tragic collection of unrealized potential as opposed to a fruitful body of valuable contributions. In my case, however, I don't feel that the amount of views/viewers I have is important at the moment. I don't have a groundbreaking product or idea to pitch, nor do I have any other sort of latent value that is being wasted by not being shared; no one besides perhaps my peers are likely to benefit from my blog in its current state.

Resource of the Day 3/27/2014

This interesting article discusses some attempts at measuring happiness, and the challenges that are imposed when dealing with such a subjective state.

SEEKING MENTOR

The characteristics that I identified for my Expert Profile had mostly to do with, well, a person's expertise: the skills, knowledge, experience, etc. that he/she possesses. A mentor, however, is slightly different. When I think of a mentor, I think of someone I look up to--someone I trust personally, as well as professionally. This sort of relationship isn't something that can be forced; it must develop naturally, and this is rarely a quick process. I honestly have no idea where to even begin when it comes to facilitating something like that; I feel like it just has to happen on its own.

IS THERE AN EXPERT IN THE HOUSE

*I didn't post this assignment earlier because I already have a couple of experts on standby, so I didn't feel that it was necessary. It is a prerequisite for the direction we are taking now, though, so here it is.

My Expert Profile:
- Knowledgeable in an area (or areas) pertaining to my topic
- Credible: extensive formal education and/or able to demonstrate clear mastery of the concepts at hand
- Experienced, both in life, and in his/her given field
- Versatile: should be able to speak with authority in various areas, even if he/she specializes in only one
- Analytical with minute attention to detail
- Forthright and willing to provide honest feedback/criticism

Resource of the Day 3/25/2014

Today, I found this great little article on happiness; it is difficult to imagine these ideas being conveyed any better with so few words.

Resource of the Day 3/21/2014

This Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry is the perfect starting point for the next branch of my topic: desire. This subtopic was introduced to me by an expert who I met a couple of weeks ago.

THIS IS ONLY A TEST

My "test" will be based on the longstanding philosophy that the best way to test one's own understanding of a concept is to attempt to teach that concept to others. Either by giving a presentation in class, or merely by conversing on my own time, I will explain my project to some of my peers prior to giving them a brief quiz to make sure that I was successful. If I can teach someone else about my topic well enough that he/she is able to answer the sort of questions that I would consider asking myself to test my own knowledge, then I will feel comfortable saying that I know my material to the degree that I should.

Resource of the Day 3/18/2014

        Today's resource is a book which I found in the bibliography of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on happiness that I posted one week ago. It is entitled Exploring Happiness: From Aristotle to Brain Science, and is said to provide a more-than-comprehensive account of happiness in terms of philosophy, as well as in terms of psychology, neuroscience, genetics, and economics. I am having this promising book transferred to a local library and look forward to reading it.

In-Class Essay Follow-Up

My essay was not oriented around my Masterpiece, though the information I have accumulated thus far definitely contributed to my thought process while writing. My research on flow & happiness particularly shaped the way I addressed the last part of the prompt (which I actually chose to use as the foundation of my essay), as I define "success" differently now than I would have earlier. Don't get me wrong - I have always assigned value to the journey itself and not just to the destination but, prior to my readings as of late, I probably would have taken the word "success" as a measure of physical attainment like most people do. While I haven't believed this definition to be true--at least in terms of happiness, which is what everyone ultimately seeks--for many years, I most likely still would've have assigned it to the word "success" in constructing my essay, which would have drastically changed all of the other content that depended on it. Basically, I think I would have considered "success" a measure of wealth, fame, power, etc. dictionally, though not in practice if it weren't for my Masterpiece research... If that makes any sense... Anyways, I feel that my essay came together fairly well. I was a bit nervous about only having 40 minutes to try and create an essay that I would be proud of, but I think I managed to pull it off. I can't be sure though, as I began writing immediately after the prompt was revealed and continued until the very end of the period, leaving me no time to look back and read anything that I had written. I felt pretty strong for the first couple paragraphs, but hearing the 10 minute warning when I was barely half way finished admittedly rattled me a bit. I turned it up and managed to finish, but, in that frenzied state, I was not able to convey my thoughts as eloquently as I would have liked, and I imagine I probably made a few mistakes. It is what it is though; not to mention that, sometimes, stepping out of one's comfort zone is the only way to grow/advance, and I always relish an opportunity to better myself.  

Resource of the Day 3/12/2014

Yet another Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry! These wonderful resources are difficult to pass up... This entry on emotion completes the trio in terms of the three main components of my topic.

Resource of the Day 3/11/2014

Last weekend I posted a Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on pleasure. Today, I bring you its counterpart - a Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on happiness.

I, ENTREPRENEUR

The blatant lack of effort being displayed by many of my peers caused class to fall apart today, and we never finished the conversation that was to serve as the premise for this assignment. I will attempt to answer the questions as best I can regardless of this unfortunate turn of events.

"...describe three things: (a) how the expert you designed the 10 questions for is or isn't an entrepreneur according to how we defined it in class; (b) how you are or are not an entrepreneur according to how we defined it in class; and (c) how this culture associates expertise with entrepreneurship, and how you think this idea should be reinforced or changed."

(a) Class was interrupted just before we defined entrepreneurship, so I will substitute in my own definition for the sake of this assignment. I think it's safe to say that most people would describe "being an entrepreneur" as operating a business/enterprise with the intent of turning a profit. I, on the other hand, believe that this idea of an entrepreneur is a bit too limiting; for I consider anyone who seeks to distribute an original idea of any sort to be an entrepreneur. According to this definition, any experts in fields related to my topic are undoubtedly entrepreneurs so long as they publish or otherwise make available their work.

(b) My definition has made this question somewhat difficult for me to answer... While I have, of course, expressed "original" ideas (original as in my own - not original as in unique or interesting) via this blog and other outlets, none of them have possessed enough practical value for me to deem them entrepreneurial. Furthermore, knowing that few or no people will actually come into contact with with the material I post on this blog or anywhere else, I cannot say that I have actually posted anything with the intent of distributing it. For these reasons and many others, I am not an entrepreneur, though I hope to change that in the future. 

(c) Expertise is a crucial component of successful entrepreneurship. That is not to say that an impressive formal education is required, but rather an advanced level of knowledge/aptitude in a given area. Any individual can pitch his/her ideas, but the ideas must be good in order for anyone to benefit from them, and a certain expertise is required for the ideas to be good. This is not a manufactured effect, but rather a necessary result that can be neither changed, nor reinforced.    

10 QUESTIONS

If I had the chance to pick the brain of an expert of a field related to my topic, I would likely ask him/her the following questions:

1) How and when did you realize that you wanted to study [x] field?
2) What steps did you take to make it happen?
3) Are you satisfied with the work you've done so far? Do you feel like you have made a difference?
4) Surely you have made some mistakes; how did you resolve them and move on?
5) What are the greatest difficulties you have faced, and how did you overcome them?
6) It can be challenging to balance work and personal life. Do you feel that you spend too much time on your work/research, and not enough on yourself and your family?
7) Do you employ any time-management strategies to make you more efficient? If so, what are they?
8) Do you ever grow tired of what you do? How do you rekindle that passion if/when it begins to flicker?
9) Have you ever considered dabbling in other fields? Which other occupations interest you?
10) Finally, do you have any advice for people looking to pursue careers similar to your own?

Resource of the Day 3/10/14

I intended to include this resource a while back, but I was previously unable to find it online. I happened to stumble across a copy of it this weekend while I was completing the Benchmark assignment, so I figured I would throw it up now.

A few years ago, Nidhya Logeswaran and Joydeep Bhattacharya performed an experiment where they showed a test group images of faces while simultaneously exposing the participants to music. Their results are outlined by this publication.  

BENCHMARK (Remix of What I've Done So Far)

"What am I passionate about? What do I want to do?": This is the first of six questions that my peers and I were to answer five weeks ago while initially choosing our Masterpiece Project topics and beginning to research them. When this question was first posed in class, I looked around me and observed writing utensils casually scratching at paper all around the room, indicating that nearly everyone had some idea what they wanted to do, both for their projects, and their lives; this is as it should be. Each of us must have something that we are deeply passionate about, right? Unfortunately, I have never been able to personally confirm that statement. While most everyone else answered the question "What do I want to do?" with natural triviality, my pen never touched paper; for I was faced with the exact question that I have spent the majority of my life attempting answer without even approaching success. The preceding years of failure made it clear that the likelihood of me spontaneously producing an answer on my own was slim or none, so I came and saw Dr. Preston at lunch to see if he could work his magic and give me some ideas. Sure enough, only a few minutes later, I walked out of the room with feelings of clarity and excitement towards my project that I would have never thought possible prior to having that conversation. As a starting point, Dr. Preston had me rattle off some of my interests from before school got its sapping hooks into me, and we determined that, cultivated by a long-standing family culture of surfing and diving, the ocean is the closest thing to a passion that I have. There's something about being out there and feeling the power of the waves--the incessant crashing and gurgling sounds slowly washing away the rest of the world--lips tasting of salt, eyes and nose burning from duck-diving seemingly endless sets of waves; a "saltwater cleansing" as my dad calls it. And that got me thinking: When else do I experience that sort of rapture/elation? While listening to a 'moving' piece of music immediately came to mind - "the music chills". It also hit me that, although induced by different circumstances, what I described is the same sort of sensation that artists/musicians report after creating a new piece, and that athletes report as "being in the zone".  So, I took that fantastic sensation and applied it universally, thus yielding "The Science of Stoke".

Personally, for me, music is the most common inducer of that type of the sensation, so I began my research there. Upon looking into, in my exact words, "how physical processes are able to have such a profound effect on our moods/emotions (i.e. being 'moved' by art or music, or being elevated to an almost euphoric state while performing a favorite activity)?", I discovered that, as I suspected, emotion-charged, 'moving' music can trigger the release of dopamine in the listener's brain. This "reward chemical" explains the physical pleasure that occasionally coincides with listening to music; a phenomenon commonly referred to as "the music chills". The emotional connection that is said to cause this release of dopamine was left unspoken for, however, raising a new question: How does music arouse, if not induce, certain emotions in the listener? After finding not even an attempted explanation where it seemed that this information should fit in the resources I was looking at, I foresaw a substantial roadblock in the form of the aforementioned question. Unfortunately, my trepidation was realized, and I encountered more difficulty here than anywhere else in my project thus far. Phenomenology, the blend of psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy that aims to study conscious experience through the perspective of the "experiencer", is an incredibly difficult field that is tasked with taking on some of the most daunting problems in modern science (i.e. David Chalmers' "hard problem of consciousness"), and it just so happens that the answers I was seeking fall under that domain. So while, sadly, I did not find any magical resources that resolve the mysteries underlying conscious thoughts, feelings, sensations, experiences, etc., I did find enough information to put together a partial account of which elements of music seem to have the greatest effect on a listener's emotions and the pleasure that he/she experiences as a result, although the "why" and the "how" are still missing. Two main ideas that I came across stood out: firstly, Paul Bloom's idea that we derive our feelings about things not solely from what they are, but also from what we believe them to be (or what they are to us); and secondly, that the technical components of music--pitch, rhythm, intensity, tempo, etc.--all relate in one way or another to human communication and movement, effectively rendering music a form of "emotional language" (as outlined by Mark Changizi in this article). While not a complete explanation by any means, ideas such as these are moving us in the right direction in terms of figuring out why music "speaks to us" the way it does, though the true answers surely will continue to elude us so long as we fail to understand subjective experience in virtue of itself.    

It was at this point that my topic took a relatively drastic shift. I realized that my research was growing redundant, both in that the answers to my questions we becoming fewer and farther in between, and especially in that, as I mentioned in my essay a couple weeks ago, any sort of practical application of my research appeared doubtful, which was cause for concern when thinking about delivering a final product in June. So, with this in mind, I slightly augmented my topic. Dr. Preston had just recently introduced me to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's theory of flow, which quickly became the object of my research. It was immediately apparent to me that the midpoint at which my initial path of inquiry and my new/current one intersect is, quite simply, happiness. So the topic of my project then became human pleasure and happiness. This more general topic enabled me to tie my research together without anything seeming out of place, and it will allow me more freedom in the future for researching and applying what I find. What's more, thinking back on that surfing scene that led to the initial, epiphanic birth of my topic, it is clear to me that it was actually a flow experience, even though I didn't even know about flow at that point. So it turns out that a sizable portion of my initial inquiry has been satisfied by the information I've obtained with my new one - funny how things turn out. 

Anyways, I am now looking into human pleasure and happiness in general, with flow being my primary focus. I am not going to go into too much detail on flow here because I am currently reading Csikszentmihalyi's book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, for this semester's second literature analysis (I know it's super late...) and have already included nearly everything I would write here in that assignment, which I hope to have finished and posted within the next few days. It would not be fair to even mention something without at least providing a definition, though, especially since this is supposed to be a remix of everything I've done, so I will include this much: Flow is a mental state that can occur when a person is working towards a clear and inherently rewarding goal that requires roughly the same amount of skill that that person possesses. Flow is characterized by absolute focus/immersion (often to the extent that a person experiencing flow will lose track of what time it is, forget to eat, etc.), greatly increased performance/productivity, and inexplicably deep  momentary enjoyment accompanied by a notable increase in long-term happiness (again, I have explained Csikszentmihalyi's arguments on this matter in much greater detail in the literature analysis that will hopefully follow this post very soon).

While I have been collaborating with several other individuals/groups, this "remix" tells the story of where I'm at with my own project. As of now, I have not gotten past the idea/research stage, though I do believe I'll be ready to start making something happen soon. The only question is, how can I take the information I gather and construct something meaningful with it?      

Resource of the Day 3/6/2014

I wanted to keep my resources consolidated to make them as convenient to follow as possible so, up until this point, I have been posting them in a single post entitled "Research Progression". Unfortunately, I neglected the fact that the post would get buried over time and eventually become irrelevant... Also, I have admittedly fallen behind on my research and haven't added anything in quite a while, so I feel that a fresh start is in order. From now on, I will be posting each day's resource in its own post as I've seen some of my peers do.

Here is this weekend's: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pleasure/

This monstrous Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry outlines pleasure from a philosophical standpoint. I haven't read the entire thing yet, but this lengthy and comprehensive bit is the most promising resource I've found in a while; I imagine that its enormous works cited page will keep me busy for a while.