arm twisting

in the situation about arm twisting i think it really comes down to if you believe in the ends justifying the means. Im not really sure if i believe in doing something wrong to someone even if it does end up helping other people. What do you think?

puppy punting

although puppy punting obviously seems wrong to you and I, I don't really believe that it is morally wrong just because we believe that it is. I don't think that any one person can truly know what is morally wrong or right.

morality

In the example from the discussion board i believe that most people would be stopped from torturing a child by their morality. Most people have this sense of wrongdoing when they do something that they know isn't right. I think this is what makes us different from special cases where people do something really wrong like a serial killer, in most cases they know that what they are doing is wrong but they just don't feel bad about it and have no remorse.

milgram

the milgram experiment makes me think that the reason all of these people keep shocking the other person is because we have all been trained to listen to authority figures since we were little. Because this is definitly true in places like the military, why do some soldiers get in trouble for commiting war crimes if they were just following orders? is it really their fault when weve all been trained like this since we were born? Even if what they have been ordered to do is wrong is it really thier own fault and do they really have a choice??

Freedom

This week in class we talked about what it is to be free and if we really do have control over our lives. I think this is one of those questions that will never be able to be answered because there is no way to tell if for sure if someone makes a decision freely or if it has been predetermined by outside factors. Id like to think that i have control over my own life, but theres really no way to know for sure.

teltransportation is impossible

When we first started talking about the teletransporter, i thought that it definitely would be possible for someone to be transported to another planet, after being dissentegrated, and still be the same person. But after thinking about it a little longer i think that it would be impossible for someone using this teletransporter to be the same person on another planet. If the person using the teletransporter presses the button, but is dissentegrated only after the new body is made on the other planet it would be impossible for the "real" person to be embodied in the "new" body because then the person would have to be at 2 places at the same time. This is exactly the same thing that happens in the teletransporter example except only that the dissentegration is delayed. So therefore tele-transportation must be impossible. (except in Jumper , Willy Wonka, Star Trek, Heroes, and Back to the Future, )

The Mind vs. The Machine

This week in class we talked a lot about the difference between the mind and the brain and what things actually have a mind. I believe that if something has a mind the most basic characteristic of this is to be able to properly display emotions. This is what separates us from super computers, even with all the advancements in technology over the past decades no one has been able to replicate a machine that can display emotions quite like something with a mind. I'm really not sure if anyone will ever be able to do this either.