April 14, 2015 - 15:57
***this is a retroactive posting of an activity from class on February 5th, the first point is something I pulled from reading Coetzee's text and the rest are points made by classmates during our silent discussion***
+ presumably she was trying to… to say that rational accounts are merely a consequence of the structure of the human mind; that animals have their own accounts in accordance with the structure of their own minds, to which we don’t have access because we don’t share a language with them
= I often wonder what creatures would say if we could actually communicate
+ I think that much of what Costello was attempting to communicate was that we an’t know – but that we assume. The possibilities then are fairly infinite and how do we know they don’t have some way of understanding death and consciousness? Still I think Costello may have gone a bit far in putting thoughts into the heads of animals for them
= going off of that it seems to me that Costello wants to prove that humans assume and then try their hardest to rationalize their assumptions because they are mobile to live without reasoning
+ humans claim to be the most “knowledgeable” the most “evolutionarily advanced” but that is only within a human context (through the eyes of our own agenda) à other organisms are just as advanced as us, they have just evolved in different ways where “knowledge” and “language” aren’t measures of success
= there are a lot of things that we don’t know in this World. We don’t eve know if the laws + theories of the universe are even true. What know that it works. Anything that fits into the “bigger” picture of things, we choose to believe. We can’t be sure of anything. We can be sure of what’s happening in our lives, how we feel, how we act, or what we like, but not beyond that
+ are we even sure of what is happening in our lives? How well do you understand your own actions, their motivations and sources. For example, does EC understand what motivates her? “It comes our of a desire to save my soul” (pg 43)