Hoo boy, like I really have time for this when I should be finishing my metaphysics midterm paper... (both the story I'm about to relate, in condensed form, and the telling of the story). I'll keep it very brief. I guess it won't work out to so much of a story as me reviewing my thoughts, because I am not 100% sure what I think should happen yet. Anyway. I can't get too sleepy before I have to determine how coherent the paper is as I cut out a page and fill in some fuzzy bits!
We are (probably) on the verge of kicking someone out of the prison program for transgressing some rules. After tonight's class we took him into our own ad hoc kangaroo court in order to try and suss out whether he would continue to threaten our program or not. I and my co-facilitators all had our own various levels of conviction that he should be kicked out. I was a close second in that old witch-hunting feeling to the facilitator who has actually dealt with the guy personally in prison. That's unusual; generally speaking I've learned that when anyone in the class comes up and asks for some special rule-bending treatment, I have to refer them to the other facilitators because I'll just say okay to anything anyone asks. But tonight I got to play a bit more of a bad cop than I generally do.
There are some hard-set rules about what we do and do not talk about with the tutees, and how we conduct ourselves in there. The topic of conversation part is easy: conversation is acceptable if and only if it is about the educational material we are helping with. The conduct part is pretty easy too: in general, be professional. Okay, that's vague, but the part that matters is not. Physical contact is okay if and only if it's a terrorist fist bump. There's one way to go right, and a million shades of ways to go wrong. ("Okay, we accidentally touched. Acknowledge and move on." versus "We are slapping each other's backs and giving neck massages.") Likewise with conversation.
This guy, who hates our rules and calls them "inhumane" broke all that. Spent a half hour talking about "How did you get here? How do you guys treat rapists? Tell me more about what you are saying about the interracial dynamics in prison. What are you doing when you get out?" etc. Made the other tutors uncomfortable, and if a guard or the principal had seen that, we'd be ass-out in the wind.
Talking tonight, I felt like he was a bit disingenuous, and rather manipulative. As though we hadn't gone on for a month at the start of the program about what was and what wasn't acceptable. Yeah, I guess basically I don't feel much reassured--and yet that seems to require that I think he was lying to my face, and I'm not sure that he was. You know, ESL and all that, maybe some of the nuances didn't get through. His apparent barrage of challenges to, say, the handshaking rule didn't receive what was a convincing rationale to him, so he seemed to blow it off, and was slippery in discussing how things went down.
There had been some friction the previous week, but I guess it was just another debate about whether we are inhumane for not shaking hands or something. That softens the story a little--I'd gotten to think that he was a repeat offender and it was all over for him. Maybe he'll be better if we let him back in? But the other tutors were quite uncomfortable. Anyway, I have to stop thinking about this and start thinking about a posteriori necessary truths, specifically the statement, "heat is molecular motion."
See? That was brief.
Isn't heat considered the final, and most useless, stage of molecular motion? That's the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
ReplyDeleteWhat does entropy have to do with philosophy in your world? I ask because the SLoT and the ADP/ATP mitochondrial process both had huge impacts on my world view development. Some people have visions of the Christ. Some see burning bushes. I read "Entroy increases," and something in my universe shifted.
Entropy qua entropy doesn't have much of anything to do with philosophy, that I can think of. I'm sure there's plenty of things to say about it in the philosophy of science, but that's not what's going on here. In this case, the interest is in a theoretical claim of identity--that heat is to be identified with a certain kind of molecular motion. Whether that claim was actually correct is beside the point (though it sounds about right to me), rather what's at stake is whether, given that such a statement of their identity is true, it is necessarily true. As some metaphysicians would say, it is necessarily true just in case it is true in all "possible worlds." And then you can argue about what it means to talk about possible worlds. On the view in question, a possible world is basically a stipulation of what properties might have obtained in the world, i.e., an abstract entity, a maximally specific description of the way things might have been. And so all this question is asking is, if we (in the actual world) identify heat with a certain type of molecular motion, must we maintain that identity across all possible worlds, or might it be coherent to talk about a world in which heat was not in fact to be identified with average kinetic energy of molecules in an area?
ReplyDeleteI certainly appreciate the wackiness of mitochondria--our little creatures-within-a-cell. And I appreciate, in vague ways, some of the wonders of cellular replication. But it's been a while, so I don't remember what SLoT, f'rinstance, is. Kindly expound upon your world view's development!
Okay, I may have to concede to the constant teasing and admit that have a lingering acronym addiction from my days with The Dark Side.
ReplyDeleteSLoT=Second Law of Thermodynamics. I assume that's what you're asking, right? Just in case I'm really confused, the SLoT states that Entropy increases. Long version (out of my ass and not properly googled) is that energy is neither created nor destroyed, merely changes state/form, and ultimately dissipates into heat--which is the lowest state of energy, involving just sort of *buzzing* molecules.
It would be funny if I had this all wrong. Funny, tragic, and typical.
As to your paper, I can now relate as I had a conversation in a bar about something like this one time. It was about whether a table was a table in all contexts, or if it ceased to be a table when taken out of our frame of reference (earth and physics as we currently perceive it).
It sounds much fancier and smartier when you say it. And it probably is.