Bias and Original Thought

Note: Sorry about the long hiatus, but I can't seem to maintain a schedule well. I'll try to get some posts running and the blog back on track soon. For now, I hope you enjoy this post.

Bloom's taxonomy is a simple presentation of the cognitive heirarchy in learning, and the higher processes represent a more refined and deeper understanding of an idea or subject. We begin with the base of the pyramid, which involves a rote memorization and basic memory of the subject involved, a fact collection stage. After this the understanding, application and other stages which are more or less self explanatory from their names. But the pinnacle of this pyramid is creation, which represents the deepest level and highest cognitive process that can be called upon when we are using the fundamental ideas we have gathered at the fact collection stage. This also involves a great deal of understanding the facts and also their interplay with different scenarios and facts.

Bloom's Taxonomy

But even with all that, even at the highest stage of creating, there is an inherent dependence in the facts learnt at the bottom of the pyramid. And in fact collection there is a great deal of prejudices and opinions that are gathered too. And the inherent problem in this is that, unconsciously, we become conduits for ideas, and opinions of other people. What we call as identity is simply degraded into a mere confluence of ideas and emotions that have been collected over the span of a person's education or lifetime. In such a situation, where does original thought exist? How many of us present the ability to express an idea that is truly original and not born out of the many prejudices and influences that have made their impression on our mind?

Perversity of Beauty

Note: Please understand that the blog entries do not intend to and cannot describe everyone in general. They are only indicative of certain trends and the entries are usually clear about what they seek to comment on. And in my opinion, I'd call this article juvenile, but something I still wanted to put out.

Beauty can hardly be construed as something that inheres completely in the object beheld, but it could completely be confined to the realm of perception itself. Beauty isn't just a simple perception or an amalgamation of thoughts, beauty is better described as an emotion. And that makes it all the more harder to give it a form and definition. But even if you can't see the wind blow, you can see the leaves rustle in it. And beauty is better judged by the mark it leaves on a man than on absolute terms.

And the perversity of beauty I speak of is less a perversity of the object but the perception attached to it and it's present incapacity for subtlety. and for depth. A story would illustrate the point well, though I don't remember the source.

In an art gallery a man was looking intently at a painting of a beautiful, young and incidentally naked woman. An old woman who passed it by remarked that it was a very vulgar thing to display to which the man coolly said, "The vulgarity of the painting, madam, is in your eyes".