This is a project I'm doing for my "Freewill and Determinism" class at college. I'm trying to get the opinions of non-philosophers (as well as philosophers). Please check it out and send it around! Thanks! (if the quiz doesn't appear, please visit this link.

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Commencement Speech

This is a speech I gave as the Distinguished Student when I got my Associates Degree:

Hello teachers, staff, fellow students, and parents and friends of fellow students. I’d like to thank my parents, P and E, for my existence and their love support, along with my grandmother B, who did so much to foster my intellectual development, and my grandparents C and C, all of whom provided me with so much love, knowledge, and support, and who I can’t leave out since they are sitting in the audience. I’d also like to give a shout out to my brother, M, and all my friends. And thank you, faculty and staff of NVCC, President Daisy Cocco De Filippis and Dean Mitch Holmes, for giving me this education, and this honor. I must admit I feel vaguely like Obama accepting the Nobel Peace Prize: I’m not entirely sure why I should have been chosen over any other student, and I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge all my fellow students who have worked and continue to work hard, both inside and out of class.
So, I should probably tell you all a bit about myself. I was homeschooled since the beginning of my education: I never went to public or private school. Mostly unschooled, I was free to pursue whatever I was interested in, although my parents certainly required that I learn certain subjects that may not interest me as much as others. But it wasn’t hard: I loved gathering information. I would wake up in the morning to a pile of assignments on the table: when I was done, my schoolday was done, which could take as little as a few hours or as much as several days. If I needed help, I would ask them.
However, there was a point where my parents could no longer help me the way they had, specifically in math. They reached a point where they were only giving me the odd-numbered questions out of textbooks, since those were the ones that had answers in the back. So when I was thirteen I started taking classes here, well, not here, but at NVCC. We chose NVCC not only because of the beautiful campus and the caring, professional atmosphere we felt from the staff, but also because of the school’s adept system for dealing with homeschoolers. I was not to be treated any differently from any other student: teachers didn’t even have to know my age (fortunately, at thirteen, I could pass for much older than I was). I only took College Algebra the first semester, but after that I started taking other classes that appeared interesting, and even though I still considered myself homeschooled, my education pretty much entirely took place at NVCC.
Perhaps it is just my own temperament, but I have had no bad classes at NVCC that I can think of. A couple weren’t excellent, but none were terrible. Most all of the teachers I have had cared about teaching, and were often thrilled to have a student as talkative and interested in the material as I was. This is probably a good time to mention some of the teachers who meant a lot to me. I almost feel bad about doing so: if I had a could without boring you, I’d mention every single teacher I had. But there are a few that come to mind: Sandra Pettinico and Anthony Prushnicki, the teachers I alternated between during my four semesters of trig and calculus, both clear, fun, and engaging, and the latter the most hilariously curmudgeony person I’ve known. Students of higher level Calculus definitely constitute something of an exclusive club, and my relationship with my fellow students and these two teachers probably constitute my closest and most favorite times in the classroom. Patricia Pallis, my English 102 teacher who through her love of my work helped me realize my abilities as a writer. Peter Benzi, my physics II teacher, with his dry humor and his intelligence. Richard Gard, head of the music department, who’s, well, you have to know him, and Kirsten Peterson, my infinitely patient one-on-one music composition teacher. Christine Mangone, head of the theater department, who I’ve never taken a class with come to think of it but who has been a wonderful, patient, caring director in the two shows I’ve done with her. And I’ll also add two teachers who aren’t at the school anymore: Mark Priest, my Music Theory II teacher, and Ed Wierzbicki, my Acting I and II teacher.
NVCC has prepared me for the rest of my education. It allowed me to explore my interests at an early age, which I certainly did to, some might say, excess: I have after all been a nearly full-time (I was usually a few hours short) student here for 5 years, and only got the last two requirements for a Liberal Arts degree out of the way this last semester. I have made friends, and even those friendships that didn’t last beyond the end of classes were some of the closest relationships with other human beings I’ve ever experience. I’ve had the opportunity to be in numerous shows, which is wonderful, since I never got that through school. This school has been my life for five years: it’s going to be hard for me to leave, although I take comfort in the fact that, being a student in both the theater and music departments, I’m just going to keep coming back, whether I want to or not. On the last day, I bought a large french-fries at the caf, and ate every single one, ‘cause as I’m sure you’re all aware, those things are ridiculous, and I may never have them again. I’m going to miss the friends who are still here. All in all, I’m going to miss this place.
So what now? I’ll continue learning. I have always felt that knowledge is an end of its own. We are, as human beings, incredibly lucky to be able to understand the world around us, and to take it’s materials and create something new. We are, as Carl Sagan said, a way for the cosmos to know itself. I have always felt that with these abilities that we are, as humans, lucky enough to have comes a responsibility, and responsibility to understand, to think, to create. Doing otherwise, we are turning our back on the universe that created us, and provides us with life and infinite mysteries to be discovered and explored. There is, I think, to much beauty in knowing to not know. However, not all are going to be interested in, or even capable of, this pursuit of knowledge. But if we are to learn more, we, as a species, must survive, and this survival is the responsibility of all. We must feed eachother, care for eachother, entertain eachother, understand eachother. As Carl Sagan also said, if you disagree with another human, let him be. In the entire universe you will not find another like him. I would add that if another human needs your help, help them, for once again, they’re like no other. This would be my message to all.
Thank you.

Sermon for Church: The Symphony of Science

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I did a paper last semester on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. As I continued to write the paper late into the night, what began as a last-minute attempt to squeeze out the minimum of 5 pages turned into a 10 page monster. I blame Beethoven. There were so many little things to pick up on, so many elegant ways in which everything fit together, in which the entire piece was planned. For some, perhaps, this would reduce the joy of the music. Not for me. For me, every time I hear that piece, it will mean even more to me. Understanding it makes it even more sublime.

Music has a peculiar power of the human spirit. It can make us feel things in ways nothing else can. Especially words. The most inane poetry can reach us deeply if made into music. I mean, really, “in the desert you can remember your name, ‘cause there ain’t no one for to give you no pain”? Because of its power, music has often been the vessel for important messages, that can resonate with you in entirely new ways. Such was the case when I first saw one of the videos of “The Symphony of Science”. I have always had a deep sense that there’s something profoundly spiritual about a scientific understanding of the natural world, yet when I watched “The Unbroken Thread” it hit me powerfully. It probably helped that it was near midnight. But also the words of scientists expressing their deep reverence for the universe, put to music, had a stunning effect.

This reverence is one I share. People have commented that the language I and those such as Carl Sagan use to describe our feelings about the universe are suspiciously similar to that used by religious people to describe their experience of god. They are absolutely right. The difference is that we take God out of the picture. Why can’t we admire the universe not because we view it as the work of God, but because it is simply something worth being admired? I feel that the natural, material world is so full of mysteries and beauty that it is almost a waste to concern ourselves with spirits and angels and gods. This is the hypothesis I’d like to put before you: that there is nothing beyond the natural, material world. No spirits, no gods, no karma, no qi. I call it a hypothesis because I honestly do not know enough to say for certain that such phenomena do not exist. But I want to show why, for me, they are unnecessary for filling the spiritual need.

Let’s start close to home. Really close to home, in fact. Let’s start in our heads. Put your fists together like this. Your brain is slightly lager than this. An utterly insignificant lump of jelly, when you get down to it. Yet there’s something bizarre about this lump of jelly: it contains you. Everything about you. All your memories, the maps of where you’ve been, your personality, your perception of me. It contains our ideas. If you are an artist, it produces your creations. If you are a writer, it is capable of inventing and keeping track of entire worlds, worlds with other personalities in them, vast fantasy landscapes contained within this small lump of matter. Think about it. Really think about it.

Think about how, when you look at the night sky, you are looking at the source of every particle in your body. Every ancient particle. You are made out of matter that has existed since nearly the beginning of time. You are constantly exchanging that matter with the universe around you. At a subatomic level, there is nothing, really, separating you and the rest of the universe. Think about how the little dots you see are stars many, many times, sometimes thousands of times larger than our earth, which is so huge we cannot even perceive it as round. Some ofwhat you see are galaxies, which are collections of billions of these starts, which look close together in a picture, but are really light-years apart. A light year is about 6 trillion miles.

Think about each individual cell in your body. The complex machinery, honed over years of evolution. And we can’t even see them. We are made of trillions of them. Think about all the other intricate machines that constitute life. (give examples)

Think about the pebble you kick down the street. How that pebble is also made of particles that have been around for nearly eternity. How it’s made of minerals that were forged in the collision of dust particles and rocks that created our earth, burped up from the inside of our earth, and hewed by billions of years of geology.

Think about a rainbow. How it is a product of photons produced by nuclear fusion deep within the sun, which take thousands of years to push their way to it’s surface, finally escaping and zipping across millions of miles of space, before colliding with water droplets in the atmosphere and getting refracted into all sorts of different wavelengths, then traveling through the air to your eyes, where the hit your retina and produce electrical sensations that travel to your brain and are perceived as color, and then spread out and activate your capacity for pleasure, for memory, for imagining the entire cosmic play I just described.

Some people are scared to think about it. For some reason, they believe that to understand beauty is to kill it. Those such as John Keats accuse Isaac Newton of unweaving the rainbow by explaining it. Why should discovering the intricate, elegant laws that underlie the world make it any less beautiful? If an artist attempts to portray the meaning of a rainbow, it is beauty: if a scientist attempts the same thing, it is somehow ugly. If someone can appreciate the wonder and beauty of a scientific worldview, they are somehow seen as a little weird: a nerd, an egghead. So many people don’t want to hear about the fascinating underpinnings of everything they experience, about the new ideas that scientists are constantly coming up with. The scientist is often the fool on the hill who sees the world going round, but who no one wants to listen to. I must admit, I am not entirely sure why. Because while people may think that because I live in a world understood it must be dull or dry, nothing could be further from the truth. I live in a world that constantly amazes and fascinates me. I am never without a source of stimulation if I want it: not when I can consider the mysteries of my brain, not when I can look at the sky and imagine space stretching out into infinity, with pricks of light that are galaxies incomprehensibly huge, not when I can feel my connection with everything around me. Not when I can look at the familiar as though it was unfamiliar, as something new and exciting. Science let’s us look a little more deeply into things. It isn’t a methodology or collection of facts. It’s an attitude. It’s an appreciation that beauty understood is even more beautiful. To understand the symphony of science is only to make it more sublime.