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Free Thinking

I have always wondered and I once did a philosophy course and I am not sure whether i started my wondering after the philosophy course or before but anyway, I have wondered how we learn to look at things? Do all of us look at things in the same way? Why is it that a bird is always a bird for everyone? Is that what we thought when we were babies? See when I was a kid i always asked myself if purple was purple for everyone. Did everyone look at purple and see purple? Or do we associate what we see and are told is purple tend to start associating the name with what we see.

Of course after the philosophy course I know the vocabulary to use, at least some of it, to discuss these 'kind of issues' but using language of a discipline limits thinking in how we ought to think when dealing with 'such a subject'. So you wonder then about university disciplines and the tunnel they provide for your thinking by the language and research methods. They are pretty much standardized. Why stop at University. It starts right at elementary school doesn't it when we say 'a for apple'. If you watch movies and follow them intelligently you can see how in different phases they moulded public opinion and created 'popular' culture. Of course I am talking here specifically of Hollywood influence.

The question that I ask myself time and again is whether to accept this secondary derivation of knowledge (as i call it)or resist this onslaught? But at what stage do we resist it? When we are kids and are taught 'a for apple' or later when we were learning at school in Pakistan that Hindus were some sly human species or even later when we were told that all knowledge can be neatly divided into disciplines like history, philosophy, theology, biology etc. When do we start resisting? But I think an even greater question is not when to resist but whether at all to resist because if not this form of acquiring knowledge then what form? Is any other form possible? Is return to the point before apple was tasted possible? Or are we doomed?

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