Resurrecting UP College Baguio 1996-? (or: Pavlov VS Skinner, Round 1)
As a great person once said: “The only thing constant in this world is change.”
True this phrase is repeated often enough and, with all certainty, will be truer tomorrow than today. However, to be able to present this in the most precise and valid way possible (which of course is oh so applicable to our post-UP situation), we must do so in a quasi-hermeneutical perspective (psych 180, anyone?) [albeit, hermeneutics the mark-way ; )].
We time travel to the past by resurrecting memories of old, comparing new situations with history in feeble attempts to remain in the past. To live in that bygone glory, to feel as we once felt and to live as we once lived. We strive to achieve this sense of reality by altering our logic. We fall into the simple trap of misconceiving our own perception. Forming a virtual sift for segregating reality.
The simple S-R model of Ivan Pavlov, as embodied in Classical Conditioning, can greatly explain this and thus, inadvertently overly simplifying this inherent process.
We come face to face with various situations that force us to compare with our recent past that after awhile this becomes a conditioned response for us. That after a period of time of unconsciously deceiving our reality we become nostalgic of the past, bitter of the present, and wary of the future. We are forced in automatically believing that in the past the grass was greener, the sky was bluer, and we got through everything through hardwork and perseverance.
But it is in this cyclical reaction, our reminiscing, do we stay grounded. Remain as our true selves, unfazed by change, unfrazzled (hey! I know this word doesn’t exist just don’t dis my artistic license in writing this piece) by time. Where we remain true to our ideals… uncompromising… unbending. It is in our incessant comparison with the past, do we make sense of the constant bombardment of time against our very own persona. It is this continuous battle with time where we must remember in order to stay aloft regardless of change… we must remember in order to cope and survive in the process.
Thus life can be more so comparable to B.F. Skinner’s model. A model where in we are not mindless, pre-cognitive individuals, a model where we seek to reason and voluntarily react to whatever stimuli is brought upon us. Thus reacting to change in the most humanly way possible (the only way possible), by way of assessing new data by sorting through whatever available past experience we can hopefully tally with and make sense of the current situation.
Tabula Rasa, they say. And this is definitely more applicable to us. For we are not just vessels of innate yearnings and instincts, we are basins of potential and sponges of intelligence…
The past will remain past, the future impenetrable. As time goes on, we move on. But as we change with time, we must always remember a bygone era, an infinitesimal epoch of our mundane and sedentary existence… a time we spent in UP College Baguio. Where we can readily affirm and take to heart that when we talked about classical and operant conditioning, we were doing so in order to understand the dynamics of learning and not in trying to elucidate questions in perception and humanity… ; )
True this phrase is repeated often enough and, with all certainty, will be truer tomorrow than today. However, to be able to present this in the most precise and valid way possible (which of course is oh so applicable to our post-UP situation), we must do so in a quasi-hermeneutical perspective (psych 180, anyone?) [albeit, hermeneutics the mark-way ; )].
We time travel to the past by resurrecting memories of old, comparing new situations with history in feeble attempts to remain in the past. To live in that bygone glory, to feel as we once felt and to live as we once lived. We strive to achieve this sense of reality by altering our logic. We fall into the simple trap of misconceiving our own perception. Forming a virtual sift for segregating reality.
The simple S-R model of Ivan Pavlov, as embodied in Classical Conditioning, can greatly explain this and thus, inadvertently overly simplifying this inherent process.
We come face to face with various situations that force us to compare with our recent past that after awhile this becomes a conditioned response for us. That after a period of time of unconsciously deceiving our reality we become nostalgic of the past, bitter of the present, and wary of the future. We are forced in automatically believing that in the past the grass was greener, the sky was bluer, and we got through everything through hardwork and perseverance.
But it is in this cyclical reaction, our reminiscing, do we stay grounded. Remain as our true selves, unfazed by change, unfrazzled (hey! I know this word doesn’t exist just don’t dis my artistic license in writing this piece) by time. Where we remain true to our ideals… uncompromising… unbending. It is in our incessant comparison with the past, do we make sense of the constant bombardment of time against our very own persona. It is this continuous battle with time where we must remember in order to stay aloft regardless of change… we must remember in order to cope and survive in the process.
Thus life can be more so comparable to B.F. Skinner’s model. A model where in we are not mindless, pre-cognitive individuals, a model where we seek to reason and voluntarily react to whatever stimuli is brought upon us. Thus reacting to change in the most humanly way possible (the only way possible), by way of assessing new data by sorting through whatever available past experience we can hopefully tally with and make sense of the current situation.
Tabula Rasa, they say. And this is definitely more applicable to us. For we are not just vessels of innate yearnings and instincts, we are basins of potential and sponges of intelligence…
The past will remain past, the future impenetrable. As time goes on, we move on. But as we change with time, we must always remember a bygone era, an infinitesimal epoch of our mundane and sedentary existence… a time we spent in UP College Baguio. Where we can readily affirm and take to heart that when we talked about classical and operant conditioning, we were doing so in order to understand the dynamics of learning and not in trying to elucidate questions in perception and humanity… ; )
posted by silver surfer at 2:52 PM
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