Other

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aIGktLuyipHGoHVrLBH0CCUJ0KsYmQKxvNUhW1X_ypY/edit : Learning Plan

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEA18FAF1AD9047B0&si=MT7sj6HsKXpcsb4c My philosophy course I completed, called "Death with Shelly Kagan" 

Journal: Wk 6

Yesterday was the day where I practiced my German during the week and I did that for about two hours. And today is my Russian practice. I have also made my way up towards 73000 words in my novel I am writing. I learnt more formalities in German and different words in Swiss German. I am not that confident at German, because Russian is my main language, but German is about at the same level as my French, (a bit less than my French though). The French I do on the weekends. Demons is what I am reading along with the Idiot for my project. Demons is the most challenging but rewarding book by Dostoevsky for myself. My project is more along the lines of showing what I know about Dostoevsky’s works, rather than learning more things. I have started to improve at the violin a lot more. It is rather enjoyable to play the violin. I love playing my instruments and it is more of a hobby than a thing I find myself forcing myself to do. I had a writer's block around a week before, but recently it had gone away and I am writing to my heart's content. I can usually write faster if I am drinking tea, particularly sleepy time. 

A part of my book. 

“I know…You know what…come in now we should kill the time. Actually! I will get something special that will lighten the mood! Just for us. Go sit down on the sofa over there and I will go and get it! I wont be a minute…” Pierre announced as his face lit up before he went downstairs to fetch the certain thing he wanted. Jacques agreed and his face lit up as well. He was once again distracted from his responsibilities and concerns. He went into the study which consisted of a big wooden desk looking out a window in the middle of the back wall and with a sofa and an armchair with a coffee table between them, which was towards the left wall, contrary to the big book case on the right wall. The moon light directly shone through the window and lit up the room in an enchanting essence. Jacques sat on the sofa. The aforementioned desk had many books and paper on top of it, which almost consumed the whole desk. Jacques leant backwards to make himself more comfortable, almost boarding on slouching, and his head hit an object that was on the wall behind him. He stood up and observed the thing on the wall, (which he did not notice as he walked into the study room), but as his eyes adjusted, he realized that it was a painting, but his eyes still could not see it. He used his fingers to touch it and caressed the soft curves and bumps of the paint that made the painting he was touching. He could feel every single stroke of the painter who made it, while not knowing what the painting actually was because of the moonlight only shining in the middle part of the room, but not getting the painting on the wall of the left. Pierre came back. Jacques observed that he had something in his hands but couldn’t make it out from the other side of the study. “Give me one moment and I will come and sit with you Jacques.” 

Wk 7

Yesterday in my novel I reached the 80000 word count and for that I am rather happy, (at least in regards to my writing). My book is coming along very nicely in my opinion and I am very proud of what I have so far, (even though I am not half way through it). Today is my Russian day, (when I practice Russian), and I am working on a lot of verbs and getting a wide repertoire of them and getting used to the verb conjugation system, which is rather rewarding because I am getting very used to it. Tomorrow I will be doing my German Practice. I am happy with my project work and I am in the middle of his biography. I have been mainly reading “Demons” by Dostoevsky and have been rather happy while reading it because I am utterly loving it and it is also for my project. I am not doing War and Peace as a book review because my entire project just consists of book reviews. 

Wk 7

I reached 84000 words in my book yesterday and the whole thing is coming together very well. I also forgot to mention that i finished my Philosophy course I did on youtube with Shelly Kagan. It took me 23 hours to complete. In preparation for my senior project. The biggest thing I got out of it was the thought process of Philosophical analysis.

Wk 8

Yesterday I reached the 100,000 word count in my novel I am writing at the moment. I am very happy that I have achieved that goal and I am also very content with the progress I have made with the book as well. I have completed 8 books in my project so far and I have made great progress on that subject as well and I am pretty much completely ready, although I may get a couple more books done before the project begins next week. 

Lacan Article:

The mirror stage was formulated and constituted in its first forms in the early 1930s by Lacan and was first presented at the 14th congress of the international psychoanalytic association (IPA) in 1933. In the seminar he presented, he outlined the basic forms of the mirror stage, but the ideas were not received well by his peers and was interrupted and it was called off.

The "Mirror Stage" was heavily inspired by the earlier work of the French psychologist Henri Wallon, who made his infantile theories of self-recognition based on his observation of human babies and chimpanzee babies watching their reflections in the mirror. Wallon noticed that at a certain age of the child's maturation, and the maturation of the chimpanzee, they both seem to recognize some type of image in the mirror. This age was about six months. But the difference between the baby humans and the baby chimps is that the chimpanzees tend to lose interest in the image that they see in the mirror. But the human babies do not lose interest and start to explore the boundaries between their body and the image and start to map out, in a certain sense, their own bodies. Lacan took this non-Freudian idea and put his own psychoanalytic twist into it and popularized it.

In simple terms, the mirror stage is when a subject reconsiders themselves in the mirror, reflection, phone, doesn't matter, and makes the connection between being this thing they see in the reflection and developing some sense of them as a person...But for Lacan this is a much more important event in one's life. The mirror stage is a fundamental part of being human, but it also marks a tragic moment in subjectivity, that being the moment when the subject recognizes and identifies their whole being hood with what they are not. What the "not" is referring to means the body, and namely we are not the body. (It is also good to know about Lacan's mirror stage that it had changed a lot from when he first alchemized it, to the later stages of his life, the difference being that he changed his view on the mirror stage from being a certain event in one's life as an infant, into being a part of everyday life in the permanent and everlasting structure of subjectivity.) What the mirror stage also shows is that there is not a strong sense in knowing your body as it truly is and in the case of using a reflection of a mirror as the image based on yourself, you never see certain parts of your body often, that being for example, the back of your head and a different perspective of yourself. This disjunction between your real body and your idea of what you think your body is creates a misidentification with who you really are and what you think your body is. If you are going to take one thing out of the mirror stage, just remember that it is saying that your body is basically a different entity than what you perceive every day and what you base your ego and image off. Again, I will say Your body is not you. A clear example of our bodies not being truly us are individuals who identify as transgender or non-binary. These people’s experiences can show us how the body can be disconnected from who we really are, and how the body is not a coherent entity that is a flawless system. These individuals (I am not claiming to know anything about the experience of being a transgender individual) are alienated from their bodies because their bodies are quite literally not their real beinghood, and their mind was misplaced with the wrong sex to be born into.

Now I will take your attention back towards the idea of a child finding misidentifying with who they truly are. First, picture this particular scenario of the child: A child is perched on its mothers chest and it is in a rather loud environment. Maybe a plane would fly by them and then maybe someone ends up dropping some plates on the ground which smash to pieces. Then the baby would also have maybe an excruciating stomach-ache and their left leg would be numb and they could not feel it. So, with all of these external and internal stimuli I will posit an important question, that is: how does the infant know the difference between all of these internal and external sensations happening in and out of its body? How would they even know that the sounds outside themselves are external things happening outside of the body. They can’t. The baby would not tell the difference and one would think that they would be thinking that the sounds outside of their body, maybe loud sensations, would be happening inside them. Now what about the stomach ache? How would the infant know that the stomach ache is occurring inside their body? How does this child tell the difference between sensations being separate from themselves, those occurring from another source such as another human creating a sensation for them to experience, and the sensations that are occurring from within themselves, such as a headache and the aforementioned stomach ache that I asked you to imagine. Now how did we as, I assume being not babies, come to tell the difference between these sensations, what is the difference between sensations happening from within and those that occur from outside ourselves. Now I would like you to think of another question I will convey. That is, when a baby, a very infantile one, would be lying on its back with all of its chubby legs flailing about, how would they be able to know the fine line between their body and the outer world? (Everything other than the body). How would they know what their body is and what isn’t their body? Their own body image at that point would be so alien-like and confusing, literally, their limbs would appear as if they were alien things separate from their body, acting on their own accord and moving by themselves. Because of their infantile knowledge of the body, they would not be able to tell the difference between what their body is not and what is their body. Now think of the mirror stage of a mapping out of the body and all of its landmarks. What the mirror stage tells us, is that the child learns to map itself out and explore the boundaries of its body. Now all at the same time of all of this extremely fast maturation and naïve exploration, the parent, whoever it may be, would be telling this child that this is you, that this poor image reflected in the mirror is you, (referring to the child.) But what this does is transmogrify the child’s life all the way until they are an adult making them think that the body is them. But all the recognition in the mirror does is make the subject (subject meaning anyone), alienate themselves from the image, because the image of ourselves is not a coherent one and the way our bodies truly are as the form in itself are not shown in the mirror nor the ideal image that everybody knows of themselves. It makes a distortion between us as we think we are and the body how it is really without our idealized perspective of it, this I mentioned before. Lacan’s theory is also saying that we make an ego based on our image as we see it, not how the image really is in its multiple formats and perspectives, but in the way we want ourselves to look in our most unalienating form and the way which we feel most at home with. But I do not want to talk too much about how the image provides us with an ego, I will possibly come to that later, but I will drop it now, but it is very important in Lacanian theory. I will now talk more about how the body is not what we think it is and will start with a really great example from Kafka’s magnum opus novella “The Metamorphosis”. Now really the plot of the book doesn't really matter but its main themes I will describe. Franz Kafka’s book is a symbolist novella about his own alienation from society. The book immediately opens with his magnificent prose describing the following:

“One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous vermin. He lay on his armor-hard back and saw, as he lifted his head up a little, his brown, arched abdomen divided up into rigid bow-like sections. From this height the blanket, just about ready to slide off completely, could hardly stay in place. His numerous legs, pitifully thin in comparison to the rest of his circumference, flickered helplessly before his eyes.”

The novel follows the aforementioned man who has metamorphosed into a terrible insect. It follows his consequent alienation from his family, who held him so dearly before the conundrum. And the novella even finishes with him being practically murdered by his father and left to rot in the dusty room he was locked in with his despondent state of mind. Throughout the whole novella he tries to convince his family that he is really Gregor, but I won’t linger on the plot. In many parts of the novel, he is described in the novel in certain ways of not being able to use the new body he is in, and not being able to control it properly and failing all the time.

Now bring your attention back towards the second infantile example I conveyed, the one of the baby flailing about with its alien-like limbs it was born with, being unable to properly use its body. This example perfectly coincides with the Franz Kafka Novella. The novella is about the meaningless and absurd state of how the world runs with a focus on personal identity and alienation from society, and if I apply that to how we are just born into a body with contradictions rather absurd conundrums, you can see how the mirror stage shows us in an art form how the body is an alienating thing. We are born into an alien like and surreal world that is rather absurd if you look at things how they truly are. We murder each other because of such frivolous things like our skin color being different or what Gods we choose to worship, we have death factories for animals who are tortured and mutilated for our own benefit of a tasty meal, we spend the majority of our adult lives slaving away at a job for a boss we hate with a passion, and now in the world there is an entirely new epoch that is so new that only a generation ago it was not here, that being the internet and AI. We are born into a world full of contradictions and absurd things, we are literally born into this world that is so absurd if you really look at it how it really is. And to top it all off, we are born into an alienating body that we have to try and explore to get used to, so we can function properly as a subject, (I will tie in how the mirror relates to his theory later on.) To finish of the example of “The Metamorphosis” just think about how long it takes babies to actually be able to control the vessel they are born into. For human babies it can take almost 7 months to a whole year until they can just crawl around, and to walk it takes a baby about almost 18 months at the most. We are all born into this alienating vessel called a body and it is truly alienating if you really think about it, only until a child sees and identifies themselves in the mirror, do we as humans develop a certain sense of coherence with our body, but it will always be an alienating identity because the body will always not be us. Now, to go with the absurd nature of how we are born into these alienating vessels, and how it takes us years to maturate, just take one look at the animal kingdom and observe how quickly animals get used to their vessel’s in comparison to our own maturation. I will provide some examples. One is that foal’s (baby horses) can actually start walking and even trot an hour after their birth and then they will start nursing within two hours. A secondary example are blue whales who grow more than double their size in six months and grow on average about 13kg a day. Blue whales live up to 90 years in their life span. You can barely even measure how much a human grows each day because it is so small. The point is that we as humans have basically the slowest maturation out of the whole animal kingdom, and even compared with our fellow ancestors, such as chimpanzees, we stay in childhood more than double the amount of time that they are in it. But I am not trying to rant, I am just trying to paint a picture of how dependent we really are on our maturation process and how we actually have to discover our bodies and form an identity with ourselves, but in the process, we alienate ourselves from who we really are. If you are not yet convinced of the alienating essence of these vessels we are born into, I will show some more examples which are human related.

My favorite example is a well-known experiment called the body transfer illusion, or the fake arm experiment. Which goes as follows: someone is sitting down on a chair with one of their arms visible for them to see and feel, but the other arm is out of view, usually with a small blockade making it unobservable. But a fake arm is placed through a sleeve making it look like a real one. The experimenter strokes the person's real unobservable arm with a brush or whatever it may be, and at the same time they stroke the person's fake arm which they can see. Thus, making the person being experimented on think and really feel that this fake arm they have been given is their real arm, or it at least feels like it is. And in some instances, or maybe I just saw this in the one I watched a while ago, someone gets a big hammer and then smashes their fake arm to see how they would react. And it is quite interesting to see because they actually are taken aback by the hammer and sometimes jump out of their seats. The point of the experiment shows that people can literally be hacked into their brain into thinking that they have just been given a new limb. But the point of this example is that applied to the mirror stage theory and the concept of our body not being ours, is that we can literally be tricked into thinking that our body is something that it is not. This shows the true absurdity of the human body and how it is really not what we like to think it is. The body is not a coherent thing that is comfortable and normal to be in, it is only because we have gotten used to this vessel, we are born into that we have learned to make an identity and feel like this body is really us, because I have mentioned it profusely that we are not the body. If we boil it down to what the body really is as a thing separate from our minds interpretation of it, we get something similar to previously mentioned Kafka novella which shows the alienation in a raw way. Our bodies are not these coherent things, we have only convinced ourselves with our minds' perception of it that the body is us and does have coherence. If you really cut the conundrum down to its naked core, we can see what the body truly is, that is a lump of flesh that we walk around in and this flesh we call “us” or “me”. A lump of flesh that has many contradictions that comes with it, and in consequence of these palpable contradictions and flaws, we get alienated when we are confronted with our bodies in the form that we don’t like it to be in. For example, when one has a bad ache day and their whole face is covered in pimples, they feel alienated and dysphoric when confronted with the harsh reality of how their body just happens to look like in that state. Or when one injures themselves severely and their body doesn’t work how it normally would they are confronted with the fleshy reality of our bodies and are also reminded that our vessels are mortal things that can get hurt and can get broken, but we forget this a lot. When this happens to someone it challenges how they have perceived themselves to look like in their ideal form. When someone gets challenged by how their certain lump of flesh happens to take form on a certain day, they say something such as: “Oh! I had a bad hair day yesterday; it just wasn’t me.” An example like this shows us that we all as individuals have certain ways in which we prefer to look. We all have a certain way in which we want to be presented in our flesh vessels. Which is obviously a normal thing that people do. Humans just happen to prefer themselves in different ways, in our ideal way. Thus, once one happens to be confronted with how our bodies happen to look on a certain day, we get alienated and we are taken aback by it, because we think that there is an ideal form that we have. But this happens once we make an ego (who we think we are and what we hold as values) from our body and say that our body should be looking differently from what it happens to take a form into. We are challenged once our preconceived notions of who we truly are get challenged.

One common misconception about the mirror stage is that the body image that one makes of themselves from identifying in the mirror is a faulty image or fake image of yourself. But that is not true. The point is that having a body image gives us a lot of coherence and helps us make an identity, but boiled down to the main point Lacan is trying to say that there are a lot of faults in the image of who we think we really are. It is quite simple when you cut it down to its core and it comes to these two points.

·         A) Firstly, the experience of how we see and feel our body in an ideal form of how we want it to be and how our brain perceives it in a biased way.

·         B) And secondly the real and raw entity that is our body and how it really is without our identity and idea of what we think our body is.

These are the main ideas that make up the mirror stage. And I will provide you with some more examples of our body being an alienating vessel.

·         When one gets awfully ill and they are confronted with all different types of symptoms, and in this case, we take for granted how our body is in its healthy form and when it is working properly, but once we realize how our body can cause harm to our “mind” we want to go back to the normal state of our bodies.

·         When one gets too hot or cold, we realize that our body prefers to be in different temperatures and our whole body starts to perspire. But again, we also take this for granted when we are at an ideal temperature.

·         When you flip a camera around on a phone and you see how people really perceive your face it freaks you out. This is because we have an image of ourselves how we think we are, but for this example we don’t really ever see our face in its true form, because mirrors and phones are backwards. This shows how fragile our own image of ourselves truly is. So fragile that we are weirded out by our face being inverted, but we are weirded out by it because our whole image of our face is built upon mirrors or phones, which project a backwards image to us.

·         When someone shaves their hair off of their head their image has been so attached to this image of a person with hair that it looks alienating, and when we shave our heads, we sometimes forget that our hair was even shaved in the first place and we touch our head and are freaked out.

·         Our nose is clearly in view for our eyes yet we filter it out and we don’t even notice that it is there.

And so on and so forth, it will go forever if I list all of the examples of the body being a contradictory entity. One very common question about the mirror stage is: “What if the individual had never been in view of a mirror?” This is a good question, but assuming they have never been in view of any type of reflection or puddle and so on, the point of the mirror stage is that the mirror is showing an “Other” for us to base our ego off of. (The other means anything other than yourself, so other people and other presences.) But what the body image in the mirror actually acts as in the mirror is an “Other”. Because the child had not been subjected to seeing itself in this type of medium the mirror image acts as an Other (capital O for the Lacan term) because the body is a separate entity from us. The part of the mirror stage when the child actually looks into a mirror and identifies with itself is the part when the child is exposed to the Other. But because the mirror stage is about self-identification and finding an ideal image, it is using the Other to make the image. Thus, one can use another person as their image.

I will get back to how we use other people as our image, but first I will explain how we desire in relation to other people. We can see this in all of our modern consumerist society with advertisements with famous people promoting products and so on. This is called desire of the other and comes from the Lacan quote that reads: “Desire is the desire of the Other”. What he is saying in this quote (notwithstanding it can be interpreted in many ways) is that we want what other people want, or we desire what other people desire. We desire what other people want, we desire what society wants as an entity in itself, for example trends and fads occur because lots of people tell other people to do a certain thing and then the people make a whole identity as a full entity that tells other people what to want. The mirror stage is also, (as I said before) the coming to terms with the Other, (being an alienating body and the other people in the baby's household who act as aliens in themselves, because once the baby is born it is born into an absurd world with contradictions and with the Other.) Some examples of the Other’s desire is maybe because Margot Robbie wears a dress lots of people suddenly want to but the certain dress, or because when Ryan Reynolds drives a care in an advertisement it is suddenly seen as a care worth more than a normal car, which is a different Philosophical idea coined by Karl Marx called “Commodity fetishism” which is the relations between peoples and objects and when people evaluate objects to a higher level then what they are, which is what the example of Magot Robbie’s dress and Ryan Reynolds car. But what the desire of the Other does is, (in contemporary capitalist society) is elevate objects and commodities to almost ethereal level. This is because we prescribe value to things that are more than what the “thing” or “object” is. For example, (and I know lots of people would know this example), the Stanley cups fad that started on the internet, in which people ran into stores to get a pink thermometer cup. And in the act of getting this certain cup people started to riot and push past each other in order to buy the idiotic thing, and even camped outside stores. Now, for one second just think about what these people are doing, (which should not be very hard), these people are rioting for a Goddamn cup. It is purely absurd and hysterical that people riot to get a cup, notwithstanding you can just buy a cup and then drink your water and you won't get squashed in trying to buy it. It is delusion in its purest form. This delusion is just the desire of the Other. It is the Marxist idea of Commodity fetishism because people are lifting up a commodity to what it is not, namely a stupid cup into a God damn omniscient and godlike trinket, when you can just buy a cup from the store for like three dollars. I won’t linger on that absurd example anymore, but I will now apply it to Lacan. It is just how things can seem like normal things that are coherent and make sense, but if you think about it in what it truly is you can see the absurdity in the world, (which coincides with the two philosophical disciplines called “Absurdism” and “Existentialism”.)

Now back to the example of the baby in the absurd world of the Other’s desire. What the mirror stage claims is that we learn to desire from other people. In the moment of a premature baby a parent may ask them: “What do you want?” which is where we learn to desire things. But in this “What do you want?” There is a hidden layer to it, that being what the parent wants. In this you can imagine what the parent actually wants from their child and that maybe something that is contrary to what the child wants. This is another Lacanian concept which dabbles around the unconscious contradictions in our languages. When the parent is asking what the child wants, they learn that they can make noises that convey to the parent that they want something, but when the parent asks the child the aforementioned:
“What do you want?” the parent really wants to know what the child wants. And this ties in the unconscious layers of our languages, for example, when people who are…let's say less than friends…ask each other something along the lines of: “Oh! How are you going are you okay?” this seemly normal expression that our human languages convey has a hidden layer to it, the actual question in itself is “are you okay and how are you doing?” So, if one actually conveys how they truly feel to the person who asked them this, it would be quite an awkward interaction, but this shows the unconscious happenings of language and how we use it, (I mentioned the unconscious in my previous article, but it is the feelings and desires that linger inside us without any conscious knowledge, thus the title the unconscious.) But I will put the language in an example to show you how it truly works in the unconscious and how it relates towards desire.

“Oh, wow! I haven’t seen you in quite a while Bob! This is so great it is good to see you! We need to catch up! Don’t you think? Anyway…tell me how you are going.” Linda asked.

“…Well…no it is not good to see you. I actually hate you and I have dreaded the thought of seeing your abhorrent face again…And you ask how I am going…Well, my children have been taken away from me, my mother and father have died in a double car accident, and my wife wants to claim my house…So no. I am not well and I am quite terrible…And no I don’t think we need to catch up.” Bob somnambulantly remarked with a certain look of hatred in his eyes.

Now, in this example the fictional “Bob” answers (pretty much all of the questions) that Linda Inquired about, it was maybe a bit rude but he actually said how he truly felt in that response to his acquaintance. I mean you could probably label the character Bob an angry prick who has no knowledge of social cues, but did he really say anything weird at all? He merely answered all of the questions Linda asked, those being them not seeing each other in a while, the statement that it is good to see him, and her asking how he was going. He answered all of what she asked, but the hidden unconscious thing is this: her desire. She is an Other to Bob, and she is desiring something, her desire is to ask how he is going. But in that desire that is rather palpable in the speech when you think about, that being the question how are you, but there is something other than the question how are you, Bob? That thing is what she truly wants from him. Because Linda desires to know how he is going, she also desires an answer from him. That answer would be a good answer and that is how language works, she is confronted with his true feelings once he actually answers how he is feeling. This is the desire of the Other and how it would work in language. Now the aforementioned parent asking their baby how they are shows the hidden layer, that layer is what the parent wants. Because if the parent really doesn’t want the baby to respond in some way conveying that they want food, they will be taken aback if the baby actually wants something. But because the parent is asking what the baby wants, the baby learns how to convey their desire, which is through the medium of the language of the parent and what they desire, which is the answer from the child so they can get the child what they desire.

I will now bring your attention back towards how we use the Other, namely other people as our image. But what is our image in the first place? We may use our body, as many people do, to make a coherent image for ourselves. But when we attach an “I” to the body that we see in the mirror and we use this “ I” or this image to apply our ego onto us we get contradictions. This body image we have and the one we apply our “I” to, becomes by definition a thing that is separate and other than ourselves. The image we use/ our body is a thing that is separate from ourselves. The body is separate from the mind you could say. But with the body image being a separate entity from oneself, you get the contradiction that this body or this image is more “I” than “I” really is. Because of using the body as an image for oneself, namely the “I” the conundrum pops up, that this “I” in the mirror or reflective surface is more “I” than the actual “I” that I really am because this “I” that is my image that I see came before my ego and my concept of who I am. So, the image of myself is really more me than I really am because the image is the original one. It is because we take the body which is something other than ourselves and not who we truly are when we get this contradiction, but this happens because we use something that is separate from us to posit a coherent identity or an “I”. And this can also make the contradiction that this “I” that is my image is the Other, but because the image came before me does that mean that I am the Other, (being the thing separate from one's subjectivity.)

Now, because the actual image in the mirror is not you and other people’s image of themselves is not truly them as well means that the Other, or other people can act as a mirror for you and we can see ourselves in other people, and vice versa that other people see themselves in you. This makes us as humans able to use other people’s images as an image for ourselves and we can use other people’s images to give ourselves an identity and give ourselves cohesion just as how we give ourselves cohesion from seeing our own image in the mirror, with this image representing how we truly feel. This shows how the mirror stage works constantly as an oscillating truth of our human subjectivity that is ongoing and perpetual and debunks the claim that the mirror stage will not work if one is not exposed to a reflection of themselves. When we see people who validate our image, we feel a sense of jubilation and cohesion. Think of when one person likes the exact things as you and are very similar to you, you feel a sense of validation from it and it compliments your own image. Or when someone likes to dress the same type of style as you like to dress you feel a sense of cohesion of seeing yourself in somebody else. I would like to lean into this idea that we see ourselves in other people because it is very true and it is how we make an “I” for ourselves in the first place. If you think about it, how much of your identity and your knowledge and reasoning comes from your parent/parents? A good amount of it I would like to say. Your entire knowledge in itself is from other people anyway, such as other people teaching you such things or when you learn something that somebody else had thought of and now you know it as something you know. We are always in a constant to and fro interaction with the Other. All of our knowledge and art is from other people, namely that everything we know is from other people and nothing is original. Such as your favorite type of music, which may be some type of music made in the last fifty years that is rather popular and has influences in pop and rock. All of your favorite pop music is all influenced by other people’s music. Such as the Beatles which is the influence for basically all of pop music and really all music today. But who were the Beatles influenced by? They would be influenced by blues music. But who were the blues musicians influenced by? And so on and so forth. You can see that everything we know and everything we think is influenced by the Other and other individuals. And you, I am assuming a human being, have been made by your parents and your entire being is quite literally them! We all are influenced and are being influenced by other people and this is why we see ourselves in other people’s image, thus being able to use their image as our own image because we can see ourselves in them. Consequently, showing that it is not just about a mirror that we base ourselves on and that the mirror stage is a perpetual process in the human condition that is true in our individual life’s every single day. And disproving the claim that the mirror stage fails if one is not exposed to an image. The mirror stage is a truth about our lives and it is an interpretation of the human condition and what it means to be human. 

Notes - science term 1 2024

prefers

- good drainage

- Full sun

Watering once a week (monday)

Small 5ml

Normal 20ml

Big 40ml

Hypothesis:
Overwatering the bok choy will cause it to bolt. Bolting is when a plant grows extremely fast from one stage to another, often causing a plant to become inedible as it uses most of its energy in seed production and that often leaves leaves tough and woody. It’s often caused by too much or too little water, as well as too extreme of a temperature in either direction.

Watering the bok choy the right amount will cause the plant to grow the best, causing normal texture in bok choy leafs and having the slowest growing time but best results in the end.

And underwatering the bok choy will cause it to either stunt in growth, or bolt, similar to the overwatered one.

• prone to bolting (Especially in low temperatures)

• Overwatering will cause plant to bolt

• Underwatering will cause plants to struggle to grow, possibly bolting as a defence mechanism.

bolting definition:

When a plant grows extremely fast from one stage to another, often causes a plant to become inedible as it uses most of its energy in seed production and that often leaves leaves tough and woody.

Sites used:

https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/edible/vegetables/bok-choy/planting-bok-choy.htmhttps://www.growveg.com.au/plants/australia-and-nz/how-to-grow-bok-choi/https://thewoksoflife.com/how-to-grow-bok-choy/https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/edible/vegetables/bok-choy/preventing-bok-choy-bolt.htm#:~:text=Too%20much%20or%20too%20little,soil%20remains%20damp%20between%20watering.

Results: 

The other plants have not been able to be watered so at the moment there only resides my plant, (which was the one that was meant to be underwatered). I have given the plant the prescribed amount of 5ml exactly and at each time it was the same. The results show that because the plant was being underwatered, it has wilted and grown rather limp. There is 6 individual stems that have grown from the soil and the measurements consist of the following:

• 8cm 

• 7cm

• 9cm

• 5cm

• 5cm

7cm The plant has started to wilt from the lack of sufficient water, albeit it has grown a rather large amount in comparison to what I had thought, because originally I had thought that it would barely grow at all and would soon die, but it has been rather different to that.

Excerpts from my novel called: "Verisimilitude, Reverie, Anamnesis":