Hw # 1

In the world today we are surrounded by other creatures that live with us, eat with us, breathe with us... Yet even if they are standing a centimeter away from us in a crowded elevator, we do not know a single thing about them. Their name, hobbies, age are all unknown things. Even though we are standing so close, it seems that we are standing miles and miles away. This connects to Banach's idea of "absolute individuality", and how we are the only ones that know the most about ourselves compared to anyone else; our likes, dislikes, etc... We seem to be too busy about what is going on with us and our lives, to care about what is going on with others. We live in a pool of our own thoughts, ideas, and feelings and don't have the time to have any interest about others. "Other people only see us from the outside. No one else can feel what we feel, and we cannot feel what is going on in any one else's mind." This is absolutely true if you live in today's world. We don't seem to give any interest on what is going on with others. We seem to know more about them from their physical experience than we do from how they are in the inside.

Absolute individuals to me means that we are all on our own in the world, we keep everything to ourselves because it's not anyone else's business. Since we keep all these things to ourselves, we are all alone in this world. I agree with Banach at some level because this is true at some point. We all seem to keep everything private from each other, and people have adapted to the idea of "minding their own business".

While being an absolute individual, we have absolute freedom as well. The same way we are able to keep our thoughts and feelings to ourselves, we are able to have our own freedom to do what we want. Absolute freedom of individuals means that we are able to make our own choices on deciding to be an individual like keeping everything to our self, or letting the whole world know all about who you are, what you think, or what your feelings are. This all depends on what you want as an individual. To me human happiness is having the freedom to do what you want whenever you want. You are not told what to do, or how to live, you do what you want as your own person. A code that can emerge would be letting others do what they want because they have their freedom and their own rights to share or not to share certain things. It all depends on what they want to do.

What seems strange to me is that Banach wrote this lecture based on if people do not know each other at all, they would be "absolute individuals". We are not absolute individuals to everyone in this world; yes to many we are, but not to our family and close friends. They all know what we like or dislike, what we feel, etc... To me this lecture is based on how we are "absolute individuals" to others in the world surrounding us.

I guess that now a days we are not "absolute individuals", I would say that we are individuals but we are able to connect with others in our world. This is possible by modern technology, we are able to use digital/electronic media to help us connect with others and let ourselves be heard. Maybe not to every single person on this planet but we do make an effort to let ourselves be heard by others. The repercussion of this would be if we lived in a world with no digital technology what so ever. We would only be heard by the people living with us. How would this differ from the world we live in today?