As the sole STEM person in a family of humanities majors (phys ed/history, political science, and comparative religions), I’ve always believed that the humanities have a lot to offer. If nothing else, every scientist and engineer will, at some point, need to write something. Knowing grammar is a generally a prerequisite for that (I hope). As a whole, though, engineers tend to be pretty focused on functionality, and that does lead to a very narrow view of what’s “useful.”

Sorry your family gives you grief! You can always come talk to my family. I think they’d probably understand you better than they understand me, anyway! I’m the weirdo in that bunch.

I read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy, and I definitely view a lot of it differently than I used to. Especially things with robots. Watching Star Trek, I always just took it as a given that Data was a person, but was he? Can something we create, that is acting according to programming, be a real person with a real personality? I think that goes with your question about the Timeless Human Experience. Things like that never occurred to me before I took this class.

I had no idea that floral design was a class! I learned something today!

Personally, I’ve always enjoyed music (mostly singing in choirs, though I used to play the flute and piano). I’ve often felt that that experience ties into my engineering somehow, though I’m not sure how. It definitely helps me teach – large lung capacity and practice using it! I can speak louder than any of my students!

I find the driverless car question very interesting, because I’ve wondered about that with the cars now that can brake themselves to avoid a collision. What kind of ethics are built into that?

“if humanities classes are going to actually do what they claim to do (foster independent thinking, etc.), they have to capture people’s interests”

Agreed! Most of my English classes in high school didn’t teach me to think independently. They taught me to figure out what kind of interpretations my teacher liked (death? oppressed women? insanity?) and fit that into every paper. I didn’t enjoy most of the books (and I read for fun a lot) and didn’t feel like I got much out of it beyond the proper format of a five-paragraph essay. If you want to claim that humanities classes make people think, then you need to make them interesting enough that people will WANT to think about the material.

I prefer my big questions to come with stories, too. Like I said in a previous comment, some questions are just too large to think about. It needs some kind of scenario to make it more approachable. Also, The Matrix really is more fun than Plato.

I really don’t know. Student requirements are getting more demanding, but I don’t think we should lose general education either. Maybe the answer is to eliminate some requirements (I can think of a couple in my program that seem to exist because “it’s always been that way”). Or maybe the answer is that some programs really should be five years long. That is definitely a good question, though!

I think a big part of it was that the questions were explored through stories. If you just say, “What is consciousness?” that’s too big to wrap your head around. But you could say, “A man has Alien Hand Syndrome and claims that his hand acts on its own, doing things he would never do. Who or what is controlling that hand? A part of the man’s consciousness he’s not aware of? A different consciousness? If it’s different, is this hand the only way it can communicate? Is there a fully formed conscious person trapped in there?” That breaks the giant question into manageable chunks and makes it more understandable by wrapping it in a story.

It definitely forced me to consider things I never had before. My philosophy seminar never did, because I found it too dry to get interested. But when the topics were connected to something I already liked, it was much easier to pay attention and really think about the questions.

I’ll have to check that course out. It looks interesting! Thanks!