Tuesday, March 28, 2006


"I believe in many things." John Locke, Lost

I'm afraid I'm turning into a tv nut. Despite what everyone is saying and all that flak about how most tv shows being nothing but trash, I still think television is one of the best man-made inventions other than sliced bread.

I fiercely disagree. Watching Lost will definitely put your faith back in television. Forget the reality show crap. Lost is television content at its finest. And it's not your run of the mill story either. What starts out as a typical plane-crashes-into-a-remote-island-with-a-handful-of-survivors storyline, it soon develops into subplots and seemingly implausible situations that will leave you confused, piqued, curious and rattled at the same time.

A favorite character, John Locke seems to be the resident philosopher. Small wonder that he's also named right after a great one greatest British philosophers. The real philosopher John Locke, believed that the universe as made up of material bodies, which in turn are made of "insensible particles," which interact mechanically. There are also immaterial substances associated with human bodies. These bodies have sense organs, which when stimulated produce "ideas of sensation." These ideas are operated on by our minds to produce "ideas of reflection." These two types of ideas are the material of our thoughts, perception, and consciousness, which are all derived from experience; we can have no knowledge beyond our ideas. In perception, according to this view, we are not directly aware of physical objects; we are directly aware of the ideas that objects "cause" in us and that "represent" the objects in our consciousness. Our ideas of primary qualities of objects, or the mathematically determinable qualities of an object, such as shape, motion, weight, and number, actually exist in the world. Secondary qualities, those which arise from the senses, do not exist in objects as they exist in ideas. According to Locke, secondary qualities, such as taste, "are nothing in the objects themselves but powers to produce ideas in use by their primary qualities." When an object is perceived, a person's ideas of its shape and weight represent qualities to be found in the object itself. .
Our fictional philosopher believes that the island has powers and that they are sent there for a reason. The philosophy of the real Locke plays out with what happens to the characters' lives in the island. Their fears realized and represented as mythical and invisible beasts, polar bear attacks in an otherwise tropical island, a mysterious number that repeats itself..

This is my new obsession. Call it good tv or a story that could seriously mess up with logic and reason. What IS this island? Again it questions your archetypes, your allusions. Everytime someone asks me why they should see it, I go, "basta."
And no one seems to be disappointed yet.