As I’m getting started with research on my capstone/senior symposium project, I’ve looked back at what I’ve already interacted with that serves as information towards my questions. What does it mean to exist? What’s reality and what isn’t? How does our perception of those and understanding of those affect how we live and breathe? These are all human-centered questions. We ask these through the eyes of ourselves, hoping to gain an answer that provides clarity for ourselves. My prior experience of interacting with these has been through movies. While these are (for the most part) fictional works, I believe it presents a very interesting and psychological take on how humans may choose to see reality/existence, or how they choose to subvert expectations with their intentionally make believe ideas. Some movies that come to mind are: Memento (due to its heavy usage of memory and memory loss and how one may act knowing or not knowing what they’ve lost or gained), The Truman Show (due to its huge theme on existence, individuality and conformity, and how we’d act if existence shattered for us), Blade Runner (similar to The Truman Show with characters experiencing their reality shattering), Inception (due to its exploration on dreams and reality and how the line between the two can blend), The Lighthouse (due to its extraordinary plot taking viewers for a ride and making them question reality from fantasy), and so much more. I’d love to dive deeper into these moves and examine what drove them to tell what they did, and how they each present different examples and explanations for the questions many ask on existence and reality. From what I’ve glanced and read at so far on existence, it’s already raising even more questions, like whether existence is property, does anyone not have existence, is existence an illusion, are all memories real, do we all perceive and see the world the same, and more. It’ll be interesting to see where these new questions take me.
     Internally, I plan to try and interview DW and Mr. Clark. I think they’d give me really diverse and thoughtful responses, one from a more philosophical and religious standpoint, and another from a more scientific and logical perspective as well. I’d probably ask them what do the major leaders/experts in their fields believe about the topics of existence, dreams, and reality, and then what they believe themselves. I think that’s probably the most important question, is what they believe themselves on the topic. It’ll take some refinement to get those questions down, but I think it’ll produce some really great responses.
     Externally, while I’m not sure on this yet, it might be fun or cool to somehow talk to Neil deGrasse Tyson. It’s definitely a stretch, but from the interviews and discussions I’ve seen online, I feel like he’d be able to give me a really amazing viewpoint on the universe and existence itself. Additionally, I could watch his TV special Cosmos to further enrich my understanding and questions on the topics. I could ask him about his beliefs on these questions, and additionally, what he thinks about someone else’s beliefs. To get a different perspective or maybe a more religious perspective, another source could be one of my Rabbi’s or something along the lines of that, asking similar questions as well. On a flipside from all this, maybe talking to Chris Stuckmann, he’s a movie reviewer on youtube, and getting his perspective on all the movies I choose to watch for this project would be such a fun thing to do.
     From this point on, I think I need to solidify and begin fleshing out my research, as well as grounding it through an AP Lit topic. I think I’ve done a great job of exploring and thinking about my idea, but I need to plan how I want to interview my experts, and how I want to go about incorporating movies into my project. I’m excited to continue this thinking for the future.