Week 4 Blog, Oriental and Western differences on Medical, Technology, Human Body and Art

Oriental and Western differences on Medical, Technology, Human Body and Art

From lectures and readings this week, I have learned that the Westerners have a great passion on the structure, the beauty and the nature of human body since hundreds of years ago.
The interest in our body and how it works is one of the most important and intrinsic interest of human beings, shared across the race, across the culture and across the history.
However, in Oriental cultures, especially in China, the view of human body and the interest in human body have a different approach than those in the Western cultures. I think that can be introduced as a great supplemental idea of our learning this week.
On contrary to the interest by the Western cultures which have great interest in anatomy, the physical structure and the physical beauty of human body. The Chinese and Oriental culture have emphasized their interest on invisible features and  specifications of human body. This includes the "chi" called by Chinese people, which means "energy flow" expressed in English.
The Chinese culture did not focus on the anatomy and structure of human body. Chinese culture classifies the human body as the dynamic combination of five elements, they are metal, wood, water, fire and earth. The Chinese culture links several organs into these elements, and believes all the disease of human body is a result of the unbalance of these five elements, and use herbs and traditional medicine or food therapy to fix, rejuvenate any single element in human body and reach balance state.

The Chinese culture and medicine also uses needle therapy, which insert needles into acupuncture points on human body to help the healthy flow of energy in our body. （It doesn't hurt at all!)

Needle Therapy



The Chinese culture's view on human body is rather "soft" than Western cultures' "hard" anatomical view on human bodies.

In my view, the Chinese culture's view on human body and the Chinese medicine and therapies have more art characteristics than the Western view.

Chinese medicine, most of them are herbs and some are food instead of medicine

Work Cited: 

The Photo 1: Needle Therapy: http://www.jzsos.com/cure/xstj/1530.htm, The editorial team

The photo 2 : http://www.bayvoice.net/gb/popular-programs/pp-bestdoctor/2015/03/03/382895.html, Discussion on Chinese medicine,BAYVOICE.NET, the editorial team

Robots have an more and more important role in our life. Their presence indicates the arrival the new era of human technology development.
Robots that have been developed can be divided into mainly two categories, ones that assist us and ones that entertains us.
The robots that entertains us has only been developed in the recent years, including the Japanese robot dog. I used to have one of them when I was young, and I have to admit, I preferred a real dog as a kid. The robotic dogs today have much more interaction features than robotics dogs at the time when I was a kid. I have to admit that I thought they were boring. Because for a kid, what makes a toy interesting is interaction with it.
For robots that are designed to assist us in production and daily life, there is always a myth that will they have their free mind sometime and develop their own mind and surpass us and took the domination of the earth someday? And that has been illustrated in many movies. I believe that when we design robots to assist us, we shall specify their roles, give each kind of robots minimum variety in their duties to limit the possibility of their developing their own free mind. And give them the Turin test every month!