To die would be an awfully big adventure

Is killing ever morally right? We have always been taught to not kill or hurt people, but then in law people can be sentenced to death, or a life in prison. But isn’t this sentencing the exact same as killing people in everyday life? What makes killing people through law better or more moral? What is the difference between the two?
For example if one person went on a rampage killing and destroying people and things, and then was arrested and sent to court where he was charged with murder and sentenced to death, where he was killed, what happens? What does this achieve? How can someone tell you not to kill, killing is wrong and then kill you? It doesn’t make sense, and it teaches people if you kill for the ‘right reasons’ it’s okay. But is it really okay? Or is it also murder? And should the person who killed the murderer be killed also as they had just killed someone? Does it just become a vicious cycle? When is it ever right or not right to kill someone?

I'm hit with mixed emotions

My friend and I were having a discussion about depression, what is it and why is it not classified as a regular emotion as 1 in 5 people have depression. And then that got me thinking about emotions in general, what is an emotion? How can one classify what an emotion is? It could be a feeling for just a split second, or is it an ongoing feeling that can last for years?

How do you define emotion?

Do you see what I see?

The other day in TOK class one of the student presentations was about perception, and it got me thinking. In years before now there was no such thing as 'editing' or 'photoshop' or 'graphic effects' and what people saw with their own eyes was real, and they believed it. But nowadays because these things are regular things used in everyday life, we never know if what we see if real or not.

How do we know that last picture of [insert someone] was real, or did someone use photoshop to edit what they looked like. Even in the news, how do we know that last video we saw wasn't edited, and there really wasn't an explosion in Lebanon.

How do we know that everything we see isn't fake?

This also reminded me of the movie 'The Truman Show." In this movie a man, called Truman, lives his every day life and believes what he sees is real, however he learns he is actually the main character on a TV show, and everything he has touched, seen, known for the last 40 years is fake and never existed. What if everything we knew and saw wasn't really there?

How do we know what we see and touch and feel is real?