We are not a tabula rasa

[Hobbes' Choice]

I do not think the son of a blacksmith is best suited to being a blacksmith in his turn.

There isn't a blacksmith gene, but there is a genetically transferred set of natural abilities and disabilities, personality traits, types of intelligence and stupidity and so on that will incline one towards certain life circumstances.

It's not always true the son of a blacksmith should follow in his father's footsteps, but that's not a bad place to start the search. Of course, one might try following in one's mother's footsteps too.

True. However, there is more to people than their genes.

In your own example, your choice of career may have as much to do with your environment as with your genes, and it is almost impossible to divide the influence into two quantities.

Imagine twins separated at birth, one goes to a well educated upper middle class family, given the best education, love and stimulation. The house is full of books and puzzles. He is surrounded by people in a range of professions and his choices are many, having good examples.

Take the other and give him to a poor family living in a falling down bothy in a medieval field. He works digging turnips and pollarding the fences to keep the sheep in. He ends each day tired and cold. He has no education. Thus no access to a realm of ideas enjoyed by the other.

Now tell me how important the genes are.

However much is the role played by genes, it is far more useful to concentrate one's nurture are one's nature is immovable. So rather than give in to a perceived natural outcome of one's life, it is possible to change and improve upon your lot with education and stimulation. To fill what ever blankness exists with rich content.

[Kuznetzova]

When Locke talked about it he was rejecting the idea that man was born into original sin, that blacks and other non-white races were inherently inferior; and he was making a plea that every person could improve and make use of education. That in each of us was the potential to grow, change and progress.
In it historical context the tabula rasa was revolutionary.

This argument is now more about degree. None of us are born with a language. So on that level you can safely say that our existing potential for language, existing as cerebral structure is empty of content.
And whilst each child has a specialised area for recognising and remembering faces; we are not born with any knowledge of a face.

The entire tradition of Western Philosophy is bankrupt. The basis of the tradition's epistemology was a Cartesian skeptical crisis. This crisis led Rene Descartes to only conclude that he is some sort of disembodied mind which receives sense perceptions, and that he couldn't find a way to demonstrate the factualness of anything beyond that. This bandwagon was jumped on by a number of writers in the century following Descartes' Meditations. And the culmination of this (failed) epistemology was that, "All knowledge is derived from sense perception." In other words, we know absolutely nothing at birth, and we literally use deduction on perceptions alone, to produce all of our knowledge.

This tradition is based on wobbly foundations. A more solid foundation is that we are organisms on a planet, and our brains and sense organs are tools which are primarily used to keep our bodies alive in the environment and facilitate our own reproduction. We are not floating, disembodied tabula rasas. The facts of modern biology and modern neuroscience are now running contrary to this mystical framework. (FBA = Functional Brain Area) A tentative list:

1. The limbic system contains a functional brain area called the Amygdala. This is located in the same location in every human brain. It is therefore, ipso facto, a product of our genetic blueprint. The amygdala is the FBA which mediates panic and fright. In particular it mediates an ancient response to fright that is freezing. Humans do not deduce this freezing response -- freezing in response to sudden loud noise is both innate and operates below conscious control.
2. The brainstem is located in the same location in every human brain. The brainstem is the FBA that is responsible for controlling breathing, heart rate, and body temperature. Even people with severe brain damage my have a completely intact brain stem, allowing their heart and breathing to operate normally. These people are said to be in a "persistent vegetative state". Most importantly for you philosophers: These functions are carried out without conscious control, completely automatically. They proceed normally during sleep, for instance.
3. The brainstem and amygdala demonstrate that entire portions of the brain exist in all humans, whose primary purpose is to keep the body alive in an environment. They have nothing to do with deductions on sense perceptions.
4. There are FBAs in all human brains, roughly located in the same location in the left temporal lobe, whose functions are concerned with the production and processing of speech. They are the Vernicke's Area and the Broca's Area. This means that human children do not reinvent language from scratch, but are endowed with innate capacities to process phonemes in spoken language. Children are not blank slates.
5. How much of the brain actually performs deducing? We can surmise that this is probably done with the lateral prefrontal cortex, with some supporting role played by the hippocampus. (The thalamus will play a role, but only because it plays a role in everything you are paying attention to while awake). The evidence from science for this is that the PFC is the major brain area for applying verbal rules to behavior. Why am I mentioning this example? Because it shows that only a tiny portion of the brain is actually concerned with DEDUCTION in any sense of the word. The rest of the brain is doing low-level processing having to do with memory, visual processing, spatial processing, and processing of fine control of muscles. Don't mince my words: The vast majority of the weight of the human brain is not dedicated to performing deduction.
6. All knowledge is derived from sense perception? Really? But the human eye does not see the world the way it is. The human eye sees the world in such a way that was conducive to the survival of our primate ancestors in rainforest. Consider the facts here -- the human eye only sees a tiny slice of electromagnetic radiation range, called the "Visual range". On top of that limitation, our eyes have a filter for green, meaning our retina does not even receive that particular wavelength. Dogs and cats are nocturnal, and can navigate well in near darkness. And rightfully so. These hunters had to catch prey at night, and that is directly related to their survival. The human retinal cells are trichromatic, whereas the eyes of birds are tetrachromatic. Compared to birds, we have a limited color palette, and we are blind to ultraviolet, which is, ironically, a chief component of sunlight. The eyes of George Berkeley and John Locke were blind to the chief spectral component of sunlight. Mull that over.
7. Cats are nocturnal hunters, thus their eyes can see in near darkness. This ability has a direct bearing on their survival in the environment. This has not a lick to do with "God wanted it that way."
8. Human beings are social animals, and have innate capacities to process faces. When these innate capacities fail, produce bizarre illusions, all documented by neuroscience. Facial processing is directly related to survival in our (social) niche, and has not a lick to do with "God intended it."
9. The organs of perception in our bodies are tools related to our survival in the environment. Organs operate by the laws of physics, and their individual operation is understood at the chemical level, in some cases down to the molecules. It is not the case that "God gave Man eyes so that we could perceive His Creation". The problem is that in order to for you to be a good academic, you need not only suspect and feel like the God-gave-eyes claim might be true on your more spiritual days. Nay -- you must commit yourself to it as a binding axiom of your knowledge. And that is wrong. And that is misguided. This is one of the many reasons why philosophy is becoming marginalized on university campuses.

We enter the world on our first day , screaming, cranky, hungry and thirsty. We are ready to suckle a breast for sustenance from our mothers. We are endowed with innate responses to do so. From the first day, we enter a universe of human value. Those values are primarily defined by biophysical needs of our bodies. This would be a much more fruitful epistemological framework, than the Cartesian one. Descartes will have you believing you are some disembodied mind passively receiving sense perceptions. That you are a mind-container thing holding little objects called "propositions" which collectively constitute your "knowledge". You are no such thing. You are an organism that is born and must survive long enough in a dangerous environment prior to dying. Our entire method of carving up the world into categories is primarily a symptom of these biological values.

We do not deduce from first principles, that we are hungry and must eat.

We do not deduce from first principles, that we should salivate around good food.

We do not deduce from first principles, that we are thirsty and must drink.

We do not deduce from first principles, that our body is too warm and must start sweating to avoid hyperthermia.

We do not deduce from first principles, that we are afraid of something.

We do not deduce from first principles, that we are attracted to the opposite sex.

We do not deduce from first principles, that injuring our own flesh is a bad idea.

We do not deduce from first principles, that having sex with the opposite sex is a good plan.

If at this point you still cling to the failed tradition of Western Philosophy, consider the following. Where is the discussion of value in any of these writers? Is the human being a robot, cleanly and logically deducing shapes and regularities from its environment? Or do human beings live in a mental world of valuation? What do you really think is the case? Those things which are conducive to our reproduction all feel pleasurable -- while those things which run contrary create pain and suffering. Why did this simple equation allude the "Greatest Minds" of Europe?

We can speculate -- perhaps the origin of human value was simply too complicated a subject for them to tackle in the time in which they lived.

[Hobbes' Choice]

When Locke talked about it he was rejecting the idea that man was born into original sin, that blacks and other non-white races were inherently inferior; and he was making a plea that every person could improve and make use of education. That in each of us was the potential to grow, change and progress.
In it historical context the tabula rasa was revolutionary.

This argument is now more about degree. None of us are born with a language. So on that level you can safely say that our existing potential for language, existing as cerebral structure is empty of content.
And whilst each child has a specialised area for recognising and remembering faces; we are not born with any knowledge of a face.

The entire tradition of Western Philosophy is bankrupt. The basis of the tradition's epistemology was a Cartesian skeptical crisis. This crisis led Rene Descartes to only conclude that he is some sort of disembodied mind which receives sense perceptions, and that he couldn't find a way to demonstrate the factualness of anything beyond that. This bandwagon was jumped on by a number of writers in the century following Descartes' Meditations. And the culmination of this (failed) epistemology was that, "All knowledge is derived from sense perception." In other words, we know absolutely nothing at birth, and we literally use deduction on perceptions alone, to produce all of our knowledge.

This is still true, and may be tested by placing a new-born in a black box for 14 years opening the box and asking if it knows anything.
Whilst we have potentialities and cerebral structures that guide the acquisition of knowledge, as I have mentioned. The fat that knowledge is derived from the senses is absolutely true, depending on the definition of "knowledge".
But this thought experiment is a very important stage in human understanding, as it was thought, and tested that we are born with the language we use according to ancient philosophers.


This tradition is based on wobbly foundations. A more solid foundation is that we are organisms on a planet, and our brains and sense organs are tools which are primarily used to keep our bodies alive in the environment and facilitate our own reproduction. We are not floating, disembodied tabula rasas. The facts of modern biology and modern neuroscience are now running contrary to this mystical framework. (FBA = Functional Brain Area) A tentative list:

No one is saying that we are "floating, disembodied TR". Descartes comes close to the insistence on a soul, but this is not supported by subsequent philosophers of the materialist and empiricist camps which you seem to seamlessly confuse with Descartes.
But is do not think that Descartes even denied that we are also dependant on our bodies.

1. The limbic system contains a functional brain area called the Amygdala. This is located in the same location in every human brain. It is therefore, ipso facto, a product of our genetic blueprint. The amygdala is the FBA which mediates panic and fright. In particular it mediates an ancient response to fright that is freezing. Humans do not deduce this freezing response -- freezing in response to sudden loud noise is both innate and operates below conscious control.
2. The brainstem is located in the same location in every human brain. The brainstem is the FBA that is responsible for controlling breathing, heart rate, and body temperature. Even people with severe brain damage my have a completely intact brain stem, allowing their heart and breathing to operate normally. These people are said to be in a "persistent vegetative state". Most importantly for you philosophers: These functions are carried out without conscious control, completely automatically. They proceed normally during sleep, for instance.
3. The brainstem and amygdala demonstrate that entire portions of the brain exist in all humans, whose primary purpose is to keep the body alive in an environment. They have nothing to do with deductions on sense perceptions.
4. There are FBAs in all human brains, roughly located in the same location in the left temporal lobe, whose functions are concerned with the production and processing of speech. They are the Vernicke's Area and the Broca's Area. This means that human children do not reinvent language from scratch, but are endowed with innate capacities to process phonemes in spoken language. Children are not blank slates.
5. How much of the brain actually performs deducing? We can surmise that this is probably done with the lateral prefrontal cortex, with some supporting role played by the hippocampus. (The thalamus will play a role, but only because it plays a role in everything you are paying attention to while awake). The evidence from science for this is that the PFC is the major brain area for applying verbal rules to behavior. Why am I mentioning this example? Because it shows that only a tiny portion of the brain is actually concerned with DEDUCTION in any sense of the word. The rest of the brain is doing low-level processing having to do with memory, visual processing, spatial processing, and processing of fine control of muscles. Don't mince my words: The vast majority of the weight of the human brain is not dedicated to performing deduction.
6. All knowledge is derived from sense perception? Really? But the human eye does not see the world the way it is. The human eye sees the world in such a way that was conducive to the survival of our primate ancestors in rainforest. Consider the facts here -- the human eye only sees a tiny slice of electromagnetic radiation range, called the "Visual range". On top of that limitation, our eyes have a filter for green, meaning our retina does not even receive that particular wavelength. Dogs and cats are nocturnal, and can navigate well in near darkness. And rightfully so. These hunters had to catch prey at night, and that is directly related to their survival. The human retinal cells are trichromatic, whereas the eyes of birds are tetrachromatic. Compared to birds, we have a limited color palette, and we are blind to ultraviolet, which is, ironically, a chief component of sunlight. The eyes of George Berkeley and John Locke were blind to the chief spectral component of sunlight. Mull that over.
7. Cats are nocturnal hunters, thus their eyes can see in near darkness. This ability has a direct bearing on their survival in the environment. This has not a lick to do with "God wanted it that way."
8. Human beings are social animals, and have innate capacities to process faces. When these innate capacities fail, produce bizarre illusions, all documented by neuroscience. Facial processing is directly related to survival in our (social) niche, and has not a lick to do with "God intended it."
9. The organs of perception in our bodies are tools related to our survival in the environment. Organs operate by the laws of physics, and their individual operation is understood at the chemical level, in some cases down to the molecules. It is not the case that "God gave Man eyes so that we could perceive His Creation". The problem is that in order to for you to be a good academic, you need not only suspect and feel like the God-gave-eyes claim might be true on your more spiritual days. Nay -- you must commit yourself to it as a binding axiom of your knowledge. And that is wrong. And that is misguided. This is one of the many reasons why philosophy is becoming marginalized on university campuses.

But none of this is "knowledge of the world" as we generally conceive it.
Although a new-born seem to have "knowledge' of a milk bearing nipple, so do all mammals. This Is an instinctive reaction. Whilst I agree that it marks a challenge to the traditional idea of TR when expressed in absolute terms, it does not really challenge the spirit and intention of the concept in any way.

We enter the world on our first day , screaming, cranky, hungry and thirsty. We are ready to suckle a breast for sustenance from our mothers. We are endowed with innate responses to do so. From the first day, we enter a universe of human value. Those values are primarily defined by biophysical needs of our bodies. This would be a much more fruitful epistemological framework, than the Cartesian one. Descartes will have you believing you are some disembodied mind passively receiving sense perceptions. That you are a mind-container thing holding little objects called "propositions" which collectively constitute your "knowledge". You are no such thing. You are an organism that is born and must survive long enough in a dangerous environment prior to dying. Our entire method of carving up the world into categories is primarily a symptom of these biological values.

We do not deduce from first principles, that we are hungry and must eat.

We do not deduce from first principles, that we should salivate around good food.

We do not deduce from first principles, that we are thirsty and must drink.

We do not deduce from first principles, that our body is too warm and must start sweating to avoid hyperthermia.

We do not deduce from first principles, that we are afraid of something.

We do not deduce from first principles, that we are attracted to the opposite sex.

We do not deduce from first principles, that injuring our own flesh is a bad idea.

We do not deduce from first principles, that having sex with the opposite sex is a good plan.

If at this point you still cling to the failed tradition of Western Philosophy, consider the following. Where is the discussion of value in any of these writers? Is the human being a robot, cleanly and logically deducing shapes and regularities from its environment? Or do human beings live in a mental world of valuation? What do you really think is the case? Those things which are conducive to our reproduction all feel pleasurable -- while those things which run contrary create pain and suffering. Why did this simple equation allude the "Greatest Minds" of Europe?

We can speculate -- perhaps the origin of human value was simply too complicated a subject for them to tackle in the time in which they lived.

Great so you are saying that bacteria have "knowledge"?

[Kuznetzova]

Hobbes' Choice,

Like in all other organisms on this planet, the vast majority of the work done by the human brain goes towards keeping the body alive in its environmental niche. We are an organism. We have needs. The brain is a tool towards achieving those needs.

I think the reason that people are drawn to philosophy, is because deep down they

1. Do not believe the human beings are composed of molecules.
2. Do not believe that human beings are the products of billions of years of evolution by Natural Selection.

And so you become a trained, fast-talking clever and "persuasive" writer whose underlying motivation is to peddle woo-woo. And all the techniques of rhetoric and journalism come to your disposal to do this. In many cases, you are too sneaky, too passive-aggressive, too cowardly to simply outrightly state in plain english that: "No I do not think human bodies are composed of molecules, and No, I do not believe we are the products of Natural Selection."

You have already indicted yourself on this forum in a different thread.

But what he was concerned to preserve is the enigmatic realm of ideas, and sense of self that a hard materialism still fails to describe or explain.

"...enigmatic realm of ideas...."

"...hard materialism fails...."


Spoken like a dyed-in-the-wool peddler of woo.

[Hobbes' Choice]

Hobbes' Choice,

Like in all other organisms on this planet, the vast majority of the work done by the human brain goes towards keeping the body alive in its environmental niche. We are an organism. We have needs. The brain is a tool towards achieving those needs.

I think the reason that people are drawn to philosophy, is because deep down they

1. Do not believe the human beings are composed of molecules.
2. Do not believe that human beings are the products of billions of years of evolution by Natural Selection.

And so you become a trained, fast-talking clever and "persuasive" writer whose underlying motivation is to peddle woo-woo. And all the techniques of rhetoric and journalism come to your disposal to do this. In many cases, you are too sneaky, too passive-aggressive, too cowardly to simply outrightly state in plain english that: "No I do not think human bodies are composed of molecules, and No, I do not believe we are the products of Natural Selection."

You have already indicted yourself on this forum in a different thread.

But what he was concerned to preserve is the enigmatic realm of ideas, and sense of self that a hard materialism still fails to describe or explain.

"...enigmatic realm of ideas...."

"...hard materialism fails...."


Spoken like a dyed-in-the-wool peddler of woo.

The truth hurts baby!

I'm not peddling anything.

You are way off beam. Just because I don't follow your brand of religion does not mean I have my own to peddle.
So what is it, exactly that you think i am peddling here?

FYI. I am a materialist Darwinist, amongst other things. The only difference between me and you is that I'm not making a religion out of it, nor do I believe we have the whole thing explained.
I also have a keen sense of history and understand the evolution of the ideas that gave rise to understanding evolution and the material world.
I am also keen to give credit where it is due; to the hard working thinkers who, not having it all laid out on a plate, as it is for you, made speculative errors.
History is likely to show in the future that your own endemic assumptions upon which your entire philosophy resides may well also turn out to be utterly misguided. This is a fact of Intellectual History that is quite common place.


PS. As far as "woo" is concerned, as pretty as your fringe might be, and as nice as your face is, I am not trying to Woo you.


woo
wuː/
verb
1.
try to gain the love of (a woman), especially with a view to marriage.
synonyms: court, pay court to, pursue, chase, chase after, run after; More

[jackles]

Sorry but what exactly is woo.who is pro religion in this argument.

[Hobbes' Choice]

Hobbes' Choice,


Spoken like a dyed-in-the-wool peddler of woo.

Cat got your tongue?

[Kuznetzova]

You are lost in a realm of ideas.

[Hobbes' Choice]

You are lost in a realm of ideas.

What woo am I peddling?

I'd rather be lost in the Realm of ideas than completely clueless, as you.

[A_Seagull]

We are not a tabula rasa.

It depends what you mean by 'we'.

If you mean the individuals you and I, then I would agree, as our brains come fully loaded with software and hardware and firmware and algorithms and automatic responses etc etc.

But if by 'we' you mean the human species whose forebears disappear into the antiquity of time, then I would disagree. Our origins are in the realm of a tabula rasa. For back at the first stirrings of animal life there was no hardware nor software nor firmware etc etc. It was a blank sheet.

[egg3000]

I agree, the notion that humans are just these completely malleable blobs which are moulded entirely by experience is trivially false.

Take the human visual system, for example: it is a biological system, and it therefore has certain scope and limitations. The average human retina, for example, contains about six to seven million colour cones, which can be divided into three types: red, green and blue. This is something which is biologically determined, you cannot learn to have more types of colour cones, any more than you can learn to grow two hearts. Accordingly, you cannot learn to see more colours. Of course, it is perfectly possible for a human to be locked in a dark room for most of their life, and in this case they would not be exposed to the full range of colours that the scope of their visual system permits them to otherwise experience. But this fact does not imply that it is possible for a human to somehow acquire, from experience, the capacity to see colours that lie beyond the scope of their visual system: that scope is genetically determined.

Well, going on the assumption that the mind is in fact part of a biological system, the same must be true of it (and, indeed, of all domains of human experience).

then there is no freewill... you were made to do as you do...

-Imp

Not necessarily. In fact, one could just as easily make an inference to the contrary. If we were not endowed with these pre-determined biological systems, then we would have nothing to work with; it is precisely because of our genetic limitations that we are able to do anything at all. Take visual art as an analogy: you can't paint anything unless you have something to paint it on; but whatever material you pick for this purpose, that material must itself also have a certain shape, it must be of a certain size, must have a particular texture, and so on. Having limitations is a necessary condition for possessing capabilities.

-egg3000

[Hobbes' Choice]

We are not a Tabula Rasa. But there are very good reasons to say that we are. When Locke asserted it as a idea, he did so in the spirit of the notion the people are improvable; that we are not wholly determined by rank and birth, and that privilege by blood, nobility and aristocracy were ideas to be challenged.

Humans, more that any other animal on the earth is best qualified to apply the term tabula rasa.
From the same seed, a human baby can adapt to any earthly culture, any environment, lean any language, adapt any religion and accept the normative moral rules from primitive hunter gatherers to modern technological society.
None of this is innate.
A transplanted baby can be an English socialist, a Scottish Presbyterian, a Roman Legionnair or an Apartheid secret policeman. Culture is not innate, nor is nationality, religion, language ad infinitem...
But the potential to learn all these things is.

All human have the ability to have language, bigotry, ideology, face recognition, bipedalism, all as potentials. This is what makes us a natural human.
What separates us is cultural differentiation.

[GreatandWiseTrixie]

We are not a tabula rasa.

We are not floating disembodied tabula rasas who are passively receiving sense perceptions. Anyone whom marries themselves to this axiom; anyone who fixes this presumption as a foundational pillar of their epistemological framework -- anyone who does this is off track, off base, and leading themselves into error.

That is as simple as it gets.

Mr. Rogers, I thought you were dead.

Care to provide any proof for this claim?

[Arising_uk]

Mr. Rogers, I thought you were dead.

Care to provide any proof for this claim?

He can't as he's not dead but banned.

[GreatandWiseTrixie]

Mr. Rogers, I thought you were dead.

Care to provide any proof for this claim?

He can't as he's not dead but banned.

Well I accidentally necroposted to a mass murdering, homicidal maniac. What else is there that can be done? I feel fulfilled.