I think its the reverse. Its a very comforting to think that you can break the mold, that you are more than the sum of parts, that you have free will, the divine spark that transcends the limitations of reality’n such.
If anything, the extraordinary claim here is that (in the easiest sense of what im proposing) you can in absolute terms break causality and put the fried chicken before the species or life itself came to exist, and still know what it is.
But im not talking about something as simple as situations.
Try to follow the problem and simplify it, break it down into it’s smallest functioning form.
Its not about commonalities.
If you want to slap this problem onto physics then it has a dozen names.
Causality. Creation of something from nothing. Energy conservation. Einstein’s theory, etc.
Im just not very versed in physics and mathematics so i broke it down to something simpler: Thought and information.
On a side note, i was curious so i proposed this idea to AI.
While pointing out the caveat that we do not know everything so we can only assume, as it stands, the proposition is correct. The human brain recombines information. It does not create it.
It also proposed the following:
If a piece of information were truly disconnected from everything you know, then:
you couldn’t describe it
you couldn’t recognize it
you couldn’t think about it
In a sense, it would be indistinguishable from nothing to your mind.
I think we can both agree that sometimes change can be continuous and sometimes change can be disruptive. Do we agree?
I lost what you mean there - those first 2 topics are metaphysics, for example.
You indeed assume the brain can’t create information. If you have something entirely new (‘ineffable’) you certainly cannot communicate that properly… I’d say that we rely on luck for others to understand our ideas by text anyway.
At some point, you were a baby and everything was new, so you could over time think it, recognize it and such, so it is not something new that you can, over time, describe, recognize and think stuff that you couldn’t.
That is completely different than ‘nothing’ to you.
Your observation is limited to the finite amount of matter that exists in this universe
So propose you have achieved omniscience.
You have observed EVERYTHING so you KNOW EVERYTHING that exists.
Did you now hit a brick wall?
Or can you create something new that did not exist before?
And now you are spiraling into the entire topic of creating something from nothing, how matter cant be destroyed or created only transformed between states, etc etc etc etc.
Again: Try to minimize and maximize the problem to the smallest and largest possible scales.
You can observe your own thoughts, imagination and so, which was what you asked about. No need to know the entire (maybe finite) universe.
As I told you, suppose you experience something entirely new. Would you say it has something in common with another experience you had because you are the one experiencing that?
Its the same problem on a different scale, and pardon me but i cant make sense of your answer.
The question is if your brain can create something completely new.
And your response is that you can observe your own brain for thoughts and imagination…?
I keep on thinking that you dont really understand what i mean by completely “new” in the fullest and most literal sense of the word.
No. If it was something entirely new, then you could not say that it has something in common with another experience you had. Thats what completely new means.
You said that if you had the knowledge of everything material and so, the point being that your imagination is outside it
I think I know exactly what you mean by completely new, that’s why I’m telling that so. If it is something entirely new, you are perceiving it (be it in your imagination), so it has that in common. You are perceiving it in your imagination, so it has that in common. Would you say so?
Expand and extrapolate on that because i have no idea what you mean.
My point was that if you had the knowledge of everything, you’d be still locked inside the same problem. You maximalized observation. There is nothing more new to observe. So now your only source of “new” is removed.
You are stuck.
Why would you be “outside it”? How would you be “outside it”? And what would that even change unless there is something new to observe?
You mean the observer being the connection between the old and the new? Cause through your observation the new information would become part of the “known” information?
Yes. That would be correct, but that has nothing to do with anything. Or i am failing to follow what you mean.
It doesnt matter what happens with the information after it has been integrated. The question is whether or not you can produce it in the first place ABSENT of observation.
At this point, we have to agree to disagree, at best. It seems to me that you are not understanding what I meant, and it seems to you that I’m not understanding what you meant.
But we can agree that for you it’s impossible to come up with something entirely new, and for me it isn’t impossible.
At last, would you agree that if you are in two situations, one you right now, and another you with something new (humour that such was possible), you’d say that in the second situation the situation wouldn’t be entirely new since you are there too?
Thats… not really how this works…
Neither of us are separate from this reality, if its possible for you, then the possibility exists for everyone else. Or it doesnt and it doesnt exist for anyone else.
I dont think anyone is so extra special that they get to break reality while nobody else gets to lol
Assuming ofc that all of us are cut from the same cloth and not sprinkled with some demigod stuff
Two separate me or am i one and the same person?
Because if its two separate me, then the other me who gained something entirely new, would be disconnected from the me that does not have that entirely new thing.
But in all earnest i fail to follow the way you think about it/frame reality.
So for something to be called a new thought it must have no connection to anything prior to that thought? It would see that not only can we not think of anything new but there can be nothing new because whatever arises arises out of the context it was in. The word ‘new’ has no meaning.
And presumably your thought that we cannot think of anything new would also not be a new thought, even when the first person thought it.
It seems to me the word ‘new’ has uses. QM ideas were new. Shakespeare’s works and conception of communication was new. Cars were new, when they were.
New to me doesn’t mean ex nihilo, but that there is a qualitative difference between what is called new and what came before.
This makes it sound like everything is rearrangement. But combinations can lead to new ‘things’, in the sense I would use the word new. Perhaps I would argue that a certain rearrangement would lead to something new, but I wanted to add other processes that can take place with ‘input.’
This seems to be treating us as tabula rasae. But we’re not. We are each combinations of genes - if we are following science, and our natures affect how we deal with nurture or input. Never before has that exact nervous system gotten that exact input. And then the input is over the lifetime with earlier experiences affecting creative activies much later in life, and the development of the individual brain being unique, so we are not mirroring.
Note, I am not saying that this creates something that has nothing to do with anything that has gone before. That’s a bit like demanding that the person create something but NOT have a causal relation with it.
I made that, but my mind and body in the time of making it (stuff that is from before) did not cause it.
It is a paradoxical criterion. Which you could say merely argues your case.
However the word ‘new’ still seems very useful to me. And also we are much more than distorting mirrors and so is nature itself. I don’t think anyone means by ‘new’ that it has nothing to do with what has come before. Just as this is made of atoms (I am being extremely reductionistic, but in a sense using that to show that even then ‘new’ has meaning)
Quite possible there were things like it not long before, but if we go back in time, to the world without this, it bears no relation to anything. Well, except in the banal way it is a physical thing, and a life form. Newness accumulates.
Oh, in case it seems like I am putting words in your mouth, by bringing in the things of the world and you were focused on ideas and images - internal, mental stuff - the same problem for using the word new would be there in the outside world. With your sense of ‘new’ there would be nothing new under the sun, because everything would be derived from things that were there just before. Made of matter at the very base. But in other ways derived or made from combination or new ‘things’ produced by the same forces and potential and laws and patterns. So, there is nothing new, ever outside us also. I took the word and looked outside also. If new means X, can there be any new things? It seems not. We can drop that word.
Transpeople and the related surgical techniques: not new.
Nuclear weapons: now new back in the 40s
Plato’s works: not new when he thought them and wrote them.
Does one even have grounds to complain about anything that arises?
Can there be a bad trend if nothing is really new?
Like Woke culture…
A:it’s terrible.
B: Ah, it’s nothing new. It’s just shuffling stuff around.
Naturally. There is no word to express something that is disconnected from everything you know.
By the very principle of such a concept, you’d not be able to define it, describe it, recognize it, or think about it in the first place. Thats the entire point.
Im using the word “new” to express the concept, but it is not the concept itself.
No. I understand what you mean. You can create a pattern that has not existed before, but it’d be still based on the information available to you. All you did was transform and not create.
What i meant by the use of the word “new” was that you exclude transformation as a whole.
You do not transform information.
I asked to create new information.
I always thought that the refutation of tabula rasa was kind of sophistry and not good faith arguing.
Your body and genes are to you what the tablet/paper is to tabula rasa.
This argument has played out many times in many culture from china to ancient Greece, but every time it was handled as an argument to be defeated or proven instead of trying to bring it closer to what is objectively true.
And what is true that both statements are valid. Nature and nurture both.
Your genes carry information, your cells are executing functions the moment the egg was fertilised.
But a fertilized egg carries no consciousness.
Consciousness and self-awareness develop after the age of 2. They are learned functions. It does not exist within you on a cellular level, nor is it there when you are born. So when it comes to YOU as in the EGO, as in the “I” that thinks, that is absolutely beholden to tabula rasa.
YOU are not there when you are born. Your body is a blank tablet that will now have to learn in order for the you to emerge.
And its not rocket science to figure this out because every concept, every thought, every word, language and so on is learned. Lock a newborn into a glass tank where its deprived of every interaction and chance to learn, and when you release it at the age of 18, all you will have there is what you started out with: A body and it’s functions. No person. No self-awareness. No consciousness.
Nature and nurture, Aristotle’s tabula rasa and Plato’s innate thought are not mutually exclusive concepts. They are just true each in a different framing and category. They need not clash.
Yes. When it comes to what i asked and meant by new (creation and not re-combination) all of your examples are nothing “new”.
All of your examples are new patterns, but they are not new information.
So, you would use the word new, but consider it not meaning this other thing that has no words. I can live with that.
So, then, there is no creating. The word describes something that never happens. I can go along with that, but I still find the word useful. Yes, any creating I do would be perhaps a series of transformations and combinations leading to something with what most people would call ‘no connection to’ the ingredients one started with. But at the molecular level or that it was verbal, yes it would not be this free and complete creation where something with no relation at all to what was there now exists.
That’s what I was saying.
I’d suggest you check that one. It is pretty much consensus to the contrary in science.
Twin studies go heartily against this. And so do studies of adopted children. We are combinations of nature and nurture. And babies do not all act neutrally slowly gathering temperments.
In physics and information theory new patters are exactly new information. It would be like saying that a building contains no more information than the building materials randomly piled. Or if you had an out of order list of the letters in Shakespeare or a text on physics, you are no new information when they are arranged as the plays and poetry of Shakespeare and the text on physics.
I think a more general problem is that you more or less have a god criterion. If you can’t conceive of something that cannot be conceived of you can’t think anything new. Because if you can conceive of it it would then have connections in some way to what you already know and how you know. I’m not sure what we now know when you say this.
“And its not rocket science to figure this out because every concept, every thought, every word, language and so on is learned. Lock a newborn into a glass tank where its deprived of every interaction and chance to learn, and when you release it at the age of 18, all you will have there is what you started out with: A body and it’s functions. No person. No self-awareness. No consciousness.”
This argument doesn’t actually prove what it thinks it proves. Sure, a newborn locked away from all human contact wouldn’t develop into a functioning person — but so what? Nobody in the nature/nurture debate is claiming nurture doesn’t matter. The whole point is that both contribute. Showing that nurture is necessary doesn’t refute that — it just confirms one half of the position you’re supposedly attacking.
Try flipping it: destroy the brain at birth, then surround the child with loving parents and the best education money can buy. You get a vegetable. Does that mean nurture is meaningless? Obviously not. Showing that removing one thing produces a disaster only tells you that thing was necessary — it says nothing about whether the other thing also matters.
There’s also something slippery about calling the newborn just “a body and its functions.” That’s not a neutral description — it’s the conclusion dressed up as a premise. The newborn’s brain isn’t nothing. It comes loaded with the architecture for language acquisition, emotional bonding, pattern recognition — all the machinery that determines how a child will respond to the environment it grows up in. That’s exactly what the nature side of the argument is about.
And honestly, the thought experiment doesn’t even work on its own terms. A child in a deprivation tank isn’t a clean test of “zero nurture” — it’s a child being actively destroyed by trauma. You’d be measuring the effects of catastrophic abuse, not isolating biology as a variable.
The whole argument boils down to: “nurture is necessary, therefore nature contributes nothing.” That doesn’t follow at all.
OK let’s deal with tabula rasa in general:
The blank slate debate isn’t really a debate anymore. Twin and adoption studies killed it.
Start with twins. Identical twins share all their DNA, fraternal twins share about half. If you measure pretty much anything psychological — intelligence, personality, mental illness risk, political leanings, religiosity, even how likely they are to get divorced — identical twins match each other far more closely than fraternal twins do. That gap is genetics doing the work, and it shows up everywhere you look.
Then come the separated twins, which is where it gets genuinely weird. The Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart tracked over a hundred pairs of identical twins who’d grown up in completely different families, sometimes different countries, and found they were nearly as similar to each other as twins who’d been raised together. Same IQ ranges, same personalities, same quirks — and famously, pairs who’d independently given their dogs the same name, married women with the same name, or taken up the same obscure hobbies without ever having met. At some point “coincidence” stops being a satisfying explanation.
Adoption studies are the knife in the argument’s back. If nurture were running the show, adopted kids should end up resembling the people who raised them. They don’t. By adulthood, they match their biological parents — people many of them never met — and the influence of their adoptive family has largely faded out. The Colorado Adoption Project
and the Swedish Adoption/Twin Study
both found this. Lovely adoptive parents matter, especially early on, but they’re not changing some of the core self.
The broader picture from behavioral genetics is that somewhere between 40% and 80% of variance in most psychological traits is heritable.
That’s not a fringe finding — it’s been replicated many times.
Then there’s the awkward fact that every known human culture, however isolated, shows the same basic emotional expressions, social structures, moral instincts, and language features. If we really were blank slates, you’d expect a lot more variety. You don’t get it.
And if you’re still not convinced, consider that selectively breeding animals for behavioural traits works reliably and predictably. It seems a little strange to accept that genes drive behaviour in every other species on earth and then insist humans got a special exemption.
Now let’s say but that isn’t knowledge, greenfuse. Knowledge doesn’t come from these things….
Fine, let’s accept that for a moment. If personality, temperament, cognitive ability, emotional tendencies, risk tolerance, and even political instincts are all substantially heritable, then the “tabula rasa” is already dead. What’s left isn’t a slate — it’s a highly specific piece of hardware with its own processing speed, emotional architecture, and built-in biases. But the problem with that argument (which you haven’t made but I’m trying to save time) is that what knowledge you get, how much you get, how you think of it and interpret and much more are all going to be affected radically by those traits.
And no one is arguing that you inherit verbal knowledge, say, or the ability to speak Spanish. But the ideas that you come to hold, the ones that are appealing, where your interests lean, how you think about your ideas, how well you learn, whether you are adventurous in combining and arranging ideas or whether you tend to simply parrot your group, all these things are radically affected by the personality and behavior traits.
Let’s look at one trait: relation to authority. Studies show that this goes as high as 50% heritability see link at the end. Let’s think about those who are more likely to question authority and those who go along with it. The former are much more likely to combine ideas, look to alternative sources of ideas, combine ideas differently, look for new solutions (not new in the absolute sense you are looking for, but in the sense we usually use that term).
Some of the traits that the twin study also reported as having more than 50% heritability ratio include leadership, obedience to authority, a sense of well-being, alienation, resistance to stress, and fearfulness.
And actually I was really quite surprised just how strong nature is. I knew it was significant, but I didn’t realize how much.
And another issue: your idea about babies being blank slates has been countered in another way.
Babies have distinct personalities and these are PREDICTIVE of adult personality traits.
There are many more studies.
And even newborns show distinctive personality/behavior traits. As of yet there aren’t longitudinal studies. They’ll need more time for those.
///EDIT: I choose to delete everything before this paragraph because this is where i realized the reason for our different view points. The answers i gave before this would have been meaningless and offtopic///
We agree that both concepts are true, but i think we fundamentally disagree on the hierarchy and nature of each concept.
You seem to imply that both have equal parts and roles and mix like sugar and water.
I am stating that they each fulfill completely different purpose and mix like oil and water. They can be separated and told apart with very little effort.
In short: Potential.
Unrealized, assumed, “yet to be realized” potential. The nature of the paper. The properties of the stone slab. The form of the empty vessel.
Objectively speaking you are arguing something that is not there, but something that is to come.
Maybe. Potentially. It may be realized. It may not. It may persist. It may be ground down and destroyed.
Yes. I do think we see the hierarchy of nature and nurture completely differently.
They are not equal by any means.
You are correct in stating that the size and properties of the tabula influences great many things.
What tools i need to use to write on it. How many words i can fit onto it. How easily those words will stick and how easily will they vanish off of the surface.
But vessel and content are categorically and fundamentally different.
Yes.
Both nature and nurture are needed for you to have a glass of water, but on their own neither water or glass are the glass of water. One is an empty vessel with an unfulfilled purpose, the other is a drying puddle on the ground that had no vessel to hold it.
The concepts reference, fulfill, handle and talk about completely different purposes.
The paper, the body, the nature will not give you the sonata, the ego, the nurture.
Lastly: We are still in no contradiction.
The studies you provided are not contradicting what i am saying.
Your genetics influence, your body has a potential, property, a nature, a bias.
None of those words will somehow magically produce the very thing they are supposed to influence. They are the vessel. Not the content.
As a footnote i will also reference data with scientific consensus in regards of what i meant:
You should search or ask an AI ~ at what age does the human self-awareness develop ~ You will find that there is also consensus on the fact that it develops gradually and it’s most basic signs surface only around the age of 2.
Until then a child cant even pass a mirror test because it wont recognize itself.
Narrative/reflective consciousness develops even further down the line around ages 3-5
Do you agree that you think “It’s impossible to come up with something new” and others think “It’s possible to come up with something new”?
Let’s say we put that to the test. What experiment would we make in order to test if it is one or the other?
You are the same person, in that situation, of course. Since you are in both situations. What I point out is that it seems no matter what you say nobody can think something entirely new because the someone is the same… It’s like saying you can’t travel anywhere new because every time you arrive, you are there, at each place.
I don’t know if they are equal but that both have significant effects.
Nurture’s effects can be ground down and destroyed. Nurture can also be missed by the entity. They focus elsewhere. They weren’t paying attention in class. Later experiences overwrite. Schizophrenia arises (heritable)
And what you are saying is true also for nurture. It goes in and leaves potential for learning certain things. In fact your whole argument is based on things being potential, that may or may not be realized, and that is why there is nothing ‘really new’ because it was in potentia before.
Au contraire. You teach the kid who dislikes authority the same lessons the kid who wants to please authority and they will write extremely different sonatas.
You doing the same thing. The nurture won’t create anything without the very specific nervous system and what is produced is radically different depending on it.
Are you conceding consciousness then? as far as self-awareness, Chatgpt calls it proto-selfawareness in from birth, so I’ll concede that one. But really that issue doesn’t matter.
1. Early bodily awareness (0–12 months)
What appears:
Awareness of their own body as separate from the environment.
Recognition that their actions cause effects.
and 15 - 24 for the mirror test. But now you seem to be arguing that there is no nature before full-self awareness. Newborns have distinct personalities, whether they have full self awareness or not.
And this are not necessary to know that the personalities, attitudes, ways of approaching life are to a very significant degree innate. And the twin studies show that it is to a very significant degree innate. This is conflate two issues. If their nature heads in a very specific direct regardless of experience to a significant degree we are not tabula rasae. And since this affects the sonatas we write the ideas we come up with, how we relate to teachers, information, the world, what we produce in not just stuff going into this built up from neutral blank paper. It has been interacting from the beginning with nature and is significantly dependent on it. Personality and how you relate to authority and your interests - significantly common between twins raised separately - is going to change the way your write the novel, what you focus on, your voice or style, etc. And so it will affect any art form and then on the mundane level how you communicate, how you relate in relationships and with coworkers.
What anyone thinks is not up for debate. Anyone can think anything they do/prefer/believe/etc.
What purpose does it fulfill to ask me whether or not i believe that everyone has their own beliefs and understanding? Of course we all do.
I do not understand what you are asking of me.
No test is required. We are individuals. We are not one and the same. And because we are not one and the same, we do not hold the same positions. I think this is an evident and observable fact.
Now with that being said, anyone can think anything. What can be confirmed?
I am even now just trying to guess what this even means… i… would need you to walk me through this step by step slowly. One step at a time, because i dont think i am grasping what you are trying to tell me.
Are you seriously asking me if something could not be new because i have been there already?
This is skull f-ing me.
The question does not seem to hold any meaning at all.
At one point before i acquired it, the information had to be new to me.
I dont understand what you are trying to do here. Whether or not its no longer new to me, does not mean that it never was. I just… dont know what you are asking of me.
Past that, this is still just talking about observation. Limited to what new things we can observe in this finite universe.
What test would you make to see if it is the case that someone can come up with something new or that it is impossible? A test that given one result, it’s one of those, and if it isn’t, it’s the other, in your view.
Yes. Correct. And how does this contradict anything i have said?
My point was that you need to teach both kids before they could write a sonata.
Not whether or not the two sonatas would be the same.
As stated above.
Consciousness i admit was maybe a bad choice of word. That concept is so broad that it can mean almost anything up to and including self-awareness.
And this is where you are using a concept too broadly.
What is personality? A tendency to do and not do things. How quickly you get irritated, how prone you are to react violently, etc etc etc etc. A personality is part of nature. The vessel part of the analogy.
I am not entirely sure what you are arguing here.
Are you suggesting that instinctive tendencies are a sign of ego/self-awareness?
Cause i’d disagree with that. Clearly what you are referencing here is more biological than learned/emergent.
Okay. Tabula rasa refers to the idea that we are born blank.
Literally as blank paper/tablet.
Empty vessel.
What you are arguing here at this point is that because even the most identical of vessels are not perfectly identical (and thus basically saying that all vessels are unique) we are born with innate knowledge.
And thats objectively false.
For you to prove that we are not born tabula rasa, you’d have to show me a child that is born with not the potential to learn any language, but having being born with a language.
We both know that is not going to happen, because you are born without knowledge. Tabula Rasae.
I think the problem here is that we mean something different by “knowledge”.
You seem to suggest that every and any information the body holds, whether its genetical or otherwise, is knowledge.
So we are not born “tabula rasa”.
I disagree.
Knowledge is what you learn. Not what your body innately does or what properties it has.
Again: Vessel and content.
If you want to be difficult about it, you could argue that even dna is a kind of ancestral memory, a biological knowledge our species has attained through millions of years of evolution.
To that i would reply 2 things:
Child in a glass tank. It will be alive, and it will hold all that ancestral memory and “knowledge” the body has collected. And yet it will be missing everything that’d make it a human indivdual.
The only way to entertain this idea is by moving the frame of reference and view humanity as not individuals and an abstract thinking emergent phenomena, but the net sum of flesh that managed to propagate.
Its not this simple. What makes us “us” is in a way very much an error of the biological vessel.
We are abstract thought. A glitch in the system. A system that became aware of itself because it became desynchronized with itself.
Again. What test? This is a Venn diagram.
You have one circle with all known information.
If there is another circle that is not overlapping with your known information circle, then its new.
You want to test what this would mean in the practice?
It would mean that you have absolutely, fundamentally, completely no idea what you are looking at.
Not. One. Bit. None. At all. Not as a hyperbole, but literally. None of idea.
If taken to the extreme, even the question would arise whether or not you could look at it, since your brain is the result of this universe/reality’s evolution so if you can look at it, its already a concept that has to have some kind of interaction with known concepts and information that exists within this reality.
But this would be too extreme to process even as an example.
So to summarize: From the point of an individual, your test would return the result of: None of this would make one f of a sense to you on any level.
You would not even be able to tell what you are looking at (IF you can perceive it in the first place).
This is why its easier to talk about this from a philosophical/metaphysical point of view, as a concept, and not as something real.
What im proposing is pretty much breaking the entirety of reality anyway, because its an impossiblity. You are basically tasked to create something from nothing. True creation instead of recombination and transformation.
So, you say that for you, it’s impossible to have something new. You get that as a predicate. Alright, you see anything as not new. Anything at all. At that point, you have twisted so much the meaning of ‘new’ that you are quite like Parmenides saying movement is impossible.
Picture this: If you were wrong, you wouldn’t notice it.
End of the topic for me, since you are ok with saying you are correct anyway. The situation, from your side, is indistinguishable from the situation being that you are wrong and not able to notice
