Lecture: video.google.ca/videoplay?docid= … &plindex=2
By Steven Pinker
talks about the blank slate, ghost in the machine and noble savage (nonviolent hunter/gatherers) about how those concepts are wrong. It talks about a biological basis of morality and so on and so forth.
@ your sig : “Power does not corrupt man, but man corrupts power.” ~Dan~
Also, if that’s a movie/video, I can’t be assed to wait so long on dialup to download.
Is there a text version of what’s been said there?
I don’t think hunter/gatherers are nonviolent, that’s for sure, and people still hunt [seach for products] then gather [consume products] even in the most modern of cities.
What’s your main idea here?
Yes, please expand on your thoughts: as I would like to contribute to this thread…
My thoughts are that people should watch the lecture because it contradicts many philosophical ideas.
Have you seen how long the video is? My days of lectures are over! My attention span is short, and my boredom threshold, low…
As several people have said, some of us have dial up and are incapable of watching the clip.
Alright fair enough, its a long lecture and some people have dialup, that being said if you don’t have dialup, its an y thing but a boring lecture and focuses on philosophy as much as anything else. That being said some topics discussed are:
How parenting doesn’t do much to effect a child: adopted brothers are as similiar as strangers, brothers seperated at birth as similiar as brothers raised in the same house, and twins raised apart never havi9ng seen each other, are identical to the point that a person would have problems accecpting anything but freak-chance.
It talks about the blank-slate and evolutionary psychology, how we have domain specific mechanisms for dealing with adaptive problems, he talks about descrates nonsense duality between mind/brain, he talks abouit violence in hunter/gatherer societies, pre/currents.
talks about ‘determinism’ ‘biophobia’ basically all the stuff covered in the book of the same name.
or the text document for the lecture;
Sounds like an interesting lecture but I’m on dialup too so watching it is impossible.
Wonder what is meant by the ‘blank-slate’? Does it mean humans are at birth ‘blank slates’ rather than having some inherited characteristsics? Or does he mean something different?
He means, considering the blank slate as true is a modern denial of human nature, that humans come pre-equipped with domain specific mental adaptations for dealing with regularities in the world.
I can definitely agree with that.
Conditioning of an individual is filtered, the filter has so much to do with whatever becomes, and the filter is body/gene.
If people could accept that, it would end quite a few arguments in a heartbeat.
I have to question the idea that real responsibility can be derived from a mutability of behavior resulting from assignation of praise or blame; it only proves that the illusion that we control our behavior is a useful one. Perhaps “responsibility” ought be better defined… cannot think of an analogy to better describe my objection.
Huh? “persecution of the successful”? How does belief in a blank slate cause that, and where does it exist? I certainly begrudge the successful people their success, but that’s more out of envy than anything.
I’m a fan of most of what I’ve come across from Pinker, though I’m wary of his popularity.
I believe in the blank state theory in that men are born at birth with no pre-existing need for abstract or the absurd complexities of civilization that consumes our very present lives.
I will say that men are born with physical stimuli on a biological level leading to instinct where the desire to be social comes from not to mention our natural inborn predatory behaviors come from too.
Define yourself very clearly and at length what exactly are you denying/suggesting? Which exact complexities/abstractions?
We are not born with the ambitions to formulate mathmatics.
We are not born with the ambitions for government.
We are not born with the ambitions for religion or spirituality.
We are not born with the ambitions for technology, mechanics or machinery.
We are not born with the ambitions of reading or writing.
All those things are not natural necessities but instead remain luxories. They are arbitrary in origin.
Men are only born with the position of feeding, reproducing, and conquering.
We are born with the ambition/ability to think abstractly about numbers/items but not in the way of a traditional number system, no.
People have innate ambitions for social status which naturally creates social hiearchies, which are naturally a form of proto-government.
religion is a byproduct of adaptations, religions cross-culturaly exist and theres evidence they always have, theres evidence for why/how people are religious and which adaptations and why, how they are transmissable etc. Agency detection, folkbiology,psychology,physics (innate concepts of each) all lend themselves easily to supernatural interpretation. You’re just wrong and theres MASSIVE MASSIVE evidence to show otherwise.
Evidence you will never care about because you never do care about evidence that flies in the face of your delusions.
Chimps use spears, we naturally invent ways to cope with the environment. spears are technology. Using tools is technology.
people have an instinct for language which naturally lends itself to both in some form of symbol manipulation, drawing lines in the dirt, cave painting, etc.
Your view that humans aren’t religious in their natural state is so blindingly wrong that its obvious to almost everyone besides you its a faith-based and a religious idea itself. Try to remain a non-hypocrite to your values Joker.
Doesn’t mean that we can’t have secular societies some day, or lend any credence to religion, infact it takes a lot away by reducing it to misfiring mental architecture. Its not very encourging to think that we can’t eliminate religion easily, if at all, though.
I believe people were alot like our biological cousins the chimpanzee in their natural state concerned only with physical survival and reproduction at a time where religion or abstract thought was unknown.
I can tell you that religion hasn’t always existed and that before than we can assume that people were like all the modern primates we see today.
I can also say that physically people are only adapted to tropical climates just like most of the great primates we observe today since at one time or another people were limited to only tropical conditions at a time where we all walked naked or barefoot.
Religion was a accident befallen on man just like this absurd civilization around us today that extended from religious premises but people of fear can’t accept that their fates are accidental so they create fictitious purposes to ease their existential anxiety creating whole histories to make themselves feel justified or that they are apart of some higher plan to distract them from the facing reality of their own limited finiteness.
We are born to differentiate seperate forms of mass and nothing more.
Example:
I can tell that two trees are not the same entity but whether they correlate a number because I give them one out of a invented traditional number system is entirely make believe as a crude memory device.
Acceptable.
Today’s governments doesn’t revolve around social status but instead revolves around the monetary market.
Through capitalism the market surpasses individuals in decision making in regards to sociality.
Social hierarchies are much different than actual governments.
There is a big difference between pre-state societies operated on a localized scale versus today’s government that operates on a centralized scale.
This isn’t proving anything. At this post I just see a bunch of unfounded statements.
Yes they do but they are not born with the ability they acquire it instead.
There is a big difference between acquisition and somthing which is innate.
People have an instinct for communication. Primitive communication is much different than actual language itself.
Language is different by its mere syntax.
Writing as I have illustrated in another thread was born out of ritual. The first rituals being religious.