Epigenetics is commonly used these days to descibe what genes do or do not do in any given environmental situation, not just as affecting markers on parents’ DNA. I would not rule the latter out, however. See epigenetics for dummies–http:/en.wickipedia. org/wiki/Epigenetics for various interpretations of the word.
Maybe these are the same on the ontological level of awarenesses.
Yes, on some fundamental level i think you’re probably right that on all knowledge begins, at least, with feeling. But i don’t think that means we can actually know there is naturally a right to be (or any rights at all), because not all feelings are awarenesses. i mean, feelings can be misleading, no?
Thanks UPF, I’m not saying that any full-fledged right to be exists in the ontological level of awareness–just tendencies toward later expression. Yes, feelings can be misleading. Learning amounts to what goes on when existential feelings are considered in the verbal milieu–where distinctions can be made. An emergence of misleading feelings as predominant in the human psyche would doom the human race.
Tab,
That was semantic policing, not biological policing. Please make an attempt to understand this thread before dissing it.
What happened during the Enlightenment that caused philosophers (Locke, Rousseau, etc.) to be concerned with the rights of Man?
Clarification–
If one believes that mind has physical precedents, it cannot be a blank slate. Minds owe to a genetic heritage and a social history. Epigenetics is simply what a gene can or cannot do in specific environments. This “Loose” definition applies to genes in the molecular environment as well as genes in a macro environment, such as a culture or “nature”. Humans, as is true of other organisms, are participants in the history of their species. Since we are co-creators of the environments to which we must adapt, and our awareness includes ideas of reponsibility, our dispositions toward ethics becomes morality in the social milieu.
During the Enlightenment philosophy appears to have become self-conscious and began to include, on a large scale, considerations of the knower in dicussions of what can be known. Descates considered the human body and all “lower” animals to be autonomous machines. Spinoza attempted to settle the mind/body problem by seeing the individual as part of the whole.
In other words mechanical functionality and “mental” functionality are not in opposition. Humans “create” from an experiential knowledge of how we are constructed.