Personally, I disregard innate, as that almost falls into the a priori trap.
Knowledge is stimuli collection, memory retention, and abstraction towards application.
Instinct, is simply a matter of environmental stimuli generating a biochemical response without abstraction or executive function.
An animal senses fear, they do not question it, or attempt to induce/deduce cause. They seek to move from the objectified producer of fear, and out of instinct, they can also run off a cliff, or onto a busy highway.
Chomsky’s theory is still just about the standard for linguistics, which says that the basic foundation for human language is innate. He proves it by showing how children structure their sentiences in a complex way, with very little knowledge of what to base their speech off of and without understanding or knowing any of the rules.
monkey see, monkey do is not proof of intelligence…
infants hear how language is constructed by hearing speech and they simply repeat it… that is not evidence of a higher structure… it is evidence of mimicry… chomsky is incorrect on this point (et.al.)
Children learn language, in the same manner that they learn virtually everything ~ mimicry.
The mirror neuron network is responsible for this function, and it is very adept at not only monitoring the environment, but for cataloging the differences, then abstracting “next step” behavior.
I honestly don’t know Noam Chomsky’s views thoroughly enough to debate them, but I know that his argument is the standard of linguistics; saying that humans are born with the basic knowledge of the universal rules of grammar. His proof is that children can put together sentiences in complex ways, without enough exposure to language to have been able to put together sentiences like that if we were like a “blank slate,” so to speak.
I was already aware of the claim, and if you were to look for yourself, you would find that Chomsky is not an empiricist, he’s a philosopher of linguistics in line with Fodor.
He wasn’t comprised of the knowledge/academic background to refute empiricism.
Not to mention, mirror neurons and their function weren’t even known to him.
He has no proof, he has philosophical supposition, in opposition to substantiated scientific facts which say otherwise. Mimicry is how children learn, and in the event that a child has a sterilised environment, devoid of human language, they will not be able to speak or perform basic sequences of remedial motor functions, and may even be autistic.
Chomsky is not a valid source for the current discourses.
Interesting discussion! Are thoughts or ideas like instincts kept in the DNA code?
Can instincts be thought of as thoughts or ideas? I don’t think so.
So what exactly is this knowledge, thoughts, or ideas we are talking about?
Are we prone to certain thoughts or understandings due to something in our genetic makeup?
In a way, it sort of reminds me of the old, “Can virtue be taught?”
Interesting!
[size=75]“Drawing on decades of research in the “sciences of human nature,” Pinker, a chaired professor of psychology at MIT, attacks the notion that an infant’s mind is a blank slate, arguing instead that human beings have an inherited universal structure shaped by the demands made upon the species for survival, albeit with plenty of room for cultural and individual variation.”[/size]
Kind of reminds me of the old theological debate,
“Are we born sinners?” Predestination vs. Free Will (or blank slate)
I was once under that persuasion as well, but recent research indicates that the real culprit in those scenarios is maldevelopment of the brainstem, especially where serotonin receptors, responsible for heart rate, breathing, blood pressure, body temperature and arousal, are not present or sufficiently low.
Most often caused by deficiencies during pregnancy due to a number of mitigating factors.
Instinct is a different programming than knowledge, a wasp is incapable of knowledge. It simply reacts instinctively, (autonomous biochemical response to environmental stimuli).
P.S. You should have watched the entire clip, they told specifically how it “knows” … pheromones, (biochemical scent with high reacitivity, like any peptide hormone).
Yes, I did watch it (the entire series). My question was: Why does it do it? Why blue butterfly caterpillar and not some other larvae? Why lay eggs this way and not some other way?
As I stated, you were told: pheromones are powerful peptide compounds, and activate sequences of other hormones to be released. Insects are driven by biochemical cursors, they haven’t the capacity to “know” anything, they simply react according to genetic programming, (more complex biochemical sequences), autonomously.
Just as the ants started to attack one another when the wasp released the effecting hormone. Biochemical stimulus > reception > reaction in hormonal release in affected individual > biochemical processes affected > behavior change.
You are attempting to anthropomorphise the behavior. At some point in time, there was a behavior change due to this or similar hormone, and with the behavior change, the new offspring kept the genetic information in its DNA, so the line continued, and the behavior biochemically repeats even today. It’s evolution. If the behavior change had created a negative impact, it is likely to a certain degree, that this species of wasp would be part of the fossil record, and found nowhere else.
This is where we differ in our opinions. You might say that one can have a custom-designed stimulus response mechanism in their genes, but to me this would be “innate knowledge”.
It is pointless to argue what has already been proven. Instinct bares no similarity to knowledge, which is privilege of the higher order species that can actually engage application towards new behaviors through a posteriori information , or memory, abstraction and application.