Conscience
- Thread starter thrawn
- Start date
oh sure. get the glarb girl or whatever it is outta the country and take the hot chick ALL TO YOURSELF. selfish slime.
so when should i be expecting that ticket???
so when should i be expecting that ticket???
Check every 5 minutes until it arrives. I accidentally spilled raccoon scent on the envelope, so the frequency of your checking is extremely important. The moment you neglect to check is the moment one of those cunning little bastards could make off with your dream vacation.
This is an interesting thread. I'm going to carpet bomb it.
There are both uncultured and cultured aspects of morality. There are no societies on the planet where incest is allowed, for a reason. This doesn't mean that morality is all the same everywhere, though.
There is a strong genetic component to sociopathy, violent behavior, agressiveness, risk-taking, and planning.
If you're talking about things like autism, then yes, they really don't know what they're doing in a very significant sense. Severely autistic children have no theory of mind -- they don't realize that anyone else actually thinks or decides independently. In that limited world of thought, it's impossible to think even of "stealing", because that would imply that something belongs to someone else.
As good of a theory as any I've heard out of that field. There are some who disagree, based on the lack of variation and selection pressure to drive it. But I haven't heard any better alternatives.
Mob mentality IS a social structure -- one that we don't teach. If I may allude to Jerry Fodor: How can one learn what one cannot represent? Humans have special cognitive capacity allowing our societal organization. In light of this, I'm not sure what you're getting at.
Society started by a more cooperative process -- the species needed what you're describing here just to survive.
That makes a lot of sense from a learning perspective.
I'm pretty sure they're a myth.
The fight or flight response is innately under executive control in the front part of your brain. You have to allow for at least some other basic social function.
Free will is a biological aspect of a human. It exists physically, in a layer underlying the psyche. The human mind can be defined perfectly, given enough time to study it; the electron is the elusive being.
Conscience is a matter of personal perception, but perceptions respond to evolutionary forces and become increasingly more veridical.
What in the hell could a child do by himself? Coherent definitions of morality always involve at least two people. Basically, it revolves around not hurting other people. It's quite possible that a child left alone in the woods would not do anything wrong to you if you came and met him later.
The Blank Slate inherently implies the Ghost in the Machine. Free will is implemented biologically.
...
Let's see what that jumpstarted.
There are both uncultured and cultured aspects of morality. There are no societies on the planet where incest is allowed, for a reason. This doesn't mean that morality is all the same everywhere, though.
There is a strong genetic component to sociopathy, violent behavior, agressiveness, risk-taking, and planning.
I vote you post as many pictures of her as possible as well!
Just joking.
I believe we are born with a conscience of some sort. How we are brought up and society plays a huge part. But, in the same turn it also has to do with how our brains are wired so to speak. There are those born with mental disorders (Im talking a wide variety here) may not have the proper "wiring" as others do. Then there are those that are victims of their environment.
I know it sounds like I am babbling but I assure I know what I am talking about, but you can cut me some slack...I have had half a cup of coffee and its like 6:30 am. I am not really all that awake.
If you're talking about things like autism, then yes, they really don't know what they're doing in a very significant sense. Severely autistic children have no theory of mind -- they don't realize that anyone else actually thinks or decides independently. In that limited world of thought, it's impossible to think even of "stealing", because that would imply that something belongs to someone else.
As good of a theory as any I've heard out of that field. There are some who disagree, based on the lack of variation and selection pressure to drive it. But I haven't heard any better alternatives.
Mob mentality IS a social structure -- one that we don't teach. If I may allude to Jerry Fodor: How can one learn what one cannot represent? Humans have special cognitive capacity allowing our societal organization. In light of this, I'm not sure what you're getting at.
Society started by a more cooperative process -- the species needed what you're describing here just to survive.
That makes a lot of sense from a learning perspective.
I'm pretty sure they're a myth.
The fight or flight response is innately under executive control in the front part of your brain. You have to allow for at least some other basic social function.
Free will is a biological aspect of a human. It exists physically, in a layer underlying the psyche. The human mind can be defined perfectly, given enough time to study it; the electron is the elusive being.
Conscience is a matter of personal perception, but perceptions respond to evolutionary forces and become increasingly more veridical.
What in the hell could a child do by himself? Coherent definitions of morality always involve at least two people. Basically, it revolves around not hurting other people. It's quite possible that a child left alone in the woods would not do anything wrong to you if you came and met him later.
The Blank Slate inherently implies the Ghost in the Machine. Free will is implemented biologically.
...
Let's see what that jumpstarted.
And he could eat your face off. Him not killing you wouldn't be proof of an inherent morality as much as a simple inherent curiosity.
Again, please explain how you can code morality into DNA in order to make it "inherent". Until you can do that, the argument is pointless.
The same way you encode anything inherently in the brain. Children recognize all kinds of stuff when they're less than a day old: biological motion, object occlusion and reapperance, the human face, depth, etc. They know more abstract things too, like that hands have agency -- in other words, that they tend to have goals. Their pre-existing knowledge of human languages is simply stunning. Let me dwell on this last one a little longer.
Let's say you were in an unexplored item and you met some friendly natives. Nobody knows their language. A rabbit runs by and a native points and says "Unduku!". What does unduku mean? Well it could mean rabbit, or it could mean "look!", or it could mean fuzzy white thing, or running thing, or a ton of other things. Or it could mean something weirder, like what if unduku means rabbit on Tuesdays but means housewife on Saturdays? Basically, the fact that any kid ever picks up our language means they start out knowing a whole ton about it when they start out.
Obviously I'm shortening that a lot, but it's by far the dominant idea in language acquisition research. Genetics can and do encode such abstract ideas as a subjunctive tense. Morality could very well be the same way.
Dharma1521
Soooo do I look as young as I look?
We are confinded by language. Monitor your thoughts for a bit and see that everything (well at least the majority) of your thoughts are words. Even pictures have words associated with them. We limit the ability to actually know something because we restrict it with language.
i was hoping you'd show up for this
what is your official stance on the whole Chomsky mentality with language? I'm curious to hear what you think about it
Good point. I was thinking about this the other night. Specifically how termites, ants, bees, etc. know how to construct vast and complex structures and how that can be reconciled genetically. Obviously they don't go to insect school, and yet they are possessed of a very, very profound building instinct. And obviously this is only one of millions of similarly amazing behavioral examples in the world.
But what of individuals who lack any sense of right and wrong, those who never made a choice to ignore their allegedly inherent conscience but instead simply have a void where one "should" be? Does their DNA lack a component, or are they simply a product of their environment? And what if their environment was developmentally mundane?
Nature is a mysterious and incredible thing.
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Monitor your thoughts ...? What are my thoughts, and how does one find out what the majority of them are? When I think about thinking, what comes into my head is an fMRI. In this sense, the best definition of thought is neural activity. The vast majority of this activity is completely unrelated to language. When you go play catch with someone, think about what a startling feat it is that you have any ability to try at it at all.
Just the visual component is incredible. Your eyes each take in literally billions of points of data (photon strikes). This information is greatly compressed, then sent along the optic nerve. There it goes through filter after filter until it arrives in the primary visual cortex. That area, the top half an inch on the back of your head, performs hundreds of analysis methods on the information to try and pick out important parts. All of this is eventually compiled and sent to your frontal and prefrontal cortex. So in the blink of an eye, a huge wash of information is transformed into "Oh hey, it's my friend Zach."
Another point to make: Conscious thought is mostly in a linguistic format, but this can be freeing as well as restricting. The human mind is capable of using language in a process that creates new concepts. This is mostly what my research is about: how kids learn to count. Kids first learn the count list one through ten just as meaningless placeholders. But then the mind begins noticing correlations and patterns, and starts filling in these placeholders with the actual meanings.
You can probably remember this process from physics class. When you teach a highschooler force = mass x acceleration, they first just know these as placeholders. Until you describe what force, mass and acceleration are, all they really know is that F=MA. They're only defined in terms of each other. It's meaningless, and doesn't effect their reasoning. Then they begin to understand what mass is (as apposed to weight, density, size, etc.), then acceleration, and finally understand force. Now the kid has a different way of reasoning about the world. (As a sidenote, they fill in the placeholders by using language as a communication tool as well.)
i was hoping you'd show up for this
what is your official stance on the whole Chomsky mentality with language? I'm curious to hear what you think about it
Chomsky says a lot of weird stuff in non-language realms these days. His basic point is well-taken though. At this point, the real debate in the field is over exactly how much kids know to start out with, not whether Chomsky's basic idea was right or not. Some of his specific details weren't quite right, but that's not really something to dwell on.
Well, my view of the world is that you'd have to fit that person into a category like the severely autistic. I mean, I don't think such a person would seem normal; they would almost for sure have other cognitive deficits. The sad truth is that some people suffer from genetic disorders. Otherwise, I think they made the choice to ignore it.
This is a pretty philosophical question though, haha. There's not really going to be a good way to resolve it.
And ants are fascinating.
There is a sociology word for this but I don't remember it. The movie Nell with Jodi Foster was suppose to touch on this concept. The basic concept was if someone was raised without language they wouldn't develop true understanding of some normal concepts of mortality, time passage etc. The movie Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes touched on that thought too. I took a sociology class in college and did a term paper discussing that concept and how it's easily seen in that Tarzan movie. It got printed in some Sociology Journal. I think I have it storage somewhere.
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