[Krimel]:
Thanks for sharing your first impressions about [Paiget's] work.... Three generations of researchers have a worked to show that much of what Piaget thought was wrong. But his approach to the problem, the questions he asked and the research he conducted still have an enormous impact on even the man on the street's understanding of childhood and children. ... You really should acquaint yourself with his work before second guessing him.
I am not second-guessing Piaget, or any other psychologist. In fact, my interest in psychology has exposed me to Freud, Jung, James, Fromm, B.F. Skinner, Viktor Frankl, and Rollo May. Piaget discovered that children pass through four stages of intellectual development, from sensory-motor (first two years) through concrete (relational and symbolic), to abstract thinking. He maintained that the child learns spontaneously by interracting with the environment, rather than by rote learning. I associate Piaget with the Montesorri method, and my son spent some kindergarden time in one of those schools.
I have no quarrel with this developmental breakdown as a heuristic model for educators. However, by defining learning as a biological process, he misses the motivational factors that trigger it. The curiosity which leads to discovery, for example, or the desire to control one's environment by mastering its known principles and reasoning out the unknown. These motives have a valuistic basis, as does everything we learn in the life experience. Intellection is a psycho-organic process, the result of which is the individual's cognizant "being in the world". To equate awareness, intellect, or thinking with neuro-physiology is like equating your computer with the program that runs it.
I was going for a simplicity and brevity. But there is no special meaning attached to any of the terms. The energy is transduced when it changes form. When gasoline burns chemical energy is transduced into heat. When a rock rolls down a hill potential energy is tranduced into kinetic energy. When a photon hits the leaf of a plant light energy is tranduced into chemical energy. [snip] As Jill Bolte-Taylor said in her TED presentation we are energy beings exchanging energy in our environment.
So, I gather that you consider the human mind an energy transducer. Is it your theory, then, that physical energy is transformed to mental energy in the process of thinking? This would imply that reality in its primary or pre-intellectual state is energy of some kind, which I assume must be created.
[Krimel, previously]:
"Values" I am afraid are mostly inherited. They are the emotional valances programmed into our genetic code and modified or made specific through experience.
[Ham]:
And is the suggestion that "Values are mostly inherited" another assertion that you can't justify?
[Krimel]:
Who said I can't justify this assertion? Values are what we like and dislike. They are positive or negative, good or bad.
That much we agree on.
All of our emotional responses are hardwired. They are expressed autonomically as well as through movement of various muscles.
Not sure what you mean by "hardwired" in this context. We show our feelings by smiling, frowning, laughing, or gesturing, some of which may be autonomic responses, although the autonomic system is usually associated with proprioceptive stimuli, such as sitting on a hot stove. I'm not hardwired to enjoy a woman's beauty or a favorite symphony, nor is my expression of this joy necessarily autonomic. If I were hardwired to respond in a certain way, I wouldn't need value as a stimulus. What I "like" or "dislike" would be meaningless in such an epistemology.
They are nearly impossible to hide or to fake. They are expressed identically by most people everywhere on earth and can be identified in others everywhere on earth. Infants enter the world with an impressive range of values and they are equipped to communicate themselves valuistically to any adult in earshot.
Could you elaborate on this "impressive range of values" that the newborn infant possesses or expresses? They certainly can't be aesthetic, moral, conceptual, or intellectual in nature, which would seem to leave only proprioception (e.g., pain, pressure, hunger, tactile-sensibility, etc.)
In addition to that, the closer we are to other primates on the phylogenic tree the more similar are our emotional expressions. We do _learn_ which stimuli in the environment are most likely to evoke what kind of valuistic response. But we are genetically programmed to value food, warmth and companionship; we learn what is good to eat, where it is safe to sleep and who it is safe to sleep with. We are not free to enjoy being ignored or to be hungry or to like being smacked on the butt or to enjoy eating our offspring.
Apparently, there is no such thing as an "acquired taste" or individual preference in your worldview, and we're all programmed to react to our environment non-valuistically. How in this automatic world can Quality or Value have any meaning? (I'll defer the demands stemming from your "vigorous disagreement" with my ontology until I have a clearer understanding of your epistemology.)
--Ham Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
