Edwina, Daniel, Stephen, List,
I agree with Edwina. I think there are social and altruistic instincts, but they may be destroyed by a rigid culture, and replaced with other instincts, which are "if-then"- routines, such as egocentric, tribal, and warrior instincts.
I think, that the nature of humans is usually good, in a liberal and equality-supporting culture. But there are also sleeping bad predispositions, which may be awakened in a bad environment, for the purpose of surviving there too. But of course, a human always has choices.
The "Left" do not utter "nonsense" by saying that there are more than two genders, but they (the "Left") are merely liberal, by not wanting to forbid anybody defining their own special gender, like "lesbian, gay, trans, both, none, or between man and woman...", if they feel one of those suits better to them than either "male" or "female". A culture that presses on everybody one of two labels is rigid.
A rigid culture is more likely of starting a war than a liberal culture. In a war situation, bad instincts are awakened, up to making psychopaths out of people. A psychiatrist visiting a continuous war zone in Congo has said, the psychopaths ratio in the population was 70%. The other 30% remain, because people still have brains and choices.
All this may have to do with "brain wiring", ok, but not with cultural relativity, as "rigid", "liberal", "equality-supporting", and so on are universal terms.
Best,
Helmut
08. August 2018 um 14:41 Uhr
"Edwina Taborsky" <tabor...@primus.ca>
wrote:
"Edwina Taborsky" <tabor...@primus.ca>
wrote:
Interesting - but - if you see our species [homo sapiens] as a kind of 'black slate' so to speak - then, how do you explain the fact that the infant has to be socialized; i.e., our species is not born with innate knowledge and requires a long nurturance period. And our type of socialization requires language. So- how do you get away from the notion that the requirement for language is innate?
Edwina
On Wed 08/08/18 5:14 AM , Daniel L Everett danleveret...@gmail.com sent:
https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo16611802.htmlHere are two recent works of mind on culture and cognition. I will be exploring these further in a specifically Peircean context in a book coming out next year from OUP.Dan EverettSent from my iPhoneList, here's an interesting article that resonates with ideas that I've
touched on in this forum (culture, neural plasticity, scaffolding,
bucket-of-bugs... no such thing as instinct, no such thing as a "blueprint"
that wires the brain). I'm not sure whether the author would take it as far
as I do, but definitely of direct semiotic/biosemiotic relevance:
https://news.northeastern.edu/2018/08/06/what-if-people-from-different-cultu
res-and-economic-backgrounds-have-different-brain-wiring/
Barrett's paper also got me thinking about a point that I've been mulling
over recently... the importance of initial conditions (scaffolding in the
context of chaos theory)... the idea that experiences can never occur in
isolation (objectivity), but must build on prior experiences (subjectivity):
"This leads to another significant implication-that childrearing and
early childhood experiences are more important than we thought. Not only do
early experiences shape our personality and values, they also create the
wiring that will govern our perception of the world far into adulthood."
Initial conditions are particularly important in the cultural relativism
debate, for example, where the Left entertains nonsense about more than two
genders. Initial conditions based on childhood AND the body that you inhabit
lock you into a fairly narrow trajectory, with the implication that you
cannot just wake up one morning to decide that you're a special snowflake in
the wrong body, and that you need to change genders.
sj
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