Nature vs Nurture: A Philosophical Perspective?

During the last session it was suggested we talk about (human) development in terms of the contributions that come from genetics (nature) and from the environment (nurture).  I added the term human in this statement, as I don't recall that the topic was limited only to people as first suggested.

My first reaction was that this was less a philosophical topic and more one for psychology or some other field.  Behavior, learning, language, etc. fall into the field of psychology, which gladly accepts it.  Here is a link that lays out the nature vs nurture argument in psychologically clear terms, and identifies the key players in their origin and development.   John Locke's use of the term tabula rasa in 1690 to describe human mental development at birth as a "blank slate" upon which our environment (through learning) will provide the information to write upon it really set the argument rolling for this dichotomy of ideas.

Genetically, the viable product of an egg and a sperm will be an offspring that is related to the parents constrained only by the DNA/RNA/enzyme and protein manufacturing capabilities of the resultant cells.  When I taught Intro. to Biology we dedicated a week to the basics of genetics, including genes and how they determine growth and development of an organism.  We did a fruit fly experiment where we crossed red and green eyed flies, who also had a gene for either smooth or crinkly wings.  We then counted how many flies had the various characters and determined dominant and recessive traits.  Studies of the presence or absence of features like this make a strong case for a fundamental genetic basis to physical characteristics, which I think we can all agree upon.  

Looking for references that shed some additional light on this phenomenon, I ran across this Ted Talks Blog where the relationship between our neural network and its reaction to our environment is explored.  The author says that our genome reacts to the environment we put ourselves in, acknowledging the interaction between environment and our DNA, and suggests that the right sorts of stimuli we may encounter might enhance our cognitive abilities.  Our brains are continually making new neurons, he says, and our environment can influence how they grow and develop.  Hanging out with smart people will make you smarter?  Makes sense to me.

So rather than a dichotomy of influencers, nature and nurture both play a role in human development (of course), and this is an on-going and dynamic process we can influence as individuals.  

Here are a couple of things you might want to look up before our next meeting.

1.    Studies of the separation of twin babies separated at birth, who subsequently grow up in very different environments.  What case studies can you find?  How does the influence of genetics (nature) play out in the individuals?  Can we draw conclusions about the influence of the environments (nurture) on their ultimate development?

2.    There was a time when this was a very hot topic.  People in he past have been obsessed with the idea that language was learned by babies because of their environment, but if this stimulus could be taken away, the infant would innately use what was called a natural or Adamic language.  Accounts of this being tried find their was into the literature: babies may have been actually used in these experiments where all language was withheld from them just to see how they would develop.  Here is a link to the Wiki summary of 4 such studies. 

What is your Essence?

 For those of you who pay attention to new movies that have been released in the past year, a Disney/Pixar release called Soul has been getting some recent attention (available only by streaming on Disney + channel).  The reviews have been good, so Judy and I watched it last night.  It raises many, many philosophical and theological questions, many of which shoot past in dialogue or situation very quickly, but the story is charming and the graphics are amazing.  

For example, one of the characters is 2-dimensional.  When was the last time you saw an actual 2-dimensional character in a movie?  (Hint: comic characters in the newspaper are only lines on paper, hence 2-dimensioinal.  The movie characters in Soul have been reduced to the absolute graphic minimum, and they are fantastic.)   I’ve teased out one of the major threads presented in the movie, “What is your essence?”, and I think we can make a pretty good BQ out of it.  If you have a chance to watch the movie before we have our meeting it would be best, but isn’t totally necessary.

In the movie, newly formed proto-soul’s have a short series of attributes they need to obtain before they are fully formed and ready to fall to Earth to start to inhabit a body.  One of these attributes is an essence.  They are allowed to find whatever their essence is through a process of participating or observing anything that happens or can be done on Earth (a pretty fun scene), and once identified, their soul is complete and off they go. 

The hero of the movie is Joe, a former living human with a fully formed soul, but things have conspired to place his adult soul among the newly formed little souls who are gathering attributes.  Joe knows exactly what his passion is as a human has madly pursued it, and only learns of his essence later, upon reflection.  He learns that the conflicts and disappointments in his life that he has been fighting all along are because his passion blinded him to the greater good he was actually doing with his essence.

This passion vs essence conflict jumps off the screen to me as it is a manifestation of Fredrick Nietzsche’s famous quote, “Become who you are!”  This sentiment ran its course philosophically in the 1800’s and 1900’s and influenced notable thinkers like Carl Jung and Albert Camus, among many others.  Read about it here.

This topic has been done before, in the Being vs Becoming topic we did last Sept 3.  Seeing it presented so well in this movie drags it up again for me.  I hope you get a chance to see it before we meet.

What is humor?

 I attended a serious philosophical lecture on this topic at the Univ. of Washington several years ago hoping the lecturer would salt his presentation with witticisms that would make me laugh.  Sadly, it was very dry and mostly boring.  If you want a philosophical analysis along the lines of that lecture, check this link out.  Maybe that was what was desired when the participant from the last session suggested the topic, or maybe they wanted someone to tell a lot of jokes first so we could all enjoy them?  Please come with your favorite joke book in hand, ready to share.  Holiday or COVID jokes might be the order of the day.

The click-thru link above leads to an article that discusses the difference between laughter and humor, which I liked.  Children telling knock-knock jokes and then laughing understand that the joke was funny enough to get people to laugh at least once.  That repetition diminishes the likelihood that people will laugh again is not as easily understood.  One writer distinguishes laughter and humor this way. "laughter results from a pleasant psychological shift, whereas, humor arises from a pleasant cognitive shift."  This sort of mind-body duality appeals to the Descartes-ian in me.  "I laugh, therefore I am!"

Here are books that use jokes and humor to teach the ideas of philosophy.

    Plato and a Platypus walk into a bar...; Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes, by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein, 2007.  This book follows the standard Big Questions of Philosophy pattern of identifying the BQ, and then laying them out through the use of jokes and funny stories.  There are 2 characters in the book so they can approximate a dialectic discussion of the topics, which helps to make it interesting.  If find just reading through the jokes to be a lot of fun, honestly.  I keep this book on the headboard of the bed for nighttime reading.

    Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates; Using Philosophy (and jokes) to Explore Life, Death, the Afterlife, and Everything In Between.  Cathcart and Klein, 2009.  This book uses the same format as the one above, but includes far more 1-panel comics as well.  The comics are often in a Far Side sort of style, although I don't think there are any from that source.  It is less a survey of BQ topics and more of an exploration of topics around death, the afterlife, immortality, Heaven, and so forth.  In one cartoon an old man is lying in bed, his wife is holding his hand, and the caption are his likely last words, "I should have bought more crap!"    My addition:  said nobody, ever.

Adding to the list of sites to visit for additional info about the philosophy of humor are these:

BigThink.com:  This sponsored site has a fairly good summary of the topic, and includes a video of a famous comic talking about how humor and laughter work, from his perspective.

PhilosophyNow.org:  A short article that has some excellent examples of verbal humor, and links to related articles worth visiting.

PsychologyToday.com:   There is a section here talking about the humor around the Corona Virus pandemic, if you can believe it, and some of the jokes are pretty funny.  Also links to podcasts that relate to Philosophy of Humor, if you like podcasts.

There seems to be no end to on-line info on this topic.  I hope people take the time to look at some of it, at least, to become grounded in the philosophic side of the topic.  And to bring their favorite jokes to share.

What is cultural relativism, and can we judge others?

Note:  this topic will be discussed on Nov. 13.

On October 11th the Seattle Times published 2 articles by Ron Judd concerned with the subject of George Washington.  The questions raised were essentially, why was our state named for someone who owned slaves and never set foot here, and how can we venerate founding fathers who promoted the ideals of universal freedom for all and still owned slaves?  Click here and here to read the articles.

The philosophical question behind these questions is, do we have a right to judge others in different cultures or from different times using the standards we have today?  Is it right to think that our values and norms are somehow universally correct for everyone, everywhere, and everywhen?   Or, do we need to step back and say, they lived in a different time and by different norms we can't really judge?  The subtext is, are there universal norms that always apply, like murder is always wrong, and slavery is always wrong, no matter what?

I liked the even-handedness Judd uses in his articles, and how he included interviews with black historians who study Washington and others of the founding fathers, and shares their perspectives.  I can feel the relativistic process at work, tying in the recent Civil War statue removal backlashes, among other current issues.  At one level you can see a revisionist history being written while, at the same time, we are asking ourselves if it is right to change the way we interpret and report on past events.  Can't we accept that things were different then, and accept the people of that time (in this case), and somehow understand their perspectives and motivations?

The practice at the time of the young USA was for a slaveholder to free his slaves upon his death through his will, which Washington did.  Jefferson did the same (for the most part).  Judd's historians raise the question, how different would the fledgling USA have turned out if he had freed his slaves while serving as president?  He missed his chance to be that shining example that maybe he should have been.

What is consciousness?

One of the more interesting philosophical ideas of the past few years is the concept that "machines" might be able to think.  Most of the Sci Fi books I read today include at least 1 character who is an Artificial Intelligence, or AI.  When the author embraces the concept and imbues the AI with a quirky personality, or some sort of noble purpose, he makes them into a human-sort of character we can all identify with and enjoy.

At the root of all this is the idea that a machine, a computer in most cases, can think in the same way we all believe we think, including having emotions, feelings, motivations, and so forth.  Collectively we might call the running cognitive process in our minds consciousness and identify it as something special that only humans and other biologic close relatives might be capable of having.  Can your computer be said to have consciousness?  Can a collection of silicon chips and metal wires be conscious?  What is the underlying essence that makes human consciousness so special?

If you haven't run across John Searle's Chinese Room Experiment, please look it up.  In this thought experiment Searle shows how, at the level of actually manipulating machine code, a computer of any kind does not actually know what it is doing - it only manipulates information according to the programming that runs it.  For this reason the machine cannot be said to actually "understand" the information it is dealing with, it only manipulates 1's and 0's.  Searle goes on to talk about how a computer can be made to run in almost any sort of medium, not just the silicon chips we talk about commonly today, so we need to keep a very broad concept of what a computer might be in our minds.

Alan Turing's AI Test, which I like to call the If It Walks Like A Duck, It's A Duck Test, says that if you cannot tell the difference between a machine and a person in a blind test (you send in questions and read the answers without knowing which is which, for example) there is no difference.  If a computer can be programmed to replicate any nuance of human responsiveness you can think of, and could then respond in a way indistinguishable from a human response, then the machine can be said to have all the cognitive properties a human has. In the movie Blade Runner you might recall that the future robot police developed very sophisticated tests to identify the androids/robots among us, since their responses to human life and situations were indistinguishable from almost all human responses.

Which brings me back to consciousness, and what it is.  Like free will, where we are free if we believe we are free, is consciousness ours to claim if we simply believe we are conscious?  Is a dolphin not conscious only because a dolphin has never asked itself that question?  Or your dog?  Are these other biologic creatures, who are clearly intelligent in some ways but who act predominantly according to some genetic or basic survival programming and not with willful intent, actually conscious in the same way we feel we are?

And for the Trekkies out there, are the “individuals” in the Borg conscious?

What ought we to do?

Ethics.  Always a difficult subject for people.  Where do we find the blueprint for our actions that help us live healthy, happy, productive lives, free of worry and in harmony with others?  Philosophical thinkers have weighed in on this issue down through the ages, and their thoughts can be roughly sorted into categories we might want to take the time to explore.

Main Ethical Theories

Religion Based:  Divine Command Theory  -  The divine command theory asserts that an action is morally right if the action is in harmony with God's commands.

Consequence Based:  Utilitarianism  -  A utilitarian believes that an action is morally right if it maximizes overall well-being and happiness.

Duty Based:  Deontology  -  A deontologist believes that an action is morally right if the motive behind the action is good.

Agent Centered:  Virtue Ethics  -  A virtue ethicist holds that an action is morally right if an agent who has all the virtues would have performed the action.

To prepare for the meeting you might want to look these up in your favorite search engine and see where your ideas fall.  Where would an atheist most likely feel comfortable?  A person strongly committed to the Bible?  A pagan?  A Buddhist?  A humanist?  You can see where I am going.

Enjoy the process.  If we were doing this "the old way", I'd have several volumes of books arrayed on my coffee table when you arrived that address this topic in many different ways.  The popularity of the concepts leads to a plethora of authors who like to talk about it.  Including me, apparently.

Leave a comment, please.  I'd like to know where you all stand.

What is the ideal society?

 A common theme that runs though ancient and modern societies is the idea that, if isolated and handled properly, humankind can life in a more harmonious and fulfilling way than we typically do today.  History is filled with the stories of Utopian groups who have conceived of a way to live where all aspects of life may be different than world from which they have come, but the new "order" leads to better lives better lived.

I came across Thomas More's Utopia recently, which sparked my thinking.  If you Google it you will come across the Wiki summary, which is not bad.  I encourage you to find a copy of the English translation and read it.  I direct you to a chapter called, A Day In Utopia, in which More outlines the basic way of life for the people living there, and points out the advantages of the new way of living.  Along the way he points out that the basic problem with normal society is that it is based on the principle that The Rich Get Richer, and the Poor Get Poorer.  It was first published in 1516, in Latin, in Belgium.   He was hanged for heresy in 1535.

You remember Ralph Waldo Emerson, of course.  His Transcendentalists formed a utopian compound in the Concord, MA area in the 1820's.  It ran out of food in the first winter and didn't really succeed.  If you get a chance to read any of the accounts of the group and how they operated, it was a real collection of special people.  One guy would not wear clothes and would only eat crackers, for example.

The most successful group of that time was John Noyes' quasi-religious community in Oneida NY in the 1850's.  It persisted until a tornado almost wiped it out in 1878, but it exists today as the flatware company Oneida Ltd.  I don't think there remains the sort of living arrangement Noyes set out in his original vision (read about it and you will see just how different it was).  He had some strong feelings about sex, I can tell you.

Jim Jones and his band of religious zealots who "drank the Kool-Aid" in Guyana in the 1970's are another kind of societal group seeking to create a new way of living.  For many years we had the garlic-growing Love Isreal group in Arlington.  Remember them?

So, the question to be discussed is, What is the Ideal Society?  What sort of norms and values need to be shared in common to make one successful?