How is this distinguishable from blank slate hypotheses
@SamHarrisOrg
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In the same way as with actual slates. Saying their present content need not depend on previous content is not the same as saying they were initially blank, or initially identical.
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Replying to @DavidDeutschOxf @godsven3loquist and
Pinker was right to say the Blank Slate is wrong, but so is the Immutable Slate, which claims we cannot change our inborn dispositions.
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Replying to @dela3499 @EvanOLeary and
The ratio of genetic determination vs susceptibility to environmental adaptation is probably variable and entirely genetically determined.
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Replying to @Plinz @EvanOLeary and
That’s true for most aspects of our bodies (e.g. muscle mass & skin tone), but genes don’t determine the scope of human thought - except by making it universal.
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Replying to @dela3499 @EvanOLeary and
What makes you so sure that this has to be true? There are probably conditions under which a degree of innately enforced groupthink would have adaptive benefits for the group, and I don't think that it is impossible to encode tendencies for that genetically.
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Replying to @Plinz @EvanOLeary and
Suppose that’s true. What happens when somebody, a mutant perhaps, points out the groupthink about an idea? Presumably human brains can represent variants of that idea. What, other than an irrational *culture*, could prevent them from adopting such a variant?
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Replying to @dela3499 @EvanOLeary and
Like differences in height, having different kinds of minds is a normal part of population diversity. However, history is full of purges of intellectuals, infidels (and their offspring) etc. especially when rulers wanted to breed more collectivist or docile societies.
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It seems that most people have to difficulty to accept irrational beliefs when presented by high ranking ingroup members (especially in childhood and adolescence) and to stick to them, even when presented with clear evidence to the contrary. That has obvious adaptive value.
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You two seem to both agree on the difference between hard changes and impossible changes and just seem to disagree because you're stressing different things
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I think that homo sapiens is not so successful because we are more intelligent than other hominids, but because we sacrificed universality for programmability. It happened via mutations that bias the mind towards authoritarian groupthink ("normies") and against rationality.
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That is very interesting - can any non-human animal create a criticism of another animal? If so, they would just need to form societies to create a tradition of criticism. But how are we not universal? I.e. what am I strictly incapable of?
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Replying to @EvanOLeary @dela3499 and
I suspect that you are universal, in the sense that you can entrain your brain with almost arbitrary functions, up to a certain degree of complexity. But to get there, we need a few generations of bootstrapping, and individually, we need to break free from the hiveminds.
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End of conversation
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