Evolutionary justification for confidence? And whence confidence in evolution?

How do we know that these other ideas are "unconscious"? Our brains are modular and we could have several different parts forming different concepts with different data. — Harry Hindu

I'm not familiar with modularity in brains. We can tell that math isn't straightforwardly innate because there wouldn't be any such thing as a math class if that was true. That's one prong of Locke's attack. The other prong is to say that if Leibniz (and others) are saying that humans have a potential to acquire knowledge, then the thesis is trivially true.

Leibniz says it's something else. He uses the tabula rasa image, but says we should imagine it as marble with streaks running through it. Any statue can be cut from plain marble, but the streaky kind will reduce the number of possible outcomes... in like manner, the mind has an innate tendency to think along certain lines.

But do the streaks lean us toward the truth? Descartes says we can rely on that because of God's benevolence. For Leibniz, it's more that the human mind is a reflection of the divine mind.

You absorb parts of them begin to synchronize in thought and feeling — Wosret

A painting of it would be a blue world with darker blue people running around.. each one free of history and expectation.

But I think - am I deceiving myself? - that it is possible to form an attachment to one's daughter, not just to an image of oneself being attached. — unenlightened

Dramas pervasively shape the way people interact.

An example is that little Johnny is forced to eat broccoli by his father. An unfinished drama is set up as a result. Through his life, Johnny is basically telling everybody around him "NO!" He doesn't know why.. they don't know why.. and none of them realize that the whole sentence Johnny is trying to express is "NO. I don't want the broccoli." The father needs to say "OK. I'm sorry and I was wrong to make you eat that." But until the little Johnny down inside the big Johnny can hear that, the drama will continue to play out like a broken record.

That's overly simplistic, obviously. A real psyche is full of harmonies and resonant frequencies so that nothing is really pure. But the point is that people go around recruiting other people to play roles in their dramas. A father may not see his daughter beyond the role he's cast her in.

So I think it's not that attachment to others and the world is formed. It's always there. Nobody is an island. Stuff covers over attachment (which is apt to be experienced as love.)

There's a Buddhist thing that helped me. A fair portion of it results in detachment from the drama. I mean.. as opposed to trying to dig down and find the origin of the drama, just pop free of what binds one to a drama: fear and anger. I let myself be free of anger and fear, and I let others be free also. Now I'm letting you be whatever you are. I don't need to squash you into a role.

Interestingly, that stuff is preceded by immersing oneself in emotion. Some old Buddhist would imagine a woman standing by a river and her baby was carried away by the current. And then recognize that this love and grief is what everybody feels sometimes. That's similar to what the dude who taught me massage therapy said: drop down out of your head and out of your identity to be free of the drama. But that state is too amorphous to navigate a busy life. It has to be protected in a sanctuary.. maybe not necessarily a physical sanctuary. Sometimes I think that's what people are doing with prayer: making a little mobile sanctuary.

Rambling maybe, but I think idealists are comfy with the notion that knowledge is generally of something, so knowledge always starts with encountering stuff. Leibniz agreed with that.

It's really more your hard-core materialists who deny that. For them, knowledge should be thought of as being about how to. Knowledge of red is competence in using the word, right?

Thanks for all the responses guys! Lots of food for ponderating.

I think ever is the negation of a negation. Ever and n'ever (not ever) are interdependent ideas. As Baden pointed out, if you only have one tense, you don't really have any tenses. Without negation, the positive isn't there either. Sorry if that's cryptic. Bleehhh!

I'd like to comment further on that. Can't now though. Leibniz was a big fan of binary numbering... which consists of one and not-one (none). I wonder if that relates.

What I mean is: are we just talking about a battle of definitions here? — Baden

For Leibniz and Locke, it had implications that reached as far as how we deal with religious intolerance. If there are innate ideas, then we could sit all the religious leaders of the world down and let them commune with their innate ideas to realize a Grand Reconciliation. That was something near to Leibniz's heart. Locke said screw that. Life has painted a different picture on each of the tabulas that make up a room full of clergymen. Stop dividing people up by religion and divide them up by who will embrace Separation of Church and State and who won't. Kill the ones who won't (or lock them up... whichever.)

So what does it mean in our times if someone accepts innateness of ideas or doesn't? I guess this thread is about whether the question can shown to be in need of reformulation. Is it really a question about language?

Agreed.

I mean the more basic you make a language, the less it is a language, and if ideas are inextricably linked with language, they may, the further you trace them back, lack the qualification of being ideas and end up as just emotions or motivations or drives. — Baden

You know, honestly, I've long pictured thought as a section of a piano. Emotions and basic drives are the base notes. The intellect is the high notes. I could reference songs that I experience as blending a lot of different aspects of the psyche....

But anyway, you're reminding me that we may be analyzing the psyche... laying the pieces out on the table and then forgetting that a functioning psyche isn't nicely sorted in piles like that.

As I said.. I stole it from human origin studies. There are hominins who had the apparatus for speech, but there's no clear evidence of abstract thought in the remnants we have of their cultures. Thus.. maybe they had some sort of abstraction-free speech.

Arguments for innate ideas sometimes feature aspects of abstraction (particularly necessity). Could an opponent attack these arguments with a materialistic view of ideas (which reduces them to features of language) while actually talking about the above mentioned "basic" language? If so.. that wouldn't be fair. Or maybe it doesn't matter.. if so, why not?

Consciousness is always of something. It isn't clear that all thought and ideation are necessarily conscious. I think nativism is counting on the existence of unconscious ideas. If such a thing exists, how does that work?

It is not on this basis a concept but rather our ability to perceive, and we cannot perceive without this ability. It is not conceptual in that sense, it is necessarily a part of the hardware we born with. — Cavacava

But space is a relation between objects. Time is a relation between events. Wouldn't you say that a relation is fundamentally an idea?

Insofar as language is learned and all ideas are expressed in learned languages it makes it seem as though all ideas are acquired by experience. I seem to remember that Kant made a distinction (and I think he was following Leibniz' own explicit statements in this) between ideas that are merely acquired by experience but cannot be confirmed or dis-confirmed by particular experiences and yet are self-evident by virtue of the general logic of experience itself, and ideas (in the form of beliefs and judgements) which may be confirmed or dis-confirmed by particular experiences.

I take this to mean that some ideas are intuitively self-evident to us and so are not dependent on language per se, although they do require a language for their formulation. It is language which allows us to make explicit what would otherwise be merely implicit and would be reflected only in our behavior and dispositions. — John

Leibniz's mature thinking was that principles can't arise from instances of experience (he's pretty close to expressing the problem of induction here, I think). So he's zeroing in on the innateness of our ability to identify necessary truths.

You seem to be saying language is like a mid-wife to ideas? I don't know. Maybe that deserves a thread.

In any case, however, these hinge beliefs seem to work pretty well. Hinge beliefs, or beliefs in general, that are horribly off-base would probably not be very conducive to survival and would thus be selected against. — darthbarracuda

I'm curious about how the issue of innate ideas (nativism) is related to metaphysics. Are one's metaphysical commitments actually the driver here? Or could it go the other way?

It sounds like (in your case) materialism comes first here... unless you're a lot more Nietzschean that you look. Right?

I didn't know that. That would be an interesting argument. Why roughly?

So how does that play out in your metaphysics and general take on what you are.. what the universe is.. that sort of thing?

Cool!

The closest I ever get to that stuff:

That could be as well. I think of Shakespeare's Richard 3rd as a dude who can't face the experience of weakness so mutilated his own psyche.

The executioner I mentioned just doesn't feel anything. He or she is good at looking at people as if they're meat. All emotion is deadened. A lot of us in this world have ancestors who were like that. I think it was a survival strategy.

Lol. You think this. — StreetlightX

WTF?

Sure - symbolic with respect to what? — StreetlightX

The perception of her humanity. We're done here.

What in the world is 'spirit'? It is another completely underdetermined and fuzzy feel good word? — StreetlightX

You don't need that word to understand what the vision of the free society is. It's helpful, though.

As if Parks were not driven by the real, material circumstances in which her community were being treated as second class citizens, as if she wasn't contesting - in a literal manner - the appropriation of space and time (a bus seat, in this case), — StreetlightX

Nobody thinks she wanted that particular seat. Her action was highly symbolic.

But no, far better, apparently, to think of her acts in terms of 'spirit' and 'authenticity' and 'belief'; psychological weasel words that absolve you of actually engaging in 'life as actually lived', with history, with space and time. — StreetlightX

Lol. You're protesting that we should the think of the Civil Rights Movement in terms of physics. So yea.. .let's do that. A rationalist approach is going to land us where it always has landed us... determinism. How about some empiricism?

When a Rosa Park sits at the front of a bus, this expression of freedom is abyssal, terrifying, completely dehumanizing in every sense of the word. But it has nothing to do with how she 'feels or thinks' and everything to do with what she does — StreetlightX

Huh? As it relates to a discussion of Rosa Parks, freedom is a property of the spirit. We're somewhere downstream from metaphysical issues. I'm not seeing why John's view wouldn't accommodate it.

And this is the end point of my whole thread and analysis, and it is what is strongly resisted by the controller and the analyst; that they are unnecessary fictions. Rather, it is possible to feel one's feelings and not try to operate on them to control or defend, and in fully feeling as one feels, there is no dissociation, no contradiction, and no stress. — unenlightened

Or maybe the controller and analyst aren't fictional people. They're aspects of your psyche which have a history of doing a fabulous job of protecting you and keeping you functional. They aren't going to come into view as "unnecessary fictions" until they aren't needed anymore. Then they can be taken off the way a cast is taken off a broken limb.

There's no benefit at all from trying to force a broken leg to support you. But a cast on a healthy limb is crippling you.

Does it make sense to assign a (universal, not personal) "meaning" to "life"? Or has the question always been a category error? — hypericin

The answer back-engineers the question. A Roman answer: To do what you were born to do.

If you decide that there is no answer, then you just made the question disappear.

When it comes to the basis of spacetime, I tend to visualise all space and time as one existing point extended into a nearly endless quantity of points of extension analogous to atoms. — Punshhh

Time is a circle. Laying an x-y axis over it, a sine wave can be generated. Add birth and death and we have the arc. Leibniz believed the monad is immortal, but denied that memory is lost in death. This moment is a facet of the eternal diamond?

More thoughts: for an idealist, mind is not a realm of illusion or a reflection of what is. At base, to know the truth is for mind to know itself. Intuitions regarding the ubiquitous point of view are a case of this. The monad is a unit of reality.

Yes, I think the psychological concept of over-determination deserves a mention here. We tend to identify with the way we feel and that in turn causes a cascade of events to happen in the mind. One does wonder though, can one dissociate from the way they feel, for example being depressed over being depressed ad nausium. Or if dissociating oneself from their emotions is even a healthy thing to do and what does that in turn lead to... — Question

In English we identify with feelings. In other languages feelings may be owned (as if stored in an internal suitcase) or they may be upon one as if sadness falls like rain. Since a form of dissociation is managed by the autonomic nervous system, it may be dubious to ask about how healthy that is. .

In Spanish, one apologizes by saying "Lo siento", which literally translates as "I feel it." It can be taken as a verbal signal that one is experiencing the results of empathy. IOW... imagine that empathy is always there like radio waves. You become aware of the feelings of another by tuning your radio to that frequency.

This is a handy way to think of it for me because like other people I've known, I had issues in my younger days with being unable to control the radio. I wouldn't try too hard to explain unity of consciousness or the communal nature of emotion to someone who doesn't experience it that way. People can be incredibly strong in the conviction that we're all the same. The result is that we can't listen to one another... all we can do is preach.

And.. a person may say "Lo siento" without meaning it. Sometimes wording is just a matter of custom.

Offer them $100 for it. Otherwise some douche will come along and buy it... for maybe less than that.

Are we each willing to acknowledge that it is only a hypothesis, and that we may need to change, as new information becomes available? — anonymous66

I am, but I only became aware of that because I pegged something else as infallible: the content of my experience. Interpretations can change... iow: how my experience testifies or relates to what is and isn't.. that is always in flux.

:) For Leibniz, space and time are ideal.

Immaterial doesn't mean non-existent.... obviously. But note that when you invoke the concept of an object, space and time might run to the stage to play their roles. So you rightly point out a pending mind-explosion in regard to idealism. Where's Mariner? He explains this really well.

Yes the intellect has to fashion a suitable conceptual form. — Punshhh

A suitable form for what? I've found since I've been reading about Leibniz that a sort of mathematical vibe has entered my experience.. kind of in the background. Just walking down the street, I find I'm thinking about substantiality and what it has to do with logical imperatives.

However I imagine it requires some kind of sensual stimulus. — Punshhh

I know what you mean. Leibniz took pains to point out that he wasn't saying that motion requires an observer, but that in principle it has to be observable. He's explaining verificationism.

The void banana is (in principle) tasty.

More specifically something to do with our conscious experience. — Punshhh

You were asking about seeing monads. It would mostly be with the mind's eye. Even unity of consciousness is really something detected by the intellect.

BTW: an interesting comparison is Leibniz to Einstein on the relativity of space.

E's Special Relativity is based on a thought experiment involving motion in a void. You watch someone getting bigger and bigger and then zoom by you. There's nothing (even in principle) that allows you to say who is moving.

L's criticism of Newtonian space is that if Newton was right, God could move the universe a few miles to the west. Even in principle, no motion would be observable. Therefore space is a relation between objects, not a container which holds objects.

She emotions have a target, the soda, and she is playing out similar to the way she may have experienced her mother and father argue. — Cavacava

Yep. As I told John, there was a time when I would have strongly supported this view. Witnessing first hand that kids aren't blank slates changed my mind. Notice that when she says "You know what? Listen to me." She's easy to understand. That is mimicry. When it's hard to understand her, she's struggling to construct English sentences. "Daddy never gave my soda back!" is not mimicry. That is something pretty freakin' astonishing and as far as we know, only found in humans.

I wouldn't say never. It's hard to picture it soon, though.

I am also excited by the possibility of electing the first female president. It's interesting how little discussion that's merited, either because that fact has been so overshadowed by Trump's antics, or because people are just so used to Hillary that it barely registers: she's just part of the political furniture by this point. — Arkady

I was thinking about that. Maybe it has to slip up on us in order for it to happen at all. Next in line: President Ramirez or whoever...

Yep.

I don't know that much about it, to be honest. But I know that he has made it clear that he will use whatever power he has to take the stick approach, rather than the carrot approach. Especially when it comes to China. And that strikes me as concerning, in that it seems risky and potentially damaging and counterproductive. — Sapientia

Yea. We'd have to invent a word for the new level of Stupid where the US provokes China while the US national debt is $19 trillion.

And judging by their own reactions, it is clear that they see a Trump presidency as troubling, in stark contrast to a Clinton presidency, which doesn't even get brought up. — Sapientia

I'm not sure what they're seeing. Maybe his attitude toward Russia? Anyway.. nobody wants to say it out loud because it might impact voter turnout, but it doesn't look like Trump has a snowball's chance.

I have to say I am working up a little emotion over voting for the first female president of my country. Really? Woo Hoo!

Yes. It's definitely an environment where the child is allowed to express anger. In a family where anger isn't allowed, the child would be shutdown.. maybe taught to direct the anger inward. I think it's in those cases that the anger can begin to feed something malignant and possibly violent. That's what I believe... that before it becomes violence, it was just a spontaneous spew no more intentionally harmful than a thunderstorm. Denying that spontaneity is the monster-maker.

On the contrary, if Trump were to win, then that would be the catastrophe, and in so many ways, including internationally. — Sapientia

I don't know about that. I don't think the executive branch can actually start a trade war. Otherwise, Trump is isolationist. Most of the attempts of the US to be involved in the world lately have resulted in all-out grade-A catastrophe.. so maybe a little isolationism would give the world a break.

Mom is in charge. Notice how the child directs appeals to her. Dad's comments on the child's tone seem to be directed at Mom. Mom is the one laughing which suggests to me that if this is a case of inherited quickness-to-anger, it's probably coming through Mom's genes.

There was a time when I would have been all nurture about that sort of thing. In fact, I point blank told a friend who reported that there was an anger-gene in his family that it wasn't so. Actually witnessing the two-year old who had been identified as carrying it changed my mind.

Possibly, but I doubt it based on the reaction of the father.

I don't care about these a prioris that big heads think about leadership — Agustino

I think your arrogance might just be matched by your naivete... which means it's a sure bet that Uncle Sam wants you. Have you checked into whether you can fast-track to citizenship with military service?

What do you mean? — Agustino