Humans - and members of any species - generally react in certain prescriptive, consistent ways, responding to certain stimuli in predictable and innate manner. Their impulses, desires and reactions are governed by their physiology, particularly how the human brain is structured after millions of years of evolution bringing it to this point. That is: how they are hardwired.
Different species seem to behave in accordance to the environment they are in.
Even Humans who were separated from Human culture as kids have not developed Human language or behaviours which link them to 'civilized Humans' - however, they were also successfully re-integrated into society for the most part - not every attempt was successful, but we are also learning new ways on how to educate Humans.
For that matter, if you took a baby born in the USA and left it with the amazonian head hunters... that baby will (if no exposure to other cultures is present) likely develop their language, culture and probably to become the best possible head hunter there is - and from that point of view, there's nothing intricately wrong with it... its a different culture.
How do you expect this baby from the USA to learn how to speak English language if it was never taught, or know Algebra, what a car is, etc?
Or do you argue that this knowledge will somehow 'come to them' out of thin air?
That's culture, which is entirely different. Of course they're not going to automatically acquire culture and language - but they are all wired for its acquisition. You keep responding as though the differences are paramount and ignoring the underlying similarities. The human body, and the human mind, works to a particular plan. The actual acquisition of language, or a language, is environmental: the underlying capacity for language, and tendency to respond to that stimuli in certain ways, is innate to the human animal as it has evolved.
I can break a baby's arm in three places and it will grow up with a deformed arm. That doesn't change the fact that all human DNA encodes for the growth of healthy arms. The fact that humans growing up away from contact with other humans utilizing language will never acquire language skills, or at least have great difficulty doing so, doesn't mean that the human brain is not innately structured in such a way that language will emerge with the right stimulus.
Your assertion that we are blank slates made into what we are by the environment around us has no basis in reality, and selectively promoting the influence of environmental factors and epigenetics does not cause them to stand alone and triumphant, does not allow them to support the entirety of the human experience. They demonstrate that the matter of who we are is a complex one and that environmental factors play what was considered by many to be a surprisingly large role - challenging some preconceptions - but they merely challenge the idea that people come entirely pre-packaged, they don't demonstrate the romanticism of the opposite conclusion. That's ideology substituting for understanding - the tribalist's need to wear a perceptual grid and filter the world through it.
Where did I say we are blank slates?
To my recollection, I did not.
I argued that Humans can be born with tendencies towards some things, but whether these tendencies lay dormant, emerge and/or change is up to the environment.
Big difference - also, tendency towards something doesn't necessarily equate 'knowledge'.
You implied it very strongly, particularly as I never challenged or disagreed with what you say here, yet you keep stressing environmental factors and epigenetics to the point that you flat out deny there is any such thing as human nature. How is what you say supposed to read other than as a defence of the blank slate?
Why do people have different sexualities? Because their brains are wired in different ways: it's not a choice. What would you say, that it's all malleable? That environmental factors alone govern sexual preference? Can we change someone's sexuality by altering their environment? That you can change someone's nature?
Whoever said its a choice?
I simply stated that environment shapes Human behaviour, our choices, tastes, what we like and don't like.
And apparently, you hadn't read the section of my reply where I indicated that the womb is also an environment that impacts Human behaviour (hormonal impact for example?).
Plus, there are heterosexual, homosexual and bisexual people (to name a few) who later on in their lives experienced other stimulations that prompted their interest in having sex with people they never considered before (gay men slept with women, gay women slept with men, bisexuals have done both sides of the spectrum and also even 'settled' on one or the other).
I'm gay myself, and I don't see women as sexually attractive, but I don't discount the possibility I might become sexually aroused by a woman later on in life due to different environmental stimulus impacting my sensory input that might prompt this reaction.
You were consistent, which I appreciate. No backtracking to preserve political status.
I'm quite aware that environmental factors will have an effect on sexuality.
To illustrate further... are you aware that you are not the same person you were as a kid?
You may have retained certain behaviours like most people, but you definitely aren't the same.
What has changed in that time?
Too many factors to count them all, but I'll name a few:
your education, perceptions of life, how you conduct yourself in life, how you relate to people, where you live and how this environment impacts you, etc.
But my underlying nature has not changed - I have worn these different clothes over time, but my body remains my body. My body itself has grown and changed over time, but it remains my body. You keep insisting that change can override that, that people can essentially cease being what they are. A human is a human and not another animal, and carries with it certain capacities and possibilities while not carrying certain others.
Do you think I of all people need to be told how environment helps make you what you are? I've frequently banged my head against peoples' refusal to understand that experiences in early life, whether remembered or not, have very real and substantial effects on people as they grow; on their developing physiologies and so on their developing psychologies, developing personalities. My entire problem here is that no-one is doing anything to change the environment, but instead exposing the young to, and reinforcing and promoting, the exact same social environment that I was exposed to. While insisting and believing that they represent
change. While they defend the idea that people can change wildly while never actually showing any indication of it. Because they will not act against their social, political and sexual instincts, and all other concerns are secondary to these, which means that reason and ethics and ideals don't mean a thing, because they last only so long as they don't conflict with those needs. People act and think on the basis of what feels right to them, and what feels right is that which satisfies the impulses and drives that feed that animal's particular needs.
One particularly cannot work to change their behaviours and parameters when they refuse to acknowledge that those behaviours and parameters exist to begin with.
I am well aware of the plasticity of the brain, thank you. That doesn't mean the brain can do whatever it wants or form patterns that don't conform to certain core principles. I can use my body in various ways, I can train and exercise and diet in ways that will affect my body, give me a different body than I would have had, but my body will still work to the same general plan that my DNA is encoded for, and that plan is very, very similar to the plan of any other human's body. The brain is malleable, but there are limits, and focusing on the possibilities does not cause them to outnumber or invalidate the barriers and the limitations.
Have I argued that there aren't limits?
I'm just stating that those limits do not really extend to Human behaviour which seems to be constantly changing due to environmental exposure, new information and sensory stimulus in general.
Except there is a consistency in that behaviour that makes human reactions mostly predictable, across cultures and across environments. There are also obvious trends, customs and patterns within any given society. To claim that human behaviour is not restrictive or confined by limits is to ignore the social dynamics around one. That is my central point here - that the vast majority of humans exist within a social dynamic that was evolutionarily advantageous for the species and thus which is rarely questioned or challenged.
In general, whether a change or a distinction is a meaningful one is mostly a matter of perspective. If a Christian, a Muslim and a Jew sit down and discuss theology, they may, from their perspective, be massively different and contradictory, with yawning gulfs between them. But from the perspective of one who is not religious, say, there is little difference, and that apparent gulf is no division at all. It's too easy to focus on the differences and the malleable aspects and so ignore the fundamental similarities.
Humans are, when you get down to it, all essentially the same and all working to the same innate plan; variety and environmental influence and plasticity aside. Like all species, they have the capacity and the imperative to adapt, and to experiment. But if there exist consistent behavioural tendencies across environments and across cultures - and there do - then these tendencies stem, in some measure, from what we might call human nature. This, in turn, is the consequence of the shared genetics and similar physiologies of all humans; we are all products of the same environmental pressures and thus are encoded for similar behaviours that have proven beneficial.
Of course people change; like everything, they exist in motion and are never consistent; they develop from one moment to the next. Again, I am not disagreeing with any of this. But they hold the same general shape, and no amount of change can be realistically expected to make people into something they're not.
The vast majority of humans will never challenge or discard the tribalist mentality, and thus will never acknowledge that they are reinforcing an abusive system that destroys lives and other beings. They apologise for and defend the system, and talk change while obstructing it at every turn. One cannot solve a problem by reinforcing the cause of the problem.
The only possible explanation is that they are naturally hardwired for this. There's no point in being angry about it, it's who and what they are. If you disagree - if you think that people in general can be something other than that - then
show it. I want to be proven wrong here. But the years have instead just piled on ever more instances of people prioritizing their status in the social group over the very reason and ethics they otherwise defend and exhibit so eloquently. You say people can choose to change - indeed, yes, but it would never occur to them to change or to want to, it likely wouldn't register with them that they were working within a certain system anyway, because they are given to certain behaviours that satisfy the instinctual needs and drives of the human animal, statistically insignificant outliers aside.
Constantly, for me growing up, there was the binary - in history, in politics, in academia, in science, there were the behaviours and attitudes that were identical to those that left me in the state I was in, and the values and virtues I aspired to. It used to confuse and demoralise me to see the two so closely intertwined, but I still assumed that you could separate one from the other. But eventually I realized that the civilization I was a part of emerged entirely from the social instincts of tribalists - the same instincts that caused them to relate to me the way that they did. The entire thing was a sham. You can't separate them, you can't tell yourself it's all a big misunderstanding, that people can turn around and demonstrate those worthy qualities
without marinating it in the same assumptions and behaviours that led to me losing my grip on life. I've been waiting for years to be proven wrong, but always there is the same implicit message - that you can't have civilization without kowtowing to social, political and sexual dynamics, and those dynamics render all virtues, in practice, meaningless.
What does objectivity and reason and compassion matter when you'll exhibit them with such admirable commitment only to turn your back on them whenever they threaten to challenge tribalist instinct?
Are you seriously telling me that these experiences do NOT impact Human behaviour?
I can easily observe how environment shapes my sister's kids behaviour, and then I reflected on my own life and realized how much different environmental exposure affected my own behaviour that resulted in a different individual from the rest of my family - and I was able to trace environmental influence across my entire family.
Besides, how do you explain a person who picked up swearing from his parents and peers, but then later on decided that he does not want to be like them, and changed his behaviour by eliminated swearing from their vocabulary and aligning their way of thinking to reflect a more scientific point of view by using meditation to get him started?
Again, these distinctions are irrelevant. To swear or not to swear is on a level far removed from the basic nature I'm talking about. Pointing to different clothing styles or hair styles doesn't make the underlying similarity in body plan go away.
So here we have a Human who grew up in a specific environment and learned to behave in a certain way like most people around him did, then altered his own life by actively retraining the brain to think differently which altered his responses.
Obviously. Because people change. That is not in dispute. What is in dispute is the idea that these superficial changes mean that there is no innate human nature that governs behaviour and perception, and more specifically the idea that people will question the assumptions their nature gives them.
if my brain wasn't/isn't malleable to an extent allowing such a radical change as I became more and more informed, why did the change in question take place?
The issue is: it is not a "radical" change. You keep making these changes out to be more important than they are. Moreover, you can only become "informed" if you want to be. If stimuli go against your instinctive preferences or threaten to challenge your social and political status, you would likely ignore them - indeed, when presented with information that conflicts with the beliefs that bring them security, people will usually double down on those original beliefs and aggressively reject the new input.
The same question applies to people changing their diet from omnivore to vegan for example.
Again, these are superficial differences and changes that say nothing regarding the capacity to actually change one's nature. Flexibility in diet in response to perceived needs is hardly some daring challenge to innate human behaviour - it
is innate human behaviour.
Both instances needed exposure to information and transition. It didn't happen overnight.
It happened due to exposure to more relevant information and an arrival at a decision to make it happen.
Exactly. And when one's instinctual nature will not permit them to break ranks or question certain understandings, they will not look for that information, or will not accept it when presented it, and will not make the decision to change - though they'll probably wrap their general conservatism in the rhetoric of change and insist that they're altering the way they function, that they're "progressing". That because they've painted it a different colour it's now a different object entirely.
If you couldn't change Human behaviour, we'd never evolve to the point we have today.
Slow change, over millions of years. An individual can change much of the superficial detail, but a change to the underlying humanity requires widespread environmental shift and most likely generations. Yes, I am aware that certain changes can happen in what many would have called surprisingly short periods. But can you demonstrate that all these gradual changes in behaviour were
not made in accordance with certain universal human requirements and attributes?
Incidentally, there's more and more Humans who turned away from how they previously behaved themselves and emerged with different patterns of behaviours and responses.
Has the Christian converted to Islam, or has he actually rejected monotheism or organized religion? These are very different degrees of change.
My problem is this: why speak of change if you're not going to change? If you're going to constantly replay the same perspectives and biases and social dynamics? If you're going to be reasonable and responsive to objective realities and new revelations in one breath and then slam the door on them the next? This is exactly what I mean about people here - you're a cruel trap that promises so much, but when we get right down to it there's no escaping the tribalist system: the same system that is the cause of the things you're ostensibly trying to change, and the same system that unapologetically destroys lives, that neglects and abuses and exploits. That is mired in blind hypocrisy.
Show me the capacity for change. Show me that ideology that strokes and conforms to innate assumptions won't be embraced, that instinct can be successfully overturned in favour of something better. Show me allegiance to ideals and not to status. Show me the understanding of what innate qualities you need to be aware of so you can challenge them, rather than refusing to acknowledge their existence. Show me that you can think outside of the tribal system.
Show me that I can join and learn from you, and not have every lesson rendered meaningless.
