Tabula rasa

[L W HALL]

Thanks Michael,

Since I have been following the other threads on here and over at the other place I knew you were in a lot of different things at once so I figured you would get around to answering when you could if you didn't miss it.

I have some thought on this I want to add when I get them a little better formulated in my head.

L W

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Here are three quotes about "tabula rasa" from Ayn Rand suggested by The Ayn Rand Lexicon edited by Harry Binswanger.

Michael

From "The Objectivist Ethics" in The Virtue of Selfishness:

But while the standard of value operating the physical pleasure-pain mechanism of man's body is automatic and innate, determined by the nature of his body—the standard of value operating his emotional mechanism, is not. Since man has no automatic knowledge, he can have no automatic values; since he has no innate ideas, he can have no innate value judgments.

Man is born with an emotional mechanism, just as he is born with a cognitive mechanism; but, at birth, both are "tabula rasa." It is man's cognitive faculty, his mind, that determines the content of both. Man's emotional mechanism is like an electronic computer, which his mind has to program—and the programming consists of the values his mind chooses.

From "The Comprachicos" in The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution:

At birth, a child's mind is tabula rasa; he has the potential of awareness—the mechanism of a human consciousness—but no content. Speaking metaphorically, he has a camera with an extremely sensitive, unexposed film (his conscious mind), and an extremely complex computer waiting to be programmed (his subconscious). Both are blank. He knows nothing of the external world. He faces an immense chaos which he must learn to perceive by means of the complex mechanism which he must learn to operate.

If, in any two years of adult life, men could learn as much as an infant learns in his first two years, they would have the capacity of genius. To focus his eyes (which is not an innate, but an acquired skill), to perceive the things around him by integrating his sensations into percepts (which is not an innate, but an acquired skill), to coordinate his muscles for the task of crawling, then standing upright, then walking—and, ultimately, to grasp the process of concept-formation and learn to speak—these are some of an infant's tasks and achievements whose magnitude is not equaled by most men in the rest of their lives.

From the "Introduction" to We the Living:

Too many writers declare that they never succeed in expressing fully what they wished to express and that their work is only some sort of approximation. It is a viewpoint for which I have never had any sympathy and which I consider excusable only when it is voiced by beginners, since no one is born with any kind of "talent" and, therefore, every skill has to be acquired. Writers are made, not born. To be exact, writers are self-made.

[JennaW]

Here are three quotes about "tabula rasa" from Ayn Rand suggested by The Ayn Rand Lexicon edited by Harry Binswanger.

MSK, I don't think you specifically agree with all of that. And I have to say, with my education, that I don't agree with her on some of those points. In any case, I'd be happy to elucidate when asked.

Unrelated side note: Oh, guess what?-- I'm attempting to blog publicly on my education at a science community that brings in a lot of readership; hopefully that way I can reach a wider online audience. A second editor of the group emailed me today to note my interest and to tell me that they are thinking of my request to write for them. I'm so excited! I get to write/learn/teach about cognition, consciousness, and neuroscience! And not only that, I'll be interacting with a large # of people in the process. So exciting!

[Barbara Branden]

L.W. Hall: "On the left hand/right hand thing although I have never paid attention to my emotional state when gesturing I find the idea fascinating and will start to do so."

I'll be interested to learn what you find.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Jenna,

That's great news about your writing. You be sure to keep us posted about what you are doing. Go for it all - you can. You have a lot of talent and it is a joy to watch your growing interaction with others, especially as you keep many people honest. Where pertinent, I hope you will share some of your scientific writing with us.

About Rand's comments on the tabula rasa concept, I do not agree with her (mostly). This all depends on definitions, of course. The idea that man has no automatic knowledge is strange when you see a newborn infant sucking. Where did it learn to do that? That's about as automatic as it gets.

I would call an infant a "conceptual tabula rasa," or use the tabula rasa description as a general metaphor for higher learning, but I would not exclude all the basic drives (including strong innate capacities that we call talent) that most certainly do result in automatic value judgments.

This is an area where I believe that Rand is not exactly wrong, but incomplete - meaning a part that was right and another that was not. I think what she wrote about integration is correct, however she left out innate drives and even made statements like the ones I posted insinuating that they don't exist. (btw - I posted those quotes for reference since we were discussing this.)

Either we focus on that part where Rand is wrong, say she was all wrong and dismiss all the rest, which is what many people do, or we can add to the part she got resoundingly right and reject her appraisal of what she did not explore (and even try to understand why she would make such strange statements) - or we also can deify her and accept her at her word despite scientific evidence to the contrary.

My approach is the second - adding to her good ideas and rejecting her bad ones.

Robert Campbell has written some essays I haven't had the time to read just yet on developmental psychology and Rand. They are probably a treat in this respect.

Michael

[L W HALL]

I'll be interested to learn what you find.

I am giving it attention, and I'll be glad to let you know the results.

L W

[Robert Campbell]

One of the essays Michael mentioned is this one, on Jean Piaget's developmental epistemology from an Objectivist point of view. You can see it here:

http://hubcap.clemson.edu/~campber/piaget.html

I'm planning to revise it soon, to provide more explicit comparisons with Rand's theory of concepts, so comments from present company will be most helpful.

Robert Campbell

[JennaW]

We covered Piaget in Psychology class. I also took a Sociology class (which I didn't like particularly much, although some of that field is interesting) and Piaget was mentioned there as well.

As for this question: the problem of novelty--if what develops is merely a recombination of existing elements, is it truly new?

Maybe this could be addressed via emergent properties?

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

There's an idea about the tabula rasa concept that I want mention briefly for expanding on later. It occurred to me while musing half-awake.

I have seen very little discussion of growth in terms of how a seed does it. I have seen growth discussed in terms of mental development, meaning that as mental capacities become more mature, they become more effective. How about the prewired knowledge like left-handedness? Isn't that something like a seed in a newborn?

For instance, an acorn does not have a trunk, branches, leaves or fruit. But as it matures, it cannot grow anything but these things. Also, if you take a newborn kitten away from all other cats and provide for it so that it can survive, it will still chase a mouse when it sees one and run from dogs. This is knowledge that was not present at birth, yet "developed from the inside" as the animal matured.

I think it is possible for a certain category of information to be in a seed-like state at birth, which makes it appear that the information is not there. Yet a left-handed person will develop as a southpaw, unless this is stilted as in the Chinese habit of making him write right-handed (with him doing all else normally done with hands as a lefty). He cannot simply grow to be right-handed because his "mental seed" was a "left-hand seed."

I'm still musing for now. The seed idea could be a special form of emergence.

Michael

[mweiss]

I have accumulated several questions over the course of my life with regard to certain dreams, experiences and emotions as a toddler, but now that I am raising one of my own, I'm even more keenly interested in the display of what I perceive to be certain innate preconceptions.

For instance, my daughter, who is two years of age, reacts with intense fear to a little plastic figurine that a friend gave me from a McDonald's happy meal. It looks like a Nick Park character, a fat man with a long nose, perhaps the nose of a mouse. My daughter, when shown this toy, runs from the room and becomes very agitated, such that her heart pounds that I can feel it when I pick her up.

Last year, she displayed great contempt for a cabbage patch doll that she got for Christmas from a relative. She was not afraid of it, but she treated it like a piece of trash, always throwing it down on the floor. One time, she even stripped the doll or all it's clothes and left it lying face-down on the floor.

Now, as far as I can tell, no one taught her to be afraid of the plastic figurine, or to dislike the cabbage patch doll. Curiously, she has developed some fears that she did not possess before. A year ago, she was not afraid of anything.

Where do these fears come from? If she has not had a man who looked like the plastic figurine abuse her in some terrible way, why would that figure upset her so?

As to my own childhood, I have often wondered where the rich and often alien content of my nightmares and dreams came from. When I was between 2 and 3 years of age, I had a series of nightmares about falling backwards down a flight of stairs. That I can understand. I had seen stairs and the stairs in my dream were recognizeable as the celler stairs in the house that we lived in at the time.

I also had nightmares of being in a yellow room, and the feeling of being asphixiated. I was always alone in these dreams, the only one in the room. Those were the most terrifying dreams because I believed I was dying in those. Years later, I formed a hypothesis that I was recalling a past life--that I was put to death in a gas chamber.

Then there were the dreams where I was surrounded by refrigerators--their backs facing me with the condenser coils, and they were on fire.

I had never experienced these things by the age of two, yet I was dreaming about these things. Where do these images come from, if not from some level of memory we don't understand?

My daughter developed fears of some of her toys, where she had none as a baby.

My daughter also has a very well-defined set of asthetics. She likes only certain toys and hates most others. Usually these toys are 'realistic' and not 'distorted' in their features, for instance stuffed animals and dolls. She picks all her own toys and has done so since age 1. Anything a relative sends to her, she disdains and summarily tosses aside. I find this curious that she has formed such definitive likes and dislikes at this early age.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Mark,

I strongly recommend you read The Wonderful Way Shmurak Faces Emotion.

Your daughter has a built-in valuing mechanism of affects (just like we all did at birth). There are nine affects according to Sylvan Tomkins, who is the psychologist Steven Shmurak uses for establishing the grounds of his own work. Tomkins developed a body of empirical evidence observing young children (just like you are doing now).

Just as the baby grows in size, so these affects develop automatically. As volition develops, they intermingle with it, and with each other. Affects turn into emotions over time.

I believe this work is going to push Objectivist epistemology in a new direction. The tabula rasa concept is only valid for conceptual content. A whole lot of things come built into the mind at birth. Many of them are seed size, so they need to grow a bit to become evident,

Michael