Re: Tabula Rasa

Many adult birds migrate before their offsping, these then follow a migration for the fiirst time, so certainly something going on. many theories as to why.

An English philosopher named John Locke postulated the tabula rasa (blank slate) theory, which states that people learn and acquire ideas from external forces, or the environment. Humans are born with an empty mind, having no knowledge whatsoever. People acquire ideas from the surrounding world, turning simple ideas into complex ones. This blank slate of mind starts off devoid of any knowledge, but then it is “written on” as a person lives and experiences. Therefore, a person has no identity until after birth.

Re: Tabula Rasa

This issue nicely raises the issue of whether mind and body are different things.

Very clearly our bodies are controlled by instructions encoded in our DNA. It is indisputable. Our bodes grow and develop simply through that rule set. Hence we grow teeth in our mouths rather than on our feet.

As others have said, this is also why humans and other animals do certain things "instinctively" from birth with no tuition whatsoever. A baby will instinctively put things in its mouth because that is the fundamental mechanism by which the body survives, eating foods.

None of this is the power of the mind. It is all robotics, encoded in DNA. Every living thing on the planet follows its own instruction sheet, its own set of rules unless, as occasionally happens, some external force compromises/damages those rules and creates a mutation.

Birds don't magically migrate. Birds communicate with each other and by the time they reach adulthood who knows what they have been taught? When they fly they are sensitive to the electromagnetic forces of the planet and they can simply follow those force lines which we can't see. Again this is all native ability for birds, all part of their rule set.

So what then is the mind?

The mind is different to the body. The thing the mind resides in is obviously physical, i.e. the brain, skull and all the linking "wires" that transmit signals all around the body. The body and wiring is all just more of those DNA instructions. Cut yourself and that DNA coded body will produce signals to be interpreted as pain. No thinking is involved in this on your part, you have little control over it.

Thinking is something different. It's a complex process that is hard to understand. Almost like an immense super computer scanning myriads of past information, pictures, sounds, smells, feelings, tastes and crunching that information at incredible speeds to analyse it and reach conclusions.

This whole thing could quite equally just be more of that coded DNA rule set. It's just that it's not a defined rule set.
By which I mean, you could define rules which permit you to build a huge tank in which are a million steel ball-bearings. However that same rule set would have no control or bearing in how those ball bearings were positioned inside the tank.

So our minds are built from the human rule set, but contain elements that are not controlled by it and which are instead left at the mercy and influence of external forces, those being our senses, the things we experience, see, hear etc.

There can never really be a clean slate unless it becomes possible to delete/eradicate the physical recordings of every bodily sense since birth.

With all this in mind we must ask ourselves, what actually are we?

I put it to you that we are simply what we would call robots. Physical entities built from a set of rules, from an established pattern. Rules which govern our make up and our initial "instincts" to eat, drink, make sounds etc. We are clearly incredibly complex robots with self-healing mechanisms built in but nevertheless, everything we are is founded on that set of rules.

It is genuinely hard to know whether we are real at all or whether everything we do is merely the result of those inbuilt rules and the differenct way those ball bearings have arranged themselves over time, that being the element that makes us all seem unique.

What we think of as imagination, is simply the DNA encoded processing of information. What we imagine and think is governed by other things we have seen and heard and experienced through our own senses.

Is there something else inside us? A spirit? A soul ?

If so what would be its purpose ? When you look at it objectively, you have to concede that both of those terms have been given to us by others. We didn't instinctively dream up the concept of spirit or soul. It was given to us by other humans claiming that they exist.

The current series of the TV show HUMANS is toying with this whole concept. Synthetic robots being given CODING via a computer programme to make them "sentient". That already presupposes that sentience is merely the setting free of physical senses and unlimited recording of them together with the constant computing and analysis of all that information. HUMANS is exploring what happens when robots start to experience and process information. We see them asking questions like "why am I here?", "what is my purpose?" and so on.

Really what the program is doing is saying, wake up, look at yourself, can you see who and what you are? Do you "Know Yourself"? (Temet Nosce).

These are questions we must repeatedly ask ourselves imo.

Re: Tabula Rasa

This has always amazed me , I find it quite incredible .

A few years ago I had nesting birds in my roof and guttering , then I had a conservatory built , that spring the birds were flying into my conservatory still thinking their nests were in the same place . How on earth could these birds have remembered where they had nested the previous year

Re: Tabula Rasa

And there was me thinking a tabla rasa was some kind of musical instrument-should have paid more attention to Descartes.

Re: Tabula Rasa

I'm not convinced we are a blank page at birth I used to see a lot of my nans mannerisms in Tasha and Tasha was born after nan died.

Re: Tabula Rasa

As far as humans go the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialists in general claim that Existence precedes Essence. Essence here being our character, personality, etc. Generally they do not deny the innate apriori Intuitions of space and time that we are born with according to Immanuel Kant. but the intuitions of Kant may not be the equivalent of the ideas mentioned in the opening post. And what modern animal behaviorists call the hard-wired behavior of certain animals is also a different thing. Humans and some other mammals depend on learned behavior or culture to act upon what the environment has given them, so it is not one or the other.

Re: Tabula Rasa

But you remember where you were born surely? So why wouldn't other animals?

Re: Tabula Rasa

But realist I don't remember where I was born , I know because my mum told me