re: #499 Right Brain

The visual cliff is a classic conundrum of “things we already know” that would seem to result from experience, for those not up to Salamantis’ knowledge, it goes like this:

Two desks are set three feet apart and a piece of clear plexiglass placed between them, any baby will crawl to the edge of the first desk but will not cross the clear plexiglass to the next desk, they have no experience with falling yet they know they will fall and get hurt if they “crawl” into space. Its an experiment done to show how much exists in the human brain that we assume would come with experience, ie a disproof of the tabula rasa (blank slate) theories so popular during the European enlightenment.

Have to make dinner, night all.

I didn’t deny that such environmental-selection-inculcated psychological predispositions exist (in fact, it was I who brought up the visual cliff, as well as the fear of snakes); what I DID state is that our brains harbor far more memetically received ideas than they do genetically determined ones.

How else to explain the plethora of human languages, or the fact that they also undergo evolution via random mutation and nonrandom selection? The less efficient ones are progressively becoming extinct. And how else to explain religious and political stances and sociocultural trends? Kids aren’t born with such things.