From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Tue Mar 25 2003 - 01:50:51 MST
Nate writes
> Lee writes
>
> >Can't agree. No one "taught" the Americans anything. And
> >you cannot say it has become their Nature because dissent
> >is too widespread.
>
> I think that the real argument is with the development of
> the human mind. I don't think that genetic disposition
> matters when it comes to most memes.
Okay.
> I would go so far as to say that the mind learns almost all
> unchangeable dispositions from the enviroment. In that way
> human nature as we see it wrong.
These two sentences are enormously vague and ambiguous. You
don't support your sentences with examples, and there is almost
no redundancy. Hence, you could be talking about almost anything.
I finally caught on to this when I realized how long it was
taking me to respond to your post last night. The reason was
that I was having to get very creative attempting to divine
what you meant. Not too surprisingly, I may have ended up
talking to myself more than to you.
What would be some examples of "unchangeable dispositions"?
You probably know what you mean, but how is the reader supposed
to know? The last sentence doesn't even parse!
Take an entire paragraph for a thought; not just one sentence.
After you've written a sentence, look at it critically and
see if it's at all possible for someone to misinterpret it.
Even if it doesn't seem possible, you might take another
sentence and make it say exactly the same thing, only using
different words---your reader will be grateful because then
your reader knows for sure that he understands.
Observe when I wrote above "Hence, you could be talking about
almost anything". See how redundant that is? It hardly says
anything that the previous sentence did not, and so reinforces
that thought and removes possible ambiguity.
I dunno; I'm no expert. But I think that the topic sentence
(the one that the paragraph starts with) is supposed to
forcefully lay out your main point. The rest of the paragraph
is clarification and buttressing.
> I would even go farther to say that these learned systems are
> essential for a funtioning human being. This of course would
> be hard to prove.
What learned systems are how essential for human beings?
You could be talking about language, or you could be talking
about learning to relate to others, etc.
Also, does your emailer have a spell-checker? 8^D
Would you mind re-writing this post? It sounds very
interesting.
Thanks,
Lee
> One would need to raise a human by machine since it's conception
> inside a vacuum. I am not saying that we are a blank slate. I
> am saying that our real nature has the ablity to be much more
> diverse than the one we have learned.
>
> All memes must follow genetic paths of language. I do not see why this
> process would evolve more control when the control is already present in the
> enviroment. People should realize that this enviroment of learning plays as
> great a part as does genetics. I wonder if one could calculate the time it
> would take for a human to evolve without this learning. Although such a
> creature would lose the flexability humans have now. It would still be
> interesting to find that humans would have taken X billions years to reach
> this piont given an enviroment where that human would perfectly fit (it's
> theoretical of course). Then a measurment could be compared to how long it
> has taken us thus far. The suprising thing would be if the theoretical human
> would take more than double the time a normal human took to evolve. Then
> some would say that the "enviromental evolution" plays a larger part than
> evolution.
>
> If anyone has any sources on this let me know. Thanks Nate
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