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> Humans think in terms of symbols to model the world around him. A child is born knowing nothing, a completely blank slate, and slowly he learns about his surr

> Humans think in terms of symbols to model the world around him. A child is born knowing nothing, a completely blank slate, and slowly he learns about his surroundings. Actually, the research has found that new born infants can perceive all sorts of things, like human faces and emotional communication. There is also a lot of inborn knowledge about social interactions and causality. The embodied cognition idea is looking at how we experience all that. By the way, Kant demonstrated a couple of centuries ago that the blank slate idea was unworkable.

maxirater 8y ago
>Actually, the research has found that new born infants can perceive all sorts of things, like human faces and emotional communication. yes, thats called sensory input.... a child deprived of sensory input when newborn can die because there is nothing there to show the baby of its existence, this the cause of crib death (notice that crib death is not called arm death because a baby doesnt die in the mothers arms) >There is also a lot of inborn knowledge about social interactions and causality. no, babies are not born with any knowledge at all of even the existence of society or beings. causality is learned from the result of human experience, causality is not known at birth
- Retra 8y ago
  There's no reason to think the human brain learns things using purely statistical methods, and then turn around and try to argue that evolution cannot encode the same information into the structure of a baby using those exact same methods. Humans have lots of instinctual knowledge; geometry, facial recognition; kinesthetics, emotional processing; affinity for symbolic language and culture, just to name a few. What we don't have is knowledge of the specific details needed for socialization and survival.
- goatlover 8y ago
  Hume successfully argued that it's impossible to get causality from experience, because causes aren't in experience, only correlations or one event following another. You need a mental concept of causality to draw those connections. Hume called it a habit. Kant argued that it had to be one of the mental categories all humans structure the world of experience with. Space and time are two others. You don't get those concepts from raw sensory data. We have to be born with that capability.

maxirater 8y ago

>Actually, the research has found that new born infants can perceive all sorts of things, like human faces and emotional communication. yes, thats called sensory input.... a child deprived of sensory input when newborn can die because there is nothing there to show the baby of its existence, this the cause of crib death (notice that crib death is not called arm death because a baby doesnt die in the mothers arms) >There is also a lot of inborn knowledge about social interactions and causality. no, babies are not born with any knowledge at all of even the existence of society or beings. causality is learned from the result of human experience, causality is not known at birth

Retra 8y ago
There's no reason to think the human brain learns things using purely statistical methods, and then turn around and try to argue that evolution cannot encode the same information into the structure of a baby using those exact same methods. Humans have lots of instinctual knowledge; geometry, facial recognition; kinesthetics, emotional processing; affinity for symbolic language and culture, just to name a few. What we don't have is knowledge of the specific details needed for socialization and survival.
goatlover 8y ago
Hume successfully argued that it's impossible to get causality from experience, because causes aren't in experience, only correlations or one event following another. You need a mental concept of causality to draw those connections. Hume called it a habit. Kant argued that it had to be one of the mental categories all humans structure the world of experience with. Space and time are two others. You don't get those concepts from raw sensory data. We have to be born with that capability.