5 ms·

He advised parents to lie to their children about hugs :( Someone should tell him (and the rest of the world) that immortality is coming. It's sort of funny t

by curi 19y ago

He advised parents to lie to their children about hugs :( Someone should tell him (and the rest of the world) that immortality is coming. It's sort of funny that he says these gifted children will question traditions, and then wants to help them via the rather arbitrary touch=comfort tradition. He also says essentially: they don't fit in, but help them feel like they do. Why not tell them that fitting in isn't such a great thing anyway, and they shouldn't feel bad about being better?

jey 19y ago
"It's sort of funny that he says these gifted children will question traditions, and then wants to help them via the rather arbitrary touch=comfort tradition." I doubt it's arbitrary. It seems to be, as the article said, "a fundamental and instinctual aspect of existence". A lot of stuff is just built into us, and touch=comfort is a prime candidate for one of those things that's hard-wired into us. I doubt it's a culturally acquired/transmitted trait.
- curi 19y ago
  High level human personalities aren't hardwired. They are many layers of interpretation above any hardwiring. It's like imagining that which assembly language is under your Ruby makes a difference to which programs you can write.
  - maurycy 19y ago
    (I would ask why curi's comment was down voted, but I'm afraid of my karma, so I won't do so)
  - jey 19y ago
    This isn't a question of a high-level personality trait, but a question about the low-level firmware in our heads. The standard myth that we all grow up with is that everyone is born as a blank slate, and the child's environment shapes the person from scratch. This is only partially true, there's a whole lot about our nature that is simply fixed in stone (ok, neurons really) before we even take our first breath. Two obvious examples are the innate human calls of crying and laughter. The weird thing is that most of the rest of our minds are pre-determined by biological evolution too. <insert shock, awe, indignation, cries of "What, I'm not even at all like my identical twin brother!", etc here> There's far less variation between people than we normally think; a whole lot of us is dictated by the low-level firmware we're born with. We're just acutely sensitive to the relatively minor differences between us, just like you can tell faces apart even though they're all basically the same. If you're saying is that the relative weights vary between people, so while one person might be very comforted by touch another wouldn't care for it much, I agree with that. But this is just the small amount of variation between different people, the small amount that isn't fixed and can vary person-to-person. This is just a difference-in-degree, not a difference-in-kind. I doubt you can find someone who reacts to touch by immediately beginning to juggle knives or by sneezing. Now that would provide some evidence for the whole blank-slate hypothesis. Evolutionary Psychology is fascinating stuff. As I said in another thread: "EvPsych basically makes one important observation and asks the natural question leading from it: Just like our eyes and hands, our minds have also been developed in response to evolutionary pressures. What were these pressures and how do they account for the features we see in ourselves, like language, love, laughter, crying, etc?" A good pop-sci book on the subject is The Moral Animal by Robert Wright: http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Animal-Science-Evolutionary-Psychology/dp/0679763996 http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Animal-Science-Evolutionary-Psyc...
    - curi 19y ago
      How people interpret touch is definitely a high level personality trait that we can control. People often do. Some people associate touch with something bad and recoil from it. People also have cultural ideas about appropriate and inappropriate touching, and react accordingly. That reaction isn't firmware. A second problem with the "Genes Rule The World" hypothesis (if you get to name my position, I get to name yours ;p) is that no one ever actually explains how they do this (while allowing vast room for conscious control, reinterpretation, etc)
      - jey 19y ago
        "Some people associate touch with something bad and recoil from it. People also have cultural ideas about appropriate and inappropriate touching, and react accordingly. That reaction isn't firmware." Yes, this is all stuff that can be layered on top of the basic firmware. But wouldn't you say that when you hug someone you love in a time of distress, you're feeling something innate and at your core? I'm not saying we're simple or whatnot, there's definitely many facets to our cognition that are all in there rumbling around. But we sure aren't blank slates that are programmed by the environment. I think a better analogy is that we have a bunch of knobs with certain ranges, and the environment & genetic variation together dial in these knobs to make us who we are. This provides plenty of room for the complex interplay between the different emotions, like the example you cite where someone is generally distrusting of people and dislikes touch. I bet even that distrusting person could feel close to someone who put in a lot of effort to build a friendship to overcome their initial hesitance, and feel comforted by this closeness. Again, it's a difference-in-degree and not a difference-in-kind. "A second problem with the "Genes Rule The World" hypothesis (if you get to name my position, I get to name yours ;p) is that no one ever actually explains how they do this (while allowing vast room for conscious control, reinterpretation, etc)" That's what the fields of Genetics, Evolutionary Psychology and Evolutionary Biology are about. :-) Check out that book I referenced in the parent post, it's pretty interesting. If it's not genes that determine what we are, then what? Or at least, even if there isn't an alternative better answer yet, why aren't genes a suitable answer?
        19y ago

by curi 19y ago

jey 19y ago

"It's sort of funny that he says these gifted children will question traditions, and then wants to help them via the rather arbitrary touch=comfort tradition." I doubt it's arbitrary. It seems to be, as the article said, "a fundamental and instinctual aspect of existence". A lot of stuff is just built into us, and touch=comfort is a prime candidate for one of those things that's hard-wired into us. I doubt it's a culturally acquired/transmitted trait.

curi 19y ago
High level human personalities aren't hardwired. They are many layers of interpretation above any hardwiring. It's like imagining that which assembly language is under your Ruby makes a difference to which programs you can write.
- maurycy 19y ago
  (I would ask why curi's comment was down voted, but I'm afraid of my karma, so I won't do so)
- jey 19y ago
  This isn't a question of a high-level personality trait, but a question about the low-level firmware in our heads. The standard myth that we all grow up with is that everyone is born as a blank slate, and the child's environment shapes the person from scratch. This is only partially true, there's a whole lot about our nature that is simply fixed in stone (ok, neurons really) before we even take our first breath. Two obvious examples are the innate human calls of crying and laughter. The weird thing is that most of the rest of our minds are pre-determined by biological evolution too. <insert shock, awe, indignation, cries of "What, I'm not even at all like my identical twin brother!", etc here> There's far less variation between people than we normally think; a whole lot of us is dictated by the low-level firmware we're born with. We're just acutely sensitive to the relatively minor differences between us, just like you can tell faces apart even though they're all basically the same. If you're saying is that the relative weights vary between people, so while one person might be very comforted by touch another wouldn't care for it much, I agree with that. But this is just the small amount of variation between different people, the small amount that isn't fixed and can vary person-to-person. This is just a difference-in-degree, not a difference-in-kind. I doubt you can find someone who reacts to touch by immediately beginning to juggle knives or by sneezing. Now that would provide some evidence for the whole blank-slate hypothesis. Evolutionary Psychology is fascinating stuff. As I said in another thread: "EvPsych basically makes one important observation and asks the natural question leading from it: Just like our eyes and hands, our minds have also been developed in response to evolutionary pressures. What were these pressures and how do they account for the features we see in ourselves, like language, love, laughter, crying, etc?" A good pop-sci book on the subject is The Moral Animal by Robert Wright: http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Animal-Science-Evolutionary-Psychology/dp/0679763996 http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Animal-Science-Evolutionary-Psyc...
  - curi 19y ago
    How people interpret touch is definitely a high level personality trait that we can control. People often do. Some people associate touch with something bad and recoil from it. People also have cultural ideas about appropriate and inappropriate touching, and react accordingly. That reaction isn't firmware. A second problem with the "Genes Rule The World" hypothesis (if you get to name my position, I get to name yours ;p) is that no one ever actually explains how they do this (while allowing vast room for conscious control, reinterpretation, etc)
    - jey 19y ago
      "Some people associate touch with something bad and recoil from it. People also have cultural ideas about appropriate and inappropriate touching, and react accordingly. That reaction isn't firmware." Yes, this is all stuff that can be layered on top of the basic firmware. But wouldn't you say that when you hug someone you love in a time of distress, you're feeling something innate and at your core? I'm not saying we're simple or whatnot, there's definitely many facets to our cognition that are all in there rumbling around. But we sure aren't blank slates that are programmed by the environment. I think a better analogy is that we have a bunch of knobs with certain ranges, and the environment & genetic variation together dial in these knobs to make us who we are. This provides plenty of room for the complex interplay between the different emotions, like the example you cite where someone is generally distrusting of people and dislikes touch. I bet even that distrusting person could feel close to someone who put in a lot of effort to build a friendship to overcome their initial hesitance, and feel comforted by this closeness. Again, it's a difference-in-degree and not a difference-in-kind. "A second problem with the "Genes Rule The World" hypothesis (if you get to name my position, I get to name yours ;p) is that no one ever actually explains how they do this (while allowing vast room for conscious control, reinterpretation, etc)" That's what the fields of Genetics, Evolutionary Psychology and Evolutionary Biology are about. :-) Check out that book I referenced in the parent post, it's pretty interesting. If it's not genes that determine what we are, then what? Or at least, even if there isn't an alternative better answer yet, why aren't genes a suitable answer?
      - 19y ago