Parental influence is the most determining factor in child's moral being.
started by Dawn and Dew 9 mnths agoReplies
Maria S posted Re:Amerasian- Parental influence is the most determining factor in child on 9 mnths ago
Amerasian,
I am not sure, if you were responding to my post.
Anyways, I agree with what you said.
*I am only reading posts selectively from the screen names I know (and ONLY those I want to read!) and some screen names which are not I am familiar.
It's been working our great, seems like I can read a lot more interesting stuff and not waste my time at all!
M
Dawn and Dew posted Re:Amerasian- Parental influence is the most determining factor in child on 9 mnths agoThanks for selecting my forum to spend your good time. It's been a great pleasure to have welcomed you into my forum.
And thanks for your replies as well.
Warm Regards,
Dew.
Amerasian posted Re: {Maria} Parental influence is the most determining factor in child on 9 mnths ago
Dawn and Dew posted Re: {Maria} Parental influence is the most determining factor in child on 9 mnths agoI appreciate your honesty for saying "I also dread the possibility of them inheriting my negative attributes". The same doubt and fear is there in me. Sometimes even I feel guilty to preach or advise my child on the issues that are impossible for me. I just cut them short and try to be an example rather than a preacher and adviser.
Thanks and Warm Regards.
Parents are abdicating more and more of their responsibilities to ouside agents like teachers, media, computer etc. This is not a good trend.I may be wrong; but that is how I feel.
i congratulate you on starting this topic.It is important and topical.
Regards,
kvakutty
Thank you for the compliments and let me redirect your greetings to the great mind which really thought of it. Really it is not me. It was passed on to me for a debate in a school in Dehradun.
The whole of the credit goes to the person who thought of it. Thanks to him/her.
Regards,
Dawn and dew.
smitasamm posted Re:Parental influence is the most determining factor in child's moral being. on 9 mnths agoThat is nice to see your response and queries which stimulated my thoughts. That's really nice of you. I know a person pretty well who was brought up in a highly unfavourable circumstances where the father was a drunkard and tortured her mother more than he did to his family. Now the affected children started hating this father and they lead a gentler life keeping themselves far away from that father who is let alone in his hometown on streets and caravenserais! He could not influence his children at all for the past 25to28 years! Any comment?
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While parental influences are extremely powerful...it really depends on the individual/individual child and how they "internalize" those influences and turn out in the long run.
*Children in the same family (even twins!), exposed to exactly the "same factors/environment", turn out to be "exactly the opposite from each other".
*As you mention in your example, President Ronald Reagan's father was seen a 'town drunk' who used to sleep on the streets..in bars etc.
Reagan is said to have made a promise not to drink (and I know many children of alcoholics and drug addicts- who did the same).
Children who come from broken homes, all turn out to be so different!
M
This is NOT true at all.
> it really depends on the individual/individual child and how they "internalize" those influences
That individuals make a contribution over and above what their environment stamps in in them is persistent myth.
VC...this probably requires its own thread!
I'm reading Doug Hofstadter's I am a strange loop, and came across this precious gem - "who pushes whom around in the cranium?" from GEB days...
Individuals swirl around in roulette wheels and by random chance fall into different enviro megaspaces. Within these spaces, there is still a wide diversity of microspatial influences that individuals can pick and choose to subject themselves to...like, instead of choosing to spend time reading up fellow kinathhu-thavalais I could choose thavalais from other wells. Vestiges of free will combat life long conditioning in epic battles each day invoking my favorite bromide about how the mind is kurukshetra with multiple forces arrayed against each other. Start a thread if you want to exchange notes on the nuances.
What you see as vestiges of free will is really (other) conditioned responses brought about by recent/current settings. There is no non-physical "I" inside us exerting free will.
From Malone, Jr., J. C., & Cruchon, N. M. (2001). Radical behaviorism and the rest of psychology: A review/précis of Skinner's About Behaviorism. Behavior and Philosophy, 29, 31-57.
“Traditional psychology carries the burden of basic assumptions that agree with folk psychology and, therefore, lends popular appeal to its theories. Needless to say, these assumptions also feature primitive ways of casting some important questions. For example, the assumption that 'we' are minds 'inside' bodies agrees with millennia of popular opinion, but it is neither a necessary nor a wise psychology.”
> Start a thread if you want to exchange notes on the nuances.
I really don't have time during the week. If you start a thread, I will try to respond on Sunday. Obviously, I am very interested in the topic.
Agreed...but the myriad ways in which our minds loop back on itself (think of sitting in a barber's chair with two parallel mirrors showing infinite reflections on each side) makes it easy for us to imagine an "I" that exists, provides a convenient short hand and enables us to talk of free will. Its like having a million roulette wheels inside your head and although one could argue that the result of each roulette wheel is in some sense "predictable" based on the laws of physics, the infinite varieties of roulette results make for a rich tapestry of life...and that is just my current belief system.
Agreed. And that is its seductive appeal. However, it also propagates the fiction.
A few decades ago, talking of a vital force in biology provided a convenient short hand. It also propagated the fiction until urea was synthesized.
> Its like having a million roulette wheels inside your head
There are no roulette wheels. There is only a continuing series of caused thoughts (which are physical behavior).
>Agreed. And that is its seductive appeal. However, it also propagates the fiction.
Okay..if you are telling me that humans are reducible to hamsters and wheels in the grand scheme of things - my position is that the lab animals have taken over and are running amok. You can make reasonable predictions on macro-level behavior of masses but at an individual level, you cannot predict thoughts that will occur in a human mind. And the fundamental difference is the ability for self-awareness. If you can create a program that is able to refer to itself and embed it in a robot you would have given it consciousness. And this ability to self-refer or hallucinate, is itself the "I".
You cannot predict so many things in the physical world but we don't explain them via free will. There is a pond near my house. You cannot predict the wave pattern at any given time. However, we can confidently say that nothing non-physical ("free willish") is involved.
As for the human mind (i.e., private thinking responses), we can make people think particular things at particular times just like you can cause particular wave patterns easily (using an air blower for instance) in the pond.
> ability to self-refer
Is of social origin.
Nothing non-physical is involved.
You thinking about yourself is similar to you writing an essay about yourself for a college application. In either case, it is a series of physical responses.
What exactly do people mean when they speak of the self? Its defining characteristics are fourfold. First of all, continuity. You've a sense of time, a sense of past, a sense of future. There seems to be a thread running through your personality, through your mind. Second, closely related is the idea of unity or coherence of self. In spite of the diversity of sensory experiences, memories, beliefs and thoughts, you experience yourself as one person, as a unity.
So there's continuity, there's unity. And then there's the sense of embodiment or ownership - yourself as anchored to your body. And fourth is a sense of agency, what we call free will, your sense of being in charge of your own destiny. I moved my finger.
Now as we've seen in my lectures so far, these different aspects of self can be differentially disturbed in brain disease, which leads me to believe that the self really isn't one thing, but many. Just like love or happiness, we have one word but it's actually lumping together many different phenomena. For example, if I stimulate your right parietal cortex with an electrode (you're conscious and awake) you will momentarily feel that you are floating near the ceiling watching your own body down below. You have an out-of-the-body experience. The embodiment of self is abandoned. One of the axiomatic foundations of your Self is temporarily abandoned. And this is true of each of those aspects of self I was talking about. They can be selectively affected in brain disease.
Keeping this in mind, I see three ways in which the problem of self might be tackled by neuroscience. First, maybe the problem of self is a straightforward empirical problem. Maybe there is a single, very elegant, Pythagorean Aha! solution to the problem, just like DNA base-pairing was a solution to the riddle of heredity. I think this is unlikely, but I could be wrong.
Second, given my earlier remarks about the self, the notion of the self as being defined by a set of attributes - embodiment, agency, unity, continuity - maybe we will succeed in explaining each of these attributes individually in terms of what's going on in the brain. Then the problem of what is the self will vanish or recede into the background.
Third, maybe the solution to the problem of the self won't be a straightforward empirical one. It may instead require a radical shift in perspective, the sort of thing that Einstein did when he rejected the assumption that things can move at arbitrarily high velocities. When we finally achieve such a shift in perspective, we may be in for a big surprise and find that the answer was staring at us all along. I don't want to sound like a New Age guru, but there are curious parallels between this idea and the Hindu philosophical view that there is no essential difference between self and others or that the self is an illusion.
Now I have no clue what the solution to the problem of self is, what the shift in perspective might be. If I did I would dash off a paper to Nature today, and overnight I'd be the most famous scientist alive. But just for fun let me have a crack at it, at what the solution might look like.
Our brains were essentially model-making machines. We need to construct useful, virtual reality simulations of the world that we can act on. Within the simulation, we need also to construct models of other people's minds because we're intensely social creatures, us primates. We need to do this so we can predict their behaviour. We are, after all, the Machiavellian primate. For example, you want to know was what he did a wilful action. In that case he might repeat it. Or was it involuntary in which case it's quite benign. Indeed evolution may have given us the skill even before self-awareness emerged in the brain. But then once this mechanism is in place, you can also apply it to the particular creature who happens to occupy this particular body, called Ramachandran.
At a very rudimentary level this is what happens each time a new-born baby mimics your behaviour. Stick your tongue out next time you see a new-born-baby and the baby will stick its tongue out, mimicking your behaviour, instantly dissolving the boundary, the arbitrary barrier between self and others. And we even know that this is carried out by a specific group of neurons in the brain, in your frontal lobes, called the mirror neurons. The bonus from this might be self-awareness."
thought you might like this...reith lectures 2003.
Just a few quick comments. (I just came back to work and better get some work done..)
1. Did you read what I posted below? (I am not talking about brain stimulations at all or even about neurology. They are sciences in their own right.) My prime interest is a science a higher level (like chemistry being higher than atomic physics.) It is possible to explain self and stuff without delving into neurology.
2. > You can't have free-floating sensations or qualia with no-one to experience
Sure you can. It the physical body that experiences sensations and behaves. There is absolutely no need to posit anything else (except as shortcuts which takes as away from science).
3. > the particular creature who happens to occupy this particular body, called Ramachandran.
There is absolutely no need to posit a separate creature other than the body. The body identifies itself as Ramachandran. The body writes book. The body negotiates a salary of $300,000 or whatever.
4. > Stick your tongue out next time you see a new-born-baby and the baby will stick its tongue out, mimicking your behaviour,
The child has a reflex like behavior. Just like it can sneeze, it can mimic.
5. > instantly dissolving the boundary, the arbitrary barrier between self and others.
?? In this case the stimulus is a man sticking his tongue out instead of fresh ground black peppers in the case of sneezing.
6. > Now I have no clue what the solution to the problem of self is
Ramachandran should read About Behaviorism.
So there's continuity, there's unity. And then there's the sense of embodiment or ownership - yourself as anchored to your body. And fourth is a sense of agency, what we call free will, your sense of being in charge of your own destiny. I moved my finger.
Now as we've seen in my lectures so far, these different aspects of self can be differentially disturbed in brain disease, which leads me to believe that the self really isn't one thing, but many. Just like love or happiness, we have one word but it's actually lumping together many different phenomena. For example, if I stimulate your right parietal cortex with an electrode (you're conscious and awake) you will momentarily feel that you are floating near the ceiling watching your own body down below. You have an out-of-the-body experience. The embodiment of self is abandoned. One of the axiomatic foundations of your Self is temporarily abandoned. And this is true of each of those aspects of self I was talking about. They can be selectively affected in brain disease."
_________
Atcg,
Very cerebral, but it was a good read and makes a lot of sense to me:-)
M
And of course, i am not referring to anything nonphysical when it comes to consciousness...its all tofu like grey matter that produces consciousness. But its a miracle nevertheless to be able to break free of the tyranny of thoughts and be self-aware and knowing that we are thinking about ourselves, our thoughts...in endless regress.
That consciousness (we are still in the physical realm) is not metaphysical nor am i claiming kinship with concepts like soul etc. Although I am willing to admit that humans have a more evolved 'consciousness' than animals.
Thoughts are very sensitive to so many variables. This is what brings unpredictability. If your hear "Elandhapazham" on Thursday, it may affect what you think on Saturday. However, if I can make 10 Tamil speakers think "Elandhapazham" at will, then the problem is cracked, in concept. 100% predictability doesn't happen in physics/biology either.
> Making people think of particular things is a very inexact science
See the above example.
> making it precise would probably require many supercomputers.
Not at all. I was thinking about controlling their environment only. (This is what happens in sales/advertising for instance.)
> humans don't always behave in 'predictable' ways since they have a very rich repertoire of thoughts
Humans not always behaving in 'predictable' ways have nothing to with their thoughts. Thoughts are also behavior. The controlling variables are complex. The repertoire of thoughts and actions is rich.
It is not
Thoughts-> Actions
It is
Several other external variables -> Thoughts and actions intermixed.
Let's say I offer you $500 for telling correctly the 10th word in the American national anthem. Most likely, you will say silently "Oh", let one finger out, say silently "Say", let two fingers out, etc. The thoughts ("Oh", "Say", "can", "you", etc. ) are intermixed with actions (letting one finger out, letting two fingers out, etc.) One is not the cause of another. They are both dependent variables.
Interesting....I would have thought that when I was in KG back in Kumbakonam, Vasandha (sic) miss would use a ruler to enforce discipline and make me stick my fingers out as I read the numbers out aloud...making me internalize the actions every time I do a deliberate and careful counting task. :)
And i'm sure millions of dollars are spent in advertising research to ensure a statistically significant predictability...but you still can't predict how an individual "thinks". May be we should discuss 'qualia' next.
I have no interest in discussing qualia. We can of course terminate this discussion.
> still can't predict how an individual "thinks"
If I can get someone to utter a specific phrase (say Moo Goo Gai Pan or Vatha Kuzhambu or whatever), I have gotten him to think. Control demonstrates dependency as much as prediction.
OK, I am going to bow out of this discussion. If you want to follow up, please read About Behaviorism. (You can get a paperback for under $10.00).
Simpletruth posted Re:Parental influence is the most determining factor in child's moral being. on 9 mnths ago
Great thanks to one and all for contributing the arguments in the forum started by me!
DAWN AND DEW