Blagsta
Minimum cage, maximum cage
That's not reasoning. That's emotional needs being met/un-met.
emotions and ideas
- Thread starter articul8
- Start date
That's not reasoning. That's emotional needs being met/un-met.
Blagsta
Minimum cage, maximum cage
This is the man
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/António_Damásio
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/António_Damásio
Reasoning has to be established before all this can even come into play. It doesn't just magically springs up in the brain because of external factors. (Not even touching the fact that babies are certainly exposed to forms of socializing in the womb.)
Are you now arguing that what others say about a child before it is born, directly affects the child that has no knowledge of these disputes?
I said that outside factors influence and direct reasoning, inevitably, but the reasoning itself is present from the moment the child becomes aware.
Nonsense. I was perfectly aware of myself when I was in the cradle (and oif a whole lot of other things too).
Reasoning does not need to be acquired.
salaam.
articul8
Dishonest sociopath
The whole scenario is determined not by the baby's understanding of the situation but by the cultural expectation of maternal nurturing developed in the mother.
Firstly, babies do not cry because they feel "lonely" - they cry because some source of physical comfort is absent. This is an important distinction. It is not simply an 'emotional' need it is a physical/libidinal/biological need for satisfaction.
Imagine another scenario:
Baby is hungy - baby cries - mother nowhere to be seen (maybe post-natally depressed) - baby continues to cry
Actually at some point all babies have to learn that mother won't automatically come when baby cries. Learning to cope with the non-dependence of the world on baby's wishes is the pivotal moment in reasoning. Language/Culture emerge in part to help accommodate a world where the object of desire is missing. Freud goes into all this - narcissism is not a form of reasoning - it is the psychical complement of libidinal auto-eroticism (primary process) - the ego is yet to emerge from the Id. Reasoning comes after the repression of the drives, the emergence of the ego, and the capacity to accept that the subject and object are non-identical.
,
Blagsta
Minimum cage, maximum cage
Yes, this is true, and forms the basis of our adult emotions.
A baby has no clue about that.
Hence the ability to learn (=reason) is present since (and inevitably before) the moment the baby gets this first result. If not, the scenario would not be repeated even when there is no physical discomfort.
salaam.
articul8
Dishonest sociopath
It's not a question of particular speech acts influencing the baby. It is the fact we emerge into a world of meaning, a world already structured in a particular way according to particular cultural norms etc. How adults respond to the baby is at least as important, if not much more so, than how the baby responds to adults. Adults come with a cultural conditioning built into place, and baby learns to find their in a world which they discvoer already in progress.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Laplanche
articul8
Dishonest sociopath
No of course but it helps to shape the way the mother acts around the baby, and thus determines the nature of the world a baby encounters
Babies have the biological ability/capacity to learn how to reason (which are related but noy synonymous by the way). But that doesn't mean they are capable of "reasoning" from the outset. Babies have the ability to learn, and may learn, but it the experience of socialistion is first necessary if that latent ipotential is to bear fruit.
Don't babies need someone else to learn from?
bluestreak
HomosexualityIsStalin’sAtomBombtoDestroyAmerica
i would suspect that reasoning abilities are not learnt but lie within the human brain's "wiring". We learn to reason from the word go, as our brains develop, though it is unlikely to be true reasoning for some time. Emotions and reasoning are just two parts of a whole, and can guide each other or exist practically independent of each other depending on the situation and the society in which the individual developed.
Blagsta
Minimum cage, maximum cage
Damasio has done some work to show that our reasoning relies on our emotions. People who have had the emotional centres of their brains damaged can think perfectly well, but apparently find it impossible to actually make any decisions or function socially.
articul8
Dishonest sociopath
Clearly reasoning would be impossible if our brains didn't have the biological capacity to develop those faculties. But that is very different to the argument that reason somehow pre-dates socialisation.
As for neuro-science I'm very sceptical about highly determinist claims - a good example is the "gay men and women" have one kind of brain, and "straight men and lesbians" have another that was in the paper recently (today?) - it completely ignores the environmental factors that canditions why a brain might develop in one way and not the other,
As for neuro-science I'm very sceptical about highly determinist claims - a good example is the "gay men and women" have one kind of brain, and "straight men and lesbians" have another that was in the paper recently (today?) - it completely ignores the environmental factors that canditions why a brain might develop in one way and not the other,
...I'd say a certain knowledge is already built into emotions, particularly in how they manifest themselves. For example, a childs cry, which as you say may be at an experience of unpleasure, contains within it a knowledge that such expressions are likely to evoke caring behaviours from figures in the childs environment. Of course, this is an innate, unconscious knowledge. In this instance the parental response gives a second order, or higher level meaning to the primal state of unpleasure. Thus a social meaning emerges from an emotional response to a biolgocal need or drives satisfaction or frustration.
rogue_lettuce
Well-Known Member
Apparently it is, all you have to do is assert something over and over again with no evidence or argument. Sounds like you got the better deal to me.
I'm not labelling something I can't understand 'instinct', I'm simply saying that I see no reason to believe that a baby crying when it's lonely, if in fact babies do feel lonely, is evidence of its ability to reason - I'd say it's more akin to the reason my knee jerks out when hit with a hammer.
rogue_lettuce
Well-Known Member
That doesn't show that REASONING is affected by emotions. If anything, it shows that social functioning and at least some forms of decision-making are linked to emotions, or other things affected by the parts of the brain that also affect emotions. This might just mean that we can't function socially when these are brain damaged because we can't predict other people's behaviour, etc. That doesn't mean we can't reason (the cogito still works [or doesn't work, if you're willing to go down the postmodernist route], regardless of how you feel about it)
rogue_lettuce
Well-Known Member
Now you're conflating two different terms to try to defend your own nosensical assertions. Reason has nothing to do with having the ability to learn, it's a mental activity, namely thinking in the realm of logic/problem-solving/mathematics/etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reason
I agree. Surely this is a good reason to incorporate all these elements into some overarching conception of human agency rather than making some (in my view implausible) ontological distinction between reasoning and affectivity?articul8 said:
The sort of activity we call "rational" takes place when we take a disengaged stance towards the world and language, I'd argue, is a precondition of this. Our ability to categorise, to abstract away from difference, allows us to hold objects (well universals) in thought and consider them in isolation from our affective involvements in the world. Language use allows us to take a step back from a world which, given the nature of human agency, is defined by our involvments in it. I don't think this entails that rational and emotional thinking (or maybe disengagement and engagement) are different in kind. They simply represent the two extremes on the spectrum of what's phenomenologically possible for human agency.
No, you fail to understand that to be able to learn you first must be able to reason.
(Wikipedia, the All of All source of the unsourced. I'm totally convinced of your superiority but do try to stay polite.)
salaam.
Depends.
Humans don't need learning how to eat or drink, they do learn what to eat and drink.
Humans don't need to learn how to reason, they do learn how to express themselves in a way others understand or get informed about their reasoning. Which can be useful for various reasons and applications but isn't necessary for existence and continuation of reasoning.
salaam.
rogue_lettuce
Well-Known Member
You think the only alternative to the cogito is postmodernism?
Hmmm. How much time have we got for this? Haha. No, not necessarily, but I think objections are most likely to come from that camp, and objections from that camp will be the most successful ones.
You think "the ability to learn" and "logic/problem-solving/mathematics/etc" have nothing to do with each other?
No, you're being pedantic now
I just meant they are not the same thing by any means, whereas he was suggesting they were equivalent terms.
So i have to be able to think rationally in order to learn now? Presumably, this means you think that ALL animals are capable of reasoning, since they're all capable of learning?
bluestreak
HomosexualityIsStalin’sAtomBombtoDestroyAmerica
Says a religious man.
Just like irrational reasoning is possible, learning without being rational is possible.
I would say that animals reason, yes. You only have too watch them to see they do. It is not because we can't talk with them that we must assume they are lower creatures. In fact, I'm convinced that in the course of its development into the modern human, humanity learned a lot from observing various animal life.
salaam.
bluestreak
HomosexualityIsStalin’sAtomBombtoDestroyAmerica
Saves you having to think for yourself.
articul8
Dishonest sociopath
N0 - crying is no doubt a stimulus-response reaction to unpleasure - but the child is not capable of recognising as "other" the source of that which meets its needs. It comes as a profound shock that its desires are separate from the world, and that there is a wider environment independent from desires. This is traumatic. It has no expectation that caring behaviours will meet its needs, because only the actual experience of socialisation raises the possibility of doubt. The traumatic fact that the other has a desire too - that the baby is the object of the Others desire is where language/reason really gets going.
i-am-your-idea
pretty vacant
I would agree with it. Everything is based on feelings.
All logic must be held in the heart.
and so, Logic is not founded on logic..
Like fela said - Philosophy taken to the n-th degree burns itself out.
articul8
Dishonest sociopath
feelings might be a component in all we do and think - but it doesn't mean they are "the" (singular) foundation, and cause of all other aspects of our experience. They way we learn - through socialisation - to think, speak, communicate also effects how we feel.
Is "sadness" the same in a human, a goldfish and a cockroach? Or are the layers of emotion felt by humans in modern societies more variegated than a simple biological given?
Is "sadness" the same in a human, a goldfish and a cockroach? Or are the layers of emotion felt by humans in modern societies more variegated than a simple biological given?
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