What I am thinking about this week.

[vvvvv]

The question of nature v. nurture is so problematic a binary as to be basically meaningless. It's a dead horse and it needs to be re-framed. A complex mind can be (and almost definitely is) designed to mesh with what is in nature (i.e. what it experiences)--and it can have an underlying structure without negating the possibility of free will. The

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Yes.

This may become long-winded, but I've been thinking about these things a lot lately and it seems this is a place where it might be worth sharing some thoughts.

This past week I read a collection of interviews with, among others, John Searle and E.O. Wilson that discussed these issues in a way that made it clear from my perspective that a problem with discussing these questions is how much noise there is in natural language. Two persons can be using the same words, and mean radically different things, yet there is enough similarity among the various speakers' utterances/concepts that they can maintain a seemingly interactive conversation that might better be characterized as 'two very different conversations held mostly in parallel.' --all of which is to say that it's difficult to meaningfully discuss these things without first clarifying definitions and ground-rules, which is tedious and boring, from my experience.

Still, the conversations are worth having, but for me are best supported by specific case study examples which (for my benefit) include A LOT of visual aids in the form of diagrams, graphs, animations, etc. Unfortunately, most of the people (again in my limited experience) who like to think about these things seem to not need the visual representations and tend to stick to natural language with all its noisy signals. As a result, I have great difficulty engaging in these discussions, which is very frustrating because these are issues about which I care to an at-times unhealthy degree.

My favorite expositor of nature/nurture questions is Humberto Maturana. He is almost never read in the US by any serious academics. He did his grad work, I believe, at Urbana-Champaign around 1970, and has lived for many years in Chile. I read much of his "Ontology of Observing" yesterday and highly recommend it. "Biology of Cognition" is another of his papers that is worth reading. His view is similar to William James's 'soft determinism'-- it views human thought and action as ultimately deterministic while at the same time affirming the amazing complexity, plasticity, adaptability, and potential for novelty of our nervous systems. In this view we 'have' a vast multitude of degrees of freedom but the titanic desire for absolute freedom is still thwarted by our finititude, relationality, and conditionedness. Since many of us desire freedom and autonomy more than just about anything, it is painful to fully grasp and accept that we may in some final sense not have control over the scope and complexity of our own thinking and doing, even in situations in which we are making decisions and doing things that are highly novel, not bound to past patterns of thought and action, and motivated by compassion and good will. This can be a horrifying prospect, but one that can potentially inspire in us the extreme humility, empathy, and courage that are some of the best qualities that can emerge in a human being.

Maturana doesn't stop there, fortunately. He goes on to discuss what all of this means on a lived human level: "Every thing is cognitive, and the bubble of human cognition changes in the continuous happening of the human recursive involvement in coontogenic and cophylogenic drifts within the domains of existence that he or she brings forth in the praxis of living. [...] Human responsability in the multiversa is total." -- link to source

And now one last quote from Maturana, the only passage from an academic paper that elicits the kind of feeling it tends to elicit in me:

"Every human being, as an autopoietic system, stands alone. Yet let us not lament that we must exist in a subject-dependent reality. Life is more interesting like this, because the only transcendence of our individual loneliness that we can experience arises through the consensual reality that we create with others, that is, through love."
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to Gloria Guiloff D., my close collaborator, to whom I owe the most fundamental insight here given, namely, the understanding of the consensual domains." -- link to source

Yes.