Originally posted by Tom
We had this discussion in PF v2.0 in LG's thread called, "The Origins of Reason". DT Strain had the best post in the whole thread, IMO. I salvaged it and would like to post it here.
From DT Strain:
Very interesting topic Lifegazer. I hope it is not your last. I would have to disagree of course, but also I would differ a little with Carl...
One cannot talk meaningfully about reason, or any other activity of behavior without looking at the nature and function of those organs responsible for behavior.
There are basically two sources for all organic behavior on the planet - instinct and reason (with some fuzziness in between). It is important to take a quick look at instinct, so that we can differentiate it from reason (which I believe Carl has failed to do somewhat)...
INSTINCT:
Let us look at a simple organism like ants, which are unlikely to have much if any reason and totally intinctively driven. With ants, you have a very complex set of behaviors. But these behaviors are built into their bodies (or "hard wired") in their DNA. You can tell this because any ant will respond with these behaviors with no "training" time. You can also tell because of the similarity of the behaviors with others of the same species.
Such behaviors arise out of natural selection. In other words, organisms which didn't have certain behavioral tendencies died quicker and contributed less of their kin to the following generation. This means that instinctive behaviors change very slowly in response to environmental factors. Therefore, another tell-tale sign of an instinct is that it does not quickly change in unpredictable situations and it tends to be more blunt and crude. A more simplistic code of responses to stimuli.
REASON:
Reason is a second source of organic behavior. The areas of the nervous system responsible for reason will be generally more complex in nature than the instinctive regions. When we look at how information is coded in the brain, through neural connections, what we find is that babies are born with very few connections. But they also have the ability to form new connections at an incredibly rapid rate. The input-connection-forming system of the brain allows it to formulate new pathways in respons to its experiences, unlike the hard-wired connections in the instinctive regions which are determined by DNA.
So, as the baby experiences things, a "pattern-recognition" gets going, where stimuli are mentally connected to other stimuli in a cause and effect pattern. As these patterns get more and more complex, the ability of the child to understand and predict things about its environment improves. Eventually, it takes on language, which is simply a coding tool that helps the brain sort information. Langauge is not all together necessary for reasoning, but it helps make reasoning a lot more efficient. The basic fact here though is that no reasoning is possible without flexible neurons capable of forming and reforming connections - the basis of memory and thought.
Reason, then, acts not on the slow evolutionary timescale of DNA-defined connections, but on a much quicker scale because new connections can form on an organism by organism basis according to individual experience. This makes it a more advanced system for determining behavior.
Ants' nervous systems contain little or no "unspecialized" brain cells at their birth. Therefore, all they have are the DNA-defined connections of specialized brain cells, and no room to form new connections (i.e. "learn"). Humans have a great deal of grey matter (the unspecialized flexible neurons)but we also have a substantial region of hard-wired cells determined by our genes. This "lizard brain" is still around and gives us our basic instinctive responses to our environment and our basic urges, which we share with most animals on the planet. Therefore, we are in a constant state of tug-of-war between our instinctive area and our reasoning area. This tug-of-war is most apparent when we are on diets, when we are trying to resist urges to hit people, and so on. Part of our education as beings growing up, is for the unspecialized reasoning portion of our brains to become more intricate and influential, so that it can "dominate" the instinctive side in such cases. This is the basis of self discipline.
Therefore, any behavior which arrises out of the hardwired simplistic region is instinctive, while any behavior arrising out of the more complex, flexible, and unspecialized region is reasoning. There are many examples of combinations, where the instinctive side "backs up" the intellectual side. For example, if we feel empathetic for a person in trouble and seek to help them, our social instincts may have given us this reaction. But our intellectual reasoning side may also realize on an ethical-principles level that it is good to help those in need.
So, to answer some of Carl's points, the other apes appear to have a good deal of "unspecialized" brain matter, meaning they are capable of learning new things and applying those lessons to their behavior (i.e. reasoning). However, this is on a much lower level, as their number of neurons, and the ability of those neurons to form complex connections is lower.
As for lifegazer's comments...
We are born with brains capable of building into a reasoning thing. The reasoning would be the activity taking place within this wiring while the wiring would be the neural connections. In other words, a baby's brain is like land with no highways. The babies brain has the ability to build new highways. The Reasoning would be the "traffic" that travels on these highways, which increases as the number and size of the highways increase. Therefore, a baby is not born with the ability to reason per se, but IS born with the ability to continually increase in its reasoning ability.
You can reason without language, but its a tool that greatly helps in efficient reasoning.
Our "birthright" as you put it is to be born with a large amount of unspecialized brain cells capable of developing into a reasoning organ quite quickly.
It is the learning about things which simultaneously gives the input that helps the brain continually develope greater and greater reasoning ability. This is why it is important to give babies bright colorful toys and to play with them often. As they see these objects and experiment with them, their brain developes and they learn to reason more and more greatly.
I disagree. Things such as toys and people send impulses into the brain. These impulses attract materials that form new connections, the electrical activity along these connections transfers the data needed in reasoning. The toys, people, neurons, synaptic connections, electricity, and light, are all things.
Since the premeses are mistaken, the conclusion is as well. Again, it is completely irrelevant to make conclusions about the mind without any reference whatsoever to the nature of the organ which generates it.
