Venting humans being are unbelievably fucking stupid

[Darkover]

human beings are born with a blank state and we have limited cognitively no human being as a complete understanding of any subject

humans start as blank slates and have cognitive limits. While we've made remarkable progress in understanding many subjects, no one has complete knowledge. There's always more to learn, and human cognition itself is prone to biases, errors, and limitations. It can feel frustrating when we hit those limits

we can build calculators which can compute almost anything in a milliseconds, human beings aren't born with any knowledge of mathematics

Humans created calculators to overcome our cognitive limits, especially in fields like mathematics where precision and speed are crucial. It's fascinating that while we aren't born with any inherent knowledge of math, we've developed abstract systems like arithmetic, algebra, and calculus—then designed machines to handle those tasks faster than we ever could.

This shows both our ingenuity and our limitations. We're capable of great innovation, yet fundamentally, we have to build tools to surpass what our brains can do naturally. It's a reminder of how much human progress is a collaborative effort between our minds and the tools we create.

 

[EvisceratedJester]

The whole "blank slate" thing is not true. Most psychologists and neurologists will tell you otherwise.

Empirical Science for the Spotless Mind

The blank slate, the dominant theory of human nature in modern intellectual life stating that humans are shaped entirely by their experiences and not by any preexisting biological mechanisms, is being challenged …

www.psychologicalscience.org

 

[Darkover]

The whole "blank slate" thing is not true. Most psychologists and neurologists will tell you otherwise.

what your saying is while we aren't born knowing specific facts, we come equipped with a foundation that shapes how we learn and interact with the world still a blank state, We're born with certain innate structures—like reflexes, pattern recognition, emotional responses, and cognitive predispositions—that shape how we process experiences and learn. These aren't facts, but they guide how we interact with the world.

 

[avalokitesvara]

What disturbs me is how entirely dependent someone's life, personality, knowledge, outlook, everything are on their upbringing. Whatever innate attributes you may be born with, it still is so dependent on the family you are born into and the society around you. One interaction with one person when you're a child can foreclose or open up huge potential swathes of human experience. In my own life I lack any mathematical or scientific knowledge bc my parents weren't STEM types and I was socialised into the humanities and declared to not be good at maths or science (sexism too probably). So I believed that about myself. Who knows what I could have learnt and been able to understand if someone had told me the opposite story, that I was good at maths, and put effort into fostering that in me. What other people might we all have been?

 

[EvisceratedJester]

what your saying is while we aren't born knowing specific facts, we come equipped with a foundation that shapes how we learn and interact with the world still a blank state, We're born with certain innate structures—like reflexes, pattern recognition, emotional responses, and cognitive predispositions—that shape how we process experiences and learn. These aren't facts, but they guide how we interact with the world.

You still wouldn't be a blank slate. How people interact with the world around still depends heavily on how stimuli interacts with our preexisting neural structures and genes. There is a reason why there are many studies involving identical twins who were separated from each other very early on that find a lot similarities between them still despite this. Hell, even in my developmental psych class the professor mentioned the fact that most psychologists don't believe in the whole "blank slate" thing anymore.

 

[Hvergelmir]

Who knows what I could have learnt and been able to understand if someone had told me the opposite story, that I was good at maths...

Who knows what you can still learn, despite what people told you..?

Even if the blank slate model isn't factually accurate (it's very much not my area of expertise), I think it's a good model for everyday life. Even if genetics and what not have a significant impact, we can't predict an individual with very high certainty - and definitely not as laymen with very limited data.

 

[yxmux]

I think the "blank slate" theory is really just an implication derived from a gross oversimplification of psychological determinism and physicalism. There is no reason why a system's behavior that is presumably deterministic to be shaped only by its surroundings regardless of the system's properties. In this case, the system is the human and the surroundings are the human's physical environment. The physical environment itself is an objective construct, meaning that its properties, specifically its scientific properties, or its properties as an object, such as what we call gravity, temperature, light wavelength, are fixed with respect to vantage point. In other words, these properties are universally consistent regardless of point of view. The interaction between the human's objective properties (e.g., biology, physiology) and that of its physical environment through instances of conscious experience to which it gathers information from according to its vantage point, which is used to form subjective musings, judgements, or principles.

 

[ninfanatic]

i just think humans at baseline are ignorant and selfish. all human actions to differing degrees are motivated by one or both of these. ignorance is often associated with innocent mistakes i believe as well when more often than not it comes with significant consequences.