Goodreads: The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker (checkpoint 6)

Audiobook: 11hrs 19mins\ 22hrs 42mins.

This post will cover four different 'listening sessions': 2/28, 3/1, 3/8, and 3/12 (today).


2/28...
This wrapped up the rest of the neuroscience material previously being discussed. This concluded audio part 1 of 3 (through chapter 5).

3/1...
Audio part 2/3 started off explaining that the majority of the rest of the material will cover and deal with the implications (political, moral, etc.) of the content presented so far.
During the next 90 minutes he discussed how people resist certain claims of science because they fear that those claims could be used to directly justify things such as inequality, descrimination, racism, and the likes. The logic goes something like: well science says this is natrual and how it is so therefore I can justify my actions with it.

Science exists to explain phenomena in the universe by formulating models and theories that encapsulate and explain as much of the collected body of data as possible.

If scientists found that a certain subset of people were lacking certain genes or chemicals in the brain which showed they were (on average) not as intelligent as the general population, should that information be used to justify inquality and outright discrimination against those people? Some may reject this evidence outright based on idealogical premises while others may accept it. some that accept it may use it to justify treating these people as less 'human' from the general population.

Science has historically stood on grounds of explaining how things are, not how things should be. In Nazi Germany, Hitler decided to take a mixure of his religious beliefs and his understanding of the implications of evolutionary biology to justify the killing of millions of people, namely Jewish inhabitants.

Numerous other examples could be given throughout history. When people first heard the idea that the earth revolves around the sun (heliocentricity), they rejected it outright because that would make humans less significant and give us less meaning as being the center of the Universe, placed there by their creator. Benjamin Franklin placed conductive rods atop structures to study lightning as well as make storms less dangerous. Many priests responded in criticism stating that Franklin was directly opposing the will of God, which was for God to smite those chosen for punishment with bolts of electricity.

Many mix up description from prescription in the findings of science. Description tells how things are thought to be. Prescription says how it should be.

For example, "Humans are made of selfish genes. That is, they only care about passing themselves along from generation to generation." This is a description of genes. A prescription would be something like, "Since we are made of selfish genes, it is okay to be selfish and we can justify those endeavors because the very fabric of our bodies do the same."

Discrimination in and of itself is not a bad thing. When is it good and when does it become socially accepted as an evil? If you are a parent looking for a baby sitter for your young girl, you are probably going to steer away from male prospects out of fear that he may sexually abuse your child. This is discrimination on the basis of sex.

Referring to the less intelligent subset of people in my generic example above, if one of them were to interview at a job, how should the employer handle the information that this prospect lies within this group? What if this subset was a specific race or nationality? The employer cannot reject the person due to their race, however, should they be able to take this information into account and reject the individual person on account of the intelligence factor? As long as the rejection was on account of the intelligence factor (no matter what race), then I believe the author (and myself) would agree.

3/8...
This covered part of chapter 9 and went through chapter 11.

He further discussed the implications of biology and how science can seem to undermine human value and meaning. For example, if the brain and all of our thought processes is only made up of evolved matter, then life is meaningless. Another example is in more recent forms of scientific discovery that is questioning whether we actually have any free will at all, or whether our thoughts and actions are based on our biology. The concern people have is that if we take away the notion of free will then people no longer believe we can hold people accountable for their actions, because their biology 'made them do it'. 'My genes ate my homework'.

3/12...
This covered chapters 12 and 13. He discussed the geneis of the term stereotyping. It was first used in reference to a type of printing on a press, however, it has changed into a pejorative, stemming from the 1920's. We use stereotypes as a type of short hand for trying to quickly understanding something. There are many stereotypes that are fairly accurate and do their job while there are others that are more misleading. People can't all be boxed into simple groupings of behavior and character. Each individual is different, however, it is easier to remember things by grouping a set of similar things together.

While most of these chapters were on stereotyping, he also discussed his distaste with many ideas coming from relativists. A major point with which he agrees is that our eyes (and experience) are not a direct window into reality. Our perceptions don't automatically match up with reality. Pinker, however, does believe that we can grow closer to knowing reality, while the relativists don't believe that reality is actually out there, but it is only a construct within the framework of a society.

For the most part, our eyes do seem to tell us the truth, because people normally don't go walking into trees and other objects they perceive in front of them. The idea that the eyes are a window into reality was debunked thousands of years ago when masters of illusion came up with ways to trick the senses, namely the eyes.