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#14759673
One Degree wrote:@Wellsy

I believe I grasp what you are saying. Would it be fair to say this was what Scott Peck was alluding to in his books? I found his concept of 'lies' a useful tool in understanding our personal fantasy world and seeing how it related to other fantasy worlds. I find his vocabulary useful for trying to understand myself and the rest of the world. I know I am detracting from the main topic again, but I find it difficult to pass up an opportunity for your views on this. Simply ignore my post, if you wish to get back on topic. ;)

I can't say I'm acquainted with Scott Peck's books, so difficult for me to comment.
Though based on the brief look at some things that look to summarize his points in some of his books, I imagine that his idea of evil people lying might be similar to things like:
Defence mechanisms

I have a feeling this could all be nonsense and irrelevant.
The thought that comes to mind is just that we seek security, stability, closure in our thinking and are averse to anxiety, discomfort and despair. And the things we're averse to come from becoming aware of how unstable many of the things we believe are. It's my impression that all that I believe couldn't stand the most aggressive skepticism. It's simply rational and practical to accept that there is faith in certain assumptions that I can't logically justify, but allow me to keep doing things without simply being paralyzed by doubt.
There are those that avoid this discomfort by simply blocking out any awareness of the instability, and then there are those that ask a lot of questions like philosophers that seem a bit more comfortable being entirely unsure about everything. Shaking the foundations of their base assumptions and being able to accept the instability to some degree. That even after becoming aware of the shakey nature of one's assumptions, one then again simply ignores them, because it's necessary to act on the assumption to act at all, rather than be paralyzed by the doubt that leaves on with no assumption.
That one might have an assumption, leap of faith on the existence of a metaphysical God to seek closure in other beliefs like there being a normative/objective morality or that there is a soul (ultimate self) from which to base a sense of free will on. To disrupt the assumption is to bring discord into a whole array of beliefs, just as one might be in a state of crisis when their self concept of being a good person is disrupted by evidence or reasons that challenge it.
#14761958
Found a past thread post that I think raises the exact sort of questions that I think arise based on questioning the extent to which mental processes map to the neural.
Which brings into question the the theoretical foundation for experiential psychology which accepts some sort of distinction between the material/brain and the abstract/subjectivity but asserts that there is some degree of correspondence.

And this is what the article on Wittegenstein touches on as being unclear
In contrast, Wittgenstein argued we need not presume there are neural processes correlated with associating or with thinking; such that it is possible to read off thought processes from brain processes. Even if assuming a system of impulses going out from the brain is correlated with thoughts, this does not provide reason to think these thoughts would proceed systematically. It is plausible that certain psychological phenomena cannot be investigated physiologically, as physiologically nothing corresponds to them: as Wittgenstein states this assumption begs the question; “why should there not be a psychological regularity to which no physiological regularity corresponds?”[2]


That what isn't established with confidence what sort of correspondence between the mind and the body there is. Because it would seem dubious to what specificity parts of the brain service a specific psychological function. To see the fruits of our investigation for such things, one could look into evolutionary psychology and question to what extent their findings and theoretical assumptions stack.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evolutionary-psychology/
In brief, evolutionary psychologists maintain that there is an analogy between organs and psychological mechanisms or modules. Organs perform specific functions well and are products of natural selection. There are no general purpose organs, hearts pump blood and livers detoxify the body. The same goes for psychological mechanisms; they arise as responses to specific contingencies in the environment and are selected for to the extent that they contribute to the survival and reproduction of the organism. Just as there are no general purpose organs, there are no general purpose psychological mechanisms.
...
There are numerous examples of the kinds of mechanisms that are hypothesized to underlie our behavior on the basis of research guided by these theoretical tenets: the cheat detection module; the waist/hip ratio detection module; the snake fear module and so on. A closer look at the waist/hip ratio detection module illustrates the above theoretical tenets at work. Devendra Singh (Singh 1993; Singh and Luis 1995) presents the waist/hip ratio detection module as one of the suite of modules that underlies mate selection in humans. This one is a specifically male psychological mechanism. Men detect variations in waist/hip ratio in women. Men's preferences are for women with waist/hip ratios closer to .7. Singh claims that the detection and preference suite are adaptations for choosing fertile mates. So our mate selection behavior is explained in part by the underlying psychological mechanism for waist/hip ratio preference that was selected for in earlier human environments.

What is important to note about the research guided by these theoretical tenets above is that all behavior is best explained in terms of underlying psychological mechanisms that are adaptations for solving a particular set of problems that humans faced at one time in our ancestry. Also, evolutionary psychologists stress that the mechanisms they focus on are universally distributed in humans and are not susceptible to much, if any, variation. They maintain that the mechanisms are a product of adaptation but are no longer under selection (Tooby and Cosmides 2005, 39–40).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modularity_of_mind
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/modularity-mind/#FodMod
Domain specificity. A system is domain specific to the extent that it has a restricted subject matter, that is, the class of objects and properties that it processes information about is circumscribed in a relatively narrow way. As Fodor (1983) puts it, “domain specificity has to do with the range of questions for which a device provides answers (the range of inputs for which it computes analyses)” (p. 103): the narrower the range of inputs a system can compute, the narrower the range of problems the system can solve—and the narrower the range of such problems, the more domain specific the device. Alternatively, the degree of a system's domain specificity can be understood as a function of the range of inputs that turn the system on, where the size of that range determines the informational reach of the system (Carruthers, 2006; Samuels, 2006).


But this sort of thing is contentious (from Evo. Psych. Link)
(2) Such systems, when complex, need to have massively modular organization.
...
he second type of argument is one side of a perennial debate in the philosophy of cognitive science. Fodor (2000, 68) takes this argument to rest on the unwarranted assumption that there is no domain-independent criterion of cognitive success, which he thinks requires an argument that evolutionary psychologists do not provide. Samuels (see esp. Samuels 1998) responds to evolutionary psychologists that arguments of this type do not sufficiently discriminate between a conclusion about domain specific processing mechanisms and domain specific knowledge or information.Samuels articulates what he calls the “library model of cognition” in which there is domain specific information or knowledge but domain general processing. The library model of cognition is not massively modular in the relevant sense but type two arguments support it. According to Samuels, evolutionary psychologists need something more than this type of argument to warrant their specific kind of conclusion about massive modularity. Buller (2005) introduces further worries for this type of argument by tackling the assumption that there can be no such thing as a domain general problem solving mechanism. Buller worries that in their attempt to support this claim, evolutionary psychologists fail to adequately characterize a domain general problem solver. For example, they fail to distinguish between a domain general problem solver and a domain specific problem solver that is over generalized. He offers the example of social learning as a domain general mechanism that would produce domain specific solutions to problems. He uses a nice biological analogy to drive this point home: the immune system is a domain general system in that it allows the body to respond to a wide variety of pathogens. While it is true that the immune system produces domain specific responses to pathogens in the form of specific antibodies, the antibodies are produced by one domain general system. These and many other respondents conclude that type two arguments do not adequately support the massive modularity thesis.


So this question of in what way does the material structures correspond to the abstract/psychological mechanisms that we experience and express seems crucial to investigating the human subject validly. If we are to have the wrong assumptions on this issue, certain experiments may be to compromised to be of any empirical use.


Another thing that's caught my attention skimming through the older threads on here, is the idea of our subjectivity being structured like language which seems to go back to Freud.
And from these thoughts on how the mind works and it being much like language, I think it probably fits well with Wittgenstein's work and those that use it to reject what I think is treating the human mind as if it were a computer. In the sense that our subjectivity/consciousness isn't like the protocols in a machine which are input into it from an external source. But we are beings that are able to create our own meaning without some other being coding it into us. That if there is a fruitful avenue to theorize about the human mind, understanding language seems to be a good step.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8582/2155eaab49a23b71c2f5746c97ed4f9ce5d3.pdf
A great deal needs to be said about these misconceptions, but I shall restrict my remarks to four brief but very general points that, if correct, undermine these various computational theories.

First, it makes no sense to speak of symbolic or semantic representations in the brain. For such representations are determined by conventions. They are representations only in so far as they have a rule-governed use, and hence only in so far as there is a correct and incorrect way of using them. For an object, a sign, to be a semantic representation of anything, it must have a meaning. It is not a sign of, but a sign for, what it represents. And that it is a sign for what it represents is exhibited in explanations of its meaning given in a symbol-employing community, in corrections of mistakes by users, and in explanations by users of what they mean by it. But brains are not members of a community, and it makes no sense to suppose that brains can be said to employ symbols. Moreover, those who use a symbol mean something by it when they use it, but it makes no sense to ascribe meaning something to the brain or its parts.

Secondly, the supposition that a system of rules might be ‘part of the fixed structure of the mind/brain ... beyond the level of possible introspection’ is nonsensical. It makes no sense to speak of an unformulated rule being part of the fixed structure of the mind or of the brain. Human beings may engage in rule-governed activity without formulating the rule in so many words – they would teach the activity by example and exemplification. But brains and minds do not do so. And it is unintelligible to suppose that a rule-formulation is ‘part of the fixed structure of the mind/brain’, unless there is writing or speech to be found in this strange organ.

Thirdly, it makes no sense to speak of the brain’s following rules, just as it makes no sense to speak of a computer following rules (as opposed to producing results that accord with rules). To follow a rule is the exercise of a two-way ability to act or not to act. But neither brains nor computers have two-way abilities. But to be caused to behave in a manner that coincides with what a rulefollower would do, to be caused to generate the same output as would result from following a rule, is not to follow a rule at all. Indeed, it is to make any rule altogether redundant for the operations of the entity (brain or computer) – since mechanical necessitation has replaced normative behaviour. A medieval monk who struck a bell every hour as determined by an hour glass, was following a rule; a church clock is not. An abacus or slide rule does not follow any rules. Neither does a computer. Nor does a brain. And when they malfunction, they do not transgress rules.

Fourthly, it makes no sense to suppose that the brain engages in computations (any more, strictly speaking, than a computer engages in computations and calculations). For to engage in calculations and computations is precisely to follow a set of rules, which presupposes not only a twoway ability, but also an understanding of the symbolism and of the computational rules associated with it. But the brain is not a possible subject of understanding (any more than is a computer). It cannot be said to understand any symbols or to know what they mean, let alone to use symbols and mean something by their use, for brains can neither mean nor fail to mean anything.

If these four points are correct, as I believe them to be, then computational theories in psychology, cognitive neuroscience and theoretical linguistics need extensive revision.
#14761990
I think the motivation to map consciousness to physical brain structures is sometimes more of an urge, ie something more than the scientific. I've described this here by reference to Transhumanists, where this urge can be almost religious in nature. Of course, this inflated vision doesn't apply to most scientists, but we are human and occasionally like to dream.

Like in the discussions on the soul and death, I suppose it would be possible to map a simplified version of our internal self to machine-logic or whatever afterlife people envision, but most people would not recognise this as anything approaching a satisfactory translation. I suppose there will be some folks (we have one amongst us right now) who think that 'trimming the fat' from the map of consciousness is a good thing, essential even, but there we have moved to modification instead of reproduction.

As I've recently mused on my attraction to using threes, I'll conclude with this section. A line of thinking that suggests that the 'computer' model of consciousness is inadequate is described by Stuart Hammerof (this is one of his more accessible videos) where he opines that the neuron is not just the simple on/off switch needed for the computer model, but has internal processes that may be important too, to support this he talks of single-celled organisms functioning fine without a brain. He then goes on to talk of microtubules within the neuron and quantum events which is where this approach becomes a little woolly for the purposes of this discussion.
This burgeoning complexity would suggest that it is more useful to consider higher symbolic structures, and the musings on language above seem to represent this... a focus on the software as opposed to the hardware.
#14956613
In regards to introspection as a method of psychology (Wundt) and my earlier concerns that one can fall into ad hoc rationalizations, I've come to Vygotsky in emphasizing that introspection itself isn't the right method for psychology but rather one is to infer the subjective indirectly through the objective.

I've seen this point of rationalization resonate with a paragraph I read by Vygotsky in regards to a psychology of art.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/1925/art1.htm
Far more important is the difference between subjective and objective psychology of art. The difference of the introspective method as applied to the study of aesthetic feelings becomes obvious from the individual properties of these feelings. By its very nature, an aesthetic feeling is incomprehensible and fundamentally obscure in its evolution to the person experiencing it. We do not really know or understand why we like or dislike an object. Anything we devise to explain its behavior is but an afterthought, an obvious rationalization of unconscious processes. The very substance of the experience, however, remains mysterious. The purpose of art is to disguise art, according to a French maxim. Psychology attempted to solve these problems experimentally, but all methods of experimental aesthetics, as applied by Fechner (the methods of selection, determination, and application) or approved by Külpe (method of selection, gradual change, and time variation), are essentially not able to be anything but the simplest and most elementary aesthetic evaluations or appraisals.

In summarizing the results of this methodology, Frebes reaches very lamentable results. Haman and Croce criticized it severely, and the latter bluntly called it aesthetic astrology.


Rather, the method of introspection as seen with Descartes only makes clear the ontology that the mind isn't reality/matter (defined simply as that which exists outside of an individual's consciousness/not strictly dependent on it).
To summrize the issue with introspection, I share this passage where introspection is only justified should the appearence of things coincide with how they really are, but there is just reasons to doubt that this is the case though the two aren't wholly independent of one another.
Spoiler: show
So far as I know, the only current of philosophy which has a clear position on the mind-matter dichotomy and a commitment to dialectics, is the current of Marxism which runs from Plekhanov to Lenin to Vygotsky and his followers up to Ilyenkov. Vygotsky says:

“The question is whether in introspection phenomenon and being coincide” and quoting Lenin: “the only ‘property’ of matter connected with philosophical materialism is the property of being an objective reality, of existing outside of our consciousness ... the concept of matter means nothing other than objective reality, existing independently from human consciousness and reflected by it.”

This quotation is a real gem, so let us take a little time to unpack it.

Firstly, what is meant by “phenomenon” and “being” when we are talking about introspection? “Phenomenon” means appearance, how things appear to be, whilst “being” is what is. So the question is: does the impression one has of one’s own consciousness correspond to what one’s consciousness actually is. Phenomenology – the study of appearances – answers in the affirmative and makes its subject matter what is given in introspection. [Just a warning here: although this was the definition in Vygotsky’s time, the meaning of “phenomenology” has been somewhat mobile since.] On the face of it, the claim that one has direct, unmediated and reliable access to one’s own consciousness seems to be undeniable, indeed, the very definition of consciousness!

But the answer is not so simple. What is given in introspection is clear enough as a concept, but what it corresponds to is far from clear. A drunk may tell you they are clearheaded and fit to drive, a mentally ill person may tell you that they are the King of England, I might tell you I am typing the word “form” whereas in fact I am typing “from” And yet all these obviously mistaken reports of the introspective appearance of my consciousness, are contradicted by what anyone listening to me knows about my consciousness. How is this possible? Well, in our behaviour we betray our consciousness to everyone, but our introspection is only of the act of introspecting and by the act of introspecting I destroy the state of mind which is supposed to under observation. Appearances may be deceptive.

Lenin refers to “philosophical materialism.” He refers to the fact that philosophical materialism simply makes the distinction between, on the one hand, matter – everything that exists outside of our consciousness, and in whatever shape, is given to us in our consciousness, and on the other hand, our consciousness. Beyond the claim that matter exists independently of consciousness philosophical materialism cannot take a step further; matter is defined by being outside of our consciousness. And it is through our consciousness that we get to know about the world. Any attempt to blur the distinction between consciousness and matter, under this definition, is madness. At best it is missing the point. If I can’t distinguish between my thought and what I am thinking of, then either I am an infant or simply don’t understand the question. The question of the distinction between thought and matter is the fundamental question of philosophy. As Descartes saw, consciousness is what we are given. The question then is, what is there beyond that, behind our consciousness. If we blur that distinction, and obfuscate the question then we surely must have misunderstood the question.

In The German Ideology, Marx wrote “My relation to my environment is my consciousness,” but then crossed it out. But this is a very succinct way of putting it. Marx puts it in the first person; he does not say “a person’s relation to their environment is their consciousness,” because he must treat anyone else’s consciousness scientifically, in the knowledge that another person’s consciousness must be inferred from their behaviour and whatever we know about their physiological condition. But his own consciousness occupies a special position because everything he knows passes through his consciousness, including his scientific investigations. The point is that the special ontological status occupied by consciousness only applies in the first person. Descartes’ mistake was to extend a perfectly valid question he asked of himself, to consciousness in general.

THIS IS what transformed “consciousness” into a problematic substance. Your consciousness is part of the material world, and is reducible to the totality of the state of your organism and its environment, all of which is accessible to scientific investigation.

BUT my consciousness, I cannot investigate scientifically. As Feuerbach put it quite correctly: “what for me is a mental, non-material, suprasensory act, is in itself a material, sensory act.” The other point about Marx’s aphorism is that he defines it as “My relation to my environment” without any qualification. It is all-inclusive. Marx does not limit consciousness to “awareness” nor does he exclude emotions, or make any other such qualification. It is the totality of my relation to my environment. The problem of the further specification of consciousness cannot be settled in advance by philosophy but requires positive, experimental investigation. So philosophy can only give this very starting point: “My relation to my environment is my consciousness.”

Putting this together with the problem of the difference between phenomenon and being in psychology, what this means is that introspection may contribute something to an elaboration of consciousness, but consciousness is not given to introspection. Introspection is a phenomenon in its own right. I cannot step outside of myself and make my own consciousness an object of my consciousness.

The above summarizes that one's own consciousness is their relation to the world which isn't generalizable to everyone elses consciousness (Mistake of Descartes) which must be inferred and deduced.
Introspection only clarifies that consciousness isn't reality itself (mind isn't matter), but that in regards to epistemology requires a science in which we figure out things that aren't given directly in appearance but must be rationally constructed.
Like a historian who must construct the object of his study...
On the basis of these arguments we can now suggest a new method of art psychology, which in Müller-Freienfels’ classification is termed the “objective-analytic method.” Accordingly, the work of art, rather than its creator or its audience, should be taken as the basis for analysis. While it is true that a work of art as such is not an object of psychology (having no psyche of its own), we must remember that a historian, studying for instance the French revolution from materials that do not contain any of the objects of his study, finds himself faced with the necessity of actually creating the object of his study by means of indirect, that is, analytic methods. Indeed, this happens in a number of other disciplines and sciences. They search for the truth in a way similar to that of a court investigating a crime from leads, circumstantial or other evidence. Only a bad judge would pass a sentence on the basis of statements from either the defendant or the plaintiff, both of whom are prejudiced and bound to distort the truth. The psychologist operates in a similar fashion when he studies the statements of a reader or a viewer of a work of art. This does not mean, however, that a judge should not hear the interested parties – provided he takes their statements with a grain of salt. And the psychologist never refuses to use any material, even though he knows from the outset that it may not be correct. The judge establishes the truth by comparing various false statements, checking them against objective evidence, and so forth. The historian uses notoriously false or biased material most of the time; and like the historian or the geologist who first creates the object of his studies and only then subjects it to scrutiny, the psychologist is forced to resort to material evidence – the works of art – and create a corresponding psychology in order to be able to study the laws governing it.


So we must use objective means to construct a reasonable sense of the subjective to which the observable is an important part, but not the entirety of psychological science (behaviourism is lacking inquiry into the subjective).
Spinoza is asserted to have the position that one isn't to try and look into the brain to find answers but must observe the activity of people.
It is in the activity of the human body in the shape of another external body that Spinoza saw the key to the solution of the whole problem. “Within the skull you will not find anything to which a functional definition of thought could be applied, because thinking is a function of external, objective activity. And you must therefore investigate not the anatomy and physiology of the brain but … the ‘anatomy and physiology’ of the world of his culture, the world of the ‘things’ that he produces and reproduces by his activity.”

Thinking is found in human activity rather than in contemplation, consciousness is a product of man's assimilation and adaption to the world and culture.
To which the starting point of any problem of psychology is to find that which is both objective and subjective, ie the basic unit of analysis.
An empirical phenomenon which is the simplest unit of a complex whole.
#14957090
Conceptual Confusion in Knowledge
Bulaba Jones wrote:Indeed, as well as the fact that the human brain did not evolve to understand itself. We still don't really understand consciousness. We don't know exactly what dreams are, why they happen, and what they mean, if anything (although we have plenty of competing ideas, some more convincing than others). We don't even understand what hypnosis is.
You're most likely familiar with some of my ideas, concerning the noosphere and consciousness...

In The Naming of Names : the Search for Order in the World of Plants, Anna Pavord explores scientific nomenclature and taxonomy. Here's an excerpt:

Theophrastus knew nothing about the mechanics of pollination and yet, in writing about date palms, noted that 'it is helpful to bring the male to the female; for it is the male which causes the fruit to persist and ripen, and this process some call, by analogy "the use of wild fruit". The process is thus performed: when the male palm is in flower, they at once cut off the spathe on which the flower is, just as it is, and shake the bloom with the flower and dust over the fruit of the female, and, if this is done to it, it retains the fruit and does not shed it.' This is where the biggest chasm looms between our mind-set and his. How could he so accurately describe the process of pollination without going on to ask himself why this particular trick worked? He understood the concept of a male and female plant. He understood that a good fruit set depended on the female flowers being visited by the males, but he never puzzled out the concept of pollination. Seeds and fruits came, but the how of it was a mystery.

She goes on to state that Theophrastus described only what he could see with his own eyes. Spectacles had not yet been invented. Nor had the magnifying glass or the microscope. He could see the veins in a leaf, but not the stomata, the tiny pores that control the passage of oxygen and carbon dioxide in and out of the plant. But of course he did not know anything about oxygen or carbon dioxide or the way leaves breathe.

So you see, technological instruments (this can include conceptual patterns of organization, like a flow chart for example) extend our senses and reorganize our knowledge of the world. Look at morphological classification, cladistics, bioinformatics, etc; all of it aims to organize or structure conceptual patterns. Each technique is valid, and I wouldn't call any particular technique "confused." But one might suggest that an earlier form of classification is confused or incomplete.

Conceptual confusion in any field is a side-effect of our limited awareness. Like Theophrastus, we can describe things- psychological processes, dreams, and consciousness, but how any of it works remains a mystery. So conceptual confusion isn't necessarily confusion, it's likely a matter of speculative obfuscation. The information or mechanism is hidden from view and therefore it affects our observation.


With that in mind, I'm fascinated by physicists trying to eliminate the observer from an objective physical system. How can we take away the observer, when what the observer observes is an abstract process defined by being present. Any objective model of causality that wishes to integrate or perhaps eliminate subjectivity is, to me, the definition of conceptual confusion.

We should accept the notion that humanity shares one mind, and its subjective observations constitute an objective happening that only appear to be in motion because we're aware of being present. A single mind will always be somewhat confused because thinking is an act of abstraction filtered by past & present experience.

In more concrete fields, even something like developmental psychology consists of competing ideas.
In reality, all fields interconnect and lead to consciousness.

Psychology is a science, but it is (in my opinion) the most fascinating one because it is, arguably, the most speculative one. The amount we don't know is truly staggering.
Knowledge is organized ignorance.
#15038408
Something I've been thinking about is a pseudo-problem posed by confusion in the cartesian ontological distinction between mind and matter, where it presupposes their independence and thus asks who they interact with one another.
https://ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/story-concept.htm
As is well known, this starting point, true and valuable in itself, led Descartes and those who followed him into intractable problems, summed up in the condemnation of Cartesian Dualism. Not only did mind/body dualism pose the problem of finding where and how the two domains of reality interacted with one another, the dualism flowed through to all the forms of thought and matter: how was each form of thought (i.e., concept) connected to the corresponding form of being (i.e., material object) it reflected? Posed this way the problem leads to nothing but nonsense.
...
So Descartes was correct in marking the distinction between his consciousness and matter, but mistaken in making this ontological distinction the starting point for a study of epistemology. The distinction which properly marks the beginning of the study of the sources and validity of knowledge is the subject/object relation. In this case it is false to treat subject and object in a dualistic or dichotomous way, there are halfway in-betweens, the boundaries are blurred. Subject and object are a mutually constituting unity of opposites. But the subject/object relation is one which can be found not only in relation to a person and the world they know, but it can be found even in the actions of a computer, an institution, or a natural process. The problem of knowledge is the problem of the subject/object relation, not an ontological problem.

There is an illusion in thinking that conscious thought causes actions because the quality of thought is not explained in relation to the body and posed against it.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/determinism.htm
The nervous system is an elaborate system of stimulus-response reactions, a system which to a certain degree is ‘self-constructed’ under conditions not of the subject’s choosing. The human organism taken as a whole cannot be described as a stimulus-response object because through personal development people have constructed an elaborate system of stimulus-response apparatuses which mediates between the stimulus acting on the person and the person’s response. This elaborate system is the material basis of consciousness and identity. Thus, when a person responds either with conscious awareness or with an immediate, conditioned response, the laws of biology are not violated. Does this mean that consciousness (i.e., thought) causes the subject’s actions insofar as the action is executed with conscious awareness? All the natural scientific evidence points to the fact that thoughts cannot be causes of material effects.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/1930/mind.htm
Let us now from this viewpoint examine the way out of the blind alley that takes shape if we accept these claims. As is well known, to this day two basic problems have been left unsolved by the older psychology: the problem of the biological meaning of the mind and the clarification of the conditions under which brain activity begins to be accompanied by psychological phenomena. Such antipodes as the objectivist Bekhterev and the subjectivist Bühler equally acknowledge that we know nothing of the biological function of mind, but that we cannot assume that nature creates superfluous adaptations and that since mind evolved in the process of evolution it must fulfill some, still for us totally unintelligible, function.

We think that these problems were insoluble because they were stated falsely. It is absurd to first isolate a certain quality from the integral process and then raise the question of the function of this quality as if it existed in itself, fully independently of that integral process of which it forms a quality. It is absurd, for example, to separate the heat from the sun, to ascribe it independent meaning and to ask what meaning this heat may have and what action it can perform.

But until now psychology proceeded in exactly this way. It revealed the mental side of phenomena and then attempted to demonstrate that the mental side of phenomena is entirely unnecessary, that in itself it cannot cause any changes in the activity of the brain. Already in the very statement of this question resides the false presupposition that mental phenomena may act upon brain phenomena. It is absurd to ask whether a given quality can act upon the object of which it forms a quality.

The very presupposition that there can be an interrelation between mental and brain processes presupposes in advance a conception of the mind as a special mechanistic force which according to some can act upon brain processes and according to others may only proceed in parallel with them. Both the theory of parallelism and interaction theory make this false presupposition. Only a monistic view of mind allows us to state the question of the biological meaning of the mind in a completely different way.

We repeat once more: we cannot isolate mind from the processes of which it forms an inalienable part and then ask what is its use, what role does it fulfill in the general process of life. In reality the mental process exists within a complex whole, within the unitary process of behavior, and when we wish to understand the biological function of the mind we must ask about this process as a whole: what function do these forms of behavior fulfill in adaptation? In other words, we must not ask about the biological meaning of mental processes but about the biological meaning of psychological processes, and then the insoluble problem of the mind which on the one hand cannot be an epiphenomenon, a superfluous appendage, and on the other hand cannot move any brain atom for one bit – appears soluble.

As Koffka says, the mental processes point forward and beyond themselves to the complex psychophysiological wholes of which they form a part. This monistic integral viewpoint is to consider the integral phenomenon as a whole and its parts as the organic parts of this whole. Thus, the detection of the significant connection between the parts and the whole, the ability to view the mental process as an organic connection of a more complex integral process – this is dialectical psychology’s basic task.

In this sense, the fundamental debate about the question as to whether mental processes may act upon bodily ones had already been decided by Plekhanov. In all cases where there is talk of the influence of mental processes, such as fright, strong grief, painful experiences, etc. on bodily processes, the facts are mostly related correctly, but their interpretation is incorrect. Of course, in all these cases, it is not the experience itself, the mental act itself (the ardent desire for food as Pavlov said) which acts upon the nerves, but the physiological process that corresponds to this experience and that forms a single whole with it, that leads to the result of which we speak.
...
Thus, what is false in the old viewpoint is the idea of a mechanistic action of the mind upon the brain. The older psychologists conceive of it as a second force that exists alongside the brain processes. This brings us to the central point of our whole problem.


The point being that there is an incorrect abstraction in their presupposed independence of bodyless thought and a thoughtless body when real existing man thinks and his thinking isn't merely the activity of his mind but of his entire body.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/essays/essay2.htm
There are not two different and originally contrary objects of investigation body and thought, but only one single object, which is the thinking body of living, real man (or other analogous being, if such exists anywhere in the Universe), only considered from two different and even opposing aspects or points of view. Living, real thinking man, the sole thinking body with which we are acquainted, does not consist of two Cartesian halves ‘thought lacking a body’ and a ‘body lacking thought’. In relation to real man both the one and the other are equally fallacious abstractions, and one cannot in the end model a real thinking man from two equally fallacious abstractions.

That is what constitutes the real ‘keystone’ of the whole system, a very simple truth that is easy, on the whole, to understand.

It is not a special ‘soul’, installed by God in the human body as in a temporary residence, that thinks, but the body of man itself. Thought is a property, a mode of existence, of the body, the same as its extension, i.e. as its spatial configuration and position among other bodies.

This simple and profoundly true idea was expressed this way by Spinoza in the language of his time: thought and extension are not two special substances as Descartes taught, but only two attributes of one and the same organ; not two special objects, capable of existing separately and quite independently of each other, but only two different and even opposite aspects under which one and the same thing appears, two different modes of existence, two forms of the manifestation of some third thing.

What is this third thing? Real infinite Nature, Spinoza answered. It is Nature that extends in space and ‘thinks’. The whole difficulty of the Cartesian metaphysics arose because the specific difference of the real world from the world as only imagined or thought of was considered to be extension, a spatial, geometric determinateness. But extension as such just existed in imagination, only in thought. For as such it can generally only be thought of in the form of emptiness, i.e. purely negatively, as the complete absence of any definite geometric shape. Ascribing only spatial, geometric properties to Nature is, as Spinoza said, to think of it in an imperfect way, i.e. to deny it in advance one of its perfections. And then it is asked how the perfection removed from Nature can be restored to her again.

The same argumentation applies to thought. Thought as such is the same kind of fallacious abstraction as emptiness. In fact it is only a property, a predicate, an attribute of that very body which has spatial attributes. In other words one can say very little about thought as such; it is not a reality existing separately from, and independently of, bodies but only a mode of existence of Nature’s bodies. Thought and space do not really exist by themselves, but only as Nature’s bodies linked by chains of interaction into a measureless and limitless whole embracing both the one and the other.

This is a point in which the distinction between humans and automatons is found in the quality of the universality of our action rather than the efforts to explain all sorts of specific actions by brain specific modules mentioned earlier.
The cardinal distinction between the mode of action of a thinking body and that of any other body, quite clearly noted by Descartes and the Cartesians, but not understood by them, is that the former actively builds (constructs) the shape (trajectory) of its own movement in space in conformity with the shape (configuration and position) of the other body, coordinating the shape of its own movement (its own activity) with the shape of the other body, whatever it is. The proper, specific form of the activity of a thinking body consists consequently in universality, in that very property that Descartes actually noted as the chief distinction between human activity and the activity of an automaton copying its appearance, i.e. of a device structurally adapted to some one limited range of action even better than a human, but for that very reason unable to do ‘everything else’.

Thus the human hand can perform movements in the form of a circle, or a square, or any other intricate geometrical figure you fancy, so revealing that it was not designed structurally and anatomically in advance for any one of these ‘actions’, and for that very reason is capable of performing any action. In this it differs, say, from a pair of compasses, which describe circles much more accurately than the hand but cannot draw the outlines of triangles or squares. In other words, the action of a body that ‘does not think’ (if only in the form of spatial movement, in the form of the simplest and most obvious case) is determined by its own inner construction by its ‘nature’, and is quite uncoordinated with the shape of the other bodies among which it moves. It therefore either disturbs the shapes of the other bodies or is itself broken in colliding with insuperable obstacles.

Man, however, the thinking body, builds his movement on the shape of any other body. He does not wait until the insurmountable resistance of other bodies forces him to turn off from his path; the thinking body goes freely round any obstacle of the most complicated form. The capacity of a thinking body to mould its own action actively to the shape of any other body, to coordinate the shape of its movement in space with the shape and distribution of all other bodies, Spinoza considered to be its distinguishing sign and the specific feature of that activity that we call ‘thinking’ or ‘reason’.

This capacity, as such, has its own gradations and levels of ‘perfection’, and manifests itself to the maximum in man, in any case much more so than in any other creature known to us. But man is not divided from the lower creatures at all by that impassable boundary that Descartes drew between them by his concept of ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’. The actions of animals, especially of the higher animals, are also subsumed, though to a limited degree, under Spinoza’s definition of thinking.

This is a very important point, which presents very real interest. For Descartes the animal was only an automaton, i.e. all its actions were determined in advance by ready-made structures, internally inherent to it, and by the distribution of the organs located within its body. These actions, therefore, could and had to be completely explained by the following scheme: external effect – movement of the inner parts of the body – external reaction. The last represents the response (action, movement) of the body evoked by the external effect, which in essence is only transformed by the working of the inner parts of the body, following the scheme rigidly programmed in its construction. There is a full analogy with the working of a self-activating mechanism (pressure on a button working of the parts inside the mechanism movement of its external parts). This explanation excluded the need for any kind of ‘incorporeal soul’; everything was beautifully explained without its intervention. Such in general, and on the whole, is the theoretical scheme of a reflex that was developed two hundred years later in natural science in the work of Sechenov and Pavlov.
...
Man’s ‘response’ mechanisms are by no means switched on just as soon as ‘the appropriate button is pressed’, as soon as he experiences an effect from outside. Before he responds he contemplates, i.e. he does not act immediately according to any one prepared scheme, like an automaton or an animal, but considers the scheme of the forthcoming action critically, elucidating each time how far it corresponds to the needs of the new conditions, and actively correcting, even designing all over again, the whole set-up and scheme of the future actions in accordance with the external circumstances and the forms of things.

And since the forms of things and the circumstances of actions are in principle infinite in number, the ‘soul’ (i.e. ‘contemplation’) must be capable of an infinite number of actions. But that is impossible to provide for in advance in the form of ready-made, bodily programmed schemes. Thinking is the capacity of actively building and reconstructing schemes of external action in accordance with any new circumstances, and does not operate according to a prepared scheme as an automaton or any inanimate body does.



Many distinctions are abstracted out of the whole of a human's activity and not considered in relation to this whole. The point being that the distinctions should remain but not considered in analytical independence in actuality.
https://www.personalitycafe.com/redirect-to/?redirect=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ethicalpolitics.org%2Fablunden%2Fpdfs%2FCritical%2520Appropriation%2520of%2520Hegel.pdf
The great contribution that Hegel made was that, while not eliminating the subjectiveobjective distinction from his philosophy, he made this distinction secondary and derivative from the more fundamental unity between human beings and the world created by human activity in the world, which was his starting point. This meant that it was possible for Hegel to give us the definition of a concept which did not define concepts as inward subjective thought-forms, nor as objective worldly entities, nor a duality comprised by pairing up something subjective with something objective.

The concept of ‘formations of consciousness’ gave him a primary concept from which objective and subjective aspects could be distinguished. Contrariwise, any approach which begins from entities as either objective or subjective cannot eliminate such a dichotomy because it is built into its foundations. Whether we call it Spirit or Activity is an entirely secondary question, in fact, provided we begin from a foundation which is prior to the rupture between the subject and object of activity.

There are only a limited number of concepts in our culture whose objects are not implicitly either subjective or objective. We may say that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” but 3 “beauty” still designates an attribute of the object

https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/chat/index.htm#action
Actions are the main units of human life, of Activity. An Action is a purposive act or doing. An Action is therefore both objective, external, material, perceptible movement, and subjective, internal, mental – intentions, plans and feelings. That is, actions are a unity of both consciousness and behaviour. (‘Behaviour’ does not include any subjective component.) (See LSVCW v. 3, pp. 35-50.)

Since Actions are purposive, a person is generally consciously aware of their Actions; those Actions which are carried out without conscious awareness (such as stepping over a kerb while walking) are called Operations. But in human beings, Operations always have the potential to be transformed into Actions, whilst conversely, through force of habit, Actions may also be transformed into Operations. (See Leontyev 2009, pp. 369ff.)

An Action is not however objective behaviour + subjective thought; action is a prior unity which is subsequently (i.e., in development) differentiated into subjective thinking and objective behaviour, as, for example, a growing child learning to subject their own behaviour to conscious control. An Action cannot be ‘broken down’ into movements and meanings (what you did and what you meant to do), because without the real unity of the two, it is not an Action. Nonetheless, actions contain an internal Contradiction in that what you mean to do is not always what you do, and vice versa. An Action can only be understood together with the train of thinking which manifested itself in an objective act, not limited to a momentary state of consciousness.


The issue though is that in criticizing this conception of the soul, we also destroy the idea of the metaphysical free will and have to then explain how man can be both determined and free.
Because true to the earlier point that it makes no sense to speak of the the mental causing material affects in the body.
http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Mail/xmcamail.2015-06.dir/pdf9UQ7dqv45X.pdf
Spinoza took issue with the Cartesian conception of will grounded in a separation of the material world from a wilful mind capable of free action in relation to it. He ridiculed the common-sense notion of free will: ‘...so firmly are they persuaded that the body is moved by mere command of the mind, or is kept at rest, and that it performs many things which merely depend on will or ingenuity of the mind’ (Spinoza, 1993). He also denies it: ‘The body cannot determine the mind to think, nor the mind the body to motion, nor to rest, nor to any other state (if there be any other)’ (Spinoza, 1993).

And the idea of the will undetermined by real world motives confuses the matter with a faulty abstraction.
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/10867/1/VWills_ETD_2011.pdf
Marx's second argument against Kantian morality is that its focus on the free will belies the extent to which the will is itself determined by material conditions and material interests. The abstraction of the “free will” is illegitimate according to Marx because it attempts to prize apart the intellectual life of individuals from their economic, social, and historical context. A person with a will that is “wholly independent of foreign causes determining it,” to adopt Kant's phrase, simply does not exist in reality, and therefore such a subject makes a rather poor starting point for moral theory. (Later, in 1853, Marx writes, there critiquing Hegel, “Is it not a delusion to substitute for the individual with his real motives, with multifarious social circumstances pressing upon him, the abstraction of “free-will” — one among the many qualities of man for man himself”74!)


The issue of our free will then gets replaced that like all biological beings we can be reduced to a stimulus-response model of reflexes as based in beharourism. But Lev Vygotsky doesn't accept this as adequate and wishes to push beyond a crude materialism whilst establishing continuity with it, such that lower mental functions develop into higher ones. Otherwise how would we distinguish ourselves from machines, how do we adequately explain the universality of human activity which some do attempt to reduce to properties of machines.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/determinism.htm
Although Vygotsky at times refers to free will as an “illusion,” he does not support the line, common among natural scientists, that consciousness merely supervenes on activity, that is, that consciousness is merely an epiphenomenon of behavior. Such approaches claim to explain human behavior without reference to consciousness, but this is not Vygotsky’s line. In his earliest contributions to psychology he proved that behavior cannot be understood without reference to consciousness, mediating between stimulus and response. Human behavior cannot be explained without recourse the language and concepts of psychology.

http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Mail/xmcamail.2015-06.dir/pdf9UQ7dqv45X.pdf
Vygotsky understood that what he was working on coincided with Spinoza’s understanding of freedom in the Ethics. He criticised Descartes for his explanatory inadequacy in failing to ‘make a clear distinction between passions of the soul and passions of a soulless machine’ (Vygotsky, 1999). He was also acutely aware of the difficulty of theorising will and distinguishing it from the sort of mechanical explanation that would only be reasonable when discussing machines:

In the final analysis, the question is: does what is higher in man, his free and rational will and his control over his passions, allow a natural explanation that does not reduce the higher to the lower, the rational to the automatic, the free to the mechanical, but preserves all the meaning of this higher aspect of our mental life in its fullness, or to explain the higher, do we inevitably have to resort to rejecting the laws of nature, to introducing a theological and spiritualistic principle of absolute freewill not subject to natural necessity? (Vygotsky, 1999)


His task here was to follow Spinoza in an idea of freedom which isn't undermined by being determined but is about how from determinations we can develop a level of self-determination.
It is in this sense that education is a freedom-enhancing process: to put the point simplistically in Spinozist terms, to know the reasons why I act is to be a cause of myself (causa sui) rather than to be the subject of extraneous determinations.
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For Spinoza it is in self-determination that human beings exhibit freedom. A free agent is not one whose actions are undetermined, but one whose actions are self-determined and self-determination arises only when we are not controlled by our passions. A passion here is not the same as an affective impulse; rather it is what Spinoza called an affect produced by external causes rather than by our own power. We are not controlled by passions when we understand the reasons for our actions is based on adequate ideas. To be guided by adequate rather than inadequate knowledge is to be free from external determination.
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Free will only arises when humans are active rather than passive. In turn, actions which are active in Spinoza’s terms (i.e. self-determined) are only possible when such actions coincide with adequate rather than inadequate ideas.
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The more our actions are formed by adequate ideas (i.e. ideas where the genetic connections are understood explicitly) the more we are determinate of our own actions and, as such, active. The more we act according to inadequate ideas (ones whose relations are unexpressed) we are said to be passive and as such our actions are not free.
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Thus for Spinoza free action is not a matter of choice or volition but of the mind’s activity as opposed to passivity. Activity for Spinoza concerned the quality of action rather than the mere fact of acting: the mind is active when its ideas are adequate and passive when its ideas are inadequate. For Spinoza, we are said to act when we are the adequate cause of our actions; that is, when the ideas on which our actions are based are adequate ideas. This is a totally different sense of action from the common one that makes no such profound distinction. So many of the actions that we feel ourselves to be engaged would, according to Spinoza’s line of argument, be understood as vain repetitions.


So to determine ourselves rather than be determined by external things, we must understand (have adequate ideas) the reasons for doing what we do. This is knowledge that understands why it does something, it's not a collection of facts as much as it makes explicit the relationship of things to one another.

This brings us to the beginnings of Vygotsky's work on the will, which he sees as integral to all higher mental functions which grow through qualitative stages in our development by mastering our activity in relation to predicaments in the world.
He tends to emphasize that the difference between man and animal, in man's capacity for a free will is how we can decide our own actions as mediated through artefacts and in doing this we train our bodies (our actions) to a point that they come under our conscious control, we master ourselves in the same way we master material tools as both are tied together as one can't master say, playing guitar independent control of one's own body.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/the-individual.htm
Once, however, the process of internalisation is complete, the artefact, which may begin its life as an objective, material thing outside consciousness, albeit a thing endowed with social significance, has become integrated into the psyche itself, and cannot be said to be something other than the psyche. The same can be said of the activity of consciousness in relation to other people and an artefact; this activity ceases to be something that the psyche does, but rather is the psyche itself. In Leontyev’s words: “Man’s activity is the substance of his consciousness,” or as Johann Fichte put it: “The self is pure activity.” (Fichte 2000)

Lev Vygotsky’s key idea about the construction of consciousness is based on how we learn; learning takes place through the collaboration of the novice with an adult member of the culture using some artefact to allow the novice to complete some operation they need to become a competent member of the society. That artefact may be a sign or any other kind of useful thing provided by society for the achievement of social ends, or a role-model (a symbol, index or icon, in Peirce’s categorisation of signs). The child learns to coordinate their own activity using the artefact, and then gradually internalises that activity so that the use of a objective thing, spoken word, etc., may no longer be necessary, but is taken over by internal functions within their own body.

The essential components of this learning action are the individual child, the artefact and the ‘representative’ of society, who sets tasks for the child and assists them in achieving the tasks using the artefact. As the learning proceeds, the material thing, the artefact, is transformed into a kind of node within the psyche, a ‘psychological tool’. At this point, the learner has acquired the competency of an adult member of the society (skipping over here the long drawn out series of transformations that takes place during the process of internalisation or appropriation) so that the distinction between the material and mental aspects of the element of culture is secondary and relative; the artefact is an ‘ideal’ or ‘universal’. The outcome is not the insertion of the ideal into some kind of mental substance, but rather the restructuring of the nervous system with the individual coordinating their activity by means of the ideal, which remains an element of material culture. When we talk of activity then, we are talking of the coordination of the purposive activity of two or more individuals in some kind of social practice by means of socially constructed signs. This includes the coordination by the individual of their own body so as to act in relation to the entire society and its culture, irrespective of the immediate presence of any other person. In the limiting case of such activity then, the person acts in relation to their own body as a cultural product.


But this is where things get a bit harder to understand without greater insight into Vygotsky's works, he has some great examples that I think point to how we master control over ourselves and this leads to self-determination rather than only external determination of ourselves such that we can't be reduced to biological processes although such processes underpin the higher mental functions but nor is it explained strictly by the activity of the mind. This is where I'm at the moment, in trying to understand.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/determinism.htm
The first element of Vygotsky’s theory of self-control is that “in voluntary action, we must differentiate two apparatus that are relatively independent of each other.”

(1) “a conditioned reflex is constructed” – an internal change in the subject’s nervous system, and then at a later time:

(2) “the actuating apparatus, that is, the functioning of the cerebral connection already formed in this way,” when the subject acts.

If we were to consider how an athlete or artist or mathematician achieves a particular feat, there are two phases: first a protracted process of training their bodies to respond to artificial stimuli in certain complex ways, and secondly the performance of the feat by the activation of the self-constructed bodily apparatus. In this second phase, the various forms of action have been mastered and are executed with conscious control, but without conscious direction of the individual reactions. ('Consciousness’ includes those processes which, while not part of conscious awareness, can move into conscious awareness in response to events.)

A second important distinction Vygotsky makes is that between motives and stimuli.

(1) A stimulus triggers a conditioned reflex which has been trained and is part of (2) an elaborate system of interconnected stimuli and reflexes which constitute the internal form of a motive. Every form of action is directed and organized by some motive, and when conflicting motives arise, these apparatuses can be combined in complex ways to resolve the conflict.

When a subject is faced with a conflict of motives (e.g., needing to get out of bed but still wanting to rest), the subject will voluntarily introduce an artificial stimulus which they use to resolve the conflict (an alarm clock or telling themselves “I will get up on the count of 3, ...”).

These artificial stimuli which the subject uses to train and control their response to stimuli are provided by their social and cultural surroundings. Adults purposely direct the actions of infants in their care and in doing so introduce these stimuli. Later, children appropriate these same stimuli to “command” themselves. By school age, a child is able to exercise what must be recognized as free will and a significant level of control of their own behavior, while remaining culturally and socially dependent on the conditions of their existence, beyond their control.

“Freedom of will is not freedom from motives.” Yes, though the ability to educate one’s own motives is crucial to the attainment of a genuinely free will, something which may or may not be attained to some degree in the course of an adult life.


There a good examples that Vygotsky shares in regards to how our decision is mediated by artefacts which allows us to then perform actions as if they are aren't willed, such that the free will is a pardox of both relatively free decision if based on adequate ideas comprehension of the situation but in excuting the action, it takes on necessity once again.
We create in ourselves an apparatus based on our decision making via an artefact that then can be put in action automatically without us making the choice, such that the free choice occurs prior to the action.
So for example, he gives an example of a child that has equally positive and negative motives acting upon the child causing a paralysis of decision which they can break from the paralysis through the use of a dice.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/1931/self-control.htm
The child ascribed the force of motives to neutral stimuli by introducing an auxiliary motive into the situation and leaving selection to the die. Then the child throws the die, it falls black side up, he selects the first series and the choice is made. How different it is from the selection the child had just made between similar series without the help of the die! We can compare the two processes experimentally and observe something very instructive.

First we will analyze the selection using the die. What shall we call the action chosen by the child – free or not free? On the one hand, it was not at all free, bin strictly determined; the child carried out the action not because he wanted to, not because he preferred it to the alternative, not even because he was simply drawn to it, but exclusively because the die fell black side up. The child carried out the action as a reaction to a stimulus, as a response to instruction; a second earlier he could not have said which of the two actions he would take. Thus, we have the most determined, least free selection. But, on the other hand, in themselves, the black and white sides of the die do not to any degree compel the child to take one action or the other. The child himself ascribed to it the force of a motive in advance and he himself linked one action to the white side and the other to the black side of the die. He did this solely in order to determine his selection through these stimuli. Thus, we have maximum freedom and a completely voluntary act. Dialectical contradiction consisting of freedom of the will appears here in an experimentally separated form accessible to analysis.

He also provides an even better example of someone overcoming indecision through their watch.
As his experiments have shown, human behavior that does not have a specific intention is subject to the power of the situation. Every thing requires some kind of action, elicits, excites, actualizes some kind of reaction. The typical behavior of a person waiting in an empty room with nothing to do is characterized mainly by the fact that he is at the mercy of the environment. Intention is also based on creating an action in response to a direct need of things or, as Lewin says, coming out of the surrounding field. The intention to mail the letter creates a situation in which the first mailbox acquires the capability of determining our behavior, but in addition, with intention, an essential change in the person’s behavior occurs. The person, using the power of things or stimuli, controls his own behavior through them, grouping them, putting them together, sorting them. In other words, the great uniqueness of the will consists of man having no power over his own behavior other than the power that things have over his behavior. But man subjects to himself the power of things over behavior, makes them serve his own purposes and controls that power as he wants. He changes the environment with his external activity and in this way affects his own behavior, subjecting it to his own authority.

That in Lewin’s experiments we are actually speaking of such control of oneself through stimuli is easy to see from his example. The subject is asked to wait for a long time and to no purpose in an empty room. She vacillates – to leave or to continue waiting, a conflict of motives occurs. She looks at her watch; this only reinforces one of the motives, specifically, it is time to go, it is already late. Until now the subject was exclusively at the mercy of the motives, but now she begins to control her own behavior. The watch instantly constituted a stimulus that acquires the significance of an auxiliary motive. The subject decides “When the hands of the watch reach a certain position, I will get up and leave.” Consequently, she closes a conditioned connection between the position of the hands and her leaving; she decides to leave through the hands of the watch and she acts in response to external stimuli, in other words, she introduces an auxiliary motive similar to the dice or the count “one, two, three” for getting up. In this example, it is very easy to see how a change in the functional role of the stimulus, its conversion to an auxiliary motive, occurs.


And as a final random note, a compelling proof of free will is how we can overcome the path of most resistance to realize some intent ie, we endure pain for a greater purpose, or go to great lengths for little reward.
Another substantial psychological change in the process of selection is that here we have an explanation of the basic problem of voluntary action which was left essentially unresolved on the basis of empirical psychology. We have in mind the well-known illusion that always arises with a voluntary act and consists in that the voluntary act is directed as if along a line of greatest resistance. We select what is more difficult and call only such a choice voluntary.

William James recognized this problem as being unsolvable on the basis of a scientific deterministic view of the will and had to admit the intrusion of spiritual force, the voluntary “yes, let it be!” “Yes, let it be” (“fiat” – the word with which God created the world). Selection of the word itself is very indicative. If we conceal the philosophy of this term, we can easily see that, in essence, hidden behind it is the following idea. To explain the voluntary act, for example, the fact that a person on the operating table represses cries of pain and stretches out to the surgeon the affected member despite a direct impulse that would make him pull his arm away and scream, science cannot say anything else except that here we have a repetition of an act like the creation of the world, but of course on a microscopic scale. This means that explaining a voluntary act led the scientist standing on empirical ground to a purely biblical teaching on the creation of the world.

http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=S0103-65642018000200200&script=sci_arttext&tlng=en
The relevance of the auxiliary motifs in this process is also evident for Vygotsky when investigating situations that the individual would usually avoid, but in which the construction of a meaning or purpose linked to his volitional act increases or supports his choice. For example, people persist in a hunger strike or endure intense pain due to the establishment of an auxiliary motive (e.g. an ideological project or a religious promise) that gives meaning to that decision (Vygotsky, 1931/1995c).

By examining consciousness as embedded in modes of activity, and noting how we don't simply will things and have perfect control over ourselves as a given but develop our will in relation to our mastery of artifacts as mediation of our own behaviour, he is able to make compatible a view of self-determination which is compatible with biology/physics but isn't solely determined by them.
And very interesting in self-regulation and decision making process is his emphasis on how we overcome conflicting motives which we experience all the time.
How do I wake up and get out of bed when I want to sleep more and not endure the cold morning? He references this example to William James and makes a point of how we might 'trick' ourselves by saying that we will act when we finish counting to 3 "1, 2, 3" and we get up. Without such means we are more so at the mercy of the various motives in our field of activity and take longer to make a decision and do anything.

He also examines different pathologies such as hysteria and amnesic aphasia in regards to the will to help situate how in such pathologies, the issue in regards to the will is a kind of regression of impairment in it's relationship to other functions of consciousness.
So following spinoza he often emphasizes the mediation of the intellect in many operations, so for example we can point out how unlike in Descartes view of the soul, we don't have perfect control over our emotions but we can manage them through the mediation of our thoughts.
A true fact that whilst we can't simply make ourselves feel a certain way, we can indirectly influence how we feel via certain ideas, this had a strong basis in 20th century acting theory.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/1932/actors-creativity.htm
The first consists in that Stanislavsky expresses the involuntary quality of feeling in a certain situation. Stanislavsky says that feeling cannot be commanded. We have no direct power over feeling of this nature such as we have over movement or over the associative process. But if feeling “cannot be evoked ... voluntarily and directly, then it may be enticed by resorting to what is more subject to our power, to ideas” (L. Ya. Gurevich, 1927, p. 58).
Actually, all contemporary psychophysiological investigations of emotions show that the path to mastery of emotions, and, consequently, the path of voluntary arousal and artificial creation of new emotions, is not based on direct interference of our will in the sphere of sensations in the way that this occurs in the area of thinking and movement.

This path is much more tortuous and, as Stanislavsky correctly notes, more like coaxing than direct arousal of the required feeling. Only indirectly, creating a complex system of ideas, concepts, and images of which emotion is a part, can we arouse the required feelings and, in this way, give a unique, psychological coloring to the entire given system as a whole and to its external expression. Stanislavsky says: “These feelings are not at all those that actors experience (perezhivaitsya) in life” (ibid.). They are more likely feelings and concepts that are purified of everything extraneous, are generalized, devoid of their aimless character.
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Psychology teaches that emotions are not an exception different from other manifestations of our mental life. Like all other mental functions, emotions do not remain in the connection in which they are given initially by virtue of the biological organization of the mind. In the process of social life, feelings develop and forma connections disintegrate; emotions appear in new relations with other elements of mental life, new systems develop, new alloys of mental functions and unities of a higher order appear within which special patterns, interdependencies, special forms of connection and movement are dominant.

And our affect is heavily tied to our free will and decision making.
http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Mail/xmcamail.2015-06.dir/pdf9UQ7dqv45X.pdf
Vygotsky notes approvingly inextricable connection which Spinoza drew from affects, thought and quality of action: ‘Spinoza…defined affect as that which increases or decreases our body’s ability to act, and that which forces thought to move in a particular direction’ (Vygotsky, 1993, p.234). This is a deeper, more ontologically embedded notion than the simplistic idea that the possibility of free-action depends upon sufficient knowledge. That is to say adequate ideas, understanding and self-determination are party and parcel of each other.

Emotion being a driving force although not a sole determination of our actions as we need not be thrown into action only by what we feel and may even act in defiance of what we may feel like doing, overiding such motive forces/needs. But decisions aren't solely the domain of the intellect.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/words/ch07.htm
We must now take the final step in the analysis of the internal planes of verbal thinking. Thought is not the last of these planes. It is not born of other thoughts. Thought has its origins in the motivating sphere of consciousness, a sphere that includes our inclinations and needs, our interests and impulses, and our affect and emotion. The affective and volitional tendency stands behind thought. Only here do we find the answer to the final “why” in the analysis of thinking. We have compared thought to a hovering cloud that gushes a shower of words. To extend this analogy, we must compare the motivation of thought to the wind that puts the cloud in motion. A true and complex understanding of another’s thought becomes possible only when we discover its real, affective-volitional basis. The motives that lead to the emergence of thought and direct its flow can be illustrated through the example we used earlier, that of discovering the subtext through the specific interpretation of a given role. Stanislavskii teaches that behind each of a character’s lines there stands a desire that is directed toward the realization of a definite volitional task. What is recreated here through the method of specific interpretation is the initial moment in any act of verbal thinking in living speech.


Where it isn't knowledge to bounce between the points in which emotion is a sole cause of action and thus we're inherently irrational, in that it is only in the case of the child or child like with an under developed will do they act out so impulsively.
http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=S0103-65642018000200200&script=sci_arttext&tlng=en
According to Fonseca-Janes and Lima (2013), it is possible to discern distinct steps in the development of the psychological function of thought in Vygotsky’s work: a) syncretic thinking, in which there is an aggregated and disorganized manifestation of cognitive contents; b) complex thinking, characterized by the grouping of objects based on the representations one has about them and not on their stable characteristics; and c) conceptual thinking, which expresses “a deep and broad reflection of the reality of an object in all its diverse complexity, and of the nexus and relationships between it and the rest of reality” (Vygotsky, 1931/2006, 80). In this sense, Vygotsky affirms that thinking plays a central role in the development of all higher psychological functions, that is, of the integral process of consciousness, and that thinking in concepts makes it possible to structure the will directed to an end. Thus, hysteria is also a disturbance of the intellectual activity that guides behavior (Vygotsky, 1931/2006a)

Considering specifically the contributions of his studies on hysteria, one can see that the process of development of the will, according to Vygotsky, is based on the following stages: 1) maximum expression of impulsive and emotional states; 2) overcoming hypobulia as an independent instance; and (3) emergence of an end-oriented will.

So end up with distortions of the will/decision making (which creates an apparatus internally that then becomes an means of executing a specific action upon the right relation to a meaningful stimulus) in terms of a will without direction/an end/purpose but remains strong.
Or a will that can't be properly directed by the intellect due to the difficulty of structuring the decision/intent symbolically.
#15038603
I have a degree in Psych.

It's a mistake to lump it all in together. There are a some branches that are thoroughly scientific, and many that are not.

Modern philosophy of science is descriptive, not prescriptive. Things have changed a bit since Wittgenstein.

https://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Perspectivism-Ronald-N-Giere/dp/0226292134/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=ronald+n+giere&qid=1570023546&sr=8-4
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I have found one of the best summaries of Lev Vygotsky who very lucidly lays out some of the greatest insights from his work.
Spoiler: show
http://www.unilibre.edu.co/bogota/pdfs/2016/mc16.pdf
Three principles form the basis of our approach to the analysis of higher psychological functions.

Analyzing process, not objects. The first principle leads us to distinguish between the analysis of an object and of a process. As Koffka put it, psychological analysis has almost always treated the processes it analyzes as stable, fixed objects. The task of analysis consisted in breaking these forms down into their components. Psychological analysis of objects should be contrasted with the analysis of processes, which requires a dynamic display of the main points making up the processes’ history. Consequently, developmental psychology, not experimental psychology, provides the new approach to analysis that we need. Like Werner, we are advocating the developmental approach as an essential addition to experimental psychology. Any psychological process, whether the development of thought or voluntary behavior, is a process undergoing changes right before one’s eyes. The development in question can be limited to only a few seconds, or even fractions of seconds (as is the case in normal perception). It can also (as in the case of complex mental processes) last many days and even weeks. Under certain conditions it becomes possible to trace this development. Werner’s work furnishes one example of how a developmental viewpoint may be applied to experimental research. Using such an approach, one can, under laboratory conditions, provoke development.

Our method may be called experimental-developmental in the sense that it artificially provokes or creates a process of psychological development. This approach is equally appropriate to the basic aim of dynamic analysis. If we replace object analysis by process analysis, then the basic task of research obviously becomes a reconstruction of each stage in the development of the process: the process must be turned back to its initial stages.

Explanation versus description. In associationistic and introspective psychology, analysis is essentially description and not explanation as we understand it. Mere description does not reveal the actual causal-dynamic relations that underlie phenomena.

K. Lewin contrasts phenomenological analysis, which is based on external features (phenotypes), with what he calls genotypic analysis, wherein a phenomenon is explained on the basis of its origin rather than its outer appearance. The difference between these two points of view can be elucidated by any biological example. A whale, from the point of view of its outer appearance, stands closer to the fish family than to the mammal, but in its biological nature it is closer to a cow or a deer than to a pike or a shark. Following Lewin, we can apply this distinction between the phenotypic (descriptive) and genotypic (explanatory) viewpoints to psychology. By a developmental study of a problem, I mean the disclosure of its genesis, its causal dynamic basis. By phenotypic I mean the analysis that begins directly with an object’s current features and manifestations. It is possible to furnish many examples from psychology where serious errors have been committed because these viewpoints have been confused. In our study of the development of speech, we have emphasized the importance of the distinction between phenotypic and genotypic similarities.

In their external, descriptive aspects, the first manifestation of speech in the one-anda-half to two-year-old child are similar to adult speech. On the basis of this similarity, such serious researchers as Stern come to the conclusion that in essence the eighteenmonth-old child is already conscious of the relation between sign and meaning. In other words, he classes together phenomena that have absolutely nothing in common from the developmental point of view. On the other hand, egocentric speech — which in its outer manifestations differs from internal speech in essential ways — must be classed together with internal speech from the developmental point of view.

Our research on young children’s speech brings us to the basic principle formulated by Lewin: two phenotypically identical or similar processes may ‘be radically different from each other in their causal-dynamic aspects and vice versa; two processes that are very close in their causal-dynamic nature may be very different phenotypically.

I have said that the phenotypic approach categorizes processes according to their external similarities. Marx commented on the phenotypic approach in a most general form when he stated that ‘if the essence of objects coincided with the form of their outer manifestations, then every science would be superfluous” — an extremely reasonable observation. If every object was phenotypically and genotypically equivalent (that is, if the true principles of its construction and operation were expressed by its outer manifestation), then everyday experience would fully suffice to replace scientific analysis. Everything we saw would be the subject of our scientific knowledge.

In reality, psychology teaches us at every step that though two types of activity can have the same external manifestation, whether in origin or essence, their nature may differ most profoundly. In such cases special means of scientific analysis are necessary in order to lay bare internal differences that are hidden by external similarities. It is the task of analysis to reveal these relations. In that sense, real scientific analysis differs radically from subjective, introspective analysis, which by its very nature cannot hope to go beyond pure description. The kind of objective analysis we advocate seeks to lay bare the essence rather than the perceived characteristics of psychological phenomena.

For example, we are not interested in a des cription of the immediate experience elicited by a flashing light as it is revealed to us by introspective analysis; rather we seek to understand the real links between the external stimuli and internal responses that underlie the higher. form of behavior named by introspective descriptions. Thus, psychological analysis in our sense rejects nominal descriptions and seeks instead to determine causal-dynamic relations. However, such explanation would also be impossible if we ignored the external manifestations of things.

By necessity, objective analysis includes a scientific explanation of both external manifestations and the process under study. Analysis is not limited to a developmental perspective. It does not repudiate the explanation of current phenotypical idiosyncrasies, but rather subordinates them to the discovery of their actual origin.

The problem of “fossilized behavior.” The third principle underlying our analytic approach is based on the fact that in psychology we often meet with processes that have already died away, that is, processes that have gone through a very long stage of historical development and have become fossilized. These fossilized forms of behavior are most easily found in the so-called automated or mechanized psychological processes which, owing to their ancient origins, are now being repeated for the millionth time and have become mechanized. They have lost their original appearance, and their outer appearance tells us nothing whatsoever about their internal nature. Their automatic character creates great difficulties for psychological analysis.

The processes that have traditionally been referred to as voluntary and involuntary attention provide an elementary example that demonstrates how essentially different processes acquire outer similarity as a result of this automation. Developmentally speaking, these two processes differ very profoundly. But in experimental psychology it is considered a fact, as formulated by Titchener, that voluntary attention, once established, functions just like involuntary attention. In Titchener’s terms, “secondary” attention constantly changes into “primary” attention. Having described and contrasted the two types of attention, Titchener then says, “There exists, however, a third stage in the development of attention, and it consists in nothing less than a return to the first stage.” The last and highest stage in the development of any process may demonstrate a purely phenotypic similarity with the first or primary stages, and if we take a phenotypic approach, it is impossible to distinguish between higher and lower forms of this process. The only way to study this third and highest stage in the development of attention is to understand it in all its idiosyncrasies and differences. In short, we need to understand its origin. It follows, then, that we need to concentrate not on the product of development but on the very process by which higher forms are established. To do so the researcher is often forced to alter the automatic, mechanized, fossilized character of the higher form of behavior and to turn it back to its source through the experiment. This is the aim of dynamic analysis.

Inactive, rudimentary functions stand not as the living remnants of biological evolution but as those of the historical development of behavior. Consequently, the study of rudimentary functions must he the point of departure for evolving a historical perspective in psychological experiments. It is here that the past and the present are fused and the present is seen in the light of history. Here we find ourselves simultaneously on two planes: that which is and that which was. The fossilized form is the end of the thread that ties the present to the past, the higher stages of development to the primary ones.

The concept of a historically based psychology is misunderstood by most researchers who study child development. For them, to study something historically means, by definition, to study some past event. Hence, they naively imagine an insurmountable barrier between historic study and study of present-day behavioral forms. To study some thing historically means to study it in the process of change; that is the dialectical method’s basic demand. To encompass in research the process of a given thing’s development in all its phases and changes — from birth to death — fundamentally means to discover its nature, its essence, for ‘It is only in movement that a body shows what it is.” Thus, the historical study of behavior is not an auxiliary aspect of theoretical study, but rather forms its very base. As P. P. Blonsky has stated, “Behavior can be understood only as the history of behavior.”

The search for method becomes one of the most important problems of the entire enterprise of understanding the uniquely human forms of psychological activity. In this case, the method is simultaneously prerequisite and product, the tool and the result of the study.

In summary, then, the aim of psychological analysis and its essential factors are as follows: (1) process analysis as opposed to object analysis; (2) analysis that reveals real, causal or dynamic relations as opposed to enumeration of a process’s outer features, that is, explanatory, not descriptive, analysis; and (3) developmental analysis that returns to the source and reconstructs all the points in the development of a given structure. The result of development will be neither a purely psychological structure such as descriptive psychology considers the result to be, nor a simple sum of elementary processes such as associationistic psychology saw it, but a qualitatively new form that appears in the process of development.


One of which I wish to share in regards to the methods of psychology over the stimuli-response method which characterizes much of psychology even still today.
I noticed especially when considering theories in addiction in regards to cravings and triggers. So I found it very resonant to see Vygotsky illuminate how such a principle underpins the psychological methods of his day and mark my suspicion of the continuity of philosophical and methodological problems that are yet to find Vygotsky's improvement and sound foundation for psychological science.
Below in the summary alone you can see how it's about a direct causal effect on the subject by the environment, the passiveness characteristic of mechanical materialism. Man seen as only a natural being, continuation of natural selection and not a social being is conceived only as a result of the world but not an agent that acts within it, changes it and thus changes himself. But hence why many human qualities remain confounded behind metaphysical illusions where man isn't properly conceived as biosocial despite any rhetoric in desire of such a perspective.

http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=S0103-65642018000200200&script=sci_arttext&tlng=en
Main explanatory models for craving

In the neurobiological model, the craving may be triggered by things such as images, sounds, odors, and environmental contexts. These triggers can be internal or external cognitive cues that are in some way related to drug use. This relationship is established by pairing repeated drug use with internal or environmental variables, stored together in memory.

Because of this pairing, a person’s neural circuits become hypersensitive to drug-related stimuli, triggering a strong desire to consume. Consequently, the main strategy for craving management in this framework is to recognize the triggers that induce this strong desire in order to avoid situations in which they are present (Zeni & Araujo, 2011).

In the cognitive framework, on the other hand, external/environmental and internal situations are involved in the process of relapse of someone seeking to stop using a particular drug. Mood swings, for example, will activate core beliefs of an individual and beliefs regarding the addictive use of a substance. These beliefs will trigger automatic thoughts that will lead to the craving (Santos et al., 2014). Also present in this model is the understanding that situations that stimulate drug use involve the relationship between additive beliefs and control beliefs:

Physiological craving symptoms, often experienced as strong anxiety, “trigger” permissive additive beliefs (such as “I will use only a little”) that may lead to substance use. Along with these additive beliefs, which are associated with the pursuit of pleasure (or relief from displeasure) and feelings of well-being, the patient may also present control beliefs (such as “I will be harmed by using”), which may lessen the need to consume the psychoactive substance (Santos et al., 2014, p. 122).

The craving management techniques proposed by this framework involve coping strategies that seek to strengthen control beliefs. Among the main techniques, it is worth mentioning the replacement by positive image (RPI), which is the visualization of the benefits arising from the interruption of the use of a substance, seeking to strengthen self-efficacy during withdrawal (Santos et al, 2014).

The behavioral framework advocates the differentiation between craving and compulsion, the former being the motivational desire and the latter the behavioral intention. In the process of conditioning that comprises the manifestation of craving, however, these two phenomena are articulated. Thus, an external stimulus (conditioned stimulus - CS) - for example, the sight of a pack of cigarettes - triggers a craving (conditioned response - CR), which then leads to a compulsive behavior, which may or may not be followed by a substance use response and its consequent reinforcing stimuli (Marlatt, 1987). The management strategies adopted according to this framework, therefore, promote a new conditioning in relation to drug use, especially by controlling the environmental variables, so that the conditioning that triggers the craving becomes extinct.
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Thus the proposition that there is no regression of psychological functions in the manifestation of the craving goes beyond dualistic conceptions such as those used in the behavioral, neurobiological, and cognitive models in which the stimulus-response relationship is ultimately what triggers the use of psychoactive substances.

Part of Vygotsky's distinction for higher psychological functions relates to the mediated role which simply extends beyond the stimuli-response principle founded in the early days of psychological science and adds the mediation of a sort of constructed/artificial stimuli which is introduced by the violation/will of the person.
When comparing the principles regulating unconditioned and conditioned reflexes, Pavlov uses the example of a telephone call. One possibility is for the call to connect two points directly via a special line. This corresponds to an unconditioned reflex. The other possibility is for the phone call to be relayed through a special, central station with the help of temporary and limitlessly variable connections. This corresponds to a conditioned reflex. The cerebral cortex, as the organ that closes the conditioned reflex circuit, plays the role of such a central station.

The fundamental message of our analysis of the processes that underlie the creation of signs (signalization) may be expressed by a more generalized form of the same metaphor. Let us take the case of tying a knot as a reminder or drawing lots as a means of decision making. There is no doubt that in both cases a temporary conditioned connection is formed, that is, a connection of Pavlov’s second type. But if we wish to grasp the essentials of what is happening here, we are forced to take into consideration not only the function of the telephone mechanism but also of the operator who plugged in and thus connected the line. In our example, the connection was established by the person who tied the knot. This feature distinguishes the higher forms of behavior from the lower.

Such a viewpoint is elaborated more so in this section on self-control: https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/1931/self-control.htm
Where he mentions the use of a die/dice to help decide between equally weighted motives, or to use one's watch to set a time to leave a room or to count to 3 before getting up out of bed. There being these created stimuli prescribed motives that help condition ourselves to do what we decide, but the acting upon the decision is just as much a compulsion as an instinct but one that is freely created.
Hence the free will is self-determined in being created but it is the creation of a compulsion, something which isn't free.
#15056045
In continuing the earlier emphasis on areas of the brain corresponding to mental functions I'd like to emphasize a point of the non-a priori nature of thinking such that is based on the physiology of the bring but isn't inherent in it.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunde ... s-talk.htm
3. The brain does not ‘cause’ consciousness. A working brain is the essential pre-condition for consciousness, but how do we move from possibility to realised possibility?

If we consider a system from the point of view of how a given possibility can be realised, we hypothetically insert ourselves into the system in question, asking what intervention is needed to realise the relevant possibility. ‘Cause’ can be understood in a practical way only by this kind of thought-experiment. To say that something is a cause is to point to how a given possibility could be realised by a hypothetical intervention in a system. To say that consciousness is caused by the brain is to say that an intervention in the nervous system can bring consciousness into being. As John Searle has pointed out, such interventions can be shown only to change consciousness, but not to bring it into being.

From the phylogenetic point of view, Merlin Donald and others before him have shown convincingly that it was development of culture and behaviour, which introduced consciousness into a pre-human hominid species, not the other way around.

The ontogenetic evidence is that under all but the most adverse conditions, human infants with healthy brains will develop language and consciousness. However, no answer has yet been given as to how consciousness could be introduced into living tissue which was not already capable of consciousness. Thus, the ‘cause’ of consciousness has no coherent meaning in the ontogenetic context. Further, if consciousness is a feature of the brain, an organ like any other, “a system-level, biological feature in much the same way that digestion, or growth” (Searle 2004), then the origin of free will remains a mystery.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/1930/psychological-systems.htm
We have no reason to assume that the human brain underwent an essential biological evolution in the course of human history. We have no reason to assume that the brain of primitive man differed from our brain, was an inferior brain, or had a biological structure different from ours. All biological investigations lead us to assume that biologically speaking the most primitive man we know deserves the full title of man. The biological evolution of man was finished before the beginning of his historical development. And it would be a flagrant mixing up of the concepts of biological evolution and historical development to try to explain the difference between our thinking and the thinking of primitive man by claiming that primitive man stands on another level of biological development. The laws of dreaming are the same everywhere, but the role which the dream fulfills is completely different and we will see that such a difference not only exists between, let us say, the Kaffir and us. The Roman believed in dreams as well, although he would not say in a difficult situation “I will dream about it,” – because he stood on another level of human development and would solve the matter, in the words of Tacitus, “with arms and reason and not like a woman through a dream.” The dream was a sign for him, an omen. The Roman did not begin something when he had had a bad dream about it. In the Roman, the dream had another structural connection with other functions.
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To a certain degree this also holds true for one of the most difficult problems – the localization of higher psychological systems. So far they have been localized in two ways. The first viewpoint considered the brain as a homogeneous mass and rejected the idea that the different parts are not equivalent and play different roles in the formation of psychological functions. This viewpoint is manifestly untenable. Therefore, henceforth it was tried to deduce the functions from different brain parts, distinguishing, for example, a practical area, etc. The areas are mutually connected, and what we observe in mental processes is the joint activity of separate areas. This conception is undoubtedly more correct. What we have is a complex collaboration of a number of separate zones. The brain substrate of the mental processes are not isolated parts but complex systems of the whole brain apparatus. But the problem is the following: if this system is given in the very structure of the brain in advance, i.e., if it is fully determined by connections that exist in the brain between its various parts, then we must assume that those connections from which the concept develops are given beforehand in the structure of the brain. But if we assume that it is possible to have more complex systems which are not given in advance, a new perspective on this problem results.

Allow me to clarify this with an admittedly very rough schema. Forms of behavior that earlier were shared by two persons are now combined in the person: the order and its execution. Before they took place in two brains. One brain acted upon the other with, say, a word. When they are combined in one brain we get the following picture: point A in the brain cannot reach point B through a direct combination. It has no natural connection with it. The possible connections between different parts of the brain are established through the peripheral nervous system, from outside.

Proceeding from such ideas, we can understand a number of facts of pathology. These include, first of all, patients with a lesion of the brain systems who are not capable of doing something directly, but can carry it out when they tell themselves to do so. Such a clinically clear picture is observed in Parkinsonian patients. The Parkinsonian patient cannot take a step. But if you tell him to take a step or if you put a piece of paper on the floor, he will take this step. Everybody knows how well Parkinsonian patients walk on stairs and how badly on the level floor. In order to lead the patient to the laboratory, one has to spread out a number of pieces of paper on the floor. The patient wants to walk, but he cannot influence his motor system, this system is disturbed. Why can the Parkinsonian patient walk when pieces of paper are spread out on the floor? Here there are two explanations. One was given by Sapir . the Parkinsonian patient wants to raise his arm when you tell him to do so, but this impulse alone is insufficient. If you link this request with another (visual) impulse he will raise it. Flic supplementary impulse acts together with the main one. We can also imagine another picture. The system that allows him to raise his arm is now disturbed. But he can connect one point of his brain with another one via an external sign.

It seems to me that the second hypothesis about the locomotion of Parkinsonian patients is the correct one. The Parkinsonian patient establishes a connection between different points of his brain through a sign, influencing himself from the periphery. That this is so is confirmed by experiments on the exhaustibility of Parkinsonian patients. If it would be simply a matter of fully exhausting the Parkinsonian patient, then the effect of a supplementary stimulus would increase, or at any rate lie proportional to a rest, a recovery, and play the role of an external stimulus. (One of the Russian authors who first described Parkinsonian patients pointed out that most important for the patient are loud stimuli (a drum, music), but further investigations demonstrated that this is incorrect. I do not want to say that in Parkinsonian patients things proceed exactly like this. It suffices to conclude that it is in principle possible. That such a system is actually possible we can constantly observe in processes of dissolution.

Each of the systems I mentioned goes through three stages. First, an inter- psychological stage – I order, you execute. Then an extra-psychological stage – I begin to speak to myself. Then an intra-psychological stage – two points of the brain which are excited from outside have the tendency to work in a unified system and turn into an intracortical point.

Allow me to dwell briefly on the further destinies of these systems. I would like to point out that from the viewpoint of differential psychology I do not differ from you and you do not differ from me because I have somewhat better concentration than you. The essential and practically important characterological difference in the social life of people resides in the structures, relations and connections that exist in us between different points. What I want to say is that most important is not memory or attention per se, but the extent to which the person utilizes this memory, the role it fulfills. We have seen that for the Kaffir the dream may fulfill a central role. For us the dream is a parasite in psychological life which plays no essential role whatsoever. The same is true for thinking. How many idling fruitless minds, how many minds who think but are not at all involved in action! We all remember a situation in which we knew how to act, but acted differently.
I want to point out that here we have three extremely important planes. The first plane is the social plane and the plane of social class psychology. We wish to compare the worker and the bourgeois. The point is not, as was thought by Sombart [1913], that for the bourgeois the main thing is greediness, that a biological selection of greedy people takes place for whom miserliness and accumulation are most important. I assume that many workers are more stingy than a bourgeois. Essential is not that the social role can be deduced from the character, but that the social role creates a number of characterological connections. The social and social class type of the person are formed from the systems that are brought into the person from the outside. They are systems of social relationships between people, transferred into the personality. Professional graphic investigations of labor processes are based on this. Each profession requires a certain system of these connections. For the tram-driver, for example, it is indeed not so important to be more attentive than the ordinary person, but to utilize this attention correctly. It is important that his attention has a position which it may not have in, say, a writer, etc.

Finally, from a differential and characterological perspective we must make a fundamental distinction between primary characterological connections which yield certain proportions, for example, a schizoid or cycloid constitution, and connections that develop completely differently and which distinguish the honest person from the dishonest, the honest from the deceitful, the dreamer from the business person. These do not reside in the fact that I am less tidy than you, or more deceitful than you, but in the development of a system of relations between the different functions that develop in ontogenesis. Lewin correctly says that the formation of psychological systems coincides with the development of personality. In the highest eases of ethically very perfect human personalities with a very beautiful spiritual life we are dealing with the development of a system in which everything is connected to a single goal. In Spinoza you will find a theory (I am changing it somewhat) which says that the soul can achieve that all manifestations, all conditions relate to a single goal. A system with a single center may develop with a maximal integrity of human behavior. For Spinoza this single idea is the idea of god or nature. Psychologically this is not at all necessary. But a person can indeed not only bring separate functions into a system, but also create a single center for the whole system. Spinoza demonstrated this system in the philosophical plane. There are people whose life is a model of the subordination to a single goal and who proved in practice that this is possible. Psychology has the task of demonstrating that the development of such a unified system is scientifically possible.


Those who consider man primarily as a biological being are unable to account for the great historical development of human beings, because I differ not from primitive man biologically by socially. And this also emphasizes how in the division of roles, labour and such, that one's individual personality is in large part acculturation of that aspect of society.
And the mind has certain basic functions or instincts which then develop into conditioned reflexes but which then give way to an intellect, which in man becomes particularly combined with speech, a distinguishing human characteristic.

So for example, a child has reflexes that are innate, that allow it to survive, it's not simply nothing biologically, but these lower forms cannot explain the higher mental functions of man.
One cannot explain man through conditioned reflexes and as much is clear even in anthropoid apes.
Vygotsky's summarizes Kohler's research on chimps in one of his works examining zoology, primitive man and modern man.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/1930/man/ape-man-1.pdf
He finds that the distinguishing characteristic between conditioned reflexes of an ape and their intellect is marked by the manner in which they learn something (it's genesis).
A conditioned reflex takes time, training between two stimuli such that one decreases their degree of error and develops mastery of the action over some time. Whereas with the intellect, it is an abrupt change where upon seeing the solution, it is clearly remembered and performed as if it were immediately a habitual behaviour.

In many cases, one can see an animal when confronted with a new situation in which its instincts and conditioned reflexes are unable to achieve what it wants.
Due to some difficulty, being a delay or an obstruction, the animal's activity increases greatly, it puts more effort into the habit/reflex to overcome the delay or obstruction or it seeks a roundabout path to it's goal.
Think of a dog that wants a piece of meat and expresses great distress. It tries to reach for it, its barks, it moves around a lot.
Chimps do the same thing, but the smarter ones eventually reach a point where their external excitation is changed into an internal activity where they are presumably trialing possible solutions to the predicament of their situation as they begin to examine their direct environment (ape consciousness is very immediate and concrete). So after initial confusion, excitation and error, the ape seems to reflect on the problem and if they are smart, they may well see the solution and immediately execute it. They then are able to generalize their solution to similar predicaments away from that specific example, there is a continuation of that structural problem independent of the actual objects.
If the chimp simply resorted to repeating what it already knew, they would be unable to solve the predicament. This is analogous to humans who rely on habits but are forced to think when reality breaks the smooth flow of their habits/operations. Suddenly they have to become quite conscious as to why what they usually do doesn't work anymore and solve the problem.
They must achieve the sudden insight, the aha moment in seeing a solution and generally when the intellect is provoked by difficulties in habitual operations/actions, it is able to develop a direct and abrupt neural connection unlike the conditioned reflex due to the greater excitation internally.
A person may very well learn through rote memorization of a task, but they are better able to remember when they are confronted with a problem and are compelled to find the right solution to the task. They remember the solution better than the unconscious associations trained through conditioning.
And this is where the intellect functions, not as a passive reflection but an active seeking of a solution to one's goal.

The child has a basic intellect much like the chimp does, but no one would mistake the chimp for a human no matter how intelligent it may be in it's use of tools or even crude creation of some tools and problem solving.
This is because children being human, are able to have their intellect and language intersect in their development.
http://www.unilibre.edu.co/bogota/pdfs/2016/mc16.pdf
The first thing that strikes the experimenter is the incomparably greater freedom of children’s operations, their greater independence from the structure of the concrete, visual situation. Children, with the aid of speech, create greater possibilities than apes can accomplish through action. One important manifestation of this greater flexibility is that the child is able to ignore the direct line between actor and goal. Instead, he engages in a number of preliminary acts, using what we speak of as instrumental, or mediated (indirect) methods. In the process of solving a task the child is able to include stimuli that do not lie within the immediate visual field. Using words (one class of such stimuli) to create a specific plan, the child achieves a much broader range of activity, applying as tools not only those objects that lie near at hand, but searching for and preparing such stimuli as can be useful in the solution of the task, and planning future actions.

Second, the practical operations of a child who can speak become much less impulsive and spontaneous than those of the ape. The ape typically makes a series of uncontrolled attempts to solve the given problem. In contrast, the child who uses speech divides the activity into two consecutive parts. She plans how to solve the problem through speech and then carries out the prepared solution through overt activity. Direct manipulation is replaced by a complex psychological process through which inner motivation and intentions, postponed in time, stimulate their own development and realization. This new kind of psychological structure is absent in apes, even in rudimentary forms.
...
Unlike the ape, which Koehler tells us is “the slave of its own visual field, children acquire an independence with respect to their concrete surroundings; they cease to act in the immediately given and evident space. Once children learn how to use the planning function of their language effectively, their psychological field changes radically. A view of the future is now an integral part of their approaches to their surroundings.

To summarize what has been said thus far in this section: The specifically human capacity for language enables children to provide for auxiliary tools in the solution of difficult tasks, to overcome impulsive action, to plan a solution to a problem prior to its execution, and to master their own behavior. Signs and words serve children first and foremost as a means of social contact with other people. The cognitive and communicative functions of language then become the basis of a new and superior form of activity in children, distinguishing them from animals.

The child moves from immediacy of their visual field to a semantic field, which governs their actions.
Whilst its the case that apes have only ever been able to learn very simple forms of human language/communication, it is of great biological significance that human children are able to be accultured to human language so readily.
They do not have true concepts as many adults do, but in using language, it becomes part of restructuring their psyche and their relation to the world and guides their activity more and more.
For example, the child learns that many things have names, they tend to associate the names in a manner of conditioned reflex, a handle that is attributed to the object itself.
They speak the same words for the apparently same objects, but they aren't yet cognizant of concepts and tend to have very limited ones due to their limited experiences.
But with a name, the concept can begin to grow and they begin to better grasp the world around them, words become a handle for objects mentally.

All in all, such developments cannot be explained in the conception of a human being as capable of such multifaceted and universal actions as pre-existing in their physiology like an instinct or even developed into conditioned reflexes. Hence the poverty of the evolutionary psychological viewpoint which tries to presuppose very specific brain structures and physiology to underpin all sorts of mental behaviour. Whereas parts of the brain, as already noted, do have general and specific functions, they aren't so specific that one can simply prescribe a specifically observed behaviour as innate. Such a child would likely seem retarded in their development if this were actually the case compared to the normal and relatively expected development of a human child.

But such is the tendency due to an inadequate conception of human nature which can only explain it biologically, considers man as a passive result of nature and doesn't see the interdependence between mans work upon nature in developing himself. Man is in ontologically unity with nature and the nature we witness is one actively shaped by human needs unlike the ape which adapts itself to the environment, we have adapted the environment to our needs and developed even greater and complex needs as a result of such work.
Man has for the most part being evolutionary the same, but the evolution of man culturally has been most radical in recent centuries.

Man is born with biological instincts and drives, but such drives necessarily take a social form and development.
Very little is left untouched by being raised among humans as opposed to animals.
#15171337
Move it here as it's a huge post and feeling out of place for TLTE

Julian658 wrote:When it comes to babies there is no such thing as a blank slate. The idea that people can be molded has been discredited. Ask parents that have several children raised in exactly the same conditions. These kids can be dramatically different according to whatever genes they have inherited. Identical twins separated at birth and adopted by different parents often have similar personalities and IQ. At best the environment can enhance whatever attributes a person has, however it cannot create new attributes. Marx thought that human nature is formed by the totality of social relations. that is WRONG! The biology plays a very important role.

Yes, MAN can adapt, but not all that adapt are the same. They still have profound differences.

Sure, not solely based on biology. However, those genes will have an influence.

“When it comes to explaining human thought and behavior, the possibility that heredity plays any role at all still has the power to shock. To acknowledge human nature, many think, is to endorse racism, sexism, war, greed, genocide, nihilism, reactionary politics, and neglect of children and the disadvantaged. Any claim that the mind has an innate organization strikes people not as a hypothesis that might be incorrect but as a thought it is immoral to think.”
― Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature


This is a simplistic view. Innate talent (of any kind) is a powerful tool.


No disagreement. However, if humans are provided with anything they need and no effort is needed there is the possibility of nihilism. A man that produces nothing is-----nothing.


Would you rather be a wolf in the wild or a domestic pet?


Oh sure, having to constantly moved the legs to keep the head above water can be difficult. One would think it would be nice to have a floaty to stay above water. Where is the balance?

This is a long long long post to flesh out my view, so I’ll quickly respond to some of the later comments.
I think you’ll be hard pressed to argue the innateness of talent, at best you can speak of certain things as a precondition for the prospect of excelling at things. This works best when one has a physiological advantage such as height in basketball. Let clear in the case of intelligence and mental operations where there is no clear brain abnormality.

In regards to people have things without effort, we should definitely take the wealth from the extremely rich who have redundant wealth as you say because it only causes them nihilism and despair hehe
Indeed, being provided material things can not suffice in creating a meaningful life, it does not overcome alienation but what makes one think that socialism and communism is about the Wall-E-Esque technological fantasy of having every basic need met by a machine? As I quoted earlier, Marx emphasizes labor as the basis of our sense of belonging with one another, our very humanity and basis of everything that is definitively human. He isn’t anti-labor, but alienated, exploited labor. Life is clearly not made worse by providing the basic necessities to live comfortably and free to pursue things beyond basic survival.
The goal of socialism is to actually help make life meaningful. What you’re characterizing can be summarized by this:
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/Fedor%20Vasilyuk.pdf
1. Stress is the crisis of the easy-simple lifeworld. Here the subject has no goals and pursues no project because they demand and receive immediate gratification. Having no direction in which to strive, their diffuse anxiety is manifested as stress. A person may have many commitments, but pursues each commitment one at a time and encounters no resistance, so the subject’s world is simple and easy. Vasilyuk calls this a hedonistic crisis and it is widespread in modern, prosperous, democratic states.

https://ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/Something_worth_dying_for.pdf
It is normal to be committed to collaborative projects and for at least one of those projects to be unified by a sacred value. Such a project I will call a life-project as it gives meaning to a person’s life. Psychological pathology arises through (1) the blockage or destruction of a life-project, (2) a clash between two life-projects, (3) a crisis arising from the failure of a life-project or (4) the lack of any life-project, which is normal for a child but pathological for an adult (See Vasilyuk 1984).
From this standpoint, a substantial proportion of Australians who count as psychologically normal are in that infantile condition of lacking a life-project...
Commitment to a life-project, be that a Church, a political career, a capitalist firm or the army, brings with it an entire ethos, moral code and a theory of the world which may be quite at odds with the loose ethos which pervades public life. That “loose ethos” (Heller 1988) cannot give meaning to life however well it supports a liberal, tolerant, multicultural bourgeois society. Our children are more likely to commit suicide if we raise them to be contented shoppers than if we raise them to be passionate idealists, and more likely to do something worthwhile with their lives.

This is a problem not specifically entailed with having material means but in fact can be prolific among those with great satisfaction of their basic needs. It is a nihilism for a person with no purpose, commitment, conviction or meaning other than their basic satisfactions, i.e. a mere consumer. The frictionlessness in which they get their need met in fact informs part of this ennui. Suprirsingly one finds a lot of suicide not necessarily just among the economically deprived, but across all socioeconomic standings.
But we certainly agree that a person who produces nothing is what he does, nothing. As such, the point for Marx is to do away with the relations which put profit above all else and actually allow the pursuit of human interests. The greatest things in life are undermined by money. Think about the industries that are primarily associated with creativity? Music and Film for example, they are undermined by a need to make money such that there is an extreme limitation imposed on what gets produced.


Many people who achieve greatness do so for the love of the very activity they’re engaged in, not the external rewards of status or money which are external precisely because they’re not essential to many tasks. As opposed to internal rewards which only come from actually performing that activity. This is where the real powerful part of human motivation comes in, the sort that can inspire incredible results from an energy that can perhaps burn to brightly for some. Such motivations are the sort of ideals which cause revolutions and other great sacrifices in an effort to change things, where they do not experience things as choice but their commitment feels like destiny, that they had to do it.

I guess I might say a wolf, but then I’m not really sure as my dogs experience a lot less stress in trying to survive than a wolf. I think the analogy doesn’t quite fit in filling in the particulars of the alienation modern man experiences. In particular because the analogy would perhaps better fit my summary in regards to the pet with its needs met is more like my person whose basic needs are materially met but they have a meaningless life still. As opposed to your characterization of the poor ending up nihilistic if they were provide assistance in basic living conditions.


What is balanced is dependent on the conditions of production and how people are shaped within such conditions.


I agree, there isn't a blank slate/tabula rasa.
Again, your example merely asserts the difference is based on genetics where in fact my position isn't the idea that everyone is quantitatively equal but that such differences are in fact based in experience.
And referring to Sapolsky, there are significant environmental differences even for twins when considering the environmental influence upon genetics.
https://www.robertsapolskyrocks.com/behavioral-genetics.html
To correct for this, adoption studies are used. Here siblings with similar genes that are raised in different environments are compared. The thinking is relatively straightforward - if these siblings are more like each other than they are like the siblings in their adoptive homes, genes are playing a role.

A big study on schizophrenia based on Danish citizens shows genetic influence in the development of schizophrenia. Using adoption studies and statistical measures, they found a 1% chance of being schizophrenic among the population on the whole, but with no biological basis while being raised in a schizophrenic household the number goes up to 3%. When raised in a household that did not have a schizophrenic parent but in which the biological parent(s) do, the number jumps to 9%. And for the truly bizarre situation in which the kid had a genetic legacy of schizophrenia and managed to get adopted into a household with a schizophrenic adoptive parent, the rate goes all the way to 17%. He notes that this synergistic effect will come up again. Sapolsky also states that this study was the first time a genetic basis was shown for a psychological disorder. As such it's a landmark event because a genetic psychological problem is a medical problem, not just a mere adjustment to society issue.

But there are problems.

1. Under the cleanest circumstances the baby would have been whisked away seconds after birth, thus preventing any shared environment with the mother. However, this is not often the case.
2. Prenatal effects - the prenatal environment shared with mom, including levels of various hormones in the bloodstream.

To get around this (perhaps speciously) the argument is made that they can measure the frequency with which the trait is shared with the mother or father. If there's a 17% correlation with the mom but only 10% with the father, then the 7% difference is attributed to the prenatal effects.

3. Adoptive family placements are not random. Efforts are made to place the child in a similar type of home. Thus the adoptee shares a lot of biology with the new family, screwing up the notion that environment and genetics have been separated.

The new gold standard study model is the identical twins separated at birth model. From this group, the research suggests about 50% heritability of IQ, about 50% heritability of where you are on the introversion-extroversion scale, and about 50% heritability for degree of aggression.

This doesn't negate genetic influence but emphasizes the inseperability in excluding environmental influence, it's an attempt to abstract someone out of existence for a pure biology which is impossible. It can lend some credence to the role of genetics but the difficulty is in the causal complexity of the environment's effect ton genetics such that genes can not be seen in a clear unicausal manner. They do all sorts of crazy shit, even shifting around.
https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/barbara-mcclintock-and-the-discovery-of-jumping-34083/

Indeed it doesn't determine the genes you have but it can most certainly effect their 'expression', this is the point in which there is a focus on epigenetics to avoid a crude genetic determinism.
For Marxist's, along with Marx, there is a universal biological basis to being a human being which in its development undergoes significant changes to the base physiological processes into 'cultured' or higher psychological functions which changes their quality through the mediation of cultural artefacts, training or conditioning one's body to particular stimuli and so on.
To help situate this sentiment:
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/spirkin/works/dialectical-materialism/ch05-s02.html
When discussing biological factors, one should not reduce them to the genetic. More attention should be given to the physiological and ontogenetic aspects of development, and particularly to those that evoke a pathological effect, for it is these that modify the biology of the human being, who is also beginning to perceive even social factors in quite a different way. Dialectics does not simply put the social and the biological factors on an equal footing and attribute the human essence to the formula of biotropic-sociotropic determination favoured by some scientists. It stresses the dominant role of the social factors. Nor does dialectics accept the principles of vulgar sociologism, which ignores the significance of the biological principle in man.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/fromm/works/1961/man/ch04.htm
Marx did not believe, as do many contemporary sociologists and psychologists, that there is no such thing as the nature of man; that man at birth is like a blank sheet of paper, on which the culture writes its text. Quite in contrast to this sociological relativism, Marx started out with the idea that man qua man is a recognizable and ascertainable entity; that man can be defined as man not only biologically, anatomically and physiologically, but also psychologically.
Of course, Marx was never tempted to assume that "human nature" was identical with that particular expression of human nature prevalent in his own society. In arguing against Bentham, Marx said: "To know what is useful for a dog, one must study dog nature. This nature itself is not to be deduced from the principle of utility. Applying this to man, he that would criticize all human acts, movements, relations, etc., by the principle of utility, must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch." [22] It must be noted that this concept of human nature is not, for Marx -- as it was not either for Hegel -an abstraction. It is the essence of man -- in contrast to the various forms of his historical existence -- and, as Marx said, "the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each separate individual." [23] It must also be stated that this sentence from Capital, written by the "old Marx," shows the continuity of the concept of man's essence ( Wesen) which the young Marx wrote about in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. He no longer used the term "essence" later on, as being abstract and unhistorical, but he clearly retained the notion of this essence in a more historical version, in the differentiation between "human nature in general" and "human nature as modified" with each historical period.
In line with this distinction between a general human nature and the specific expression of human nature in each culture, Marx distinguishes, as we have already mentioned above, two types of human drives and appetites: the constant or fixed ones, such as hunger and the sexual urge, which are an integral part of human nature, and which can be changed only in their form and the direction they take in various cultures, and the "relative" appetites, which are not an integral part of human nature but which "owe their origin to certain social structures and certain conditions of production and communication." [24] Marx gives as an example the needs produced by the capitalistic structure of society. "The need for money," he wrote in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, "is therefore the real need created by the modern economy, and the only need which it creates.... This is shown subjectively, partly in the fact that the expansion of production and of needs becomes an ingenious and always calculating subservience to inhuman, depraved, unnatural, and imaginary appetites." [25]
Man's potential, for Marx, is a given potential; man is, as it were, the human raw material which, as such, cannot be changed, just as the brain structure has remained the same since the dawn of history. Yet, man does change in the course of history; he develops himself; he transforms himself, he is the product of history; since he makes his history, he is his own product. History is the history of man's self-realization; it is nothing but the self-creation of man through the process of his work and his production: "the whole of what is called world history is nothing but the creation of man by human labor, and the emergence of nature for man; he therefore has the evident and irrefutable proof of his self-creation, of his own origins." [26]

The point here being that not only are we heavily shaped by environmental influences upon genetic expression setting the tendencies of ourselves, similarly we increasingly shape the environment purposely to achieve our own ends and are such aren't simply helpless to the influence of the environment upon our decision making or necessary our genes.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/determinism.htm
When a subject is faced with a conflict of motives (e.g., needing to get out of bed but still wanting to rest), the subject will voluntarily introduce an artificial stimulus which they use to resolve the conflict (an alarm clock or telling themselves “I will get up on the count of 3, ...”).
These artificial stimuli which the subject uses to train and control their response to stimuli are provided by their social and cultural surroundings. Adults purposely direct the actions of infants in their care and in doing so introduce these stimuli. Later, children appropriate these same stimuli to “command” themselves. By school age, a child is able to exercise what must be recognized as free will and a significant level of control of their own behavior, while remaining culturally and socially dependent on the conditions of their existence, beyond their control.
“Freedom of will is not freedom from motives.” Yes, though the ability to educate one’s own motives is crucial to the attainment of a genuinely free will, something which may or may not be attained to some degree in the course of an adult life.
The nervous system is an elaborate system of stimulus-response reactions, a system which to a certain degree is ‘self-constructed’ under conditions not of the subject’s choosing. The human organism taken as a whole cannot be described as a stimulus-response object because through personal development people have constructed an elaborate system of stimulus-response apparatuses which mediates between the stimulus acting on the person and the person’s response. This elaborate system is the material basis of consciousness and identity. Thus, when a person responds either with conscious awareness or with an immediate, conditioned response, the laws of biology are not violated.

This is a great example in showing how humans do have free will as self-determining through the mediation of artefacts which we create conditioned responses in much the same way we may be behaviorally conditioned like Pavlovl’s dog, except we intentionally create such conditions for our own purposes. This resolves the issue of free will as compatible with biological necessity on the individual level inline with Marx’s emphasis on man changing himself by changing his environment, but instead of a social focus on forces of production and social relations, here it’s in the individual’s decision making in resolving a conflict of motives on what to do. And the following is interesting is that it points out that we freely create a conditioned response which we then follow as automatically and unfreely as a conditioned response which we did not intentionally create such as cravings for sugar perhaps.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/1931/self-control.htm
We can draw these two conclusions. First, we see that in voluntary action, we must differentiate two apparatus that are relatively independent of each other. The first corresponds to the instant of decision and consists in the formation of a certain functional apparatus, in establishing a reflex connection and in forming a new nerve path. This is the closure part of the voluntary process. It is formed exactly as habit is formed, that is, it consists of constructing a conditioned reflex curve. In brief, we might say that this is an artificially created reflex. In our experiments it corresponds to the instant that is presented very satisfactorily in isolated form, the instant of decision to act in a certain way depending on the fall of the die. Here we see most clearly the moment of decision because at this very moment, the subject still does not know how he will act. Here we see clearly that the decision itself that determines the subsequent choice is completely analogous to the formation of a double connection in the selection reaction. The subject as if gives himself the instruction: “If the die falls black side up, I will react in one way, if white side up, I will react in another.”
Second, we must distinguish the actuating apparatus, that is, the functioning of the cerebral connection already formed in this way. In the examples of Lewin and Bleuler, this would correspond to the moment of carrying out a voluntary action when the mailbox reminds me to mail the letter. In our example, this would be the implementing of one action or another after throwing the die. The second, relatively independent part of the voluntary process acts exactly as the selection reaction usually acts. Here we have the Pavlovian conditioned reflex.
If the first instance consists in creating a conditioned reflex that might be compared to the instant in the laboratory when a dog develops a conditioned reflex, then the second instance consists in the functioning of an already developed reflex; an analogy to this can be found in the action of a developed conditioned stimulus.
Thus, the paradox of the will consists in that we create with its help an involuntarily acting mechanism.

http://lchc.ucsd.edu/MCA/Mail/xmcamail.2015-06.dir/pdf9UQ7dqv45X.pdf
Human behaviour according to Vygotsky is neither controlled nor directed by immediate means based on pure acts of will, but is moved indirectly through the use of signs and tools. The modification of the world by human activity creates an artificiality (or ‘artefactuality’) of conditions. Within such artificial and man-made conditions volition can be directed/mediated (caused), but in these circumstances the cause of an action arises through man’s own creations/artefacts and not merely in response to external determinations. The ‘ability to conform to the dictates of no particular situation, but to any’ (Bakhurst, 1991, p.251) provides for human beings the possibility of a universality not available to animals which do no more than respond directly to environmental determinations i.e. without conscious mediation or reflection. What is significant in the analysis of these issues in Vygotsky’s work, is the symbiotic relation between the development of consciousness and scientific concepts, the ability to operate actively on matter rather than being its passive subject.

And here I would emphasize that where one sees the most change are in more mental rather than physiological functioning which most certainly is difficult to alter directly, although can be managed indirectly. The concern being that physical limitations are not synonymous with mental limitations nor in their development, where we can clearly see the advantage of certain body types in different olympic sports. However, such limitations such as being too short to being in the NBA doesn’t directly translate to limitations of the mind in every case where a person is lacking.
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All that is human in man—that is, all that specifically distinguishes man from the animals—is 100 percent (not 90 percent or even 99 percent) the result of the social development of human society, and any ability of the individual is an individually exercised function of the social and not of the natural organism, although, of course, it is always exercised by the natural, biologically innate organs of the human body—in particular, the brain.
This position seems to many people somewhat extreme, accentuated in an exaggerated fashion. Some comrades are afraid that such a theoretical position may lead in practice to underestimation of the special biological-genetic innate characteristics of individuals, or even to leveling and standardization. These fears, it seems to me, are groundless. It seems to me that, on the contrary, any concession—even the smallest—to the naturalistic illusion in explaining the human mind and human life activity will sooner or later lead the theorist who makes this concession to the surrender of all materialist positions, to complete capitulation to theories of the Koestlerian type. Here it is a question of: “Remove the claws and the whole bird perishes.” For initial arguments concerning the genetic (i.e., natural) origin of individual variations in one or another human ability always lead to the conclusion that these abilities are themselves natural and innate, and indirectly—through naturalistic explanation of these abilities—to the perpetuation (at first in the imagination, but later also in practice) of the existing, historically shaped and inherited mode of the division of human labor

This is the result whenever a theorist makes purely physical indicators of the human organism (for instance: height, color of hair, or color of eyes) into a “model” in accordance with which he also starts to understand mental indicators such as degree of intellectual giftedness or of artistic talent. This logic implacably leads to a view of talent (and of its opposite—idiocy) as a deviation from the norm, a rare exception, and of the “norm” as mediocrity, the lack of any capacity for creativity, an inclination toward uncreative, passive, and often routine work.

And here it seems to me that it is the duty of a Marxist to object categorically to this kind of explanation of mental differences. It seems to me much truer—both in theory and in practice—to assert that the “norm” for man is precisely talent and that by declaring talent a rarity, a deviation from the norm we simply dump onto Mother Nature our own guilt, our own inability to create for each medically normal individual all the external conditions for his development to the highest level of talent.

The expressed limitations of many individuals is clearly reflected of the conditions in which they’re enabled to develop and cultivate an education and well roundedness. The idiocy of many is in fact a reflection of the deprivation of their environments in many cases. Because economically, capitalists are not in need of nothing but well rounded geniuses, and education are clearly founded on the basis of skilling up people for simple but increasingly complicated tasks. The factory worker doesn’t need to know everything involved in the production line to do their job effectively so why waste the education for what doesn’t have a direct utility in making a profit or from the perspective of a worker, wage.
The idea here is if you have a brain which is healthy, doesn’t clearly have something like a TBI, then you have an immense potential as the flexibility of humans to every various activities is our great strength. We mobilize our culture through material means and social relations.
And do note that here the ideal isn’t that everyone be identical and the same.Because Marxism isn’t about such an identical quality as people do have different abilities. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm
But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only – for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.

The assumption of making everyone the same is a limitation of liberalism’s abstract equality. The call for equality and criticisms of inequality are a product of liberal critiques and reformism, not a call for radical change in production.
https://www.lacan.com/zizrobes.htm
It is, however, this very consequent egalitarianism which is simultaneously the limitations of the Jacobin politics. Recall Marx's fundamental insight about the "bourgeois" limitation of the logic of equality: the capitalist inequalities ("exploitations") are not the "unprincipled violations of the principle of equality," but are absolutely inherent to the logic of equality, they are the paradoxical result of its consequent realization. What we have in mind here is not only the old boring motif of how market exchange presupposes formally/legally equal subjects who meet and interact on the market; the crucial moment of Marx's critique of "bourgeois" socialists is that capitalist exploitation does not involve any kind of "unequal" exchange between the worker and the capitalist - this exchange is fully equal and "just," ideally (in principle), the worker gets paid the full value of the commodity he is selling (his labour force). Of course, radical bourgeois revolutionaries are aware of this limitation; however, the way they try to amend it is through a direct "terrorist" imposition of more and more de facto equality (equal salaries, equal health service...), which can only be imposed through new forms of formal inequality (different sorts of preferential treatments of the under-privileged). In short, the axiom of "equality" means either not enough (it remains the abstract form of actual inequality) or too much (enforce "terrorist" equality) - it is a formalist notion in a strict dialectical sense, i.e., its limitation is precisely that its form is not concrete enough, but a mere neutral container of some content that eludes this form.

What if political "terror" signals precisely that the sphere of (material) production is denied in its autonomy and subordinated to political logic? Is it not that all political "terror," from Jacobins to Maoist Cultural Revolution, presupposes the foreclosure of production proper, its reduction to the terrain of political battle? In other words, what it effectively amounts to is nothing less than the abandonment of Marx's key insight into how the political struggle is a spectacle which, in order to be deciphered, has to be referred to the sphere of economics ("if Marxism had any analytical value for political theory, was it not in the insistence that the problem of freedom was contained in the social relations implicitly declared 'unpolitical' - that is, naturalized - in liberal discourse").

The point however is that many peoples limitations are not innate but are social product which we naturalize just as one naturalized women’s inferiority for example by assuming the historical outcomes of women not being in positions of power reflects a biological limitation rather than an institutional one. Again, it’s as nonsensical and unexplanatory as saying a volcano erupts because eruptability, one assumes an internal essence which is derived from social relations by abstracting the individual out of consideration of such influences yet injecting them as originating from a purely internal basis, even if one says well the genes are indeed ‘activated’ in particular ways from environmental influence but they’re still genetically determined to be a particular way.
Now does this emphasis against an overly broad innatism of psychological functions mean i propose a tabula rasa? No, there is a starting point universal to any healthy human which undergoes a sociocultural development in order to become what we recognize as a person.
To this I emphasize the outlines of the biological preconditions of human consciousness developed both biologically and through material culture. I share a view with Merlin Donald on the phylogenetic development of human consciousness.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/phylogeny.htm
One of the most engaging and original insights that are provided by Donald’s narrative of succeeding types of ‘culture’ – episodic, mimetic, mythic and theoretic – is the implication is has for understanding the structure of human consciousness.

“In essence my hypothesis is that the modern human mind has evolved from the primate mind through a series of adaptations each of which led to the emergence of a new representational system. Each successive new representational system has remained intact within our current mental architecture, so that the modern mind is a mosaic structure of cognitive vestiges from earlier stages of human emergence. Cognitive vestiges invoke the evolutionary principle of conservation of previous gains ... The modern representational structure of the human mind ... encompasses the gains of all our hominid ancestors, as well as those of certain apes. Far from being a diffuse tabula rasa, modern human cognitive architecture is highly differentiated and specialised.” (Donald 1991: 3)

As Donald notes, each new adaptation pushed the earlier representational strategy into the background, and took over the role of leading development, but it by no means eliminated it. Evolution invariably preserves those adaptations which cause no harm in the newly adapted species.

Neuroscience already knows that the numerous components of a scenario are processed by distinct neuronal structures which transform various kinds of material interactions and experiences into neuronal form, and has posed for itself the various ‘binding problems’ of how these diverse components of a scenario are ‘put back together’ in a single perception. And yet perception of the whole ‘gestalt’ is evolutionarily prior to the perception of the individual ‘components’ (such as colour, movement, shape, spatial distribution, etc.). In fact, perception of ‘gestalts’ precedes self-consciousness in evolution; animals perceive episodes without those perceptions being ‘brought together’ and presented to any kind of self-consciousness. So even though the posing of the problem as one of binding is intuitively compelling to us self-conscious individuals, it would appear that it is more a problem of differentiation, of how the brain is able to differentiate the various aspects of a scenario from the whole. And of course the explanation for the various processes of differentiation is well-known: the brain has a known variety of specialised structures which make these differentiations possible.

For certain, if Donald is right, these archaic forms of representation will be built into our neural physiology. These are challenges, really, for the various sciences which seek to theorise consciousness within the various specialised forms of practice, and go outside the scope of this study. Nevertheless, Donald’s work suggests a very rich approach to understanding individual consciousness which has no need of a ‘magic ingredient’ in the brain, a je ne sais quoi which allows us to understand symbols, form concepts, have feelings, execute actions, dream up new ideas and so on. Each of the forms of representation – event perception, mimesis, narrative, and theory – constitute a relatively well-defined domain and are subject to rigorous description, theorisation and critique.
Individual human consciousness, on the other hand, poses all sorts of intractable problems which require solution by empirical science, but which nonetheless seem to elude science. Donald is able to demonstrate how each of the developmental stages of hominid culture arises by a slight adaptation on the basis of the earlier culture. This suggests that an appropriate approach to understanding subjectivity within the various branches of science, is to theoretically reconstruct the individual on the assumption that the individual is constructed by the phylogeny Donald describes.
So what is suggested is a layered structure of the mind, as follows:
an unself-conscious episodic mind able to perceive and remember concrete scenarios, and able to respond more or less appropriately in accordance with a wide variety of ‘scripts’;
a mimetic mind able to analyse, recombine and reproduce scenarios, voluntarily and independently of context, analytically reflect on scenarios and respond to them appropriately;
an oral-mythic mind able to relate and understand narratives and form an understanding of the world in terms of words and gestures of various kinds related in narrative;
a theoretic mind able to use symbols and artefacts generally to structure their own consciousness and invent and produce artefacts to assimilate their mind to the material world;
a material culture, existing independently of the individual, but providing symbolic resources for symbolic activity.

The key concept which comes out of at the end of Donald’s enquiry is the concept of ‘extended mind’ – the combination of material artefacts and mnemonic and computational devices with the internal cognitive apparatus of human beings who have been raised in the practice of using them. Human physiology, behaviour and consciousness cannot be reproduced by individual human beings alone; we are reliant for our every action on the world of artefacts, with its own intricate inherent system of relations. Theory is the ideal form of the structure of material culture. Every thought, memory, problem solution or communication, is effected by the mobilisation of the internal mind of individuals, and the external mind contained within human culture. Taken together, the internal and external mind is called ‘extended mind’. This is what Hegel called Geist, an entity in which the division between subjectivity and objectivity is relative and not absolute.
Humans are animals which have learnt to build and mobilise an extended mind. This has proved to be a powerful adaption. Individuals in this species stand in quite a different relation to the world around them than the individuals of any other extant species. Understanding of the psyche of the modern individual depends on understanding the process of development of a human being growing up in such a culture, and this will be the topic of the next chapter.

So with development in mind, the focus isn’t on strict distinction of what one is born with and what comes through experience although one may do that, but instead how the given psychological functions of memory, affect and so on are qualitatively changed by acculturation through collaborative activities as mediated by cultural/material artefacts.

A great summary of the very issue of the sort of correspondence between the mind (psychological functions) and brain (neural processes and genetics), is found in Lev Vygotsky’s emphasis of psychological systems as interdependent and thus change one another qualtiatively rather than simply progressively develop alone. I think it is very illuminating and it is based in Vygotsky’s analysis of primitive man in which his direct eidetic memory while exceptional in detail is limited while for modern man he uses tool to help him remember and develops logical memory instead of eidetic. We do not remember specifics, we remember particular abstracted details and imprisoned, we then fill in the rest with speculative assumptions. THe idea is that our basic functions are mediated by cultural artefacts but initially what is communicated through gestures, and physical representations used to evoke our recall of something, is transferred to a purely mental operation.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/1930/psychological-systems.htm
In order to explain its development in the brain it suffices to assume that the brain contains the conditions and possibilities for a combination of functions, a new synthesis, new systems which do not at all have to be structurally engraved beforehand. I think that all of contemporary neurology leads us to this assumption. More and more we see the infinite diversity and incompleteness of brain functions. It is much more correct to assume that the brain contains enormous possibilities for the development of new systems. This is the fundamental premise. It solves a question that is related to Lévy-Bruhl’s work. In the latest discussion of the French philosophical society, Levy-Bruhl said that primitive man thinks in another way than we do. Does this mean that he has a different brain than we do? Or must we assume that in connection with the new function the brain changed biologically? Or that the spirit merely uses the brain as a tool, consequently, one tool-many uses, and thus it is the spirit which develops and not the brain?
In actual fact, it seems to me that by introducing the concept of psychological system in the form we discussed, we get a splendid possibility of conceiving the real connections, the real complex relationships that exist.
To a certain degree this also holds true for one of the most difficult problems – the localization of higher psychological systems. So far they have been localized in two ways. The first viewpoint considered the brain as a homogeneous mass and rejected the idea that the different parts are not equivalent and play different roles in the formation of psychological functions. This viewpoint is manifestly untenable. Therefore, henceforth it was tried to deduce the functions from different brain parts, distinguishing, for example, a practical area, etc. The areas are mutually connected, and what we observe in mental processes is the joint activity of separate areas. This conception is undoubtedly more correct. What we have is a complex collaboration of a number of separate zones. The brain substrate of the mental processes are not isolated parts but complex systems of the whole brain apparatus. But the problem is the following: if this system is given in the very structure of the brain in advance, i.e., if it is fully determined by connections that exist in the brain between its various parts, then we must assume that those connections from which the concept develops are given beforehand in the structure of the brain. But if we assume that it is possible to have more complex systems which are not given in advance, a new perspective on this problem results.
Allow me to clarify this with an admittedly very rough schema. Forms of behavior that earlier were shared by two persons are now combined in the person: the order and its execution. Before they took place in two brains. One brain acted upon the other with, say, a word. When they are combined in one brain we get the following picture: point A in the brain cannot reach point B through a direct combination. It has no natural connection with it. The possible connections between different parts of the brain are established through the peripheral nervous system, from outside.
Proceeding from such ideas, we can understand a number of facts of pathology. These include, first of all, patients with a lesion of the brain systems who are not capable of doing something directly, but can carry it out when they tell themselves to do so. Such a clinically clear picture is observed in Parkinsonian patients. The Parkinsonian patient cannot take a step. But if you tell him to take a step or if you put a piece of paper on the floor, he will take this step. Everybody knows how well Parkinsonian patients walk on stairs and how badly on the level floor. In order to lead the patient to the laboratory, one has to spread out a number of pieces of paper on the floor. The patient wants to walk, but he cannot influence his motor system, this system is disturbed. Why can the Parkinsonian patient walk when pieces of paper are spread out on the floor? Here there are two explanations. One was given by Sapir . The Parkinsonian patient wants to raise his arm when you tell him to do so, but this impulse alone is insufficient. If you link this request with another (visual) impulse he will raise it. Flic supplementary impulse acts together with the main one. We can also imagine another picture. The system that allows him to raise his arm is now disturbed. But he can connect one point of his brain with another one via an external sign.
It seems to me that the second hypothesis about the locomotion of Parkinsonian patients is the correct one. The Parkinsonian patient establishes a connection between different points of his brain through a sign, influencing himself from the periphery. That this is so is confirmed by experiments on the exhaustibility of Parkinsonian patients. If it would be simply a matter of fully exhausting the Parkinsonian patient, then the effect of a supplementary stimulus would increase, or at any rate lie proportional to a rest, a recovery, and play the role of an external stimulus. ()nc of the Russian authors who first described Parkinsonian patients pointed out that most important for the patient are loud stimuli (a drum, music), but further investigations demonstrated that this is incorrect. I do not want to say that in Parkinsonian patients things proceed exactly like this. It suffices to conclude that it is in principle possible. That such a system is actually possible we can constantly observe in processes of dissolution.
Each of the systems I mentioned goes through three stages. First, an inter- psychological stage – I order, you execute. Then an extra-psychological stage – I begin to speak to myself. Then an intra-psychological stage – two points of the brain which are excited from outside have the tendency to work in a unified system and turn into an intracortical point.
Allow me to dwell briefly on the further destinies of these systems. I would like to point out that from the viewpoint of differential psychology I do not differ from you and you do not differ from me because I have somewhat better concentration than you. The essential and practically important characterological difference in the social life of people resides in the structures, relations and connections that exist in us between different points. What I want to say is that most important is not memory or attention per se, but the extent to which the person utilizes this memory, the role it fulfills. We have seen that for the Kaffir the dream may fulfill a central role. For us the dream is a parasite in psychological life which plays no essential role whatsoever. The same is true for thinking. How many idling fruitless minds, how many minds who think but are not at all involved in action! We all remember a situation in which we knew how to act, but acted differently. I want to point out that here we have three extremely important planes. The first plane is the social plane and the plane of social class psychology. We wish to compare the worker and the bourgeois. The point is not, as was thought by Sombart [1913], that for the bourgeois the main thing is greediness, that a biological selection of greedy people takes place for whom miserliness and accumulation are most important. I assume that many workers are more stingy than a bourgeois. Essential is not that the social role can be deduced from the character, but that the social role creates a number of characterological connections. The social and social class type of the person are formed from the systems that are brought into the person from the outside. They are systems of social relationships between people, transferred into the personality. Professio graphic investigations of labor processes are based on this. Each profession requires a certain system of these connections. For the tram-driver, for example, it is indeed not so important to be more attentive than the ordinary person, but to utilize this attention correctly. It is important that his attention has a position which it may not have in, say, a writer, etc.
Finally, from a differential and characterological perspective we must make a fundamental distinction between primary characterological connections which yield certain proportions, for example, a schizoid or cycloid constitution, and connections that develop completely differently and which distinguish the honest person from the dishonest, the honest from the deceitful, the dreamer from the business person. These do not reside in the fact that I am less tidy than you, or more deceitful than you, but in the development of a system of relations between the different functions that develop in ontogenesis. Lewin correctly says that the formation of psychological systems coincides with the development of personality.


Why all the emphasis on the brain, as this is a significant part of the hardware underpinning our behavior, the point being that it has some malleability in parts of it. The more recent parts of the brain which do not regulate so much specifically physiological functions like your breathing which keeps you alive and body functioning, can be more variable. This emphasis on the potential flexibility of human beings emphasizes the flexibility of our actions and behavior across many different contexts. One would be pushing themselves into a corner to try and explain the extreme adaptability of humans based simply on biological inheritance. THe flaw of evolutionary psychology is it’s sole emphasis on adaptationism as the genesis to heritable traits which can be universally found across cultures, the idea being control for cultural influence by showing that it occurs regardless of cultural differences. However many cultures use bowls, but this creation and use need not be explained by our biology but by another universal of gravity and the convenience of such a tool as bowl for food. Just as we do not genetically inherit a disposition on how to ride a bicycle.


Vygotskys account of how the interpersonal becomes intrapersonal, internal, and how we experience particular social relations rather than the entirety of the world, we come out as very distinct individuals due to not only our genetic dispositions but the experiences which effect them which do underpin but do not determine in themselves, tendencies in our behavior. Like I can alter a person’s behavior by how I change their physiology such as with hormones for example, perhaps make them more aggressive, but hormones do not directly cause aggression, because humans aren’t do not directly act on their physiology and can even oppose it. Think of the person who starves themselves in protest for some cause, or even because they’re a prisoner who is pissed off with their current conditions and how the Correctional Officers treat them. Such a strong physiological urge but it is resisted willfully. The is an expression of people’s freedom in what they can do, but we are not unrestrained, we exist within definite limits and those social limits are what help maintain institutional and habitual behaviors which makes social change difficult but change the social arrangements and you can change the tendencies of people’s behavior.

Consider how one might presume a woman’s biology somehow conflicts with the role of being a CEO.
https://pages.nyu.edu/jackson/future.of.gender/Readings/DownSoLong--WhyIsItSoHard.pdf
Consider another example showing how beliefs about sex differences cloud people's analytical vision. How often have we heard question like: will women who enter high-status jobs or political positions end up looking like men or will the result of their entry be a change in the way business and politics is conducted? Implicit in this question are a set of strong assumptions: men have essential personality characteristics and cultural orientations that have shaped the terrain of high status jobs and women have different essential personality characteristics and cultural orientations. The conclusion is that and women's entry into these positions unleashes a conflict between their feminine essence and the dominant masculine essence that has shaped the positions. Either the positions must change to adapt to women's distinctive characteristics or the women must become masculine. (It is perhaps telling that those who raise this issue usually seem concerned only with women entering high-status positions; it is unclear if women becoming factory workers are believed immune or unimportant.) The analytical flaw here i assuming that masculinity has shaped the character of jobs rather than that jobs have shaped masculinity. In her well-known book Men and Women of the Corporation, Rosabeth Kanter argued persuasively that the personality characteristics associated with male and female corporate employees really reflected the contours of their positions. The implication is simple and straightforward. Women who enter high-status positions will look about the same as men in those positions not because they are becoming masculine, but because they're adapting to the demands and opportunities of the position, just like men.

Or consider the idea that men are more sexual than women and thus more prone to infidelity.
http://leeds-faculty.colorado.edu/mcgrawp/PDF/Lammers.Stoker.Jordan.Pollmann.Stapel.2011.pdf
Third, we aimed to determine whether the power-infidelity link was as strong for women as for men. Many researchers have found that, overall, women are less likely than men to be unfaithful. This effect has been explained by the fact that for evolutionary reasons, women should be more oriented than men toward binding to one powerful partner in a stable relationship. Other researchers have proposed that this often found gender difference in infidelity is at least partly due to differences in the socioeconomic position of men and women. According to this proposal, if women were to obtain independent sources of income and power, their dependence on their partners would decrease, and their likelihood of being unfaithful would increase (Buller, 2005; Eagly & Wood, 1999; Smuts, 1992; Wood & Eagly, 2007).
Our findings clearly support this latter view. Gender did not moderate the effects we found. Among women who had an independent source of income (as all our female respondents did, because they were working professionals), power had a positive relationship with infidelity, and this relationship was comparable to that found among men. These findings were not likely caused by a statistical artifact; our sample was large and included similar numbers of men and women. If social desirability had affected the responses, it most likely would have suppressed responses more strongly for women than for men (Whisman & Snyder, 2007). It also seems unlikely that the observed effects are specific to the Dutch culture. Although The Netherlands is often seen as a liberal country in regard to sexual issues, most Dutch people find adultery unacceptable (Kraaykamp, 2002). According to the World Values Survey Association (2000), the opinion of the Dutch on adultery ranks 30th among the 47 countries investigated. The Dutch score, 2.7 on a 5-point scale ranging from unacceptable to acceptable, is similar to the scores of the Belgians, Germans, Canadians, Japanese, and Russians
Clearly, power increases infidelity among women, as it does among men. An emerging literature demonstrates that this is not an isolated finding; researchers studying the effect of (manipulated) power on participants’ attention to attractive individuals (Brady et al., 2011), tendency to overestimate the degree to which other people are sexually interested in them (Kunstman & Maner, 2011; Lerner, 2011), and sexual approach behaviors (Wilkey, 2011) have also found equally strong effects of power for women and for men. Together, these findings suggest that women in high-power positions are as likely to engage in infidelity as are men in high-power positions.

Attempts to explain such things out of biology are inadequate speculations that simply describe biological process and assert their connection to specific behaviors and then for evo. psych. makes a just so story of how it might’ve been adaptive. Which is no better than the state of nature idealized histories of the emerging liberal theorists which make no attempt to consider more empirically as well as logically how things proceeded, but present an idealized image.
#15171384
Wellsy wrote:Move it here as it's a huge post and feeling out of place for TLTE


This is a long long long post to flesh out my view, so I’ll quickly respond to some of the later comments.
I think you’ll be hard pressed to argue the innateness of talent, at best you can speak of certain things as a precondition for the prospect of excelling at things. This works best when one has a physiological advantage such as height in basketball. Let clear in the case of intelligence and mental operations where there is no clear brain abnormality.


People can inherit height, ability to run fast, eye color, hand eye coordination, and intelligence. People often say that high scores in college entrance exams correlate with rich neighborhoods and that low scores correlate with low income neighborhoods. They conclude that the high score in rich neighborhoods is due to more nurturing and that low scores are due to lack of nurturing. That may or may not be true. Nurturing has more of an impact when there is a high baseline of intellect. All the nurturing in the world cannot transform a very dumb person into a rocket scientist. One could also say that those that live in rich neighborhoods have parents that are more intelligent and thats is why they live in a better neighborhood. It is always a combination of nurturing and the environment, however the talent needs to be there to be nurtured. BTW, personality traits are inherited and modified by the environment.

In regards to people have things without effort, we should definitely take the wealth from the extremely rich who have redundant wealth as you say because it only causes them nihilism and despair hehe


Most self made billionaires are workaholics-----and they remain active once they had made a ton of money. So let's talk about the descendants of rich people. Kids that do not have a need to work to make it in this world. Kids with all the opportunities in the world to obtain a world class education or start a business on their own.

Affluent children are more prone to substance abuse, chronic depression, and low self-esteem, in frequent measure due to parental and household pressure. Parents who are wealthy and successful often expect the same from their kids, who can, in turn, interpret that the wrong way or place too much pressure on themselves.

Research conducted at the Family Institute at Northwestern University identified that, along with several other risk factors, affluent adolescents will likely face direct challenges to their development. Parents who hire expensive tutors place too much emphasis on results and not enough on the process. Affluent teens suffer from burnout and lose joy or interest in learning because of perceived pressure.

The Problem With Rich Kids
In a surprising switch, the offspring of the affluent today are more distressed than other youth. They show disturbingly high rates of substance use, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, cheating, and stealing. It gives a whole new meaning to having it all.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/arti ... -rich-kids
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog ... al%20means.

Indeed, being provided material things can not suffice in creating a meaningful life, it does not overcome alienation but what makes one think that socialism and communism is about the Wall-E-Esque technological fantasy of having every basic need met by a machine? As I quoted earlier, Marx emphasizes labor as the basis of our sense of belonging with one another, our very humanity and basis of everything that is definitively human. He isn’t anti-labor, but alienated, exploited labor. Life is clearly not made worse by providing the basic necessities to live comfortably and free to pursue things beyond basic survival.


Most jobs are a drag. Even rock stars that play music for a living find the work oppressive. The Beatles gave up touring, it was not fun anymore. A professional golfer, a person that plays a game for a living may find that the idea of perennial travel a drag. I have an incredibly interesting job and I continue to work past retirement age because i enjoy what i do. However, there are days when I don't want to get out of bed. I think it would not be surprising to see nihilism and destructive behavior if humans are provided with everything.


The goal of socialism is to actually help make life meaningful. What you’re characterizing can be summarized by this:

I am still waiting for that day. So far socialism has not worked because by definition it requires an authoritarian repressive government that curtails freedom.

This is a problem not specifically entailed with having material means but in fact can be prolific among those with great satisfaction of their basic needs. It is a nihilism for a person with no purpose, commitment, conviction or meaning other than their basic satisfactions, i.e. a mere consumer. The frictionlessness in which they get their need met in fact informs part of this ennui. Suprirsingly one finds a lot of suicide not necessarily just among the economically deprived, but across all socioeconomic standings.


I agree

But we certainly agree that a person who produces nothing is what he does, nothing. As such, the point for Marx is to do away with the relations which put profit above all else and actually allow the pursuit of human interests. The greatest things in life are undermined by money. Think about the industries that are primarily associated with creativity? Music and Film for example, they are undermined by a need to make money such that there is an extreme limitation imposed on what gets produced.

I do not disagree with this. But, many have no creativity and others will have to perform menial jobs that are alienating. Unless------ everything is automated and success is measured by creativity and productivity. That system will create a hierarchy of power and talent with some at the top, many in the middle, and quite a few at the bottom.

Many people who achieve greatness do so for the love of the very activity they’re engaged in, not the external rewards of status or money which are external precisely because they’re not essential to many tasks. As opposed to internal rewards which only come from actually performing that activity. This is where the real powerful part of human motivation comes in, the sort that can inspire incredible results from an energy that can perhaps burn to brightly for some. Such motivations are the sort of ideals which cause revolutions and other great sacrifices in an effort to change things, where they do not experience things as choice but their commitment feels like destiny, that they had to do it.


I have worked for myself and for an employer. My devotion to the job was exactly the same. I could be a great socialist! However, many only work hard if there is a reward. Otherwise, they do a shitty job. That is why West German engineers designed much better cars than East German engineers. BTW, in this instance they engineers likely had equal innate talent. 8)

I guess I might say a wolf, but then I’m not really sure as my dogs experience a lot less stress in trying to survive than a wolf. I think the analogy doesn’t quite fit in filling in the particulars of the alienation modern man experiences. In particular because the analogy would perhaps better fit my summary in regards to the pet with its needs met is more like my person whose basic needs are materially met but they have a meaningless life still. As opposed to your characterization of the poor ending up nihilistic if they were provide assistance in basic living conditions.


A wolf is free.
A domesticated dog is not free.


I agree, there isn't a blank slate/tabula rasa.
Again, your example merely asserts the difference is based on genetics where in fact my position isn't the idea that everyone is quantitatively equal but that such differences are in fact based in experience.
And referring to Sapolsky, there are significant environmental differences even for twins when considering the environmental influence upon genetics.
https://www.robertsapolskyrocks.com/behavioral-genetics.html

This doesn't negate genetic influence but emphasizes the inseperability in excluding environmental influence, it's an attempt to abstract someone out of existence for a pure biology which is impossible. It can lend some credence to the role of genetics but the difficulty is in the causal complexity of the environment's effect ton genetics such that genes can not be seen in a clear unicausal manner. They do all sorts of crazy shit, even shifting around.
https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/barbara-mcclintock-and-the-discovery-of-jumping-34083/


As I said above. The subject must have some innate talent so it can be molded by the environment. Tiger Woods was nurtured by his dad, but Tiger had
massive innate talent. There are lots of kids who received much more nurturing than Tiger and went nowhere.

Indeed it doesn't determine the genes you have but it can most certainly effect their 'expression', this is the point in which there is a focus on epigenetics to avoid a crude genetic determinism.
For Marxist's, along with Marx, there is a universal biological basis to being a human being which in its development undergoes significant changes to the base physiological processes into 'cultured' or higher psychological functions which changes their quality through the mediation of cultural artefacts, training or conditioning one's body to particular stimuli and so on.

The point here being that not only are we heavily shaped by environmental influences upon genetic expression setting the tendencies of ourselves, similarly we increasingly shape the environment purposely to achieve our own ends and are such aren't simply helpless to the influence of the environment upon our decision making or necessary our genes.


There is such a thing as Memes. Like genes memes are passed down from generation to generation and have profound influence on behavior.

A meme (/miːm/ MEEM)[1][2][3] is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme.[4] A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.[ WIKI

A meme explains why an American of Italian ancestry has different mannerisms that an American of German ancestry.

This is a great example in showing how humans do have free will as self-determining through the mediation of artefacts which we create conditioned responses in much the same way we may be behaviorally conditioned like Pavlovl’s dog, except we intentionally create such conditions for our own purposes. This resolves the issue of free will as compatible with biological necessity on the individual level inline with Marx’s emphasis on man changing himself by changing his environment, but instead of a social focus on forces of production and social relations, here it’s in the individual’s decision making in resolving a conflict of motives on what to do. And the following is interesting is that it points out that we freely create a conditioned response which we then follow as automatically and unfreely as a conditioned response which we did not intentionally create such as cravings for sugar perhaps.


I don't believe we really have free will. Our brain is a computer with complex software. A great analyst could easily predict how we behave.


And here I would emphasize that where one sees the most change are in more mental rather than physiological functioning which most certainly is difficult to alter directly, although can be managed indirectly. The concern being that physical limitations are not synonymous with mental limitations nor in their development, where we can clearly see the advantage of certain body types in different olympic sports. However, such limitations such as being too short to being in the NBA doesn’t directly translate to limitations of the mind in every case where a person is lacking.


Every person has a talent another person does not have. That is the beauty of diversity, we are not equal. BTW, identical twins often achieve differently according to nurturing.

I will finish the post tomorrow
#15171725
Julian658 wrote:People can inherit height, ability to run fast, eye color, hand eye coordination, and intelligence. People often say that high scores in college entrance exams correlate with rich neighborhoods and that low scores correlate with low income neighborhoods. They conclude that the high score in rich neighborhoods is due to more nurturing and that low scores are due to lack of nurturing. That may or may not be true. Nurturing has more of an impact when there is a high baseline of intellect. All the nurturing in the world cannot transform a very dumb person into a rocket scientist. One could also say that those that live in rich neighborhoods have parents that are more intelligent and thats is why they live in a better neighborhood. It is always a combination of nurturing and the environment, however the talent needs to be there to be nurtured. BTW, personality traits are inherited and modified by the environment.

Do note how your examples of heritability do mostly consist of physiological features, which as I say are quite significant in performing certain tasks.
I would also like to clarify that heritability does not denote the specific genetic material which is transferred as there is a focus on variability between persons in their traits, not necessary a comparison of their genetics, as that is expensive and timely as heck. Dealing with biology at that level is very easy to fuck up after spending years in the lab.
Summary of Sapolsky's lecture explaining this point...
https://www.robertsapolskyrocks.com/behavioral-genetics-ii.html
Heritability does not mean it's genetic. What heritability means is that the impact persists in different environments and is independent of those environments. He runs through a variety of examples that demonstrate how little can be considered truly heritable since changes in the environment will produce a change in the behavior. When it comes to human behavioral genetics, very little is deterministic because environmental changes carry so much weight in how the person develops.

He states it's not about the trait itself but rather the amount of variability around the trait. This sounds complicated until you pause and realize it's really the same thing. If you have a heritable trait for brown hair, it can't bloody well be heritable if your kids have black and red hair (too much variability). It can only be heritable if they have brown hair and the shades of brown very close to the original. Once environment is able to push the range too wide, the trait is no longer strictly heritable but rather reflects the interaction of genes and environment.

The hay-maker here is that the vast majority of "scientific" studies demand that you control for the environment. Thus, heritability has wobbly knees. It is biased toward the genetic influence appearing more important than it is.

The counter to this is that environment doesn't usually vary that drastically (think niche) and it's more realistic to control for it. This is as weak an argument as can be proposed when you recognize that if the environment has to be controlled for so that its effects don't throw off the results, you've pretty much already lost the genetically determined hypothesis.

The conclusion is simply and unalterably this: It is impossible to say what a gene does. You can only say what a gene does within the environments that it's been studied in to date.

Because heritability is a measure of variation, the fact that nearly everyone has 10 fingers to start with creates no variability in the number of fingers you have, and thus no heritability of the trait (which is 100% from your genes). However, wearing earrings in the 1950's in the US was universally common among women and verboten among men, so the heritability ends up being 100% since the one genetic factor, female or male, accounts for all of the variation.

Another example is PKU, which relates to a genetic disorder in which the body cannot break down phenylaline. It builds up to toxic levels and there you are. On the face of it this would be a 100% heritable disease since the initial comparison question "Would you rather know where this person lives or if they have a genetic mutation?" points to the gene side. But these days foods are labeled when they have phenylaline, and thus knowing where someone is living can be as powerful of an indicator as genes. Again heritability is only heritability within an environment. Remove phenylaline and the person doesn't have the problem. Remove racism, social distinctions, abuse, nutrient deficiency and you may also not have the problem.

He next puts up a chart that we'll see often - it's the bad gene + bad experiences graph. Have a bad gene and your odds go up a bit, but have both the bad gene and the bad experiences and the rate goes through the roof. Stress hormones, including glucocorticoids, play a big role in this process as they are activated and interact with the genes in question, thus providing a synergistic effect.

Math, "at which men are better than women", when actually studied in the context of gender equality within the society, does not demonstrate an inequality on the average. Instead, the greater the level of gender inequality, the greater the difference in math skills on the whole. The worst profile went to Turkey, Tunisia and South Korea. The US was in the middle. Our utopian Scandanavians were the best. In Iceland, the girls bested the boys.

In the US the gap at the high end has narrowed from 13:1 to 3:1 in the last twenty years.

Women continue to hold an edge in the verbal side, both in the worst places and the best, with the advantage increasing as the social equality level goes up.

He closes by noting some caveats about behavioral genetics. Environmental effects and modulating effects, intermediaries and whatnot. In the end, he suggests that a lot of what we see in neural freedom suggests that what's coded for is freedom from the constraints of controlled genetic behaviors more so than coding for genetically determined traits. Most any "genetic" trait will be expressed differently when the environment changes.

It pretty much captures my emphasis on the inseparability of environment and genetics, because there is too much interplay going on that a real study of such things doesn't necessarily try to restrict the influence but is more targetted in what it controls for and what is abstracted in analysis.

And the emphasis on things like wealth aren't necessarily a direct point on nurturing, I've seen studies which say you can close the literacy gap between children from poor and uneducated families with those from well off families based on how actively involved the parent is in school activities and the student's education. However, having a lower SES could contribute to not having the same conditions in which to be involved. So it can have a indirect effect in that regard of undermining the family unit, however some people bust their ass to make sure their kids get an education.
The other side however though is accessibility of a decent education, where in the U.S. funding is heavily dependent on local taxes and often results in an inequitable distribution of funding which reflects the status quo of the wealth of families in different neighborhoods. Which a policy recommendation is that when you switch the tax revenue for schools in districts in particular neighborhoods to extending the collection of school revenue to the entire county, you generally get a more equitable allocation of funding.

I definitely agree, early life is huge predictor of the rest of your life, got a lot going on in terms of experiences, and health through nutrition and what sort of home environment you have in fostering your temperament to be a healthy or psychologically stable one. Some smart people lose out because of emotional issues, a lot of students perform poorly because like an athelet that can't hack the pressure, they have poor emotional regulation and perhaps a stressful home life.

I agree with you up to a point in that there are savant and kid geniuses which seem to contradict the evidence of training and support. Have someone like Chris Langan who has a huge IQ but has pretty much being a blue collar worker all his life. However, as smart as he is, his upbringing seems to have hindered his potential a great deal because he has emotional issues and doesn't have the connections that someone with a less IQ might have but is able to do more given better opportunities.
On the other hand, while there can be a limiting factor on someones potential, it is also the case that it's not clear to what extent their potential development may be if they're not in the best conditions either. Wasted potential being the concept here. Where one might seek to blame inherent limitations on biology where it may be that there isn't an adequate environment to support success.

So I would say that can clearly call the kid savant talented, having an ability that simply defies any sense of training and environment. In the vein of Good Will Hunting, genius ability but no real support or opportunity until some professor wants to push him into a line of work with him.
However, on the other side, we do have extremes cases where one pushes children to great success through intense influence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r#:~:text=The%20experiment%20began%20in%201970,to%20home%2Dschool%20the%20girls.
In 1992, Polgár told the Washington Post: "A genius is not born but is educated and trained….When a child is born healthy, it is a potential genius."[2]

In 1965 Polgár "conducted an epistolary courtship with a Ukrainian foreign language teacher named Klara." In his letters, he outlined the pedagogical project he had in mind. In reading those biographies, he had "identified a common theme—early and intensive specialization in a particular subject." Certain that "he could turn any healthy child into a prodigy," he "needed a wife willing to jump on board."
...
Polgár began teaching his eldest daughter, Susan, to play chess when she was four years old. "Six months later, Susan toddled into Budapest's smoke-filled chess club," which was crowded with elderly men, and proceeded to beat the veteran players. "Soon thereafter, she dominated the city's girls-under-age-11 tournament with a perfect score."[5] Judit was able to defeat her father at chess when she was just five.[9] "For me, learning chess was natural; with my sisters around me, I wanted to play," said Judit in 2008.[8]
...
In 2012, Judit told an interviewer about the "very special atmosphere" in which she had grown up. "In the beginning, it was a game. My father and mother are exceptional pedagogues who can motivate and tell it from all different angles. Later, chess for me became a sport, an art, a science, everything together. I was very focused on chess and happy with that world. I was not the rebelling and going out type. I was happy that at home we were in a closed circle and then we went out playing chess and saw the world. It's a very difficult life and you have to be very careful, especially the parents, who need to know the limits of what you can and can't do with your child. My parents spent most of their time with us; they traveled with us [when we played abroad], and were in control of what was going on. With other prodigies, it might be different. It is very fragile. But I'm happy that with me and my sisters it didn't turn out in a bad way." A reporter for the Guardian noted that while "top chess players can be dysfunctional", Judit was "relaxed, approachable and alarmingly well balanced," having managed "to juggle a career in competitive chess with having two young children, running a chess foundation in Hungary, writing books and developing educational programs based on chess."[10]

While Polgár taught the girls the game, his wife took care of the home and later "coordinated their travels to tournaments in 40 countries." His daughter Susan said in a 2005 interview, "My father believes that innate talent is nothing, that [success] is 99 percent hard work." She also described Polgár as "a visionary" who "always thinks big" and who "thinks people can do a lot more than they actually do." Although Polgár was criticized in some quarters for encouraging his daughters to focus so intensely on chess, the girls later said that they had enjoyed it all. Polgár "once found Sophia in the bathroom in the middle of the night, a chessboard balanced across her knees." "Sophia, leave the pieces alone!" he told her. "Daddy, they won't leave me alone!" she replied.[5]

Polgár's daughters all became excellent chess players, but Sophia, the least successful of the three, who became the sixth-best woman player in the world, quit playing and went on to study painting and interior design and to focus on being a housewife and mother. Judit has been described as "without a doubt, the best woman chess player the world has ever seen."[5] As of 2008, she had been "the world’s highest-ranked female chess player for nearly 20 years."[8] Susan, who became second-best woman chess player in the world, was, at age 17, the first woman ever to qualify for what was then called the 'Men's World Championship',[dubious – discuss] but the world chess federation, FIDE, would not allow her to participate.[5][better source needed]

So we see how they qualify at the start that they're born healthy, this is the same point with Ilyenkov, most people do not have such an extreme abnormality of the brain that they're inherently limited by in the way a physical limitation sets clear difficulties on ability without some proper kind of compensatory device or environmental design.
But here the emphasis is on the conditions which shape to realize that potential, a lot of potential may not be realized.
And that in itself isn't terrible because there is a gamble int trying to realize one's potential. Many kids who may train early on in a sport may teeter out as not as good at it as other kids and so they don't have a viable career path in the sport.
ANd when we think of the best athletes they epitomize not only that they have potential but they are extremely hard working. They have perhaps physiological advantages like Lebon James is a freak because he is both huge but extremely fast for his size. But as one of the best athletes in the NBA, he also approaches his job as an athlete at an incredibly intense level where it's not just about taking care of his body, but how to properly regulate emotions and mindset as any good athlete must stand the pressures constantly on them.
Now not anyone could become Lebron James or even Michael Jordan, but they both epitomize that even their extreme limits of ability require extreme effort and maintenance. People talk about how intense Michael Jordans training was, the idea being that you do all the hard work in training.

The other example being how someone with great potential may not realize it at all on the basis of inadequate conditions, perhaps they showed great promise but it'll never be known what they might've done because they pursued a different life course or they didn't have the opportunities to achieve it.
So I imagine we do have some sense that there is the combination but the limits are of course variable.

Most self made billionaires are workaholics-----and they remain active once they had made a ton of money. So let's talk about the descendants of rich people. Kids that do not have a need to work to make it in this world. Kids with all the opportunities in the world to obtain a world class education or start a business on their own.

Affluent children are more prone to substance abuse, chronic depression, and low self-esteem, in frequent measure due to parental and household pressure. Parents who are wealthy and successful often expect the same from their kids, who can, in turn, interpret that the wrong way or place too much pressure on themselves.

Research conducted at the Family Institute at Northwestern University identified that, along with several other risk factors, affluent adolescents will likely face direct challenges to their development. Parents who hire expensive tutors place too much emphasis on results and not enough on the process. Affluent teens suffer from burnout and lose joy or interest in learning because of perceived pressure.

The Problem With Rich Kids
In a surprising switch, the offspring of the affluent today are more distressed than other youth. They show disturbingly high rates of substance use, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, cheating, and stealing. It gives a whole new meaning to having it all.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/arti ... -rich-kids
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog ... al%20means.

Life can be plenty bleak even for the affluent. It scares me for my daughter and emphasizes the need to create meaningful relationships for them so that their life isn't merely consuming things but experiences shared with others.
http://rickroderick.org/304-marcuse-and-one-dimensional-man-1993/
Now, I have read about many historical periods. But not one in which you can talk to young people the way you can at the college level today, and find out that they believe… nothing. Want… nothing. Hope… nothing. Expect… nothing. Dream… nothing. Desire… nothing. Push ’em far enough and they’ll say: “Yeah, I gotta get a job. Spent a lot of money at Duke.” That’s not what I am talking about here. They hope nothing. Expect nothing. Dream nothing. Desire nothing.

And it is a fair question to ask whether a society that produces this reaction in its young is worthy of existence at all. It really is. It’s worth asking that. Whether it’s worth being here at all. And my criticism of this society couldn’t get more bitter than it is in that case. It couldn’t possibly be. Remember, I am talking about the young I have encountered at Duke. These are privileged youth. At an elite southern school. Mostly white, mostly upper-middle to upper class. Now, imagine what the attitudes are like on the streets of DC if you are from another race or another social class.



Most jobs are a drag. Even rock stars that play music for a living find the work oppressive. The Beatles gave up touring, it was not fun anymore. A professional golfer, a person that plays a game for a living may find that the idea of perennial travel a drag. I have an incredibly interesting job and I continue to work past retirement age because i enjoy what i do. However, there are days when I don't want to get out of bed. I think it would not be surprising to see nihilism and destructive behavior if humans are provided with everything.

Well an issue with rockstars can even be that they get pumped by their managers and record labels to compromise on all sorts of things and worker harder and harder.
Certainly wears on one even just to be gigging on the road all the time and playing multiple shows in one day even. But there are always the monontous parts of work, however a job as a musician can still have a carved out space for creativity when they're not working like a workhorse on stage.
I however would emphasize how we work more than ever before and it takes up so much of your life that its easier for it to be a drag as you is most of your life everyday.
It's not really broken up and you may be pushed harder than you're comfortable with sustaining for a long period of time because of the type of work pressures that come or even the need to be simply 'efficient' and meet the necessary levels of production to be competitive in the case of private companies.
Some jobs have a better flow, than others.
On the other hand there can be monotony in working int he same field for so many years. Which is less the case for many people who are unlikely to have such stable work necessarily as their own parents.

However, what would be undermined in providing things is the pressure that most workers experience in the need to work to get money to provide for their needs such as paying rent or a mortgage, maintaining car and fuel, feeding the family and so on that are ongoing costs. If you can survive without having to work then yeah, a lot of people may not go to work some days.
In fact, in experiments of providing things though, you do find that many who are working just to get by do take time off such as students and mothers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200624-canadas-forgotten-universal-basic-income-experiment
One of the things we do know from the Mincome experiment is that basic income does not appear to discourage the recipients from working – one of the major concerns politicians have always held about such schemes. Forget found that employment rates in Dauphin stayed the same throughout the four years of Mincome, while a recent trial in Finland – which provided more than 2,000 unemployment people with a monthly basic income of 560 euros ($630, £596) from 2017 to 2019 – found that this helped many of them to find work which provided greater economic security.

However, people do want to work, because life is meaningless without some purpose and there can be positive feedback in seeing the results of your own work. Something to take pride in.
See the point about motivation, money is a great motivator when you need to have basic needs met. When you no longer worry about those needs, then what motivates you has to be something different inherent to the type of work.


I worked with inmates in a substance abuse program and if they completed the program they could have a few months taken off of their sentence, but it was a long program and many couldn't hack it as they weren't adjusted to sustained effort in their chaotic lives and drug dependence. I would talk to them about how they might be motivated to get that time off their sentence, but at the same time if they do not really enjoy the program, they're going to find each and everyday an utter drag. So what they need to find is a balance between the external reward of a reduced sentence, among finding something inherent to the program that they find worthwhile.
JUst as I explained that I enjoyed my job both because of it's actual nature, working with the inmates and counselling, along with the wage I was receiving. I wouldn't do the job for nothing, but I also would choose that job over others with similar pay because I enjoyed it.
So there is a satisfaction in balancing a decent wage with a job that you actually enjoy. And enjoyment isn't constant pleasure, but that there are enough moments that make it worthwhile like seeing co-workers you like or clients, being able to do tasks well and smoothly. It's taking pride in one's work.


I am still waiting for that day. So far socialism has not worked because by definition it requires an authoritarian repressive government that curtails freedom.

Freedom is left quite vague here because ideas of freedom have very specific content in different conceptions of it. There is of course a particular function in maintaining the status quo.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/macintyre2.pdf
Maintenance of the illusion of “objectivity” is essential, and MacIntyre sees the
universities as playing a crucial role in the maintenance of this illusion. Since
academics rely for their livelihood on disproving each other’s theories, the
resulting interminable and esoteric debate continuously re-establishes the
impossibility of consensus.

“In the course of history liberalism, which began as an appeal to
alleged principles of shared rationality against what was felt to be
the tyranny of tradition, has itself been transformed into a tradition
whose continuities are partly defined by the interminability of the
debate over such principles. An interminability which was from the
standpoint of an earlier liberalism a grave defect to be remedied as
soon as possible has become, in the eyes of some liberals at least, a
kind of virtue”. (p. 335)

Far from this failure to find any firm ground undermining liberalism, MacIntyre
believes that it reinforces it, because one of the fundamental bases for liberalism
is the conviction that no comprehensive idea (to use Rawls’ term) can enjoy
majority, let alone unanimous, support. This then justifies the ban on
governments pursuing the general good.

“Any conception of the human good according to which, for
example, it is the duty of government to educate the members of the
community morally, ... will be proscribed. ... liberal individualism
does indeed have its own broad conception of the good, which it is
engaged in imposing politically, legally, socially, and culturally
wherever it has the power to do so, but also that in doing so its
toleration of rival conceptions of the good in the public arena is
severely limited.” (p. 336)

Such a ban on governments pursuing the social good of course serves a very
definite social interest.

“The weight given to an individual preference in the market is a
matter of the cost which the individual is able and willing to pay;
only so far as an individual has the means to bargain with those who
can supply what he or she needs does the individual have an
effective voice. So also in the political and social realm it is the
ability to bargain that is crucial. The preferences of some are
accorded weight by others only insofar as the satisfaction of those
preferences will lead to the satisfaction of their own preferences.
Only those who have something to give get. The disadvantaged in a
liberal society are those without the means to bargain.” (p. 336)
and consequently,

“The overriding good of liberalism is no more and no less than the
continued sustenance of the liberal social and political order”. (p.
345)

In each of the historical settings that MacIntyre investigates, he is able to show
that the type of justice and the type of rationality which appears to the
philosophical spokespeople of the community to be necessary and universal,
turns out to be a description of the type of citizens of the community in
question. Accordingly, the justice of liberalism and the rationality of liberalism
is simply that justice and that rationality of the “citizens of nowhere” (p. 388),
the “outsiders,” people lacking in any social obligation or any reason for acting
other than to satisfy their desires and to defend the conditions under which they
are able to continue satisfying their desires. Their rationality is therefore that of
the objects of their desire.

The idea here is that liberalism and such is about the sense of freedom in terms of consumptive desires but not necessarily freedom to change the very conditions in which we realize our desires i.e. never to question capitalist relations which itself has elements of unfreedom for the worker.
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/10867/1/VWills_ETD_2011.pdf
The implementation of such a genuine, substantive freedom of course would require
“despotic inroads117 on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production,”
something Marx already wrote earlier, in The Communist Manifesto (Manifesto of the
Communist Party, MECW 6:504). It would neither be a realization of bourgeois freedom nor
would it even be commensurate with, or justifiable on the basis of, bourgeois freedom and
equality, even as it is bourgeois production which makes this substantive freedom first possible.

In the reformist struggles of workers under capitalism, we see a first inkling of how this
genuine, substantive freedom comes into conflict with formal, bourgeois freedom. In the first
volume of Capital, Marx writes:

"It must be acknowledged that our labourer comes out of the process of production other than he
entered. In the market he stood as owner of the commodity “labour-power” face to face with other
owners of commodities, dealer against dealer. The contract by which he sold to the capitalist his
labour-power proved, so to say, in black and white that he disposed of himself freely. The bargain
concluded, it is discovered that he was no “free agent,” that the time for which he is free to sell his
labour-power is the time for which he is forced to sell it, that in fact the vampire will not lose its hold on him “so long as there is a muscle, a nerve, a drop of blood to be exploited.” For
“protection” against “the serpent of their agonies,” the labourers must put their heads together,
and, as a class, compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier that shall prevent the
very workers from selling. by voluntary contract with capital, themselves and their families into
slavery and death. In place of the pompous catalogue of the “inalienable rights of man” comes the
modest Magna Charta of a legally limited working day, which shall make clear “when the time
which the worker sells is ended, and when his own begins.” Quantum mutatus ab illo! [What a
great change from that time! – Virgil]." (Capital, MECW 35:306)

In Capital, as in the Grundrisse, we see that the worker's freedom to enter into a contract and to dispose of his labor-power as he wills is only an illusory freedom, and that he was never in this transaction a totally “free agent” at all because he is not simply free to sell his labor-power or not, but rather is compelled to sell it if he wishes to live. That compulsion makes the worker susceptible to the most brutal working conditions. Thus, the first step in bringing about substantive freedom from oppressive working conditions and exploitative relations of production is for workers to combine together and push for laws that actually curtail the abstract freedom granted to them in bourgeois society. These measures on the part of workers are vehemently opposed by the bourgeoisie:

"The same bourgeois mind which praises division of labour in the workshop, life-long annexation of the labourer to a partial operation, and his complete subjection to capital, as being an organisation of labour that increases its productiveness, that same bourgeois mind denounces with equal vigour every conscious attempt to socially control and regulate the process of production, as an inroad upon such sacred things as the rights of property, freedom and unrestricted play for the bent of the individual capitalist." (Capital, MECW 35:361)
...
Bourgeois opposition to the attempts of workers to exert social control on production further reveals the practical contradiction between formal bourgeois freedom and the real freedom workers struggle for within capitalism, in struggles that necessarily point beyond capitalism for just this reason. While the capitalist defends “sacred” bourgeois freedom, he is at the same time also perfectly willing to defend the real unfreedom of the worker, the “complete subjection” of the laborer to capital.

However, in regards to the realization of socialism, yeah it transferred the alienation of work into the entirety of social life under the state apparatus in the USSR for example. It failed but whether this is a condemnation as the impossibility of socialism is another matter. There is a clear ideological interest in foreclosing that it has potential to be something more than what the USSR was in it's own limitations, thus generalizing things which may or may not be essential and not really discussed in any detail because it's only a vague cold war point rather than a real analysis in showing as much.

I do not disagree with this. But, many have no creativity and others will have to perform menial jobs that are alienating. Unless------ everything is automated and success is measured by creativity and productivity. That system will create a hierarchy of power and talent with some at the top, many in the middle, and quite a few at the bottom.

Indeed many people will have to be humble enough to perform some basic tasks, but the idea is that when the entirety of your day doesn't have to be spend labouring for a wage, you can engage in a multitude of work alongside work that is valuable. The idea being to break the tie to one mode of activity for one's existence in the division of labor.

For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”
- Karl Marx

The idea being that one breaks the socially necessary labor time which conditions us to produce in increasingly efficient ways for profit rather than for human need.
https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2014/07/02/indirectly-social-labor/
Marx lays out, briefly, a way to make labor directly social, breaking with capitalist value production, in his Critique of the Gotha program. In Marx’s concept of directly social labor he advocates a system which breaks with the disciplining of production by socially necessary labor time. Producers in this post-capitalist society will not be compensated according to the social average but instead compensated directly for the actual amount of labor time they expend in production. If I spend 2 hours making a widget I get a labor-certificate entitling me to purchase consumption goods equal to two hours of labor. If you spend 3 hours making the same widget you get a certificate entitling you to 3 hours of consumption goods. Regardless of productivity our labors are directly social because they are compensated in full, considered part of the total labor of society, no matter what.11

Careful readers may ask how such a society would determine the labor-content of consumption goods (the ‘prices’ at which workers ‘buy’ them with their labor-certificates) in the absence of socially necessary labor time. This calculation would be based on the average social labor-time that it took to make a commodity. The calculation could be done simply by adding up all of the concrete labor times that go into making widgets and dividing this by the number of widgets. Such a calculation would allow society to continue to make production plans and to ‘price’ commodities. But the compensation of laborers would not be done through such a process of averaging. So such a system would not eliminate the role of average labor time as an accounting unit. What it would eliminate is the role of average time in the compensation of workers.12

Earlier we used a similar example of a Wallmart executive finding the average cost of of producing a commodity to set the price of the commodity. This example demonstrated how this process of averaging, which determines the socially necessary labor time, erases all particularity of workers, treating individuals only as units of average labor time, as abstract labor. Here, in our example of a communist society with directly social labor, we also see an example of the ‘prices’ of goods being calculated through a similar calculation of average labor time. What is the difference between these two examples? The difference is that Wallmart pays the same price for all of the commodities it buys from suppliers and those suppliers in turn only pay workers to the extent that they can produce at the social average. Any wasted time is not compensated. This creates an incentive for speed-up, exploitation, and the domination of machines over humans in production. In our communist society workers are compensated for the actual amount of time they labor, not just the part that achieves the average. This means that their labor is directly social. The immediate practical implications of this are that there is not an incentive for speed-up and so machines do not loom over production demanding more and more life from the worker.

To execute such an organization of labor it would be necessary for production to be owned and planned by society and not by individual capitals competing in the market. A society of directly social labor would entail different property relations and a different organization of production. In such a system labor-certificates would not circulate independently as money nor would alternative monies emerge spontaneously. This elimination of money would not be the result of political fiat. It would be a result of the organization of the mode of production. Directly social labor has no need for money. Money does not have a role in measuring socially necessary labor time. There is no need for a money commodity to measure the abstract labor content of commodities. The products of labor do not function as commodities with values. Without money and commodities there is no capital.

Basically, need to do away with the appropriation of value to another class and make everyone a worker who is compensated in full for their labor but not directly with the products of their labor but in a similar means of exchange where one has access to the means of life but without not mediated by money.
At least this is my approximation of how it is theorized.
I have worked for myself and for an employer. My devotion to the job was exactly the same. I could be a great socialist! However, many only work hard if there is a reward. Otherwise, they do a shitty job. That is why West German engineers designed much better cars than East German engineers. BTW, in this instance they engineers likely had equal innate talent. 8)

Indeed many may slack and so on, but to properly assess motivation one needs to consider more than the individual but the individual within their social relations.


A wolf is free.
A domesticated dog is not free.

Except I don't like the connotations of freedom from society inherent in the analogy as our freedom is always tied to other people. YOu may be thinking of freedom limited to people not standing in your way, basically the liberal idea as freedom from interference, however, your ability to do many things is entirely dependent on the social relations around you.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/
However, pushing matters deeper, in an argument reinvented by innumerable critics of liberalism, Marx argues that not only is political emancipation insufficient to bring about human emancipation, it is in some sense also a barrier. Liberal rights and ideas of justice are premised on the idea that each of us needs protection from other human beings who are a threat to our liberty and security. Therefore, liberal rights are rights of separation, designed to protect us from such perceived threats. Freedom on such a view, is freedom from interference. What this view overlooks is the possibility—for Marx, the fact—that real freedom is to be found positively in our relations with other people. It is to be found in human community, not in isolation. Accordingly, insisting on a regime of liberal rights encourages us to view each other in ways that undermine the possibility of the real freedom we may find in human emancipation.

Liberalism is somewhat anti-social in this regard as it reflects the desire of a capitalist to be free from interference in their matters of production. However, this can be taken to an absurdity where one wants to act like the pursuit of one's individual desires has no bearing or implications on others. Such an attitude doesn't fly within a family for example where there are dependents, rather we abhor those who do not take the responsibility of caring for their kids and one another as even parasitic, taking but not giving back.


As I said above. The subject must have some innate talent so it can be molded by the environment. Tiger Woods was nurtured by his dad, but Tiger had
massive innate talent. There are lots of kids who received much more nurturing than Tiger and went nowhere.

I agree in the sense that they have potential, but what is talent referring to here? Because I could see it as not really specifying anything except the potential of something to be realized. As such it doesn't exist at all except as a possibility so what is talent then but the possibility of being able to do something exceptionally? It's not something already internal to the person but must be achieved otherwise how do we differentiate the person who had great potential but never achieved it with the person who does achieve it?
It seems to me to be retrospective in that we consider talented those who have proven in their actions to be talented already. There's a risk in betting on anyone to be able to achieve something and one might have an idea of what improve sth possibility but there are no such guarantees.
Consider this example.
https://iep.utm.edu/moralluc/
illiams begins the drive towards this dilemma by focusing on rational justification rather than moral justification. The cornerstone of his argument is the claim that rational justification is a matter of luck to some extent. He uses a thought experiment to make this point. Williams presents us with a story based loosely on the life of the painter Paul Gauguin. Williams’ Gauguin feels some responsibility towards his family and is reasonably happy living with them, but nonetheless abandons them, leaving them in dire straits. He does so in an attempt to become a great painter. He goes to live on a South Sea Island, believing that living in a more primitive environment will allow him to develop his gifts as a painter more fully. How can we tell whether Gauguin’s decision to do this is rationally justified? We should ask first of all, what exactly Williams means by “rational justification.” He never says, but he seems interested in the question of whether Gauguin was epistemically justified in thinking that acting as he did would increase his chances of becoming a great painter. That is, the question is whether it was rational (given Gauguin’s interests) for him to do as he did.

Williams rightly observes that it is effectively impossible to foresee whether Gauguin will succeed in his attempt to become a great painter. Even if, prior to making his decision, Gauguin had good reason to think he had considerable artistic talent, he could not be sure what would come of that talent, nor whether the decision to leave his family would help or hinder the development of that talent. In the end, says Williams, “the only thing that will justify his choice will be success itself” (1993a, p. 38). Similarly, Williams claims the only thing that could show Gauguin to be rationally unjustified is failure. Since success depends, to some extent anyway, on luck, Williams’ claim entails that rational justification depends, at least in some cases, on luck.




There is such a thing as Memes. Like genes memes are passed down from generation to generation and have profound influence on behavior.

A meme (/miːm/ MEEM)[1][2][3] is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme.[4] A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.[ WIKI

A meme explains why an American of Italian ancestry has different mannerisms that an American of German ancestry.

The meme thing seems to be captured by my point of referntialism that it simply describes what is clearly observable b ut doesn't actually explain any mechanism by which the observable occurs. It is as explanatory as the language acquisition device proposed by Chomsky, or the concept of eruptability explaining why volcanoes erupt.
Richar d Feynman was great in explaining that knowing the name or word fo something doesn't constitute knowledge, it is arbitrary and sometimes people can be fooled by the use of words in this very way as suggesting knowledge of something.
However this is a step above as its based on something which is now and not purely an arbitrary relation between a name and thing.

I rather like the CUltural Historical Activity theories own analysis on the mediation of culture through material artefacts and activities/practices. You don't come to know things except through participating in them.

I don't believe we really have free will. Our brain is a computer with complex software. A great analyst could easily predict how we behave.

Then you simply reduce humans to a computer for a lack of distinction between a computer and person.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/Psychology_and_the_Zeitgeist.pdf
A fine series of treatments of the role of tools in the formation of psychology as a science
begins with a history of psychological instruments by Horst Grundlach, showing how much the
formation and recognition of psychology as a discipline owes to psychological instruments, as
objectifications of psychological practices. Giergerenzer and Sturm take this idea further. With an
historical investigation, firstly of the use of statistics, and then of computers, as tools in
psychology, the authors show how familiarity with a tool in the psychologists’ work leads to the
adoption of the tool as a metaphor for the human mind. One of the benefits which flows from this
observation is to open up lines of critique of current theories by looking at the limitations of the
tool and at the differing strengths and weaknesses as compared to real minds.

The part played by brain-imaging tools is then placed in historical context. Roth, Münte and Heinze report on early progress in mapping correlations between activity in different areas of the brain with affective-emotional states. Rainer Bösel reports on early progress with imaging cognitive processes, and despite challenging shortfalls in spatial and temporal localization, hopes that ‘in the end, it should be possible to describe human behavior and consciousness based on the functioning of 20 billion cortical neurons’. But with no little irony, Michael Hagner responds with a history of devices claiming to image thoughts from the 19th century to the present. These products of science fiction symbolize visions of the omnipotence of modern science. But a thought is not a brain fibre, and Hagner complains that for some brain researchers “the neuronal chatter is real, and the thoughts are in the realm of fantasy.” (p. 301) Thought reflects an outside world, but neurons communicate only with one another, not with the outside world, and no representation of the outside world can be found within them.

Basically its a narrow focuses on biological processes which is unable to conceptualize a sell determining free will as mediated by objects as already outlined by Vygotsky.


Every person has a talent another person does not have. That is the beauty of diversity, we are not equal. BTW, identical twins often achieve differently according to nurturing.

I will finish the post tomorrow[/quote] Indeed the diversity of how people can flourish is great, but people should be supported in such development, not confined to what helps them earn a job because its profitable. At least that's the ideal end of communism, people who can engage in a multitude of activities.
#15171736
Wellsy wrote:Do note how your examples of heritability do mostly consist of physiological features, which as I say are quite significant in performing certain tasks.
I would also like to clarify that heritability does not denote the specific genetic material which is transferred as there is a focus on variability between persons in their traits, not necessary a comparison of their genetics, as that is expensive and timely as heck. Dealing with biology at that level is very easy to fuck up after spending years in the lab.
Summary of Sapolsky's lecture explaining this point...
https://www.robertsapolskyrocks.com/behavioral-genetics-ii.html


Intelligence is inherited. This may be difficult for some to accept, I get that. However, success in life is more than just raw intelligence. At most intelligence is 40% of the battle. An intelligent person must be conscientious, organized, dedicated, and motivated to succeed. A clever person can easily fail in life if there are no other positive attributes. BTW, I love Sapolsky.

Nurturing is also needed for a clever person to have success. Lack of nurturing can destroy an intelligent person. However, all the nurturing in the world will not turn an unintelligent child into an intelligent child. It is possible to uplift the kid with less intelligence, but overall IQ cannot be raised significantly. I know quite well this is a hard pill to swallow and many consider this a racist view. The good news about intelligence is that at the individual level anyone can have it and is not restricted to some ethnicities.

It pretty much captures my emphasis on the inseparability of environment and genetics, because there is too much interplay going on that a real study of such things doesn't necessarily try to restrict the influence but is more targetted in what it controls for and what is abstracted in analysis.


See above


And the emphasis on things like wealth aren't necessarily a direct point on nurturing, I've seen studies which say you can close the literacy gap between children from poor and uneducated families with those from well off families based on how actively involved the parent is in school activities and the student's education.


At the individual level this is quite possible. At the group level most kids that come from affluent homes get more nurturing.

some people bust their ass to make sure their kids get an education.

Asian, Jewish, and Indian parents, Guess who is doing great in school! Yes, the environment counts.

The other side however though is accessibility of a decent education, where in the U.S. funding is heavily dependent on local taxes and often results in an inequitable distribution of funding which reflects the status quo of the wealth of families in different neighborhoods.


If I had a nickel for every time I heard that statement I would be a billionaire. This has been tried more than once in the past and it does not work as long as the students have a dysfunctional home. Kansas City had a history of segregation and inadequate schools for black kids. IN the 1990s the black schools won a lawsuit and were given money to create the most expensive school system in world history. They were spending up to 40,000 USD per student per year in a state of the art school that had a planetarium and every amenity you can think of. The school even had a 25 acre farm. This experiment failed; the students did not improve to pass the very minimal requirements of an education.

The Supreme Court, which had approved the overhaul, now says the experiment can't go on forever. It rejected the school district's argument that state funds should keep flowing until student achievement rises to national norms.

But if student achievement hasn't risen to national norms after all this time, the taxpayers of Missouri are entitled to ask why. Some $1.5 billion in special outlays, over and above the normal budget, has been devoted to the task of reconstructing the Kansas City schools--more than $40,000 per student. Annual spending per pupil, excluding capital costs, is twice as high as in nearby suburbs. All the high schools and middle schools, as well as half the elementary schools, have been turned into magnet schools. Each year since 1987, the district has gotten an AAA rating, the highest the state awards.

Rotted buildings have been replaced with state-of-the-art facilities. The district boasts greenhouses, laboratories, a 25-acre farm, a planetarium, schools that offer "total immersion" in foreign languages, lavish athletic arenas, radio and TV studios, computers in every classroom--everything you could ask for.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1995-06-22-9506220051-story.html

Which a policy recommendation is that when you switch the tax revenue for schools in districts in particular neighborhoods to extending the collection of school revenue to the entire county, you generally get a more equitable allocation of funding.


See above



I agree with you up to a point in that there are savant and kid geniuses which seem to contradict the evidence of training and support. Have someone like Chris Langan who has a huge IQ but has pretty much being a blue collar worker all his life. However, as smart as he is, his upbringing seems to have hindered his potential a great deal because he has emotional issues and doesn't have the connections that someone with a less IQ might have but is able to do more given better opportunities.


See above

On the other hand, while there can be a limiting factor on someones potential, it is also the case that it's not clear to what extent their potential development may be if they're not in the best conditions either. Wasted potential being the concept here. Where one might seek to blame inherent limitations on biology where it may be that there isn't an adequate environment to support success.


Agreed. However, the best shot a child has to make it in life is the quality of parents.

To be continued
I will get to the rest of your post later.
#15171745
Julian658 wrote:Intelligence is inherited. This may be difficult for some to accept, I get that. However, success in life is more than just raw intelligence. At most intelligence is 40% of the battle. An intelligent person must be conscientious, organized, dedicated, and motivated to succeed. A clever person can easily fail in life if there are no other positive attributes. BTW, I love Sapolsky.

Nurturing is also needed for a clever person to have success. Lack of nurturing can destroy an intelligent person. However, all the nurturing in the world will not turn an unintelligent child into an intelligent child. It is possible to uplift the kid with less intelligence, but overall IQ cannot be raised significantly. I know quite well this is a hard pill to swallow and many consider this a racist view. The good news about intelligence is that at the individual level anyone can have it and is not restricted to some ethnicities.

My issue doesn't suggest that there isn't a great deal of inheritability to intelligence or specifically IQ. My point is rather that there can be the tendency to naturalize limitations where potential isn't actualized fully. So we ascribed biological or natural limitations to things which may very well have social limitations.
Like the example of girls performance in math being a reflection of gender equality rather than strictly an issue of their intelligence. There historically had been a tendency to explain limitations of observable ability or trends in women's actions as evidence of their biological inability.

I also think you're right but also vague in your example of turning an unintelligent child into an intelligent one as it's kind of defining things in such a way that it doesn't have the prospect of being otherwise. It's not as specific as saying a child with this kind of TBI or dyslexia is unable to do these specific or general things and as such is limited.


At the individual level this is quite possible. At the group level most kids that come from affluent homes get more nurturing.

Indeed, it is not a sustainable avenue to approach a social problem strictly at the individual level, there has to be a connection between the individual engagement with a matter and broader change.
Health policy often talks about being down stream, where if you don't change the situation in which a bunch of people are ending up in wheel chairs and focus only on providing the disabled wheelchairs, you're not solving the problem but only managing/reacting to it. One needs various levels of engagement with a problem to resolve it and not only at one level.
Top down stuff can just as easily be a total failure for lack of properly trust with the community's they wish to change.

Asian, Jewish, and Indian parents, Guess who is doing great in school! Yes, the environment counts.

I would also Hispanic communities sand what it reflects is the strength of their community ties against a fragmentation into isolated units mediated by markets if not isolated.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/social.pdf
The social conditions Jacobs was interested in were broadly speaking networks of solidarity,
trust and collaboration encompassing people living, working in and passing through a
neighbourhood and moral norms supporting the public good up to the point where the
population of an area could become capable of “self-government,” of effectively defending
itself against the attacks of city planners, big business and hostile strangers, securing safe
streets and good living conditions out of which people could go to off work in the morning, in
which people could raise their children and enjoy leisure time and into which people could
come to visit or do business, etc..

Reading Death and Life is a bit like watching one of those revenge movies where your
empathetic anger builds up to such a point that you find yourself cheering when the hero
eventually starts knocking the hell out of his or her tormentors. Jacobs shows how even the
poorest neighbourhood, if blessed with the kind of urban conditions which would normally be
inherited from past unplanned urban development, will eventually pull itself up by the bootstraps and become a place where anybody would want to go to live, a Thnig; but city planners
and developers with an instinct equal to that which guides eels unerringly to the Sargasso Sea
from the lakes and rivers of central Europe, systematically destroy and sabotage what
neighbourhoods achieve, mainly by trying to do it for them, but without understanding what
it is which is being built.
One of the central tenets of Jacobs’ approach to urban development is that, given a chance,
people do it themselves; invariably governments and municipal authorities and private
developers fail to understand the processes involved and in trying to help, destroy
neighbourhoods. Of course, better policies on the part of authorities, as urged by Jacobs,
could help neighbourhoods a great deal and the book is full of suggestions. Jane Jacobs’ book
is a modern classic; it would be surprising if there is even one advocate of “social capital”
who hasn’t read it, and yet the infuriating practices which Jacobs describes in the 1950s are
still going on, and it would appear, are even using her name to badge their products.

Sidewalk culture. Jacobs says that the essence of the experience of having strangers looking
out for you as a kid on the sidewalk is that they have not been hired to do so. So, if the
neighbours are paid for the job they formerly did for free, the essence of the practice has been
lost. If caring for sidewalks is privatised, transformed into “real” capital, then the so-called
“social capital” is not “realised,” it’s destroyed!
The insurance/litigation/regulation dynamic has exactly the same effect. It is no longer
acceptable for a teenager to mind their smaller cousins, and they are replaced by paid childcarers. Good news for the valuation of women’s labour, but bad news unfortunately for social
solidarity.

Basically top down interventions that are inconsiderate to the people they're intervening upon and even the commodification in which the market mediates peoples needs can undermine communities, breaking them apart and losing their social connections.

If I had a nickel for every time I heard that statement I would be a billionaire. This has been tried more than once in the past and it does not work as long as the students have a dysfunctional home. Kansas City had a history of segregation and inadequate schools for black kids. IN the 1990s the black schools won a lawsuit and were given money to create the most expensive school system in world history. They were spending up to 40,000 USD per student per year in a state of the art school that had a planetarium and every amenity you can think of. The school even had a 25 acre farm. This experiment failed; the students did not improve to pass the very minimal requirements of an education.

The Supreme Court, which had approved the overhaul, now says the experiment can't go on forever. It rejected the school district's argument that state funds should keep flowing until student achievement rises to national norms.

But if student achievement hasn't risen to national norms after all this time, the taxpayers of Missouri are entitled to ask why. Some $1.5 billion in special outlays, over and above the normal budget, has been devoted to the task of reconstructing the Kansas City schools--more than $40,000 per student. Annual spending per pupil, excluding capital costs, is twice as high as in nearby suburbs. All the high schools and middle schools, as well as half the elementary schools, have been turned into magnet schools. Each year since 1987, the district has gotten an AAA rating, the highest the state awards.

Rotted buildings have been replaced with state-of-the-art facilities. The district boasts greenhouses, laboratories, a 25-acre farm, a planetarium, schools that offer "total immersion" in foreign languages, lavish athletic arenas, radio and TV studios, computers in every classroom--everything you could ask for.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1995-06-22-9506220051-story.html

I like that you made this point as this often comes to my mind when there is all this emphasis on improving schools which is a narrow focus when you can indeed have the best school, teachers and it may even improve things but a school works within a community and a community that is broken down in some way cannot achieve the kind of educational outcomes needed.
Sometimes social problems are even framed once again as biological like a child whose mom is on meth and he has to get up early to make lunch for his little sister and himself. He didn't pay attention in class and was failing. He was diagnosed with ADHD, given drugs for it, but turns out when his Grandma was given custody and took care of him and his sister, his grades suddenly improved. It wasn't ADHID it was a shit neglectful homelife.
It also reflects how the disparities among communities cannot be overcome in the education system alone as it tends to reflect the inequalities of the community themselves.
However, funding isn't insignificant however, Funding has been an issue and leads to all sorts of cuts in education.
I don't think a change like extending funding of schools to the limits of the county instead of districts is a terrible thing. Ain't a magic bullet, but certainly could help alleviate some of the disparity between communities where some schools' funding is hit hard.

Agreed. However, the best shot a child has to make it in life is the quality of parents.

To be continued
I will get to the rest of your post later.

I agree, that to improve the situation for a child you need to improve it for the parents but the condition of the parents life is broadly tied to the larger community and trends of that country. So you end up at the conclusion that you simply need to improve your nation really.
#15223194
I started on this thread as a journey through the methodology, philosophy and history of psychology and some of its issues. But I find resonance in the critiques of early methods by Lev Vygotsky and his own means of trying to conceptually clarify what is most significant in a particular stage of analysis. This is far from my own undergrad into psychology but it has become the most convincing to me in providing a different avenue for an objective investigation of human psychology but not diminishing of the subjectivity of a person, even if it is still partially understood.

https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/vygotskys-critique.htm

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