Someone should tell him (and the rest of the world) that immortality is coming.
It's sort of funny that he says these gifted children will question traditions, and then wants to help them via the rather arbitrary touch=comfort tradition.
He also says essentially: they don't fit in, but help them feel like they do. Why not tell them that fitting in isn't such a great thing anyway, and they shouldn't feel bad about being better?
I doubt it's arbitrary. It seems to be, as the article said, "a fundamental and instinctual aspect of existence". A lot of stuff is just built into us, and touch=comfort is a prime candidate for one of those things that's hard-wired into us. I doubt it's a culturally acquired/transmitted trait.
<insert shock, awe, indignation, cries of "What, I'm not even at all like my identical twin brother!", etc here>
There's far less variation between people than we normally think; a whole lot of us is dictated by the low-level firmware we're born with. We're just acutely sensitive to the relatively minor differences between us, just like you can tell faces apart even though they're all basically the same.
If you're saying is that the relative weights vary between people, so while one person might be very comforted by touch another wouldn't care for it much, I agree with that. But this is just the small amount of variation between different people, the small amount that isn't fixed and can vary person-to-person. This is just a difference-in-degree, not a difference-in-kind. I doubt you can find someone who reacts to touch by immediately beginning to juggle knives or by sneezing. Now that would provide some evidence for the whole blank-slate hypothesis.
Evolutionary Psychology is fascinating stuff. As I said in another thread: "EvPsych basically makes one important observation and asks the natural question leading from it: Just like our eyes and hands, our minds have also been developed in response to evolutionary pressures. What were these pressures and how do they account for the features we see in ourselves, like language, love, laughter, crying, etc?" A good pop-sci book on the subject is The Moral Animal by Robert Wright: http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Animal-Science-Evolutionary-Psyc...
A second problem with the "Genes Rule The World" hypothesis (if you get to name my position, I get to name yours ;p) is that no one ever actually explains how they do this (while allowing vast room for conscious control, reinterpretation, etc)
Yes, this is all stuff that can be layered on top of the basic firmware. But wouldn't you say that when you hug someone you love in a time of distress, you're feeling something innate and at your core? I'm not saying we're simple or whatnot, there's definitely many facets to our cognition that are all in there rumbling around. But we sure aren't blank slates that are programmed by the environment. I think a better analogy is that we have a bunch of knobs with certain ranges, and the environment & genetic variation together dial in these knobs to make us who we are. This provides plenty of room for the complex interplay between the different emotions, like the example you cite where someone is generally distrusting of people and dislikes touch. I bet even that distrusting person could feel close to someone who put in a lot of effort to build a friendship to overcome their initial hesitance, and feel comforted by this closeness. Again, it's a difference-in-degree and not a difference-in-kind.
"A second problem with the "Genes Rule The World" hypothesis (if you get to name my position, I get to name yours ;p) is that no one ever actually explains how they do this (while allowing vast room for conscious control, reinterpretation, etc)"
That's what the fields of Genetics, Evolutionary Psychology and Evolutionary Biology are about. :-) Check out that book I referenced in the parent post, it's pretty interesting.
If it's not genes that determine what we are, then what? Or at least, even if there isn't an alternative better answer yet, why aren't genes a suitable answer?
http://www.scribd.com/doc/488229/Untitled
(it's from email, the quoting got lost. the first 2 paragraphs had quoting)
If I thought I was feeling something innate that would not be valid evidence I actually was, just a self-reported anecdote.
If it's not genes that determine what we are, then what? Or at least, even if there isn't an alternative better answer yet, why aren't genes a suitable answer?
The answer is memes. And the short reason why is: memes evolve much, much faster than genes, so once they existed, they got to do everything mind-related, and biological evolution no longer got to do anything. This also explains why genes aren't a suitable answer :)
"The answer is memes. And the short reason why is: memes evolve much, much faster than genes, so once they existed, they got to do everything mind-related, and biological evolution no longer got to do anything. This also explains why genes aren't a suitable answer :)"
Yes, memes exist, and they do quite a lot, but it's not like as soon as memes showed up, everything else went out the door! Even if we assume that memes had some ability to thwart further biological evolution, that wouldn't reverse all of the built-in stuff that existed at the point memes came on the scene. Everything that memes do is layered on top of the huge amount of pre-programming that we're born with; memes exist solely on the highest thin layer of a big multi-layered system. Don't forget that we're actually primates with primate brains, and mammals with mammal brains. Millions of years of mammalian brain evolution weren't discarded just because we invented a vehicle for meme transmission (language). That high-level idea transmission mechanism resides on top of a regular ol' primate brain, with all of its complex builtin emotions for survival, reproduction, social interaction, etc.
Anyway, I'm not an expert on this stuff, so I can't put together a really convincing argument citing specific experimental facts and whatever. I'm starting to repeat myself ... shows how little I know about this stuff. You should read some of the stuff on EvPsych to draw your own conclusions about the validity of the field.
Check out this blog post on Overcoming Bias: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/11/evolutionary-ps.html
I'm in the first camp. Sometimes I have some anxiety over my existence, but (as a Christian) it usually revolves around questioning whether or not I am living the right kind of life.
One thing I do know is that worrying does nothing to help the situation. Getting out there and doing something with your life does.
You are right this wouldn't reverse pre-existing stuff. But what pre-existing things were there? Reflexes? Check. Face recognition hardware? Check. High level human interpretations of touch? No.
You say memes are a top layer. That's what I said originally! And I made an analogy you have not answered: Ruby is a top layer, on top of an assembly language, and C. And the fact is, if you switch to a platform with a different assembly language, Ruby stays the same. The lower layers aren't important once you abstract them away.
You say we have a "primate brain" but aren't clear on what this means. We have a brain with universal creativity. No (other) primates have that. It's a different kind of thing.
Basic counter examples are:
Reflexes. The variation in human reaction to drugs. Down syndrome and other genetic defects.
It's the similarity in the basic human genome that lets most people assume we are blank slates. Generic mutation can alter an infant's reaction to their environment and people don't notice X-Ray's due to basic biology. Thus we are not blank slates even if environment seems to dominate the picture.