[Deep Thoughts] Don't Know Much About History

[Kyle]

What is the best way to explore human nature: psychology, philosophy, or biology?

[Zen]

An interdisciplinary approach that uses the best knowledge from each. My belief in this is precisely the reason that I chose to attend graduate school at the University of Illinois, because of the Beckman Institute, which used to be called the "Beckman Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies" but is now the "Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology" but still has fostering interdisciplinary research in it's mission statement. That was the approach to studying human cognition that I wanted to take. A Cognitive Science approach combining psychology, AI, philosophy of mind, linguistics, anthropology, and neuroscience together to get a full picture of how humans think, solve problems, etc...

What I found when I got there was a bunch of people from different disciplines with offices in the same building, doing their own research, and not really talking with each other about it that much... By the time I quit grad school I was... disillusioned to say the least. The other day I read an email from my daughter's high school that listed some of the PhD dissertations of their graduates. One of them was by a guy who was a senior in college my last year in grad school, working in the same lab that I worked in, doing fairly similar research. He graduated from U of I, with honors, and was accepted into graduate school at Carnegie Mellon University. His dissertation was basically an interdisciplinary modification of his senior honors thesis he did with my former advisor, which was a replication of a seminal study in schema theory that had originally been done at Carnegie Mellon University. The modification was the classic style of research that my former advosor did and the interdisciplinary twist was that, in addition to human data, he also had an neural net AI program that he ran through the experiment that accurately modeled the results.

I basically sat there reading it thinking that, if I had been smart enough to get into Carnegie Mellon University, I might have had enough motivation to keep going and get my PhD... But I wasn't. I applied there and didn't get in. (Of course, this guy went to the same school my daughter goes to, which pretty much means he is a freaking genius...)

But I digress...

[Phoebe]

All of that sounds very cool; to the original question my answer would be none of the above.

[Stan]

[Zen]

[Kyle]

[mimekiller]

Just google whatever topic you want to think about and smash that I feel lucky button

[Phoebe]

The idea of crumbly cookies in the bed is making me feel itchy, not in a good way. Otherwise I'd like to hear more.

[bralbovsky]

Not sure human nature is a thing.
You mean the relationship between the hardwired lizard brain stuff and our shady culturally directed stuff?

[WillyGilligan]

Of the three, I'd guess psychology, but that's still pretty limited.

Then again, my approach is talking to strangers on the internet and working to empathize with differing viewpoints. YMMV.

[Phoebe]

[bralbovsky]

Here's the problem: people are simultaneously lazy and unpredictable/irrational. The laziness creates patterns of thought and behavior; this may be where we begin to believe we can predict the future choices and actions. It certainly explains manipulation of actions and choices.

We drive to work the easiest path. We avoid painful conversations and situations. We let culture and others' expectations push us around until it's habituated. We label ideas and everything we encounter so that we don't have to think about it so hard.

This belies the fact that we know individuals who defy the labels we have made, that we resent our choices and our body image and our unwillingness to speak up (until that resentment gets more uncomfortable than dealing with the bullying). We see it happening when we unconsciously make the turn to work even though we intended to go to the park. Sadly, we can count on laziness. It's kind of evolutionary. Is that what we mean by human nature?

On the other side, however, we have weird. We have inventors and artists and activists, whom we punish, but ultimately admire. Are they aware of the social pressures they resist, or do they just ignore them?

There's a terrific Robert Redford movie "Three Days of the Condor" in which he plays an accidental spy, and for three days, he's winning, not because he's brilliant, but because he doesn't know enough about the game to be restricted to the rules. At that point, does he begin to act 'by human nature' or laziness (efficiency, if we're being generous)?

We make statements and statistics and sentimental hogwash about 'human nature. Boys are stupid; girls are crazy. These statements are true, but they are really deep lies. We expect boys to be stupid and girls to be crazy, so that's normal, and you better keep it a secret if you don't fit that model.

We warn our children to be careful around 'wild' animals because they can be unpredictable, even though they are much less complicated than we are. What I would like to understand is why Zebras are not considered trainable while horses are. Anyone know the difference?

[Phoebe]

I thought it was because they have a very complex and rigid hierarchy of social relationships, wherein behaviors involving an approach to a particular animal are often perceived as hostile and requiring a protective response from other zebras. This wary attitude maintains their harem structure and role within the harem, maybe? I have no idea, not a zebra expert. Just a zebra admirer.

[WillyGilligan]

When I was a kid, I saw a zebra in a travelling petting zoo. It was in a pen with a donkey, and the people running the zoo claimed that the donkey was there to get the zebra on the truck. Apparently, zebra don't go anywhere that doesn't already have an animal in it, because that tells them it's dangerous. So they send the donkey in the truck because he doesn't care, and that calms down the zebra. I've also heard that a zebra is not a horse, it's closer to a donkey.

Not sure how true that is, but I also found .

p.s. Since watching Baby Driver I can't settle on how to pronounce zebra.

[bralbovsky]

So, wrong, or at least in the absolute, about zebras. More primitive than horses? Cro Magnon horses? Lizards are hard to train too. Maybe it takes a certain minimum level of abstract capacity to form relationships outside your tribe. Having said that, there's a guy who has trained planaria, and not only that, did a macabre experiment where he pureed the trained planaria and fed them to untrained planaria who repeated the trick, sans training.

What does this have to do with human nature? At some level, deep in our genes, and our pre object permanence childhood, things happen that influence our behaviors. Is there some UR archetype that messes with us, some set of goals all homo sapiens have in common, that can be separated from the things every planaria wants (because it's human, and somehow relies on self awareness)? so far, nobody's defined those things (except Shakespeare, for a narrow demographic).

[Mike]

To your credit, I think the difference between horses and zebras is similar to that between dogs and wolves. Many millennia of human intervention. We could domesticate zebras pretty quickly if we were willing to put in a few dozen generations of very careful selective breeding. IMO.