lrokwild

What about Pavlov and conditioning? Terms like latent learning revolve around interaction with outside stimuli. Our environment and the way our personalities develop is greatly researched by many psychologists. Think how many times are we compared to animals in the wild? I know you are probably talking more about tree hugging nature, but still, like it was said already, nature and human nurture prevails in many areas of psychology. To answer your question, Yes, I believe our connection with nature should be main concern. After all, if you believe in some quantum mechanics than you would believe that we are all connected on a quantum level - That we all share the same energy. Also, we can better understand how other animals behave, evolve and interact with one each other as well as their surroundings. Therefore if we understand our surroundings in nature we could better understand ourselves.

can you guys/gals suggest something else i can watch? I love Quantum physics! Maybe you can recommend a good book, something thats not too complex.

oops, "whatisthesecret.tv" and What the bleep was a cool movie, it got me into quantum physics. Its a good NEWBIE movie.

I just wanted to recommend a couple of really good movies that talk about quantum physics. "What the bleep do we know" and "www.whatisthesecret.com" Both awesome movies - They talk about the power of our thoughts, and the universal law of attraction. What the bleep touches on the basic principles of quantum physics. Has anyone else seen these and want to recommend others like it? Cheers!

good enough for me

U can learn morality later on in life by way of imitation or modeling... like I already said... that’s how it is done.. there is no if and or but! How else do you think you learn? If we established that morality is a learned behavior and very little of it is genetic, then how else would someone learn to be moral unless they watched some one else act morally correct or was taught by someone else? Because we all have natural inherited instincts to survive in our environment, and in order to survive we have to manipulate people and form relationships with people, could explain that morality is more than just a cultural lesson learned by modeling. You could say that some things we call morality are things that we do subconsciously, in order to survive and prosper in our environments.

Before I spend a hour to read your lesson I have some questions. What are your credentials? Did you study psychology and/or biology in school? Is this stuff just information you learned yourself? Is this information from books? Is this information from your imagination?

Morality, compassion and other emotions all fit into the same type of cognitive constructs. Is morality instinctive? I would say for the most part, No. We learn morality; we are not born with it. Just think of a child, the "terrible twos" for example, that child has serious moral issues. A 2 year old, cries, whines, yells, insults, talks dirty, plays with things they shouldn’t, does things they are told not to, sneaks around, and pretty much doesn’t give a rats ass about what anyone thinks. Many schools of psychology have said that we have evolved from animals. Our brains carry the same primal parts that every mammal does. What we have done evolutionarily is "built" new parts of the brain that give us new ability to control our animal instincts. We always have those animal instincts, we just have the ability to simulate and sublimate those animal urges into new emotions and feelings. On the other hand, we do come genetically ready to form relationships with humans. We depend on our mothers to survive for the first few years of our life. So in that way, we have some morality in a sense that we don't kill our mothers when we are young. I think it is important for you to really understand that the idea of morality is learned. What is moral in one culture greatly differs from another. The only instinctive morals we could have "hardwired" into our brains are ones that tell us we shouldn’t kill each other. This has been hardwired into our subconscious through evolution to prevent us from killing each other. Even with this being said, one could argue that this is not true, think about all the people that DO murder others.... they obviously had some environmental influence that gave them the idea that it would be ok to kill someone. Often people think its ok to kill someone if they don’t get caught. So then this brings you back to classical and operant conditioning. As you can see, morality is really an opinion of the masses. Now as for the example of the experiments I mentioned. A group of young children, about 3-4 years old and then another group of 5-7 yrs old where split up individually and placed into a room with a big stuffed bear called BOBO and an adult. The child was to watch the adult play with BOBO and then the adult would leave the room and the child would be asked to play with BOBO. Now in one group the adult ignored BOBO. In the second the adult beat up BOBO and was very violent with him. Finally with the third group the adult played very nice and loving with BOBO. This test showed a HUGE correlation between how the adult played with BOBO and how the child played with BOBO. So if people around you do not always fight, swear, yell, ext, you are likely not to do the same. This is why you see people growing up in the ghetto very aggressive, angry, and violent people. Its because that’s what is around in their environment. We as humans adapt to our environments. So depending on what goes on around us will determine how we behave.

Many of you still have this Nazi stereo type of what Eugenics is. Eugenics was once the practice of killing people off that where already living. These dayz we can take it one step further and simply alter DNA in an embryo to produce a desired result. We simply need to start doing this and natural selection will kill off the genetically weak people on its own. As less and less people are being born with genetic weaknesses and predispositions to disease and illness, and the more genetically weak people are dying off, the stronger our species will become. On the other side of the coin..... Think if you where born severely handicapped, needed to be taken care of for the rest of your life and could only reach a maturity of a 3 or 4 years old. Would you even notice your life being cut short? Would you even care? I think if i needed to be fed through a tube, shit in a bag, breath on a machine and sit in a chair my whole life, i would rather die a million deaths then ever live a day on earth like that. I think by spending out time, money and resources on keeping utterly helpless humans alive, ones that would surely never live if it was up to natural selection, we are actually torturing them. If someone cant have the capability to express in anyway that he or she is enjoying life, then perhaps it would be better to let them die peacefully. This is the type of Eugenics I am talking about. Lets modify some of our moral constructs and deem the termination of utterly hopeless and genetically screwed people acceptable. There would obviously have to be a threshold of some sort. Like i said, if someone can not live on their own, and cannot express any desire to live, or and desire period, those should be the ones we let die off peacefully. Why would we do this you ask? Its obvious that they would not be reproducing if they were so damned in the first place. The question is, why where they damned? If it had to do with their parents genetics then perhaps we should be sparing the childs’ life, test the embryo, find out if it carries this genetic flaw, if it does then terminate it. You could let the parents try again, you could let them adopt, but you sure as hell shouldn’t let them bring a child into this world that has a horrible chance of survival, and no chance of living a normal healthy life. Remeber im not talking about killing people, im talking about letting weak people die off on their own and then never letting weak people be born in the future. Just think how much our economy would flourish if billions of dollars spent on keeping dead people alive was spent on keeping the living alive...or education. Or whatever you fancy important in today’s society.

Perhaps' date=' but also the media, government, friends, and everyday people that you interact with. We have the ability to learn by imitation, if we view something someone else does as "ok" or morally acceptable, we are likely to do it ourselves. There have been countless studies done on this, if you want I can explain some. Um...what I said is true, what your arguing about is something different. I never once claimed that we would accept the justice of being punished. I simply said that from a behavioralist POV we learn morality by certain contingencies in the environment. We emit a behavior, we either get rewarded, punished, or nothing happens. Humans naturally like to be rewarded, so when society reinforces "Moral" behavior and punishes "wrong" behavior we are likely to emit the behavior that gets us something desirable.

I think if we as humans want to better our future, increase lifespan, and essentially help to evolve our race into a stronger, smarter, healthier, faster, and evolutionarily better species, we need to stop wasting countless man hours, money, resources and time taking care of babies that have severe disabilities or genetic predispositions to disease or illness. Look how far we have come through evolution; survival of the fittest has propelled us into amazing creatures, capable of very complicated cognitive intelligence. We have used our superior intelligences to battle evolution for years now. We live longer, we are able to survive infections, injuries and so on, but yet we have more and more disease, more and more genetically inherited flaws, disabilities, illnesses, ext. When these people are born we take care of them, we do our absolute best to keep these people living... when nature obviously had other plans for them. Ok, so killing babies with MS or AIDS or what ever is probably not a very nice thing to do. Hitler tried... had the right idea... but didn’t have the technology to make it morally acceptable...and also... he was crazy... and manipulated people into killing perfectly healthy people. So ok... Hitler’s’ version of eugenics was totally ass backwards. My proposal is this, we have the technology to target specific areas of DNA and alter them to our likings. Why don’t we prevent illness, disability and "flaws" before they even start? If we put all our money, time and resources into changing DNA in an embryo to prevent predispositions to illness and disease as we did into our drug companies that only mask the problems... or treat the problems, we would make astronomical advancements. Prevention... not Treatment... we have this idea of medicine totally ass backwards. Why can’t we start using our intelligences to prevent genetic flaws and weaknesses? Instead we are so hell bent on treating them... and I would argue it’s all for the money... and our world is falling apart... contrary to what the media and governments will have you believe. Anyways that’s another topic. All I’m saying is Eugenics should be our number 1 priority.

Well, a cognitive behavioralists or social behavioralists approach would argue that our moral beliefs are constructed by interaction with humans, and modeling. So essentially a person we look up to later on in life, be it our parents still or someone else, would be our model, and their beliefs would greatly influence our own. A classic behavioralist would argue that we learn morality through means of classical and operant conditioning. In essence, we learn what we can get away with and what we cant, by means of trial and error. If we do this, we get rewarded, if we do that, we get punished. The stage i mentioned could not be skipped, unless a child was raised un till they were 2 years old and then stuck in the wild....and even then...they would look to wild animals for morality..... anyone that’s around us, taking care of us, be it our parents, a scientist, a friend, who ever, that person will project their beliefs on to us, and we will take them as our own. This is because at that early age, we have no other choice really... we are learning machines. I believe morality develops by social interaction, by evolution of culture, by conditioning, and by early interaction with our parents. Its a mixture of different psychological theories that best explains morality.

This sounds a lot like introspective psychology. Ask people to look inward and report, document, and/or chart the contents of their consciousness to another person (most likely a psychologist) and have them try to come up with patterns, or underlying "rules of behavior". Then if you analyzed these findings pyschodyanmically you might be able to pick out parts of the subconscious mind and how it is influencing the conscious..... this is what psychoanalytical psychology has been trying to do for years and years. I think your subconscious will be forming the words on the page into some sort of an association of a logical answer to the question. Basically, your pointing to a random spot in the dictionary, in the minds eye, on any one page the dictionary can have plenty of logical answers to the question you ask yourself. This test is merely showing that our brains, when already predisposed to form an answer of something... will most definitely interpret anything it sees with a very objectionable lens. The brain knows it needs to come to a conclusion; it is now going to be able to interpret things to its advantage. This test would need to be done on someone that had no idea. My suggestion would be to go and come up with a series of little tests you could do on someone and throw this new and slightly modified one in the mix. Tell someone to think of a question that he or she does not know the answer to. (weather or not the person believes there is an answer to the question or not will also greatly affect his or her interpretation of what ever they see) Then do the point to a "random" page in the dictionary and to a "random" place on the page and then tell them to look at what they pointed to... and what surrounds it.. and report what they think about it... what type of thoughts are going through their head... and ultimately figure out if they can make a connection with the words they have pointed to and the answer to their question without ever suggesting it in the first place. Whether of not the person has looked in a dictionary before or not would influence your findings as well.... because then any subconscious memories of it would not exist for them. Even then... I don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish... besides being able to be in touch with our subconscious mind.

Simply put, Freud first developed psychoanalysis, which is still used to this very day. Just because all of Freud’s ideas where not entirely correct doesn’t mean that many of his other ideas had no basis to them either. Psychoanalysis along with cognitive behavioral psychology have combined to what is most commonly called "Combined Cognitive Behavioral Psychology" and is the most common and widely used psychology to this very day. So just because you don’t like Freud’s ideas of sex and aggression doesn’t mean that those 2 drives are not major drives or wishes of humans. Just because he was a bit sexist doesn’t mean many of his theories were not correct. His models of the mind, the Ego, Super ego and ID, dream analysis, psychic determinism, penis envy, castration complex, mechanisms of defense, compromised formations, the Oedipus complex and so much more........ find out how he contributed to psychology instead of trying to find out what he couldn’t contribute and you'll like the guy a lot more.

No one is going to bother challanging my theory? ... or at least give me some feed back... wtf... pansy ass wanna be psychologists Take that... and that... and oh... you got nothing!

Morals are nothing more than a set of rules created by society in order to ensure the survival of humans. These rules continue to change as our culture changes. What is moral and what isn’t will ultimately depend on the type of culture we were brought up in. I don’t think it is so much a set of systematic rules that "attempt to define" natural human behavior. I think it is much more like a set of lenses that we are given at birth. These lenses are constantly grinded and re-grinded throughout our early childhood and adulthood. The way the lenses are grinded and shaped depend on the culture. Each culture has their different methods of shaping these lenses that we use to see the world with. One set of lenses will seem to fit for one particular culture and then make us completely blind to another. The problem is, the lenses will always be flawed in some way, but we cannot do without them. This analogy was originally used to explain human perspectives and how our perspectives will always influence what we see and believe. I think morality greatly depends on what we believe and see as well as how we where raised. There will never be a proper definition for morality, or a set of rules in stone. They constantly change and vary. Back to my initial statement. "Morality is a set of rules created by society in order to insure the survival of humans". If you think about it, this is all morals really are. The things that are universally dubbed immoral among almost every culture are usually things that would create ciaos, anarchy, harm and ultimately lower our life expectancy rate, one way or another. Its part of evolution, humans are a very magnificent organism. We are truly the top of the food chain. The past major evolutionary changes have occurred with our brains. Id say we have even lost some physical attributes while gaining mental ones. Look at a chimp or gorilla... they are much stronger and faster and more agile then humans...for the most part, but they have nowhere near the mental capacity that we do. Where am I going with this? ... Throughout evolution our brains have become smarter, and we instead rely on our brains to survive more so than our bodies. We have found extremely intelligent and efficient ways of surviving. One of those ways is by creating social groups and eventually rules of morality. Sunspot talked about unconscious processes being involved. Since I am a Freudian I believe in (for the most part) Freud’s structural model of the mind. The 'ID' the 'Super Ego' and the 'Ego' or 'I'. Freud said that the 'ID' is the part of us that is primal... its our primal, unconscious motives and drives. He believed it was sex and aggression (many, including myself believe its more than that, but they still are very major motives.) These drives are often unmoral, sick, and socially unacceptable.... I mean we are talking about drives that make us want to have sex with everyone we can and beat up any competitors that stand in the way of our sex or food. This isn't very cool now is it? He continued to say that the 'Super Ego' is our moral side. This part develops early on in child hood and is essentially our way of bringing external authority inside our heads and making our parents beliefs our own. So many argue that morals primarily come from our parents. These 2 parts of the mind constantly get into conflicts... its literally ciaos in our subconscious and our 'Ego' comes up with what is called Compromised Formations and those formations become our conscious thoughts and actions. I believe that during the falic stage nearly all of our morals develop...... during the Falic stage kids really start to want identification and we take in our parents believes and make them our own. This isnt to say that as we grow older, many of our morals wont change... but for the most part, this is where the base of them begin. In conclusion, I'd say morals are a set of believes created by society, passed down generation after generation and constently manipulated and changed by evolution. P.S. Morality is 100% a conscious process. Nearly everything that goes against morality is unconscious. You can begin to see how psychopathology develops. - It is the things we are conflicted about that get repressed into the subconscious. The things we are conflicted about are almost always something that goes against moral beliefs or social ethics. You could even say the reason we have so many people with pathological disorders is because we have created so many morals and social rules....then again.... without them we would have mass death and destruction... and we would no longer be intelligent, cognitive beings...but animals... like every other. You could even say it’s the ability to create these morals that is one of the key evolutionary developments of homosapeans. Survival of the fittest - Those cultures that where able to be at peace with one each other and work collectively as a team rather than kill each other would survive longer, pass traits down and so on and so forth. P.P.S. Ideas of morals and morality can also develop through the experience of conditioning. Essentially when you were a kid and you did something wrong or "immoral" you got smacked or yelled at, eventually you stopped doing these things partly in fear of pain, but fear of dissapointment from your parents. We have also been conditioned by society to follow rules. So i guess you could argue that acting morally correct or socially acceptable could become a unconscious process...if repeated enough times.

First of all, there are more than just one chemical that is used to "think". It's a number of different chemicals that cause different reactions between different neurons. Second of all, I agree with the statement about free will. Obviously we can only cognitively think or do things that our bodies can allow us. So we are always restrained to some degree. However, we have the ability to control parts of our brain more than any other living organism we know of. Evolutionary, if our species survive long enough, you could argue that we will develop an ability to have complete control over our thoughts/drives. Since I am a Freudian, I believe that we all are still driven by 2 main motives, which are sex and aggression. Those 2 motives are the basis for all of our thoughts, actions, ect. We have the ability to experience these feelings through sublimation and with other emotions. Anyways, if I where to take a crack at explaining how we think, I would fail miserably. As I can see, everyone else so far has also failed. Rest assure, there is a valid scientific answer to this question, but unless you study psychiatry for 15 years, your not going to be able to fully explain how we think. The reason being, there is obviously no easy answer to this question, which is why I’m surprised someone asked it and expected good answers. There are biological, chemical and psychological processes that combine in such a way that allow us to "think". Study these 3 areas for 15 years, and you might be able to write a half decent paper explaining it. Until then, good luck piecing these forum posts together.

I actually watched a movie on how the very first computer was invented. I get how a circuit board is basically just a string of wires that are used to conduct electricity in pulses that allow you to recognize what’s on your hard drive. Back in the day the hard drive was a huge interlinking web of magnets and wires. So anyways...i get it....now ill move onto software....anyone have any information on the language that controls the binary...well not controls....but the "next in line" or what ever.

If you have ever watched "What The Bleep Do We Know?" it explains a bit about the body being addicted to negitve emotions, after years of wiring and re-wiring of the brains neuro receptors.

i was sorta half joking....lol....i didnt really care

I don't recommend salvia......

yep

Should we find a way to make Eugenics work?