Thread by @IntuitMachine

The Nature versus Nurture is a debate about scientific doctrine. It is a debate about the correct way of explanation for cognition.

The Representation versus Non-Representation shares the same debate. It is also about the correct way of explanation for cognition.

It is also the difference between thinking in nouns versus thinking in verbs. Nature and Representation have deep roots in Western thinking. It is a functionalist and reductionist way of thinking that meets its limits when analyzing complex adaptive systems.

It is perhaps due to this Western bias that concepts from the study of complex systems have had little traction in modern society. It is of course, more than a Western bias, but a human bias to seek out simple causal explanations of this world.

But the world is complex and messy. Spiral dynamics which is an evolutionary model of individuals and society explains how models of the world shape ourselves and our civilization.

Human conflict is a constant because collectives have incompatible models of reality. It is only when humanity reaches an understanding of the complexities of this world that we can see beyond the conflict.

Unfortunately, we are creatures formed by the environments we grow up in. We will continue to have conflict as long as we have children who grow up in conditions of conflict.

We cannot break away from an economic system that encourages the exploitation of the weak and powerless. Such a system requires that we develop humans who are weak and powerless.

The elite class of this world who occupy positions of government and economic power in many cases have grown up in environments of privilege. It is in these environments where the gulf between the haves and have nots are obvious.

In fact, many of the highly educated immigrants of the US actually come from environments of privilege in their home countries. The reason why education is valued by immigrants is that they come from that privileged class that has seen the advantage education affords.

Very few can discover the integral levels of spiral dynamics without having the luxury available in a world of abundance. We are humans and thus learn from experience. In a world of scarcity, we do not have the luxury of time to discover the solutions to our conflicts.

This is a reality that is difficult to accept for the majority. It obviously appears to be elitism. How is it that the privileged are the only ones who can see the solutions to our world of scarcity? How is it our saviors are the persons also responsible for our exploitation?

Humans are unique in the biological world in that a big fraction of their life is spent in youth. We are a species defined by culture, how we think is defined by the 18 years we spend growing up in a culture. We are who we are because of nurture.

The idea of nature is noun centric. In a language of nouns, there are things that are fixed and never changing. In the dogma of nature, we come into this world in a state that is predetermined. If we are born to peasants, then we must surely live a life of peasantry.

The dogma of nature is the dogma of how the world should be and of a world of becoming. Humanity has existed for 10,000 generations. Our ingenuity leads us to invent, but it is also our ingenuity that leads us to deceive.

The structure of our societies is a consequence of the ability of subgroups in society to game the shared goals of society to their exclusive benefit.

The best way to deceive is to convince others about the dogma of nature. You are in your place in society because that is the natural order of things. That no amount of becoming can transcend this order.

The problem of the philosophy of nurture is that it is unintuitive and difficult to imagine how order emerges. The problem is because we have never been exposed to the intuition pumps found in the study of complex adaptive systems.

From the uninitiated, the methods of complexity appear to be methods of mysticism. Ideas that appear to be impractical. This is because they are only understood from the existing economic framework we live in. That is, a economy of fictional scarcity.

In a similar manner, ideas from enactivism, ecological psychology and semiotics appear to the uninitiated to be methods that appear to lack crispness in concepts. This is perhaps the language of nurture and becoming is difficult to map to the language of nature and things.

The debate of nature versus nurture is a debate that is driven by deeply embedded concepts of how this world should be. We all are born in cultures where the language of nouns is pervasive. It is only when we transcend to the language of verbs can we understand nurture.

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