The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

These notes are old and were written while reading — they don’t necessarily reflect my current views.

The mind just produces the illusion of the unified self. When cutting the brain in two, two agents with free will emerge.

Pinker proposes that the slate is not completely blank (as blank slates dont do anything) and not predetermined as our DNA does not hold sufficient information and environment seems to play a major role in nearly any process.

The radical blank slate argument is often made due to political motives, as otherwise claims about racism et. al could not be made. Pinker disputes this problem, as morality does not have to be based on science in this way.

Pinker wants to show that ethics does not require a blank slate and perfect free will. Therefore, he shows that ethics arises through evolutionary processes. Our legal system is considered just and only punishes if the accused has had the opportunity to change the outcome and could have had the knowledge to do so. This is strongly associated with a Gesinnungsethik. Punishment is a function of the harm done to the person punished and the (discounted) harm prevented through deterrence. One could create a cool model where the discount factor of the individuals creates conflict in the preference for punishment.

This conception of ethics, that we just generalised rules that work best overall, does give an unintuitive answer to the Ring of Gyges problem of plato.