RoR: Forum

I had never heard of home-schooling, as a Montessori director (briefly), when I was approached by a Mr. Howard Hinman around 1979 about helping to organize the first non-sectarian home-schooling conference on the West Coast. The chief instigator was a Ms. Cathy LeVesque, who had an organization by the name "Keys to Learning." Cathy was a home-schooler and an advocate, who spent a lot of her time defending home-schoolers in courts.

The conference was a huge success. We had John Holt - his first time on the West Coast, as well as a computer lab running PET computers linked via modem to a mainframe running the original "Adventure" game, all provided by Data Equipment Supply, the West Coast Commodore educational specialty store along with Larry Bauder, the computer-assisted teaching specialist for the West Coast.

At the time and prior, California parents were being actively prosecuted by DAs who would walk into court, state, "Your honor, these parents do not have teaching credentials." and the judge would convict on a prima facia case of child neglect. (And they were nasty about it, too.)

Then, in the mid '80's, the Federal Government published the results of an enormous study on educational outcomes. One of the conclusions of the study was that home-schooled kids were, on average, three years academically ahead of the kids in the public schools. Suddenly the prima facia case wasn't, and all prosecution was essentially dropped.

This is a BAD ruling and one that will surely be challenged to whatever degree necessary.

Post 1

Saturday, March 8, 2008 - 10:03pm

You may be interested in a letter of mine that was published in our local newspaper many years ago. Dale

HIGHLINE TIMES Wednesday, October 14, 1981

PARENT PRAISES HOME SCHOOLING

Editor:

I have just returned from a two-day Northwest Home Schooling conference in Arlington, Wash., where hundreds of parents exchanged ideas on the best ways of educating their children. It was very encouraging to see all the bright-eyed boys and girls and their interesting young parents from Washington, Idaho, Montana, Oregon and California working together on a project that was obviously very important to them. It certainly did not jibe with the comments of Superintendent Steele(Seattle School District Superintendent Donald Steele) on television recently that families are becoming extinct and the children will be raised by large governmental institutions in the future.

There must have been tens of different political, religious and educational philosophies held by the conference participants, but I believe we all agreed that we parents wanted primary responsibility for determining our children’s values. We believe that children should be taught by the people that love them and that children should participate in the larger adult world, learning how real decisions are made.

The home schooling movement is growing. The results are positive and I heartily recommend that parents who want to be responsible for their children’s character development obtain a copy of John Holt’s “Teach Your Own” and carefully consider his advice. Holt told us at the conference that learning is not being taught tricks (how to get a high test score) and that external discipline never turns into internal discipline.

It’s my opinion that the basic question is whether we want a society of humans who will jump when the authorities say jump, or would we prefer that each individual develops his or her own moral code and be educated well enough to confidently act independently of the group. The decision is being made by the parents of today’s little boys and girls.

Dale Reed

Burien

Post 2

Sunday, March 9, 2008 - 5:05am

The anti-home-school ruling is very bad news.

My wife and I did not quite have the resources to Fight the System, but we managed to avoid many of the bad outcomes produced by Public Mis-Education.

1. We taught all four of our children to read before they ever got to kindergarten, while it was legal to do so. My oldest son was reading at third or fourth grade level before he ever set foot in first grade. The others were almost as advanced. My oldest is a plus 9 Aspberger high functioning autistic like his old man and was semi-obsessed by the printed word. For a while, reading and writing was his life. It worked out fine for him. Until the age of seven he devoted two hours a day to reading all the electric meters in the neighborhood. He outgrow that, but he also learned how the meters worked in the process. Being high functioning autistic and an NLD* has its advantages.

2. I taught all of my kids how to do reckoning and reasoning independent of the pap they taught in the schools. They could all do algebra and boolean logic by the time they were in fifth grade. I also insisted that they have a grasp of magnitude by forbidding the use of calculating machines and computers until they could not only do arithmetic operations without batteries or electric current, but could estimate to an order of magnitude the answers. In short, they all had to know the answer to within an order of magnitude before they even solved the problem. After that I permitted and even encouraged them to save time and effort using machinery.

3. Since they could all read, I saw to it that my crew were frequent and effective library users. We used to have projects. Each would take some favorite idea or notion they had for a project and do the research using the local library. They all developed very independent and anti-authoritarian ways of thinking.

4. We saw to it that they all had hobbies that developed talents. This worked particularly well for my daughter whose forte was was art and construction. She is now one of America's leading toy designers and a vice president at Fisher-Price. She and her crew have produced some of Fisher-Price's leading toys. She also also the quasi-mother of the latest generation of Little People (tm). Those of you who have children have probably purchased some of my daughter's products for your kids. She could bend metal and weld by the time she was 18, which gives her a very good rapport with the industrial engineers who turn artistic designs into economically producible products. She is a business woman and a manager who actually knows how things are made. Imagine that!

We got these results by supplementing an bypassing the usual shit that goes on in the local public school. They were able to get the best that the schools could offer and a lot of stuff the schools could not provide. That is how we Beat the System.

My daughter married an industrial designer and they produced two very smart kids, one of whom is an artist and the other is an inventor. I think my grandson Eli Kelley, will become an effective player in the field of entertainment art (visual and games). I think he will score well in the world of Anime and Manga. He is also a plus 9 Aspie who has been a visual art machine since he was 18 months old. Shape and motion is his obsession. He also has a wicked sense of humor. He wrote a comic version of Moses and the Ten Commandments which could only get him excommunicated from the local synagogue. I advised him to pick his time and place for blasphemy wisely. When he is old enough to defend himself properly (he is almost there now, close to 16 years old) he will Strike his Blow. He and my granddaughter, the inventor too were a product of quasi-homeschooling. My daughter and son in law were able to find schools for advanced children in the Buffalo area (surprise, surprise - they exist!) so these two got a better than usual break from the System. It is doable, but it takes effort. My son-in-law, who is not only brilliant but also very tough has fought the system on behalf of his kids and done pretty well.

The System makes it hard to get good results, but they can be gotten one way or the other.

Bob Kolker

*NLD or NVLD: non (verbal) learning disability (so called). Kids with this "condition" have a harder time learning the nuances and subtleties of socializing. At a younger age it can cause some pain unless the parents can get in and smooth out some of the rough times. Later on it produces a very strong abstract approach to life. Not having a social intuition, which most people are born with comes almost automatically has some advantages. For us high functioning autistics, we have to learn it by the numbers. I even have a drivers license! It is doable. I have managed to pass as a human for many years because I can figure out the routine as a problem in logic. Maybe that is why I like the character Spock, so much.

Post 3

Sunday, March 9, 2008 - 2:57pm

Robert, I only found two things to take exception to in your submission:

First, darn it, your daughter is married already!!! Why couldn't you convince her to wait for the "right guy." I will tentatively throw my hat in the ring, on the basis of your description of her, just in case circumstances change, as she sounds just about perfect... ;->

The other is that the understanding of Aspergers has been advancing, and I - another Aspy, BTW - have followed enough of it to know that the cutting edge people in the research fields seem largely convinced now that it is actually not a form of autism. There are some common symptoms that both groups share, such as the inability to screen out unwanted signals, as in people who want to talk at the theatre during a movie, which will drive most Aspies up the wall.

However, the last I heard of the research on the genetic basis, for example, indicates that Aspergers is the result of a whole different gene complex than Autism. One researcher I met at UCI, whose specialty is Aspergers, told me that there is no such thing as a "high-functioning" autistic, which is how most Aspies got classified until recently. She said that every single time they were told someone was a high-functioning autistic, in fact they turned out to be an Aspy.

We Aspies are a human subspecies (or UberSpecies, perhaps... ) who have both pluses and minuses, due to our varient in brain construction. We find non-Aspy social niceties opaque and are constantly both misunderstanding non-Aspies and being misunderstood by them. The typical Aspy kid is often alternately a social leader (due possibly to a boldness connected with a lack of proper aprehension of consequences) and alternatively the subject of bullying, blamed for everything (although it's been noted that Aspy's can't get away with anything, as they are such poor liers) and a social pariah, the butt of nasty practical jokes.

On the other hand, when we Aspies actually congregate - such as at science fiction conventions, which have a VERY high concentration of us - we get along fine with each other, although non-Aspies still gawk in wonder as we present entire two thousand word theses to each other. (That's how Aspies converse.)

We are the world's best pattern recognizers, and can focus down on a subject way beyond the point that any non-Aspy would find reasonable, which is why we score so high on intelligence tests and make up a high percentage of the world-class computer programmers.

And, of course, we now know that Spock was actually an Aspy. They just got the racial name wrong. It wasn't "vulcan." It was "NERD," which we proudly wear.

(Edited by Phil Osborn on 3/09, 2:59pm)

Post 4

Sunday, March 9, 2008 - 3:17pm

Asperger's Syndrome is baloney.

Hans Asperger was a nazi who studied boys who did not "get along well" with others. He found that mild regimentation -- youth groups, hiking clubs -- worked wonders for them, made then fit right it! His career did well as the Nazis rose. After the War, the Allied military -- themselves a bunch of Boy Scouts -- found nothing dangerous in his ideas and they let him go.

Erwin S. "Filthy Pierre" Strauss ( whom you might know from science fiction fandom) has long held that people like you -- and many others here -- are genetic "Gammas" neither Alpha leaders nor Beta followers. He also cautioned against the "Gamma = Superman Fallacy." Different does not mean better.

There are many "types" of individuals and any individual might be measured as being any number of "types" along whatever axes.

Asperger's (so-called) has been given so many attributes that they are contradictory. You said that aspies hate it when people in theaters talk because they cannot concentrate. On the other hand, children (allegedly) with Asperger's are (supposedly) diagnosed as borderline (or high-fuctioning, you call it) autistic specifically because of their powers of concentration. So, which is it?

It may well be that boys (generally, it is boys; less often girls) who do or do not do this or that can on some basis or other be conveniently labeled for whatever purpose that serves. I assert that there is a difference between objective identification and convenience labeling.

Asperger's Syndrome is nothing but a paycheck for psychologists who specialize in Asperger's Syndrome.

You are who you are. If you like labels, call yourself "Phil."

Post 5

Sunday, March 9, 2008 - 5:07pm

Not true. There are discernable brain differences. It is physiological.

Aspberg's Syndrome is at the high end of the autism spectrum. There are differences in structure and function of Aspie brains.

It is NOT a disease. It is a variation. High functioning Aspies can be found aplenty in the software business and in scientific endeavors. You will find them in areas where social grace is not the most important factor.

Bob Kolker

Post 6

Sunday, March 9, 2008 - 5:37pm

reply to post #3

Phil the Aspie writes:

And, of course, we now know that Spock was actually an Aspy. They just got the racial name wrong. It wasn't "vulcan." It was "NERD," which we proudly wear.

I reply:

So were Newton and Einstein.

I was a Nerd before there were Nerds. I am somewhat older than you and in my day they called me Geek (as in carnival freaks), weirdo and such like. I was also dubbed "scientist" by my tormentors. Since I was beat up a lot I had to learn to fight very dirty to survive, which I did. After breaking some arms, and inflicting a concussion with a brick, the bastards let me be in peace. They were afraid I would kill.

After a while I realized my difference was not a disadvantage at all. I was able to learn enough about "normal" behavior that I could simulate it by the numbers.

I had an early talent for mathematics (I taught myself calculus when I was 13, well before it was fashionable to teach it early in the public schools) and I could study and learn in a very single minded way. I learned calculus, group theory and my Haftorah for my Bar Mitzvah. Later on I got into Talmud and Category Theory.

I was able to pass for human and won my bride to whom I am still married after 51 years. Only one of my kids was probably an Aspie (my oldest son) and he is quite fine. He learned how to relate by the numbers also.

Learning social skills as an algorithm is not really all that hard. It is no harder than learning how to act. The main trick is to learn when to shut up. Aspies get grief because they talk inappropriately. I finally learned silence was golden.

When I participated in a brain-behavior study at Rutgers University recently, the neurophysiologist looked at my MRI and asked me if I ever was diagnosed as autistic or Aspberger. He was able to tell from the brain scans. I told him that I was, most likely, but I function near normal on the social scale so it is no problem.

You may be right about having a superior variation of brain structure. Perhaps we are the evolutionary next step in a highly technical age.

Bob Kolker

Post 7

Sunday, March 9, 2008 - 6:12pm

Phil writes:

The conference was a huge success. We had John Holt - his first time on the West Coast, as well as a computer lab running PET computers linked via modem to a mainframe running the original "Adventure" game, all provided by Data Equipment Supply, the West Coast Commodore educational specialty store along with Larry Bauder, the computer-assisted teaching specialist for the West Coast.

I reply:

PET computers. My, my. You have dated yourself.

I remember John Holt very well. He was from the Boston Area and both he and I were guests on David Brudnoy's radio talk show (but not at the same time). I met John and his cello on several occasions socially. He died rather young, unfortunately. I think, maybe he was barely fifty years old. A nice fellow and a staunch advocate of home schooling.

As I explained in another posting, we never went the homeschooling route totally. We sort of finessed the system and added in what they left out. The only reservation I have about home schooling is the matter of laboratory equipment for the physics and chemistry courses. I really don't see how to do that at home. For the early grades it is fairly easy to beef up reading, writing and arithmetic since these do not require a lot of capital equipment. Pencils, paper, chalk and blackboards will do just fine and throw in a view screen and some Power Point and you have the makings.

As for Montessori, I think parents can provide that service at home. The local Montessori schools here in New Jersey are charging around six thousand a year which is a tad steep for many folks. Attentive parents should be able to provide the equivalent with a little coaching and reading on the subject.

An intermediate position is co-operative school. These are schools run by the parents with relatively little professional input. They are effective at the pre-primary and the kindergarten level.

In any case concerned parents can work around the system and provide for their kids what the public schools fail to provide. Right now my grandson Nick (4 years, ten months) is now reading at second grade level and can do single digit arithmetic. His parents (my son and daughter in law) have filled in the gaps nicely. My granddaughter Grace is not that all interested in reading. Her thing is dancing and acting, but she will pick up reading in no time flat, once she gets to kindergarten. Nick on the other hand has loved numbers and letters since he was two. He picked up reading with hardly a glitch. Ever since he was toilet trained he has brought a book with him to the Throne Room. Clever lad.

Bob Kolker

(Edited by Robert J. Kolker on 3/09, 6:13pm)

Post 8

Monday, March 10, 2008 - 5:27am

Dale Reed wrote in Post 1 of this thread:

There must have been tens of different political, religious and educational philosophies held by the conference participants, but I believe we all agreed that we parents wanted primary responsibility for determining our children’s values. We believe that children should be taught by the people that love them and that children should participate in the larger adult world, learning how real decisions are made.

I basically agree with you but have gotten into numerous arguments on this site over the years regarding the legitimate extent of parental authority. Basically, I have argued that the state should not forbid parents from teaching religion to their "helpless" children and that outsiders generally do not have adequate knowledge to judge as "immoral" parents who restrict the social and sexual lives of their minor children. Perhaps you have some words of wisdom regarding so-called "parental fascism" and those "Objectivists" who would meddle morally or even politically with that parenting process.

Post 9

Monday, March 10, 2008 - 8:47am

Asperger's Syndrome is baloney

For once I agree with Marotta, from what I've read of this 'syndrome' (someone once suggested to me I might have it and so I looked into it) I am pretty skeptical of it, it reads like an astrological profile, and is all to easily simply used as an excuse for people who put little effort into understanding and forming appropriate social behaviors to continue putting little effort into becoming socially 'normal' "Oh, well, I'm wierd cause I have aspergers syndrome" etc.

From Wikipedia

"characterized by difficulties in social interaction and by restricted, stereotyped interests and activities"

"The exact cause of AS is unknown, although research supports the likelihood of a genetic basis, and brain imaging techniques have identified structural and functional differences in specific regions of the brain."

Of course, if people choose to behave differently their brain, in fact, will indeed have different structures and functionalities. This is yet another testament to the absurd notion that humans are merely robots and any differences in one brain from another must necessarily have come from genetics. E.g. Einstien was so smart because he brain was different, not, Einstein's brain was different because he was so smart (i.e. perpetually studying and challenging himself)

"Researchers and people with AS have contributed to a shift in attitudes away from the notion that AS is a deviation from the norm that must be treated or cured, and towards the view that AS is a difference rather than a disability."

Indeed...

"A pervasive developmental disorder, Asperger syndrome is distinguished by a pattern of symptoms rather than a single symptom. It is characterized by qualitative impairment in social interaction, by stereotyped and restricted patterns of activities and interests, and by no clinically significant delay in cognitive development or general delay in language.[12] Intense preoccupation with a narrow subject, one-sided verbosity, restricted prosody and intonation, and motor clumsiness are typical of the condition, but are not required for diagnosis."

By this criteria, virtually every scientist I work with here at Pfizer is someone with Asperger's.

Like the rational person, being so disgusted and confused with what is considered 'art' these days just rejecting all art, I think a more likely cause would be logical or technically minded people get fed up with all that superifical manipulative second handendness so prevalent in society that they decide at some point to expend no effort in interacting in that manner - much like Dagny in her party discussions with Lillian Rearden. No doubt she would have been considered someone with Aspergers, she is after all obsessed with railroad rails and metals and would certainly be charachterized by a severe qualitative impairment in social interaction by Lillian and most everyone else.

Post 10

Monday, March 10, 2008 - 9:03am

Not true. There are discernable brain differences. It is physiological.

Aspberg's Syndrome is at the high end of the autism spectrum. There are differences in structure and function of Aspie brains

Bob, it is important not to confuse cause and effect here, while there is no doubt that the brains of Asperger's are different, why they are different is what matters.

The bodies of body builders are different from those of regular folks, yet we do not claim they suffer from 'bulging muscle syndrome' we know damn well why their muscles are large. Similiarly, however we use our brains determines to a large degree it's structure and functionaility.

Behaviorial researchers always confuse the cause and effect in these situations, they look at Einstien's brain and say 'ah, his prefrontal cortex had twice the nueral density, bla bla bla' and forget that he spent his life obsessively studying. Just like looking at that body builder and saying they are strong because they were born with big muscles, they are ignoring the fact that they worked out throughout their life and thus changed, structurally, their musculature.

The same thing happens in our brains. Behavioral pyschologists still wrestle with the notion of free will, they can't understand how some portion of the brain always correlates to some particular function or choice, and see people with similiar behaviors have similiar areas of the brain light up and say, 'ah, that behavior is caused by this part of the brain being configured in that manner' instead of recognizing that the behavior adopted over time caused that structural correlation, they think the structure causes the behavior.

Clearly, some things DO have physiological causes, and it is important to recognize those, but it is also important to recognize that structural differences can come from chosen behavior re-enforced over time. Scientists today still think we are either programmed by our environment, or programmed by our genes, our behavior is thus always the result of programming, and is always relegated to a false dichotomy, where they seem to neglect randomness and choice.

All human behavior, as Aristotle so presciently observed, is a combination of chance, nature, habit, and choice. All of our structures in our body are similiarly a complicated interaction of those four, some governed more so by nature, some by chance. And so all of our structures in our brain are also governed by all four, given the amazing plasticity of the human brain, and the relatively small number of genes which govern it's growth (about a dozen) the vast majority of normally distributive behavior patterns are more likely the results of habit and choice, than they are of genetic pre-determinism.

Post 11

Monday, March 10, 2008 - 9:24am

There is some evidence that the causes for the difference between Aspberger's brains and normal brains are genetic. It sure runs in my family.

The matter is under careful study and it will be resolved sooner or later by scientific means.

The fact is that in the end, Aspberger brains (like mine) are different from normal brains (like yours). It is the difference that matters more than the cause. My intellect does not work like yours. My intellect has purely physical causes. There is no immaterial mind anywhere in or near my body. I have the scans to prove it. I am material down to the subatomic level. In grosser terms, I am a hairy bag of mostly water with a little sodium and potassium dissolved. There is not an iota of spirit in me. I have no mind. I have no soul. I am all flesh.

I have been different since I was an infant. It is only through practice and craft that I can pass for human. You can read between the lines with no training. It took me years to achieve that. I was socially clueless until I was nearly an adolescent. You achieved a social sense with hardly any effort. I was literal minded (and still am) from the time I could talk (which was about 10 months old). I still have to work at "reading between the lines" and I have to fight my natural tendency toward being literal. You don't. On the other hand logical abstraction and algorithmic thinking is to me as natural as breathing. I am a natural born Turing machine and I have passed the Turing test.

Aside from a certain amount of pain suffered when I was young, I do not consider the difference at all a disadvantage. It has served me well in my paying careers as an applied mathematician and software developer. I have been rule based and table driven from the git-go which is why I am comfortable with computers and algorithms. For me everything is an algorithm. You know the old story. To a hammer everything looks like a nail. Well to me, everything looks like an algorithm. Sometimes it bothers normal folk when I am like that, so to get along I do a rather good imitation of a human. I can even do stand-up comedy. The rules are not that hard to figure out.

Bob Kolker

Post 12

Monday, March 10, 2008 - 11:06am

There is some evidence that the causes for the difference between Aspberger's brains and normal brains are genetic. It sure runs in my family.

The matter is under careful study and it will be resolved sooner or later by scientific means.

Can you cite some of that evidence? I would be interested in examining it, and seeing how much, if at all, it differs from the typical confusing of cause and effect that most behavioral scientists associate with 'evidence'

You and every one in your family could exhibit Asperger like symptons for reasons other than genetic, your eldest son, for instance, could have just behaviorally adopted many of your mannerism, the 1st born of any family is always the most likely to be idealogically similiar to their parents, later born children or more likely to differ. The more older sisters you have the more likely you are to be gay, this seems to be partly embryonic (changes in the makeup of the amniotic fluid) and partly environmental. The most startingly spectacular thing about Einstein's intellect was that each and every one of Einstein's children was spectacularly average.

The fact is that in the end, Aspberger brains (like mine) are different from normal brains (like yours). It is the difference that matters more than the cause.

True, but understanding the cause is certainly important in coming up with proper therapy, is it not? If this is a genetic thing, gene therapy would eventually work, if it is not, gene therapy would do absolutely nothing. If it is the result of behavioral choices made throughout life, or, more critically, during the years of the most physiological development, then 'fixing' it would require something entirely different, a directed and concetrated effort at understanding and then habitulizing different social behavior.

There is no immaterial mind anywhere in or near my body. I have the scans to prove it. I am material down to the subatomic level. In grosser terms, I am a hairy bag of mostly water with a little sodium and potassium dissolved. There is not an iota of spirit in me. I have no mind. I have no soul. I am all flesh

Your material determinism is part of the reason why you so willingly adopt this 'syndrome' I am right in guessing that you have a hard time reconciling free will with material reductionism?

My intellect does not work like yours...It is only through practice and craft that I can pass for human. You can read between the lines with no training. It took me years to achieve that. I was socially clueless until I was nearly an adolescent. You achieved a social sense with hardly any effort. I was literal minded (and still am) from the time I could talk (which was about 10 months old). I still have to work at "reading between the lines" and I have to fight my natural tendency toward being literal

I have the same tendancies, which is why someone suggested I might have aspergers, I am extremely literal, to a fault in some social situations, and have difficulty 'reading between the lines' as you say. This is no doubt a major reason why I have thoroughly enjoyed reading scientific and technical non-fiction throughout my life, however, learning this new skill of allegory and metaphor, where reasonable, has given me a new and profound joy of things like good poetry, which it takes me a much longer time to read than the most complicated technical works. Once I understood this particular thing which I did not like, I engaged in an active effort to rectify it, I did not say 'well, it's just how I am' or now 'well, I just have Aspergers' And after this active effort for a few years these sings became routine, and then habitualized, and are now much more 2nd nature to me.

Post 13

Monday, March 10, 2008 - 11:21am

Passing for human is like riding a bike. Once you do it enough times you don't forget how. It is not true nature. It is learned.

The mind people have the ability from the git go. Type A folks have to learn it the hard way, but once learned it is not forgotten.

I have been doing it for over 70 years now, so it is no longer a problem. When I tell people I am Type A they are surprised because my imitation of being human is quite good. I can even do stand up comedy routines.

I have even developed an analog to empathy. That took me quite a while.

Bob Kolker

Post 14

Monday, March 10, 2008 - 1:07pm

Bob:

There is no immaterial mind anywhere in or near my body. I have the scans to prove it.

To prove what? That you have a brain but no mind? Do you also not have desires because you couldn't see them on a brain-scan? "Mind" is a process that is a manifestation of having a brain, just as "gravitational pull" is a manifestation of having mass. You can't perform a cat-scan on a rock and claim "I see no gravitational pull!! Ergo it must not exist!"

I am material down to the subatomic level.

Duh!!

In grosser terms, I am a hairy bag of mostly water with a little sodium and potassium dissolved. There is not an iota of spirit in me. I have no mind. I have no soul. I am all flesh

So is this tasty prime rib steak I'm about to eat for dinner tonight. So you are nothing but a steak?

Post 15

Monday, March 10, 2008 - 1:16pm

Passing for human is like riding a bike. Once you do it enough times you don't forget how. It is not true nature. It is learned

The same is true of virtually ALL human behavior Bob, that is the point. Nobody has any abilitiy to ride a bike, socialize, or play games of metaphor from birth, everybody learns it, some learn it easier, some with more difficulty, but absolutely no one is 'born' with that ability.

I have even developed an analog to empathy. That took me quite a while.

Well, that is pretty pathetic. Empathy requires only the acknolwedgement and recognition of values, and the recognition that other people exist and have values as well. Unless you are a solipsist, empathy is a pretty rudimentary step. expressing it however is entirely different and falls back into the realm of 'abnormal social behavior' Are you saying that you would have to 'learn' to be sad when your lover's parents died? Or even that you 'faked' it? for some reason, as much as I disagree with you, I have a hard time believing that

Post 16

Monday, March 10, 2008 - 1:41pm

Dickey wrote:

Well, that is pretty pathetic. Empathy requires only the acknolwedgement and recognition of values, and the recognition that other people exist and have values as well. Unless you are a solipsist,
empathy is a pretty rudimentary step.

expressing it however is entirely different and falls back into the realm of 'abnormal social behavior' Are you saying that you would have to 'learn' to be sad when your lover's parents died? Or even that you 'faked' it? for some reason, as much as I disagree with you, I have a hard time believing that

I reply.

Easy for you to say.

When I was younger I had to construct the scenario of sympathy out of whole cloth. It did not come naturally. So I worked at it. It is like acting. One learns what it is like to feel sorry. For you, a natural talent. For me, an acquired skill.

You have no idea how my insides work, so you should not be so quick to judge. I can only -imagine- how your insides work. I can never -know-.

Your difficulty of belief is your problem, not mine.

See if you can wrap your head around the idea that we all do not operate the same way. Can you do that?

Bob Kolker

Post 17

Monday, March 10, 2008 - 2:18pm

1st of all, my name is not 'Dickey' that is my last name, if you prefer to use it, please prefix it with Mr. Or you can just call me Michael.

So Mr. Kolker, let me try to understand you then. Some questions -

1) are you sad when you lose something you value, or are you not sad when you lose something you value?

2) do you understand that other people exist and in fact have values of their own

3) do you understand then that they would probably also be sad to lose something they value

I have a hard time thinking you answer no to any of these, you do not need a 'gene' to understand these things, even the most idiotic person recognizes these, even some animals seem to exhibit this behavior. So assuming you are sad when you lose something you value, and recognize that other people are real entities, and that they would be sad to lose something they value, how do you respond to that? Are you indifferent? Calculating? Merely an observing robot? So, do you 'fake' empathy, or do you actually feel empathy? Can you expand on the difference a bit?
(Edited by Michael F Dickey on 3/10, 2:18pm)

(Edited by Michael F Dickey on 3/10, 2:19pm)

Post 18

Monday, March 10, 2008 - 3:52pm

Of course. I am not stupid or made of stone. I am as organic as you are. I just experience things differently from you.

Bob Kolker

Post 19

Monday, March 10, 2008 - 3:56pm