Tabula Rasa Liberalism and it's impacts

Author: WyIted
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#1
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# intro

Tabula Rasa is Latin for blank slate. It's of course one of the underlying ideologies that make liberalism a terrible philosophy. This doesn't apply to the champagne socialists I cover in the following threads. 

https://www.debateart.com/forum/topics/11803-the-liberal-plan-to-screw-workers

Or this one

https://www.debateart.com/forum/topics/11772-why-old-money-votes-democrat

  
It's also not to say every liberal believes this, but most of the ones you interact with on this site will. Some of the more intelligent liberals such as whiteflame and Barney I believe will not fall victim to this fallacy for example. 

It's also a concept that is so bad it threatens the underpinning of conservative philosophy. Often conservatives will have the same presupposition of Tabula Rasa and just argue how conservatism, despite it, is true. 

# What is Tabula Rasa in this context

Conservatives often say that they care about equality under the law, while liberals care about equality of outcome and it perplexed the conservative as to why this should be the case when they know some people are lazy, some are creative and hardworking etc.

However wanting equality of outcome makes sense when you start understanding their underlying philosophy, that many times they themselves are not aware of. 

Yes, yes liberals. I know you will criticize the conservative for clinging onto the Horatio Alger myths. That's a philosophy underpinning much of conservatism that is problematic, but we are talking about you right now. 

Liberals believe we are all born equal. Once born we all have equal IQs and work ethics and creativity naturally I'm us and the environment is what impacts those traits. This is the flawed Tabula Rasa theory. 

As Bestkorea pointed out in this thread. https://www.debateart.com/forum/topics/11817-equality-cannot-exist-so-why-do-people-want-equality

Bk says the following

"Thinking of entire huge text to say that equality is good is simply like saying "It would be good if everyone had everything he wants" and writing bunch of nonsense to support said claim.

Sure, it would be good if equality existed, but the fact that it cannot possibly ever exist makes it kinda pointless to want."

# How Tabula Rasa works in practice

Since the liberal thinks it is 100% environmental what happens to a person it is natural to look at differences in outcome . If less black people graduate college we need an explanation. It can't be that they are more interested in the trades or are more artistic etc, since we are rabula Rasa that means black people should be just like white people and want to go to college as often as white people do. Since women and men are blank slates when they are born, then if more men are interested in STEM, it's because women are oppressed. 

If you point this out to a liberal they may complain. That many conservatives believe that zero percent of life is environmental and everyone can pull themselves up by the bootstrap. This may accurately reflect a logical fallacy on the part of the conservative but most conservatives know that environment plays some impact even if they understate the impact. 

It should also be said that conservatives who state that anyone can do anything may also just have a heroic view of the world and trying to motivate somebody to get out of the bucket, while his fellow liberals will act like crabs trying to pull him back in.

# conclusion

Liberalism sees everyone as equal upon birth and as a result have policies that create learned helpless in society and try to address non problems. For example liberals not realizi g that it is okay if more women are interested in nursing and more men in truck driving. It doesn't mean either group is oppressed only that they innately have different characteristics due to genetic and environmental influences and that's okay.
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@WyIted
It is a shame that postmodern progressives have destroyed womanhood to the point where they are not even allowed to have their own sports league and trans men are allowed to run rape crisis centers for destroyed women.

It's only logical that by attempting to promote equity by creating a victim class of women who should then be entitled to rewards and reparations simply for being born a woman that you would also create a massive amount of incentivized men who identify as that favored class.
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@Greyparrot

It is not shameful that postmodern progressives have promoted gender equality to the point where women have equal opportunities in all aspects of society, including sports and leadership roles in organizations like rape crisis centers.
It is not logical that by advocating for equality and inclusivity for all individuals, including transgender people, one would inadvertently create a system that incentivizes men to falsely identify as women for personal gain.

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@Greyparrot
It's only logical that by attempting to promote equity by creating a victim class of women who should then be entitled to rewards and reparations simply for being born a woman that you would also create a massive amount of incentivized men who identify as that favored class
This is part of what is happening and there are underground transmaxxing communities where people do this for the sole purpose of these benefits. I self identified as transgender at work funny enough and the management is now pushing me for promotions. I won't take any because I am studying for a new career but it was funny seeing the shift In how open they were to promoting me. 

Some of it is just taking advantage of people. For example autistic people are a large number of transgenders and one of the definitive ing attributes of autism is a weak sense of self, so when somebody comes around and says "here is your solution for feeling a weak sense of self, here is why you feel like you are in the wrong body", than a lot of these kids respond because they just want to feel normal. The high suicide rate suggests this solution doesn't work, but it doesn't stop leftists from taking advantage of these kids. 

They are doing the same thing with kids who are just reaching puberty websites are listing the following things as symptoms of being transgender to take advantage of children.

1. Feeling not right in your own body
2. Feeling like you don't belong
3. You are a male and enjoy some traditionally female things or visa versa

Just things that normal kids feel and then presenting transgenderism as a solution to thus teenage angst
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and 

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@WyIted
Tabula Rasa is Latin for blank slate. It's of course one of the underlying ideologies that make liberalism a terrible philosophy. This doesn't apply to the champagne socialists I cover in the following threads. 
I would argue Tabula Rasa has never been tested on a large scale. People are raised in different families, to different parents with different lifestyles and value sets. The fact that people are given, say, the same education (and in practice they often aren't) doesn't counteract this.

While people are naturally different, it's more than fair to say that a lot of statistics we see in real life would disappear under Tabula Rasa put into action. For example, there's a substantive criminality gap between the average black and the average white person. But if black and white babies were swapped at birth, and the average white person raised in a morally bankrupt ghetto, and the average black person raised in a middle class Christian family that enforced basic discipline at home and away from home, then there's no reason to think the average black person would have a higher likelihood of growing up to become a criminal. In fact, we'd expect this cohort of whites to have a higher crime rate than their black counterparts. Assuming they were raised in the same type of home environments, and assuming the average black person wasn't negatively influenced by older blacks (who reached adulthood prior to the start of this hypothetical experiment) prone to lawlessness, we can expect similar outcomes.

Again, though, this has never been tried. So there's no reason to think Tabula Rasa has been tried and failed.
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@WyIted
Liberals believe we are all born equal. Once born we all have equal IQs and work ethics and creativity naturally I'm us and the environment is what impacts those traits. This is the flawed Tabula Rasa theory.
I dont usually see someone using my logic to attack trans people lol

I support trans rights.

I just dont support the idea that lack of equality is bad, since if we accept that, then we will always think we live in bad times since there will always be lack of equality.

Should we all look same, dress same, think same, own same things, be exact copies of each other and have exactly same lives? How far does "we should be equal" go?
Because when person says that we should be equal, one must ask "equal in what?".

If we live in bad society and can never create good society, then that just gives excuse to all bad people to stay bad since good (equality) cannot even be achieved. It also gives everyone something to complain about all the time, all the lack of equality everywhere.

Its simple, when you set goal at equality, anything less than equality becomes bad.
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@Best.Korea
I dont usually see someone using my logic to attack trans people lo
I support trans rights
Just to clarify I oppose using public funds to promote transgender ideology and think ultimately it's a unhealthy thing, but I also think that if  somebody wants to transition that is their business not mine
#9
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@WyIted
You've got a lot of distinct concepts melding with each other in this post. I attempt to clarify, this is not me saying you are saying this, I'm saying this:

Nature vs Nurture, personal responsibility vs environmental responsibility, the infinite dimensions of comparison each with its own equality of outcome vs opportunity.

Tabula rasa does mean 'blank slate', it doesn't mean "equal" it means "empty, unbound, not-predetermined" and it refers specifically to conceptual frameworks and related instincts.

It's been pretty much proven false as an absolute statement and it would be a very surprising state of affairs if it was absolutely true given our evolutionary past is full of hard coded biological responses.

That does not make it a useless concept though, it is substantially true when compared to other animals and as a concept it leads to insight because the vast majority of human cultures have presumed the opposite and have been wrong as evidenced by the range of "human nature" shown by the total set of humanity.

In other words cultures, especially isolated ones, tend to think that the way they see the world and themselves is the only way, that it's natural, instinctual, permanent, reliable, and insusceptible to improvement or degradation.  They are wrong. There are inbuilt behaviors but they are not nearly as strong or as specific as people want to think. No matter how many times they say "that's just the way things are", or "this is a transcendental truth" that doesn't make it so.

Now there is an equality in the idea that babies are all empty vessels, but the concept of tabula rasa does not make any claims about what fills the container, so if males go around beating each other senseless because of instinct that belief does not directly contradict tabula rasa even if it seems counter-intuitive that biology strongly biases the lessons that are learned.


Nature vs nurture is a different but related metric. Saying "100% environmental" is making a claim about nature vs nurture, specifically that it's all nurture. 100% genetic would be claiming that it's all nature.

The negation of tabula rasa is definitely claiming that nature is >= 0%. That is the factor of nature cannot be less than the inbuilt perceptions and concepts we are all born with.


Nature vs nurture as a concept precludes the will or absorbs it into one side or the other. When 'conservatives' say "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" they are defying the dichotomy entirely by invoking the will.

i.e. there is nature, there is nurture, and then there is what you choose. Those who insist on the dichotomy for the purposes of statistical analysis would call that idea a form of nurture.

Regardless people seeking to absolve themselves of responsibility are very comfortable with the dichotomy because they think it means there never really was such a thing as a choice.

The modern left-tribe is a conceptual mess with tons of contradictions, but they do occasionally throw back to previous assertions and one which they certainly do like is the rejection of genetic determinism. Genetic determinism was the foundation of the racist fallacy and the left-tribe sees themselves as the white knight that defeated racism. (again they can't keep any story straight these days so they don't mind saying melanin makes you compassionate)

Under the 100% rejection of genetic determinism comes the 100% rejection of nature as a factor. It can only be environmental.

Within that scope they also tend to reject the will (or personal responsibility).

That leaves "Born equal, no concepts, all taught to you, nothing is your fault"

So your conclusion is correct, but as I said at the start; it's at least three different concepts working together to get there.
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@Swagnarok
For example, there's a substantive criminality gap between the average black and the average white person. But if black and white babies were swapped at birth, and the average white person raised in a morally bankrupt ghetto, and the average black person raised in a middle class Christian family that enforced basic discipline at home and away from home, then there's no reason to think the average black person would have a higher
likelihood of growing up to become a criminal.
It would be hard to test this but some of it has been done. For example black babies raised in white families still have a lower average IQ than whites. 

I would also add that there are genetic lines that have higher IQs within that demographic, but that low IQ is going to be correlated with higher crime perhaps even more closely than race. 

We do have statistics that show that black males born in wealthy homes still will have higher rates of criminality. I don't deny that it's likely to also be largely cultural give how much criminality is glorified in movies and music targeting that community, but I there is certainly a genetic component. 

Tlnow sensible liberals will shut their mouths about these realities and use these genetic differences to know where to distribute help and perhaps there is an argument that we should help low IQ individuals or those more prone to criminality to become valuable members to society and I also can empathize with the fact a liberal politician would not be able to publicly acknowledge the reality but could use knowledge of that reality to behave in an empathetic well. 
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@Swagnarok
Again, though, this has never been tried. So there's no reason to think Tabula Rasa has been tried and failed.
That would also require a country that values assimilation of a dominant culture over valuing a diversity of "equal" cultures.
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You put that well
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For example black babies raised in white families still have a lower average IQ than whites. 
A lot of that is because the postmodern parents think it's empowering to teach the kids to be a victim and then brag to their champagne friends about how they helped victims.
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Under the 100% rejection of genetic determinism comes the 100% rejection of nature as a factor. It can only be environmental.

Within that scope they also tend to reject the will (or personal responsibility).
Free will is rejected by both nature and nurture, or any combination of these.

It is simply a contradiction to say that "you have free will, but your choices are made up by your environment you grew up in, or genes which you couldnt choose.".

The idea of free will must reject both nature and nurture in order to survive as a logical thought, which it really cant, since there are many conditions clearly changing people's choices, from education to abuse, to drug use.
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@Best.Korea
The idea of free will must reject both nature and nurture in order to survive as a logical thought, which it really cant, since there are many conditions clearly changing people's choices, from education to abuse, to drug use.
Quantum physics gets around this. You do get the decision since every possible choice simultaneously happens in multiple worlds and your consciousness just travels to the world where you made your decision and the split off universes have either other pieces of your consciousness or contain philosophical zombies
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When you accept that you are a program being run by your brain, it is not a contradiction to say your free will is part of that program.
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An infinite number of philosophical zombies, what a comforting thought. Wouldn't that imply that the people you interact with are also philosophical zombies and every person is alone in their constantly shifting universe?

You should write sci-fi horror, but hey free will is apparently still in play for some reason.

FYI I consider this definition of free will as "that which determines outcome but which is neither predictable nor random" to be useless (self-contradictory). You are something, be it spirit or flesh and that something must either be predictable or random or some hybrid of the two.

If I have to choose between being a random algorithm and a predictable algorithm of course I choose predictable. There is beauty to be found in order.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
"An infinite number of philosophical zombies, what a comforting thought. Wouldn't that imply that the people you interact with are also philosophical zombies and every person is alone in their constantly shifting universe?"

Yes and this brings me a great deal of existential dread, but the theory of Quantum immortality seems to support it. I would think that individual universes could overlap so it isn't necessarily true that everyone is an NPC
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Quantum physics gets around this. You do get the decision since every possible choice simultaneously happens in multiple worlds and your consciousness just travels to the world where you made your decision and the split off universes have either other pieces of your consciousness or contain philosophical zombies
Thats only if you run under assumption that your choice is uncaused by anything, which violates the basic law of causation, but also doesnt explain how do you control your choice.

To make it simple, choices either have a cause or they dont.

Choice has a cause = cannot choose cause

cannot choose cause = no free will

Choice has a cause = no free will

But if choice doesnt have a cause, then you run into a different problem where you cannot possibly control your choices.

Free will, even when operating under assumption that choices have no cause, just traps itself in another logical problem:

Choices have no cause = choices cannot be controlled or chosen

choices cannot be controlled or chosen = no free will

Choices have no cause = no free will

To make it simple, free will is by definition ability to make a choice without that choice being affected by anything.

But simple logical problem occurs because in order to choose something, you must choose to choose something. In order to choose to choose something, you must choose to choose to choose something.

This simple logical problem goes on to infinity where choice cannot even be made because you can never choose.

Thus, we see that any choice cannot possibly be free will, because free will is by itself a contradiction in terms.

Ability to make a choice doesnt really tell you what is it that is making a choice.
If its non-choice part of you, then you cannot choose that part, thus cannot really control choice.
If choice comes out of nothing, then again you couldnt choose which choice comes out of nothing, thus its not in your control. Its just random decisions not made by anyone.
If you can choose a choice, that leads to infinity regress where choice can never even be made.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
When you accept that you are a program being run by your brain, it is not a contradiction to say your free will is part of that program.

Lets see.

Free will = ability to choose

Me being run by my brain = me having no control over what brain I have or what is brain programmed to choose, thus no ability to choose.

Me being run by my brain = no ability to choose.

Simply, if I am programmed, then free will cannot possibly exist since I cannot choose how I am programmed.
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Thats only if you run under assumption that your choice is uncaused by anything, which violates the basic law of causation, but also doesnt explain how do you control your choice.
Quantum physics explains how free will is possible and contradicts the laws of causation. For example it says future choices can effect past events
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@WyIted
Quantum physics explains how free will is possible and contradicts the laws of causation. For example it says future choices can effect past events
The solution for the problem I mentioned cannot be solved by merely saying choices affect events. Choices are still affected by something even if they affect events. Thus, the problem I mentioned isnt solved as choices are still affected by something.

The only question is how are our choices made. Choices being made doesnt really prove free will. Thus, the question isnt if free will can be proven, since we know it cant.

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The solution for the problem I mentioned cannot be solved by merely saying choices affect events. Choices are still affected by something even if they affect events. Thus, the problem I mentioned isnt solved as choices are still affected by something
No because at the sub atomic level which  effects the atomic level all particles are in indefinite states of being and are randomly selected for. The randomness allows for free will. I would see schrodinger cat
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@WyIted
indefinite states of being and are randomly selected for. The randomness allows for free will
Randomness isnt free will, since randomness cannot be chosen. Free will must allow a choice by tautology.

Its like programming a computer to act according to random dice roll. Thats not free will, as computer doesnt choose dice roll result.

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The randomness of subatomic particles and the I fluency of the mental state which is a state the brain projects onto the physical world allows room for that mental state influenced through the invisible mind because it acts like a radio station for the mind to influence things at the quantum level. 
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The randomness of subatomic particles and the I fluency of the mental state which is a state the brain projects onto the physical world allows room for that mental state influenced through the invisible mind
Again, who chooses randomness? Who chooses this "invisible mind"?

Free will is by tautology ability to choose, which is contradictive as not everything can be chosen, thus free will is contradictive.
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"Again, who chooses randomness? Who chooses this "invisible mind"?"

You do, because there was a single creative force that created the universe and that is apart from the universe. This creative force has split his personality into billions of people and this creative force (God) chooses whatever he wants to and is above the laws of physics. Your brain which could be referred to as the radio can impact randomness as shown in double slit experiments. So the creative force using the brain as a radio has free will and it is expressed on the quantum level which impacts the atomic level and has a cascading effect. 

You could also see platos cave for a theory that can help explain how free will escapes the cause oriented universe.

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I would think that individual universes could overlap so it isn't necessarily true that everyone is an NPC
...but can turn into an NPC at any moment?

Somehow that's worse.
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Me being run by my brain = me having no control over what brain I have or what is brain programmed to choose, thus no ability to choose.
You being the program.

The computer does not determine the software, the computer executes the software. If you identify as the software, you are the physical determinant. Hence free will.
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It is unnerving but the good thing is that it makes murder and rape ethical