Felicity

Would somone provide empirical evidence for human understanding, meaning, reason, emotion, logic, illogic, imagination, curiosity, apathy, ....what else? ...justice, appreciation, honor, .....

I'm looking for something that can be concretely proven to hold true in all instances and can be demonstrated without resorting to circular logic.

Lachean

If I understand your correctly, how could one support logic if not by logic? Are some things not self-evident?

A great many things you listed are matters of subjectivity.

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At the root of every civilized achievement, such as science, technology, progress, freedom--at the root of every value we enjoy today, including the birth of this country--you will find the achievement of one man, who lived over two thousand years ago: Aristotle.

A_Wise_Fool

Ha Ha thats sort of a broad question. Are you asking what makes humans human? Or maybe contemplating whether artificial intelligence could ever emulate the human mind? Or if there is a soul within all humans perhaps?

I think your question is two fold. It seems to ask for proof of human learning and proof of human emotion. I'd say everything you asked falls under one of those two.

Proof for human learning is simple. I think that humans learn things through hindsight. Whether it be a child opening a jack in the box, learning to fly, or landing a man on the moon it all comes from testing and obeserving results and learning from those results.

Human emotion is a little more difficult. I think this is so because there is such great variation in human emotion. There has been positive correlations in the nature-nurture line of thought though. A person's emotional state can obviously be influenced by their environment. Like for instance in the news a little while ago I heard of a boy being bullied to such and extent his entire life that when he graduated highschool he had trouble accomplishing simple day to day tasks and could possibly never hold down a steady job. It was said that he had a fear of public bathroooms because a bully would jump out of the stalls sometimes and that triggered, incorrectly though but perceived by him, an emotional response that bathrooms had a high chance of causing him injury thus creating fear. Things like that are obviously the result of the "nurture" side. Meaning the traits were acquired as a result of learned experences, or hindsight like I said earlier. The opposite of this is traits inharantly possesed, and not learned, by individuals. Things like love, hate and whatnot are gerally considered "nature" traits because there is no logical immediate cause-and-effect process for them to come from thus it is proposed they come out of nature by some means.

I have never seen a way for human expression to come into all this though. Maybe we learn how to create things and enjoy doing so? But then this brings the question why do we enjoy anything, specifically things that are not necessary for our survival, or have a functional advantage if you will? It kinda results in circular reasoning like you said.

A_Wise_Fool

We must understand how to understand things before we can understand them..... it made me laugh, sort of true though

Cephus

Some of those are biochemical reactions in the brain, most are simply a way of looking at things that is not biologically determined. This isn't one of those really stupid "you can't prove love exists, therefore God is real" things, is it?

Felicity

Then let's pick just one. How can you prove man has the ability of rational thought?

Felicity

I'm simply trying to ascertain the root of human knowledge and to verify that it even exists.

Felicity

How can you prove either exists. It's not about the "process" of learning--it is that the learning is "known"--it's not about the experience of emotion, it's about the existence of it. To move to the experience of the knowledge or emotion, aren't we making an unproved assumption that such a thing as "knowing" or "emotions" exist in the first place. Can you offer empirical evidence that they do that isn't circular. For example--it would be circular reasoning to say, I read a book and now i know more about that subject, and I know I know more about that subject, because i read the book, and now I can tell you about it. That commits the fallacy of circular reasoning--doesn't it?

Edify_Always_In_All_Ways

I know it exists. Therefore, it exists...

But seriously, which bit of knowledge do you talk about? The first real "human" knowledge was the whole "run away from the tiger and breed" thing, where it was pounded into our head by our ape ancestors of a million generations. Human invention came when someone thought of tying a sharp rock on a branch to stop the mammoth from trampling it. After that, human knowledge came from memes, the quick evolution of ideas- homo sapien
see, homo sapien do. Spears led to the bow- attack from farther! Gathering led to planting- hey, I saw some of these round things here last year, and now there's berries! Caves led to the hut- I need to have some place to stay out of the rain on the plains, etc.

Human thoughts, and the human thought process, are chemical. The Neanderthals before us, and advanced apes before them, had rudimentary tools, and we picked up on it. The tool use, like many beneficial mutations, came out of randomness- Bobo the chimp sees termites crawling out of a stick in their hive, picks up stick, eats, contemplates.

I'm still not sure what you mean, though. If you are trying to get us moving in circles, please don't- eventually, we will chase you out, and poking the atheists is never a good plan.

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Edify_Always_In_All_Ways

6. proceeding or derived from reason or based on reasoning: a rational explanation.

I reasoned how to answer your question, decided to take it literally, and showed you the definition for my reasoning process, which was... deja vu.

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