'Human nature' is a tautology.

[Spyder]

Phrases typically provide some detail or convey meaning of some kind. 'Human nature' doesn't actually tell us anything about it.

It's like the difference between "you've got to know when you hold 'em" and "card games."

[Terralthra]

Phrases typically provide some detail or convey meaning of some kind. 'Human nature' doesn't actually tell us anything about it.

It does provide detail. It is the noun 'nature' with the adjective 'human' modifying it.

It's like the difference between "you've got to know when you hold 'em" and "card games."

"you've got to know when you hold 'em" is a clause, not, strictly speaking, a phrase. It has a subject and a predicate. It has a finite verb phrase, even. It's even an independent clause.

"card games" is a classic noun phrase. 'Games' is the head word, modified by 'card.'

[Spyder]

Phrases typically provide some detail or convey meaning of some kind. 'Human nature' doesn't actually tell us anything about it.

It does provide detail. It is the noun 'nature' with the adjective 'human' modifying it.

"Human nature."

"Ah, I see. Good point."

It's like the difference between "you've got to know when you hold 'em" and "card games."

"you've got to know when you hold 'em" is a clause, not, strictly speaking, a phrase. It has a subject and a predicate. It has a finite verb phrase, even. It's even an independent clause.

"card games" is a classic noun phrase. 'Games' is the head word, modified by 'card.'

Exactly, the former carries far more meaning.

[Terralthra]

"Human nature."

"Ah, I see. Good point."

"Why would that mother sacrifice her life to save children who will probably die anyway?"

"Human nature"

"Ah, I see. Good point."

I'm not sure you understand what a phrase is. A phrase does not have to stand alone as a complete thought. That's a sentence or a clause. A phrase is a set of words that have a meaning as a single unit.

Exactly, the former carries far more meaning.

The former is a clause, not a phrase. The fact that 'card games' doesn't carry as much meaning is not relevant in the slightest. All it has to do is carry some meaning as a unit, there's no threshold for how much meaning.

[Darth Wong]

"Human nature" is a term, not a phrase. Like "catalytic converter".

They're not mutually exclusive.

A term is one+ words designating something within a field. 'Human nature' fits that definition within the field of Philosophy.

A phrase is 2 or more words that act as a unit within a sentence, which 'human nature' also fits.

If there's a definition of phrase within the constraints of logical argumentation into which 'human nature' does not fit, I am not aware of it.

Yes you are, you're just using a definition of phrase which is inappropriate for this thread. Since he is accusing "human nature" of being a tautology, he obviously thinks it's the kind of phrase that is a statement rather than just a unit within a sentence. A tautology, after all, is a logic statement, albeit an empty one. And "human nature" is not a logic statement.

[Terralthra]

Yes you are, you're just using a definition of phrase which is inappropriate for this thread. Since he is accusing "human nature" of being a tautology, he obviously thinks it's the kind of phrase that is a statement rather than just a unit within a sentence. A tautology, after all, is a logic statement, albeit an empty one. And "human nature" is not a logic statement.

Of course 'human nature' isn't a logical statement. It isn't a rhetorical tautology. He may think it's a phrase that makes a statement, but it isn't. There's really no way the topic title is even an arguable proposition. Maybe he thinks 'tautology' is synonymous with 'false'?

I'm just wondering whether Arcturus Moronsk is a 15 year old who has read the spines of some philosophy and epistemology books or a 45 year-old who has spent his entire life in his mother's basement masturbating over his collection of philosophy books.

Either way, he's somehow come to the conclusion that spouting bullshit so tangled it's undecipherable will make him seem smart.

[Illuminatus Primus]

You guys don't know how bad it can get if you think he's as bad as it gets. He's relatively good, all things considered. There are far more obscurantist (little-o), more verbose, and exceedingly postmodernist among the philosophically inclined.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Very well, then. Prove it. Since you want to seem to ascribe, along with most other quasi-Christians, some laughable metaphysical 'oneness' or identity to man (this is where almost every illogicality comes into being, from comic-book 'evolution' to individual moral autonomy),

I am not arguing with your conclusions. I am arguing with your shitty shitty premises. In fact I am pretty sure everyone else here is in the same boat, so you can stop burning scarecrows anytime now.

I'll leave it to you to prove that man is more than the sum of his - organic - parts.

We are not, but as I have laid out previously your bullshit about the body's organs acting independently and in spite of each other is utter bullshit. Do you know how you produce even the simplest of responses to stimuli? It requires the complex ineractions between your skin, peripheral nervous system, brain, and hormonal control systems, from the gonads to the adrenal glands. To find yourself horny requires body-wide hormonal cascades.

The needs of organs are not met "at the expense of the whole" they are met because the other organs need what every other organ does. Your example of a drowning victim for example. The entire body needs the oxygen. Otherwise CO2 concentration gets too high and starts poisoning it, and O2 concentration gets so low that cells can no longer make ATP and they shut down. The body would get the exact same results from breathing in water as it would get from holdings its breath. The result is death. The adaptive response is, after the point where breath cannot be held any longer, to attempt to breathe.

I guarantee you that you'll not do such without implicitly and subtly denying the theory of evolution, which insists upon evolutionary pressures on the organic level. I, on the other hand, can intellectually justify my position quite naturally.

No. My position is derived from an understanding of evolution that comes from years of formal schooling in its study... Yours on the other hand is justified by premises which are depressingly bad.

This stupid and slavish belief in human nature is a grotesque generalization of an infinitely complex process on the organic level. Why does it exist? Because it beautifies man.

No. Looked at properly the idea of "human nature" is a description. Nothing more. It is the cornucopia of behavioral imperatives and drives that are the result of our evolutionary history and the genes we have inherited. "Human nature" is equivalent to the same drives present in newts turtles, lions and lower primates.

The body is more of an industrial factory than a sleek machine, but to admit to this is to invite all manner of psychological hardships on oneself that are best done without.

No moron. There is not a factory we can conceive of that reaches the level of elegant complexity present in our, or any living system. From the most primitive of prokaryotes on up the phylogenetic tree.

Have you ever stopped to realize, my good man, that none of your organs respond to your commands, that you are not even aware of what they are doing, and that any one of them might turn cancerous? Have you ever actually thought about this? Try to sleep at night with that thought in mind and see how well you can manage.

I am rather well aware you blithering idiot. And that does not bother me. Because I do not expect my organs to obey my commands. There is no reason for it to. My organs, my mind, my thoughts, all they are, are vehicles for my genes. All processes I have are focused around this one fact. This does not stop the human mind from having soem sort of intrinsic "nature". In fact, it demands it. 0

What is contentious, however, is the nature of 'the individual' as such. For it is my conceit that there are no individuals, however strange or foolish that may sound to some ears. And yet I don't believe it such as all (obviously, since I'm expounding it). Consider:

You will have a hard time with that, because individuality as such is demonstrable.

But I know she really isn't. Unlike other objects which, when reduced to their most basic constituent parts, become simple swirls of charged particles, organic life cannot be so reduced: it ceases being 'life' on the level of the organs.

That is funny, because I can keep cultured human cells alive in a petri dish for some time...

Doubtless there are tissues made up of clumps of carbon-based compounds, but these alone would not be considered by anyone to constitute 'life' as such.

I point you in the general direction of prokaryotes

Furthermore, observing the evolutionary process informs us that adaptation, the single defining 'process of life', occurs at the organic level - Darwin's finches did not themselves undergo some radical metamorphosis under problematic environmental conditions; merely their offspring's beaks changed in accordance with the demands of the environment.

No... evolution happens at the population level The genes of the individual are the unit of selection, but its effects are manifest in the genetic makeup of populations.

Despite what comic book authors would have us believe, mutation never occurs throughout the entire body. Instead, it is almost invariably limited to the organs which interface with the environment and which, through the influence of changing external conditions, undergo selective breeding which results in alterations to the particular appendages responsible for a given function of the organism.

Um... No. A mutation that occurs in a somatic cell will usually do nothing at all. A mutation that occurs in the germ line and gets passed to offspring will manifest that mutation in every single cell of said offspring, and depending on how it is regulated, may be expressed in only a few cells, to one tissue type within an organ, to across multiple organ systems and even affecting the regulatory mechanisms themselves. Sorry bitch

I am neither a biologist nor a geneticist.

Guess what I do for a living

hough we are biased towards a holistic conceptualization of organic life (perhaps by nothing more than accident: one could here advance a thesis that the mere existence of skin - another organ! - might skew our perception towards this conclusion), we perhaps ought to look instead towards a fundamentally different understanding of just what it means to be both 'organic' and 'life'.

Because our bodies do behave holistically. Just not under conscious direction from our conscious minds

[Spoonist]

Have you ever stopped to realize, my good man, that none of your organs respond to your commands, that you are not even aware of what they are doing, and that any one of them might turn cancerous?

Minor nitpicks here in the torrent of irrationality.
I have plenty of organs that respond directly to my commands. With training I could get even more of them to respond to my commands. Some of the ones I cannot make respond directly I can make respond indirectly. If none of your organs respond to your conscious commands then you would be in a vegetative state. Which would make it very hard for you to be in a internet based discussion.
Same goes with being aware of what they are doing. There are plenty of organs that you are directly aware of what they are doing. For others you would be directly aware if they would stop doing what they are supposed to. By training you can become aware of more and more of what your organs are doing. Which would be step 1 in directly controlling them.
In this day and age it is ignorant not to be aware of the chance possiblity that bodily organs can develop and propagate cancer tumors.

[Darth Wong]

It's pretty sad when someone is so dense that he actually thinks the brain has no influence at all over the body. How does he even move his arms or control his bladder?

[Illuminatus Primus]

I'll agree with at least his basic idea that human nature is often a philosophical or debate cop-out, or vast oversimplification. If human nature is something which is impervious to the influence of culture and education, than it is our drives and instincts which are genetically-wired. In the modern day it can be understood as a synthesis between human beings' species-wide reproductive/survival strategies, and individual genetic predisposition toward particular behavioral traits. Of course, even your starting point physically doesn't set you in stone - breast feeding, nutrition, parental care, interpersonal interaction all plays an enormous input to the basic genetic catalysts. And in the future, mass-genetic engineering may become practical, at which point "human nature" were steadily be eroded to nothingness as all inputs into the individual's experience and behavior can be manipulated by culture and environment.

[Darth Wong]

The idea that humans have a particular "nature" is no more bizarre than the idea that dogs do (an idea which few would dispute). The fact that you can alter their behaviour through training does not mean that they have no innate behaviours or tendencies.

Look at our alpha-male behaviour: that mentality is stubbornly immune to the effect of thousands of years of philosophy and culture.

[Illuminatus Primus]

I agree; there IS a useful way to define some kind of human nature. But the term is abused as a throwaway line that's simply taken as self-evident, without many defining their usage. Too often people use it as a cover for aspects of their personal ideology they wish to declare self-evident so they do not have to support them rationally.

[Darth Servo]

On one hand, there is the Hobbesian view of man as essentially greedy, self-serving and egoistic; and, on another, there's the Rousseauian view of man as a generous and sociable creature. These views are obviously incompatible, and are also gross generalizations which do not apply to a vast majority of human existence. Even Schopenhauer held to this stupidity, though he did us the service of attributing it to a secondary, metaphysical plane. A child does better yet - they often understand how fickle human beings are, and how little control they fundamentally have over their own actions.

Furthermore, the presupposition that man has one nature is tautological:

I wouldn't say its tautological. I'd say its a blatantly false statement. Tautologies tend to be true statement but don't actually say anything.

There is definately a trend in the psychological field to fixate on one factor, trait etc. and this is a pretty obvious example. Anyone who has known people well at all would know there are plenty of people with one foot in each of the benevolent and asshole ranges of behavior.

[Illuminatus Primus]

I would say he's right in that human nature's importance is frequently overstated as a cause; anyone familiar with economics or psychology knows of the Fundamental Attribution Error. Humans tends to avoid to qualify their statements at length, and instead simplify with an essentialist short-hand. That is, instead of qualifying the exact times and occasions and circumstances that Person X commits Action A, we will just say what feels or is most frequently true, and incorrectly attribute that to a fundamental of the person's character or nature. People in reality react based mostly on circumstances and situations according to the present incentives and risks.

Seminary students in a particular study stopped to help an actor posed as a homeless person crying out for help in pain based on whether they were late for their mock sermon, not on whether the sermon assigned was a random sermon or the parable of the Good Samaritan. This is a disturbing example to most people because it challenges their simplistic worldview. People like to believe that they can sum up basic characteristics or fundamentals to the people whom they interact with, then adequately anticipate their behavior. Since a realization that this is impossible in many people creates a realization they have little control over the people or events in their lives, people also tend to exhibit a cognitive bias where they continually reaffirm their fundamental attributions by forcibly reinterpreting contradictory actions or even creatively imagining contradictory actions away.

[Darth Wong]

None of that means there's anything wrong with the idea of human nature; only that it is an oft-misused concept. You could say the same thing about logic. How many people say that something is "reasonable" or "makes sense" or is "logical" based purely on gut instinct, even when it is not even remotely logical? Does that mean "logic" is a tautology too?

[Illuminatus Primus]

I already admitted that human nature is a useful concept and can be meaningfully defined. I think the entire gist of the OP is an argument from adverse consequences (fallacious) - namely, if you permit the premise of a "human nature", you'll get people saying stupid things and unsupported things on its authority without qualification. While this may occur, this is not a rigorous argument in favor of discarding the use of a "human nature" concept altogether. The argument fails. I do think that the idea that it is improperly used and ill-defined is worthy of more discussion, which is why I brought it up.

[Dark Hellion]

Please don't argue with bullshit ad hominem "I outrank you" self aggrandisement.

Showing that you have valid credentials for the debate you are engaging in is not an ad hominim. It is in fact a perfectly valid question, especially when so obfuscating moron attempts to use random Philosophical knowledge to browbeat the community. If he has less authority on the subject than myself (3 credits from a Bachelors in Philosophy) than his browbeating is shown to lack any certifiable authority. This removes a whole leg of his spiel, which I find as a good. The fact that he has not bothered to answer this question makes me think that he is some random kid with some college level philosophical review books.