What ideas do you believe are innate?

[Kiddo]

What ideas do you believe are innate?

As in, what ideas do you believe we are born knowing before we even experience anything in the world?

Some options….

a sense of causality (time and space)
basic emotions such as, disgust, surprise, fear, etc.
avoidance of hazards (heights, disease, etc.)
face perception
how to acquire spoken language
notion of good and evil
notion of fairness
notion of altruism (concern for the needs of others)
notion of God(s)
notion of a soul
notion of ethical truths
a desire to “subjugate or be subjugated”
mathematical truisms (obvious mathematical truths)
logical truisms (obvious logical truths)
identity perceptions (archetypes)

[Leysing]

basic emotions such as, disgust, surprise, fear, etc.
Genetic. Rather simple animals clearly exhibit these as well. Everyone has seen an ant, a roach or a housefly fleeing in panic.

avoidance of hazards (heights, disease, etc.)
Even insects avoid hazards.

face perception
I voted for this, but I'm actually not sure anymore... This could be must-be-learned. But, well, babies recognise and very early. Maybe it depends on the expression and how subtle it is.

notion of good and evil
About the same things are considered moral or immoral in different cultures (lying, killing, stealing, adultery...) even when they haven't been in any contact with each other. There are, of course, some exceptions, like cannibalism that is actually normally avoided by most animals.

notion of fairness
Animals exhibit this. I have seen countless and countless times a horse demanding justice by neighing, snorting and stomping in pure ANGER as his neighbor gets his daily hay but he doesn't

notion of altruism (concern for the needs of others)
I don't think so. I... I just don't think so. (I blame my iNtuition for this!)

notion of God(s)
I think so, yes. All cultures do have and have always had gods and religion. Today's religions are money, science, careers and so on.

mathematical truisms (obvious mathematical truths)
I've read that horses, dogs and cats can naturally count somehow like "one, two, three, four, five, a lot".

[mippus]

Hm, nice question.
The fascinating thing would not be the general concensus but to see who answers what. S vs N and F vs. T...

[Kiddo]

Any admins out there wanna fix my poll?

[elfinchilde]

innate. from latin, "innatus'---meaning inborn.

So basic emotions hardwired into biology and instinct:

lust, fear, avarice, envy. (purified, you get their counterthesis, which arguably, is learnt behaviour:

love, courage, selflessness, compassion.)

As well, the ideal of beauty: it's been found that newborn babies instinctively reach for symmetrical faces; and that symmetry is the ideal of beauty across cultures. The Golden Ratio in art exemplifies this.

Anything to do with sex and survival, essentially. which are the same things. sex for survival of the species; self survival for continuation of the individual.

The God instinct is a tricky one. Arguable that only those who have desires, have need of God. (what do most people pray for, after all. "world peace"?)

i.e., the inability to centre oneself by oneself leads to seeking for external 'spiritual'
help. Which is self affirmation by external means, really. Which is a survival instinct, since if you cannot feel good about yourself, it leads to the thanatos instinct taking over physis.

[nozflubber]

Kiddo made something interesting for once! Kudos :P

[mippus]

... and for once, nozflubber makes a comment that is almost friendly

[nozflubber]

I know, right!

[Owl]

Originally Posted by Kiddo

What ideas do you believe are innate?

As in, what ideas do you believe we are born knowing before we even experience anything in the world?

We're born ignorant. What's up? I thought you were a die-hard empiricist?!

However, despite this, I did vote for logical truths and basic emotions because I think they are essential to human nature; we can deny them, but we cannot avoid them. (Other options on your list are essential to human nature too, but they depend on these two properties.)

[nightning]

Originally Posted by Kiddo

What ideas do you believe are innate?

Answering in universally understood symbolic ideas...

a sense of causality (time and space)
basic emotions such as, disgust, surprise, fear, etc.
avoidance of hazards (heights, disease, etc.)
face perception
how to acquire spoken language
notion of good and evil
notion of fairness
notion of altruism (concern for the needs of others)
notion of God(s)
notion of a soul
notion of ethical truths
a desire to "subjugate or be subjugated"
mathematical truisms (obvious mathematical truths)
logical truisms (obvious logical truths)
identity perceptions (archetypes)

The only thing that can possibly be innate would be those consistently demonstrated by infants and ideas universally believed and understood by all regardless of culture.