People Are Born From Scratch

There are quite a few contributors of empiricism.

Empiricism as define from the textbook states “the pursuit of knowledge through the observation of nature and the attribution of all knowledge to experience.” There are also different contributions of empiricism from different contributors including primary role of the process of sensation, analysis of conscious experience into elements, association, and the focus on conscious processes. Besides Comte and Barkley who laid the foundation of positivism and materialism Locke, James Mill and John Mill were the also contributors of empiricism.

John Locke shown interest in natural philosophy while in college along with the practice of medicine. He also developed an interest in politician and during his time and being know through Europe as champion of liberalism in government until death he wrote an important book that accumulated 20 years of his studies called An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. This book is important because it was the beginning of the British empiricism. Locke started to look at the how the mind acquires knowledge from cognitive functioning.

He believed that humans are born with a blank slate (tabula rasa) and in childhood not being aware that we were being taught different ideas during that time through experience and cannot remember so. When I was a baby and as in cognitive psychology proves that we will not remember anything during those times.

I do not remember anything I experience to gain knowledge from because we apparently do have that blank slate coming into the world. The only thing we have to either help us either to remember depending on the age or something we have no memory about what so ever is pictures, videos or our parents telling the memories.

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I didn’t know how I developed from my experiences and the only thing I had was a baby video showing bits of pieces of my life and it even showed some experiences I acquire knowledge from. There are also two parts of experience including sensation and reflection. Sensation would include the sensory input from the environment that are sensory impressions which in they operate in the mind and the mind does the opposite by operating on the sensory impressions which also applies to reflection.

Sensory will appear first always because there has the be storage of some sort to for the impressions so the mind can then reflect on it. Locke also define differences between simple and complex ideas. Simple ideas are receive from both sensation and reflection passively are received by the mind and are elements. Complex ideas goes through the process of reflection and combines simpler ideas and are able to be analyzed and reduced elements more than simple ideas. The beginning of mental chemistry came about to the problem of association which is the early name for process of learning Human ideas then so can be broken down or disassemble like a clock as our text book gives an physical idea of human mind process of learning.

He also compared the mind with the laws of physics which makes since because the mental world as it said are the atoms of the simple ideas, the elements can’t be broken down no further like in the material world. And the other proposition that Locke came up with is the differences between primary and second qualities. Primary exist in an object and independently while secondary focuses of perception of the object. Locke perform an experiment that illustrates these ideas with different water temps and the persons hand going into each cup of water along with the example of not eating no food that the taste wont exist unless we eat it. Locke even accepted that perception exist only in secondary which are subjective and dependent on the observer.

The next contributor James Mill focus on the mind as a machine and applied this to his son John Stuart Mill. The goal was to destroy mental activities so the mind can demonstrate that it is all nothing but a machine and believe that other people who argued this has not gone far enough into this idea. He believe the mind functioned like a clock just like Locke described. Mill believe that the mind had external forces that operated it and that it runs by the internal forces. He focus on analyzing the mind as a machine by reducing it to elementary components to understand the complex phenome. Mill stated in the textbook “ distinct knowledge of the elements is indispensable to an accurate conception of that which is a compounded of them.” He believe that sensation and ideas only elements that exist in the mental elements. This makes sense because knowledge begins with sensation which comes from association. Mill believe that the mind because of association being automatic and passive that there is no creative function in simpler terms association is mechanical and the mental elements is the sum of resulting ideas.