Marijuana: The Walmart Effect

I can't seem to find a day where I both do not have to work AND am motivated to continue my research on the marijuana debate. Therefore, I am posting this prior to and as an attachment to the full-article.

In this small essay I will outline what I have dubbed "The Walmart Effect" and how it pertains to the drug trade and our perception of those who deal in it. By reading this I hope to convey how not all those who sell drugs are bad people, how to more appropriately handle the debate on marijuana and its future, and to potentially bring a new perspective to readers to bring about an attitude of understanding as opposed to a "good or bad" dichotomy.

Also, marijuana is just one aspect of this but it pertains to the entire illegal drug trade. I also started to switch from "marijuana trade" to "drug trade" as the essay progressed and am too lazy to correct it. Meh.

Oh, and I didn't proofread this. YOLO!


The Walmart Effect

Walmart is one of those corporations that pretty much everyone agrees is, for lack of a better term, evil. Common connotations include cutthroat, unfair, dominating, cheap, poor, under-maintained, etc. Employees are not compensated very well, are forced to work overtime, requests for improvements are ignored, theft in the parking lots is common, small business' tend to disappear in the surrounding area, traffic exponentially increases in the area... basically a lot of bad things tend to happen when a Walmart comes around. (This has not stopped a large majority of people from shopping there, but hey, where else can you get a 40" LCD TV for $200 AND diapers for your dog?)

Even with all of these negative aspects associated with Walmart, it is likely that anyone who knows a cashier or a stocker or a dock worker does not believe that person to be bad. In fact, they may pity their friend for having to work at such an evil corporation. I am quite certain that this is true even within the corporate framework, wherein friends of people who work at the corporate level do not believe their friend to be bad even if they believe the corporation in general to be quite bad. We maintain the innocence of the individual, yet condemn the company. This is not to say that there are not more than a few truly cruel people at the very top of the chain. Even if their tactics are frowned upon, they are legal. Which brings us to my next point...


I find this same disassociation to be prevalent when it comes to those dealing marijuana. More often than not, when asked to publicly give an opinion on marijuana people will almost every time condemn it. "Marijuana is evil! It is a gateway drug. Everyone who uses, deals, or thinks about marijuana is going to hell forever and ever." However, when confronted by a friend who uses, deals, or thinks about marijuana, the reaction is likely sympathy, pity, or a more neutral stance within the more intimate relationship. We do not see our friend as a bad person even though we may think marijuana is bad. It may be that our friend does not have the education to get a good job, or that there is no one hiring in the area, or that they were pressured into dealing/ using. Regardless of the reason, we humanize the person in spite of how we feel about the drug.


Understanding The Real Problem

What differentiates those who work at the top level within Walmart from those who are at the top of the drug trade are 1) the legality and tactics used and 2) the motivations behind their involvement.

With Walmart, virtually everything they do is legal in one way or another. While public opinion tends to be against what they do, at the end of the day the executives are trying to create as much profit as possible. Their motivation is money, pure and simple. They want to buy a nice house, have a nice car, support their family/ "escorts", etc.

Those in the drug trade are far more sinister. Given drugs are illegal, those who deal with them in mass very likely already have a less than perfect past with the law. Additionally, people will pay far more for something that is illegal than they would for something that is legal, which greatly increases the profits of those who decide to risk being caught by the officials. Generally speaking, your local drug dealer is probably not a very bad person. They are just doing it for the money.

This is what we need to understand and what differentiates your local drug dealer from those at the top; while the  small dealer is doing it to fund their life, those at the top are doing it to fund their already highly-illegal, violent, and fear-inducing organizations. It is because drugs are illegal that these dealers wield such power and influence; if they do not supply it, it does not come. Large organizations such as the cartels will clash over territorial disputes, which brings all kinds of terrors with it. While it rarely comes to that point within the States, we do see shades of it when two or more large street gangs battle over territory.


Conclusion

My final point is this; it is impossible to have an honest, unbiased discussion about the social effects of a drug so long as a drug is illegal. Purely by nature of being illegal, any facts about how a drug affects a community of any size will not and can not be accurate. If ibuprofen were to become illegal tomorrow, there would likely be an underground trade just like there is for marijuana, cocaine, etc., and while the drug itself is known not to be bad for you, it too would quickly become as infamous as its current illegal counterparts.

Additionally, in regards to the Walmart effect, we must understand that not all people in the drug trade are bad people, and that not all bad people are involved in illegal activities. Some just need a way to feed their families, knowing the risks that they take every day to do so.

How To End Prejudice

This is an opinion article.


7 second version: Some people are cool, and some people are dicks. That has nothing to do with their skin color, gender, nationality, heritage, etc., so stop making such a big deal of those factors. Just accept that they are cool/suck because of their experiences/ personality. 




Every time I hear about lack of gender equality, I am sickened. Every time I hear about lack of racial diversity in the workplace, I am sickened. Every time I hear something related to more rights for certain religions, ethnicities, nationalities, sexual orientations, etc., I am sickened.


When I was a kid, I had an idea of what racism was, and of sexism, and all of the other major -ism's you can name. It isn't that hard to distinguish people by their sex, or their race, or hair color, and you could easily put people into group by ancestry, religion, income, etc. Without this ability we would not be able to tell most people apart from other. It is how we identify a person. However, even as a child I knew that this is not how we should judge a person. For me, it was never a matter of, "this person is black so they must have traits like A, B, and C." If I told someone that they are looking for an Asian person, that never played a factor in that persons character.


I should distinguish that there are certainly reasons to celebrate a persons heritage, history, culture, etc., but their celebrating it is entirely dependent on them as a person. Two people may be of Irish decent, but they will not necessarily both celebrate St. Patrick's Day. Whether they do that or not is their decision as an individual. The fact that they happen to have been born into an Irish family is purely coincidental. Additionally, men and women have some genetic and physiological differences that must be acknowledged in any situation, i.e. men cannot bear children. However, as far as this discussion goes those differences are minimal at best.


Martin Luther King Jr. said that we should not judge a person by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I will be the first person to admit that stereotypes are funny, but they are funny because they are not true. I love fried chicken, kool-aid, and watermelon; does that make me black? If a person of Asian decent is good at driving, does that change their race? Universalizing a personality trait or ability to anyone because of their skin color is bound to fail. In that same light, assuming a persons luck-based traits (skin color, heritage, etc.) gives them more value than other persons, and basing that value purely on account of those luck-based traits, is just as bad to do.


I am for everyone having an equal opportunity. I am for judging a person by their actions. I am for providing free education to anyone that earnestly seeks it. What I am not for is giving special privileges to men or women BECAUSE they are a man or woman. I am not for giving special consideration to a white/ black/ asian/ middle-eastern person BECAUSE they are a white/ black/ asian/ middle-eastern person. To me, anything that places full or partial emphasis on a persons luck-based traits is prejudice.


I understand that people will disagree with me at face-value, and I will accept that if they can answer the one question that I always pose within this issue; as far as personality and skill set, how do people of one luck-based trait differ from people who lack that same luck-based trait? If I can get an answer that doesn't involve prejudice one way or another, it would impress me very much.


People should be judged by their personalities, their actions, their attitude, what they publish on blogs, what sorts of drugs they do, i.e. the choices they make in life; the choices life made for them are just fluff.



Steve

Proverbs

This will be a continuously growing list as long as this blog remains up and I continue to find insights about life. To me, poetry is compact philosophy, and proverbs are compact poetry. I hope you, the reader, can find some wisdom here. (As far as I am aware, most or all of these are original, though there are likely similar phrases throughout the internet. Wisdom doesn't change.)



- Never justify your existence through someone else. Live for others, but do not make others your reason to live.

- Apologize once if they demand you to; apologize once and make it up to them double if they forgive you first; if they make you apologize more than once, they do not deserve any apologies.

- If there is no right way to do something, then there is no wrong way either.

- Assuming you are always right is the shortest path to being wrong.

- People who claim to know what life is about are probably the most unsure.

- "They" and "us" are the most divisive words in the English language.

- Apathy is contagious.

-  Just because you do not like something does not mean someone else should be prohibited from it.

- Being comfortable in silence is being comfortable with yourself.

- Changing yourself starts and ends with you. Others may affect you, but only you can change who you are.

- You are over something only when you stop using it as an excuse.

- Anyone who said there is no such thing as a stupid question has never worked customer service.

- If all things are worthless, then all things are equally worth doing. True nihilism is optimism.

A Case For Innate Ideas

This is my thesis from college. It isn't terribly boring, I swear. It is also probably the smartest thing I've written in my life.

A Case For Innate Ideas 

Introduction

            This is less of a paper and more of a conversation. As opposed to the popular in-depth point-by-point analytic style we will be discussing broad ideas to generate thought and discussion. In this conversation I will present empiricism as outlined by John Locke as it seems to be the most concise and complete version to contend with the case of innate ideas. I will give an account of consciousness, ideas, human understanding of ideas, and the abilities of our faculties being distinguished from innate ideas. Empiricism is a useful and correct account for gaining knowledge, however, it does not account for certain ideas which I argue to be innate. It is beyond a reasonable doubt that innate ideas exist.

Empiricism from Locke to Kant

            The base claim of empiricism is that all knowledge comes from experience[1]. Empiricism rose as a response to popular rationalist ideas. Rationalism, and later skepticism, distrusted knowledge gained by the senses as it is not necessarily reliable. Take Descartes' evil demon argument, or Hume's classic sensory experiment with the bowls of water at different temperatures. Non-Humean empiricists argued against cases such as these on the grounds that if we cannot trust our senses then we are unable to actually know anything about the world, essentially being stuck at the end of  Descartes' first meditations. There is a false dichotomy here where one must either take empiricism to its logical end and become a skeptic, or to accept rationalism and limit knowledge exclusively to one's own self, unable to make any knowledge claim gained by the senses. I reject both of these, taking a page out of Roderick Chisholm's Problem of the Criterion";

"What few philosophers have had the courage to recognize is this: we can deal with the problem only by begging the question. It seems to me that if we do recognize this fact, as we should, then it is unseemly for us to try to pretend that it isn’t so. One may object: 'Doesn’t this mean, then, that the skeptic is right after all?' I would answer: 'Not at all. His view is only one of the three possibilities and in itself has no more to recommend it than the others do. And in favor of our approach there is the fact that we do know many things, after all.'”[2]

            Locke separated experience into two categories. "Outer experience comes through the senses and provides sensory qualities, e.g., color, heat, hardness, sweetness, etc. Inner experience comes through reflection [of sense experiences] and provides ideas of non-tangible and non-sensory things such as beliefs, ideas, thoughts, doubts, etc."[3] The tricky word to get around here is experience. The cogito, I think, therefore I am, presupposes the experience of existing, or experiences that require a being to exist in the first place. Mathematics requires the experience of either self-awareness, which would lead through reflection to the idea of other things to eventually develop basic algebra, or the experience of basic numerical knowledge. Kant used the example of 7+5=12, needing only the 7+5 to rationally conclude the existence of 12, but that is not so. The subject must have knowledge of what 7 is, what addition is, and what 5 is, as well as how these interact. I concede the possibility to rationalize mathematics after the base rules are understood, but those base rules are gained through experiencing space and time, not merely through reason. A priori knowledge does not have any feasible place in this epistemological account. "Locke claimed that knowledge is direct awareness of facts concerning the agreement or disagreement among our ideas. By 'ideas,' he meant mental objects, and by assuming that some of these mental objects represent non-mental objects he inferred that this is why we can have knowledge of a world external to our minds."[4]

            I certainly am not at the level of Immanuel Kant, although he pursued the same line we are walking right now between empiricism and rationalism. Kant was dissatisfied with the claims from both empiricists and rationalists. "...Empiricist positions are untenable because they necessarily presuppose the very claims they set out to disprove."[5] Kant primarily refuted Hume by proving that synthetic a priori assertions existed, that of time and space, although I disagree on the grounds that a subject must necessarily experience time and space in order  to reason it. "A synthetic a priori claim constructs upon and adds to what is contained analytically in a concept without appealing to experience." [6] Kant followed this to its logical end and found that we cannot know anything about ultimate reality other than its existence. This is because we see the observable world, that of our senses, whereas ultimate reality is unfiltered, an experience we can never come to realize in any aspect. "We humans must therefore despair of ever knowing of God, justice, immortality, or freedom, since all of these ideas overreach the human capability for knowledge."[7] All of these things are unknowable by sense experience, as ideas and consciousness suffer from the same obscurity, and are unable to be known by humans. I agree with Kant in this respect. My argument of innate ideas tries to synthesize empiricism and rationalism in a different manner than Kant did, although the end of Kant's work seems to be the end of any major epistemological work done on empiricism.

Consciousness and Ideas

            Now that we have a framework for the current state of empiricism, we may ask the question, "What is an idea?" The broadest definition possible appears to be "any conception existing in the mind as a result of mental understanding, awareness, or activity", or "any content of the mind."[8] Virtually every faction of epistemology would agree on this definition. As Locke famously stated for the empiricist viewpoint, "Let us then suppose the mind to be... white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? .... To this I answer in one word, from experience."[9] From this we can derive an important distinction; there are ideas and there are faculties to acquire those ideas. Locke goes into detail about simple ideas, such as roundness, shininess, firmness, etc., and complex ideas, the conjoining of simple ideas to create the idea of objects such as coins. We will not be covering that though since it is not highly relevant to innate ideas. We have established our concept of ideas from empiricism as thoughts or impressions gained from sense experience and reflection.

            Now we must discuss consciousness. Unfortunately, we are only able to determine the consciousness of ourselves. As the great debates over strong AI have shown us, as well as Kant's conclusion about the noumenal world, the knowledge of consciousness of others is unknowable, or at the very least inaccessible by modern standards. This may change at some point in the future but for now we must work on these grounds. Although we are unable to deductively infer the consciousness of another being, we do have the ability to inductively infer beyond reasonable doubt whether something is conscious. For instance, if we come across a tree with initials inscribed into it, we infer that an intelligent being was the cause. In the same way we can look at other beings and determine if they are conscious of their surroundings. Other humans are assumed to have consciousness whereas rocks are presumed to not have consciousness.

            Continuing this stream, we can see the results of a conscious being in its work; a human will toil, grow crops or livestock, gather materials, and commit other actions as a result of its consciousness. Rocks may fall due to gravity or other forces but we do not see rocks committing actions of their own will. We establish the consciousness of a being based on its actions, but we are never truly aware of the conscious beings motivations or ideas. The being can give an explanation, such as hunger or pleasure, but that requires communication. The subject could be lying or have their senses impaired or have an ulterior motive or simply not speak in the same terms as the listener. We have no way to directly determine any other beings ideas beyond a reasonable doubt, and to this end we are also unable to determine the content of that consciousness. This, of course, involves that beings thoughts. Therefore we have established the first point of my argument; one can only be directly and assuredly aware of one's own thoughts and contents.

            There is the apparent problem of solipsism that must be dealt with. To defeat it on these grounds we do not need to prove that every human is another conscious being. We need only to prove that there exists one other true being, to which I turn to Max Scheler, an empiricist who strongly supports the idea of the tabula rasa. In his essay "The Being of the Person," Scheler makes a convincing case for the existence of God as well as the nature of the person in general. His defense of God is my defense against solipsism.

            Scheler makes the assertion that every "world [is] the correlate of the person. Hence there is an individual world responding to every individual person. "[10] Clearly this is a solipsistic notion when a person believes themselves to be the only person. However, he makes the distinction that a person "lives into the world" but the world they live in is the world of the person which contains an "abstract objectivity" of others worlds.

"The world is by no means in idea. It is an absolute, always concrete, individual being... The fact that truth about the world and the absolute world is, in a certain sense, a 'personal truth' is due not to any supposed 'relativity' or 'subjectivity'... but to the essential interconnection between the person and the world... All [personal worlds] are... parts of the macrocosm - if there is one concrete world into which all persons look. And the personal correlate of the macrocosm would be the idea of an infinite and perfect person of spirit, one whose acts would be given to us in their essential determinations in act-phenomenology, which pertains to the acts of all possible persons. But this 'person' would have to be concrete simply to fulfill the essential conditions of a reality. Thus the idea of God is cogiven with the unity and identity and singularity of the world on the basis of an essential interconnection of complexes. Therefore, if we posit one concrete world as real, it would be absurd not to posit the idea of a concrete spirit."[11]

From this defense we must conclude that there is a God and through our perception of God we may understand there to be other people. Additionally, we must also realize that there is an absolute world with knowledge to be gained through the senses. It may be possible to reject a physical reality and a notion of God as the connector of all realities, but that would mean the solipsist is the only perceiver in all of the universe. There is a plethora of problems that the solipsist must overcome in order to stay a solipsist. Instead of devoting anymore of this paper to refuting them, I will move on with the argument. There are too many ad hocs to deal with, and solipsism is not the main focus of this paper anyways.

Actions and Ideas

            We have established that we are only able to access our own thoughts, ideas, and consciousness. This does not mean they are completely out of reach, but that we are unable to give an answer with full assurance, although we do this every day without thinking about it. How? If someone steals, we assume them to be thinking selfishly. If someone places a bet, we assume they are thinking their bet will win. If someone wears a certain outfit, we assume them to have thought about that before choosing it. Why do we assume these things people think? Actions are the only access we have to other thoughts. What someone does, how someone speaks, the choice of words, the timing of their actions; all of these play a role in our understanding of their thought processes. The entirety of the strong AI argument is based on the problem that persists in this respect.

            How do we correlate the actions of a being with its thoughts? We understand a being to be conscious if it moves around of its own will and performs actions to ensure its survival. A rock is clearly not conscious, although it will move because of forces acting upon it such as gravity. What differentiates a human from a rock is that its actions are attributed to its thoughts instead of gravity or other forces. There are obvious problems here concerning creatures of abstract thought and complex ideas. For instance, someone may commit an action of theft and, given our only knowledge of the event is the theft and our assumptions from previous thefts, we may assume them to be selfish. However, with more information we can understand them to be needy, requiring medicine for their sick parent.

            Yet another problem arises when trying to understand another creatures thought's based on their actions; knowledge in this sense is completely dependent upon each participant's level of experience. Jumping back a bit, empiricism states that all knowledge is founded in experience. Had I never been the victim of theft before or known a victim of theft, I would not understand what theft is or the reasons behind it. I would likely assume the perpetrator to have mistaken something as their own or for it to have been an accident. It is simply because I do not have enough ideas, I do not have enough experience, that the truth of another's ideas or intentions may remain unknown to me. The same argument may be made for animals or machines having ideas. It is merely a matter of humans not having enough information or experience that we are unable to recognize the contents of their minds, but, again, this is not the place for that debate.

            Here is my second point; one is only capable of determining another being's thoughts beyond a reasonable doubt based on that beings actions. This should not be a very disagreeable point to the empiricist. If Joe has never had the experience of the color green then he cannot be expected to draw a proper rainbow. If Ted has never taken a class on quantum physics no one would be disappointed that he cannot explain Schrödinger's cat adequately. Without needing to go into much detail, this second point compliments the empirical mindset rather nicely. We will now look at an example which reverses that, and then reflect that onto babies. My reasoning for this is simple; by the time humans understand how to communicate their ideas and to formulate extremely abstract ideas, they've had so many new ideas brought into their minds that it is nearly impossible for them to determine if one of them was innate or not without extreme inquiry. Furthermore, we must distinguish between survival mechanics and the notion of innate ideas, which I will argue are one-in-the-same. Finally, I will distinguish between the motivational ideas which all other ideas are rooted in and practical ideas, of which there are very few discernible examples.

The Bird

            There is a bird in Australia known as the incubator bird, which will be shortened to IB. The male IB creates a large mound to attract a female. This mound is very large, about the size of a small bus. The female lays her eggs which are placed inside the mound. The male tends to the eggs, ensuring the temperature and humidity are at the right levels for the eggs to incubate properly. Each mound only lasts for one season, so when all of the chicks hatch the mound is deserted. The chicks are not helped by either parent but are left to survive on their own.

            The chick itself is where I will start. It is born into darkness, underground, away from any possible communication with its parents. The chick hatches, gets on its back, and starts digging up. This process takes several hours, even days. The chick then gets to the top and walks away, ready to survive and do the exact same thing as its parents with absolutely no sense data or communication data on what to do, yet it will still do it. How can empiricism or any sort of experience-based theory of knowledge explain these actions? How does it know to dig, or even in which direction to dig? How does it know what to eat or how to perform the mating ritual? This species does not travel in packs, so societal information is not an option. There is virtually no way we can describe the chick's ideas based on its actions other than the ideas being innate.

            To make a short tangent, from the evolutionary standpoint humans share the same ancestor as these birds. It is not a wild theory to say that these birds have ideas since many of the same biological components can be found in both species. Although many people may not believe birds to have consciousness it is at least plausible for them to have ideas, that is to say cognitive functions with a directed goal or sense of intentionality.

            For humans I use the example of infants knowing to suckle. There is no doubt that infants have not breastfed prior to leaving the womb. In fact, they have never ingested anything through their mouths up to this point. Yet when the baby is born it knows that its mother can provide it with nutrients. There is absolutely no experience of this event prior to its happening, virtually no cognitive abilities worth mentioning, no form of long-term memory to speak of. How does the infant know to suckle? There is no way to attribute this to experience. Therefore, this is a possible case of an innate practical idea that exists in humans.

Programs, Instincts, and Ideas

            It may be argued that the bird is acting in these ways due to its survival instincts. It was born to react in such a way when presented with a certain situation. When it sees a worm, its first reaction is to eat it; when a certain time of the year is perceived, it decides to build a mound; when an egg is laid into the mound, it acts a certain way towards the egg. It does all of these things because of its survival instincts to do so, it's ideas to do so. The same case can go for the infant as well. There is a much more important question I pose to the empiricist though; what differentiates practical innate ideas from survival instincts? Certainly there are things gained from sense data and experience; fire is hot, the sun sets and rises, rain falls on occasion. These are undisputedly gained from experience. These are examples of practical ideas, ideas that are relevant to how a being can manipulate its environment to achieve a goal.

            The very essence of an innate idea is steeped in an unfortunate foundation; they have no discernible origin. To say an idea was inspired by such and such experience is to attribute it to something learned, something experienced. As explained earlier, it is possible for a single perceiver to use reflection of its very existence to gain ideas of things it never experienced through the senses but that exist in theory. There is a severe difference between theory and action in this regard though. The IB knows to dig a certain direction, knows what to eat and how to catch it, and knows to build a mound the next season purely because it must know these things to survive, not because of its own experiences. This can be seen in other animals too, yet is  attributed to instinct.

            Why aren't instincts considered innate practical ideas? Animals act in certain ways across an entire species. Virtually all dogs will chase a laser pointer. Virtually all cats will attack an object moving quickly in front of them. Virtually all bears are deathly protective of their young. The instinct to suckle is surely an idea that the infant has or it would have no motivation to do so. It is mere bigotry to say there animals do not have ideas based on their actions. Consciousness may be another issue, but instinct and practical innate ideas are synonymous. Neither originates from experience, yet permeates a creatures actions. We must remember that humans are animals too. Humans are mammals with the potential for powerful cognitive abilities, but all of modern science points to those abilities lying dormant until a certain age.

The Two Proposed Innate Ideas, A Distinction Between Practical and Motivational

            There are at least two undeniable motivations present in all humans, regardless of location, society, class, race, etc.; all humans are driven to pleasure and/or power. These two have been used interchangeably over the centuries and tend to directly impact each other. There are virtually no ideas in all of human culture that surface as much as these two, or any ideas that do not have some relation to them. They are so strong that many religions consider them a natural sin, a by-product of man's fall from grace. If there is such a thing as an innate idea in humans, it is one or both of these. This portion of the essay will focus on their use in society. I would like to note that these ideas likely dominate animals motivations as well, but for the sake of this discussion we will primarily be looking at humans. It is equally important to note that power and pleasure are motivational innate ideas as opposed to practical innate ideas. They are the root of why we do things but have no influence on the attainment of them.

            Almost every society will address at least one of the two proposed motivational innate ideas, although it is more often both. Society usually exemplifies those with strong desires for power or discoveries that increase the pleasure of the society at large. Take the examples of rock stars or professional athletes; those with power are perceived as greater sexual partners and as more persuasive. Choosing one sexual partner over another may be attributable to societal interactions and self-perseverance, but this still has the underlying frameworks of pleasure and power as motivations for actions. The main backing for virtually all people even competing to become successful are these same motivations. They wish to find a better mate, to use their success to change the world around them, or they do it purely for their own enjoyment.

            The counter-point may be made that pleasure is derived from power, which does not counter my argument at all. Why does a creature seek pleasure if it is not something innately desired to be obtained? Creatures seek the best conditions to produce offspring, which often involves power. There is the religious argument that pleasure is derived from submitting to a higher authority, such as God, which results in vows of celibacy or giving up power to God's will. However, this is still a form of pleasure for the submitting person. Both may not be gained in unison, but one can never be discussed without either implying or addressing the other two.

            To further this concept, there are never laws or rules promoting or helping people to gain pleasure or power without giving pleasure or power to another person. On the contrary, the rules and laws of religion and society are specifically designed to stave off these desires for the greater good of the community. Sexually abused children or tyrannical states are generally considered a bad thing by and for the majority populous. Societies understand this concept to be true of most people, as do many classic psychologists and scientists. Most empirical studies are framed in such a way that the human is merely an animal that thinks. Pavlov's dogs were conditioned in the same way as people riding the train to work every day. However, as much as society tries to quell these motivations within its own people, the society as a whole seeks these same things over other societies. Most nations today base their health on their economy in relation to other economies, i.e. the issue of power. Some nations are proud of their sexual freedom while others base the overall happiness, i.e. pleasure of the people, with how successful the country is doing.

            There is no empirical grounding for the immediate desire of power or pleasure among humans, or for the certain instincts animals have. It could be argued that the suckling infant has both ideas as motivating its suckling. Toddlers always seek to prove themselves to their parents, the givers of power. Why do they do this? They seek pleasure or power from their main example of what pleasure and power are. They are hard-wired to do it, and since there is no experience necessary to understand this desire, it is itself outside of the boundaries of empiricism. Experience is required to understand how to gain them but not for the desire to have them in the first place. It may be the case that the child wishes to get away from its parents. This still supports the three principles as the child seeks pleasure, to be away from the parents, and power, to show the parents that it is not under their control. This brings us to the final point to solidify the case for innate ideas; motivational innate ideas exist nearly universally within every living being which have no founding in experience, desires which drive every action those beings take. Within the empiricist worldview these can be understood only as innate ideas, existing within the being prior to experience.

            *It is important to distinguish between an instinct and a sense. Whereas the desire to have sex is an instinct, sight and hearing are senses. The senses are used to gain data from the perceived world. The senses are fallible and link the person to the world around them. Senses are used to experience and manipulate. Senses are not disputed to be the primary way beings come to understand the world around them. Instincts are much more enigmatic. They have no basing in any sense data but are a driving force behind a creatures actions. It is possible to doubt that a sense is giving the correct information since the sense is merely gaining information. Instincts are action-based whereas senses are information gathering. It is possible to doubt either one while being sure about other, or to doubt or be sure of both. There is a clear and distinct separation between the two.

            As a final distinction for this section, there are the motivational innate ideas of power and pleasure which we have already discussed and the practical innate ideas. These practical ideas are unfathomably difficult to pinpoint in any being, as they are much more easily attributable to experience within a short time after birth. We return to the suckling infant and the IB.

            The suckling is assuredly a practical innate idea. It is practical because it involves a manipulation of the world to fulfill a desire or motivational innate idea. The infant is aware that it must feed to survive, which may be attributable to it's sense of hunger. However, experience fails in that the infant knows how to feed, and had it not known how it would not survive. The issue of consciousness aside, the infant requires having some sort of idea to commit to the action of suckling. Modern science tells that long-term memory is not created until a few months to a few years after birth, demolishing any attempt to ground the suckling in experience. Each time the infant suckles for the first few months is like a new experience. Regardless of this shattering fact, had the infant not had some knowledge to suckle throughout human history it would surely have died before finding other sources of edible food. Another related issue is the knowledge of the mother to allow the infant to breast feed. How does the mother know to have an infant breast feed unless she had done it too, or seen another do it? This strand of thought boils down to a "chicken or the egg" argument. The only acceptable answer is that suckling is a practical innate idea with no attribution to sensory experience.

            The IB has the same problem as the infant to the empiricists. Digging it's way out of the mound is related to it's survival. There is no sensory experience telling the IB that there is anything above the mound, or even that there is anything other than darkness. In order to survive the IB must be aware of the world outside the mound. It must have the practical idea to dig up in order to survive. Again, there is absolutely no sensory experience here which forces it to be considered an innate idea. This is only one example from the non-human world. Surely there are countless others one can look to as being apart from sensory experience.

Implications

            This section will assume the acceptance of innate ideas.

            From the naturalistic point of view it may be that innate ideas came about because of evolution. Humans are more cognitively complex than almost any other animal known to exist, and the theory of evolution states that all living beings have a common ancestor. It could be the case that this ancestor evolved motivational innate ideas, whereas practical innate ideas have evolved in a species-specific manner. This in itself calls into question the very nature of ideas and of a mind. It is undeniable that a brain scan will never reveal precisely what a person is thinking about, or that ideas are something greater than a physical entity somewhere in the brain. Innate ideas could be the stepping stone to discovering something unheard of in regards to knowledge that I have no way of understanding today. Science once believed the Earth to be the center of the universe. We cannot rule out anything as a possibility, no matter how silly it may seem to us now.

            Continuing with Kant, skepticism is heavily affected by their existence. Senses may be deceptive, memory may fail, but pleasure and power are undeniable in the human psyche. The ideas necessary to survival are things a being must know with no doubt to live. No one may deny that they are skeptical that they think about power or pleasure whenever they commit to an action. Every other belief or experience may come into question but it is impossible to question these motivations. Even in questioning every other belief, or even the beliefs themselves, the desire in disproving these beliefs is either power or pleasure. There is no way to disprove them without proving them in doing so.

Closing Remarks

            I hope this conversation has made the impact I intended. Empiricism is an important theory in explaining how we come to know about the world around us and I endorse it as the only way to gain practical knowledge of our world. However, there must be concessions made to understanding why we seek knowledge instead of purely focusing on the knowledge itself gained. Every idea we obtain from experience will be rooted in the ideas we do not even understand why we have in the first place. Perhaps a better philosopher than myself can explain why these innate ideas are so prevalent, and perhaps they will prove me wrong in the process. Either way, I consider the case I have laid out here for innate ideas to provide powerful discussions to further the advances in understanding how we think and why we think.

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