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Classes again
Jan. 8th, 2007 10:38 pmSchool has started again, and I'm feeling much more positive about it than I did yesterday. Not so bad, really.
For the next five weeks, the issues class covers recent research in child development. Today we talked about two main perspectives on knowledge and awareness of newborn children - some favor a "rich" interpretation that attributes to them all sorts of more adult activities, like curiosity and developing hypotheses, and others think babies are considerably more primitive. It's interesting to consider the ethical implications by comparing it with animals - if you think animals have memories and "real" feelings, you're going to treat them a lot differently than if you're in Descartes' camp and think they're basically just little machines.
For the next five weeks, the issues class covers recent research in child development. Today we talked about two main perspectives on knowledge and awareness of newborn children - some favor a "rich" interpretation that attributes to them all sorts of more adult activities, like curiosity and developing hypotheses, and others think babies are considerably more primitive. It's interesting to consider the ethical implications by comparing it with animals - if you think animals have memories and "real" feelings, you're going to treat them a lot differently than if you're in Descartes' camp and think they're basically just little machines.