Why Do We Deny The Existence Of Human Nature?

21 thoughts on “Why Do We Deny The Existence Of Human Nature?”

1. Disappointed that he said there is no soul or ghost. Then went on to say there is no afterlife. And of course used Muslim terrorists as the bogeyman, that you will blow yourself up as a martyr to earn your reward in Heaven. Lazy, racist thinking, Steven. You can do better than that.

2. This guy loves to hear himself talk

3. Very good

4. Well, we are souls who reincarnate where we left off in the prior lifetime so no we are not a blank slate. Souls expand their consciousness every lifetime. The difference among us is consciousness level and accumulated experiences in the human form. God programmed each one of us uniquely to come into this game of life which is the game of expansion of consciousness through lived experience. We must achieve self mastery and impulse control and this leads to ever increasing consciousness. God also controls how many souls incarnate at a given level of consciousness. When one dies at a specific consciousness level God replaces them with another soul of the same consciousness level. This is why the more things change the more it remains the same. But actually it is different because the world consists of different souls during each time span. This why each one of us needs to focus on expanding our own consciousness and changing ourselves than other people.

5. I loved "The Blank Slate" and wholeheartedly believe our behavior traits are genetically determined. I disagree with Steven's somewhat veiled insult of people who believe in God ("We don't need … souls …). I honestly don't think it's intelligent to think all we see is all we know. After all, can any of us conceive of a Fourth Dimension or infinity? No. So is God really such a stretch?

6. Isn't it strange how jarring it is to hear somebody speak truth? All I can think of is how the woke crowd is going to try to trample this man for simply stating facts. This vid was refreshing. I've put his book in my amazon wish list.

7. simplistic AF pls go beyond that u all

8. So brillant.

9. This simple. Humans use Freudian psychosexual confabulation, Erikson's Childhood Development theory, Bandura Social Learning theory instead of evolutionary theory in understanding human behavior

10. "The better angels of our nature" is the title of a book that Steven Pinker wrote. a very popular and a great book.

    he is one of the great thinkers of our time.

11. All music is inherently evil (except for martial music and when live at Irish wakes).

12. so hes saying stuff like emotions are innate? Theres no way that's true

13. blank slate is a delusion.

14. There seems to be a vast difference among people's ability to foresee the future, called foresight, and the ability to improve the outcome, called good judgment. All living things do it, some better than others from each individual cell to leaders of nations. With knowledge of prior probabilities and knowledge of the power of individual actors, uncertainty can be reduced, and outcomes can be improved. Practice with forecasting next month's bank balance, health metrics or test scores. Since Hobbes (1651), doing it without violence or illegality has had best results.

15. if music is not result of adaptation what is it？ a hack？ but if it is a hack， it should apply to apes， doesn’t?

16. I am wondering how many people could fully comprehend the evolutionary biologist thinking in the modern times? How many of us are here?

17. Steven Pinker's video explores the denial of human nature, a concept he rejects as the "blank slate" hypothesis. He identifies four unfounded fears driving this denial: the fear that human nature implies inequality, the fear that it makes societal improvement impossible, the fear that it negates personal responsibility, and the fear that it leads to nihilism. Pinker argues these fears are groundless, asserting that acknowledging human nature doesn't preclude equality, improvement, accountability, or meaning in life.

18. Yeah, this lands in the same place for me. The fear people have isn’t really about determinism itself, it’s about losing the story we tell ourselves about responsibility. But that fear cuts both ways. If everything is genes, people panic. If everything is environment, people panic. Either way they assume accountability evaporates. And that assumption just doesn’t match how humans actually work.

    Even if you strip away souls, miracles, and metaphysics and say “fine, we’re physical systems,” those systems are insanely sensitive to incentives, expectations, and consequences. That’s the whole point. A brain that can’t factor in outcomes would be useless. We don’t need free will to be magical for responsibility to function – we just need minds that update based on feedback. And we very obviously do.
    Skinner thought conditioning undermined responsibility, but in practice it explains it. Social rules, laws, norms, praise, shame, jail – these aren’t philosophical decorations, they’re inputs. They shape behavior precisely because people anticipate them. You don’t steal not because of a metaphysical spark, but because you can run the simulation: jail, reputation damage, guilt, downstream effects. That simulation is agency in a real-world sense.

    So holding people responsible isn’t pretending they’re uncaused causes. It’s acknowledging that they’re cause-responsive systems. Responsibility works because humans are the kind of organisms that change behavior when expectations change. That doesn’t disappear under determinism – it only disappears under fatalism, which is a different and much lazier move.

    To me this ties back to the larger conversation too. Civilizations, like people, don’t need metaphysical freedom to function. They need feedback loops. Consequences. Memory. The danger isn’t realizing we’re determined in some sense; it’s deciding that determination means nothing matters anymore. That’s not science – that’s giving up on the very mechanisms that make both individual behavior and collective order possible.

19. I think music is like how we adore cold carbonated drink's. Individually the bubbles are brief acidic bursts that are painful, and so open the sensory experience wider. An individual note can be painful, but the opening of our senses across the bandwidth is like being massaged, and thus it's an emergent experience of animal's. IQ being the same in that if the senses are opened by lack of physical assault as we are not a slave down a mine, and thus rested, and well feed we can be as bright as a button. Thus it's the quality of the signal that determines our state of being.

20. It’s rooted in the leftist “god complex” and propaganda: They treat nature as an external artifact rather than an inherent part of us, believing that sufficient government intervention can “correct” societal inequalities (viewing the food chain or social hierarchies not as natural outcomes but as unjust results of oppressive systems). Admitting that inequality is innate and unavoidable would dismantle their entire political ideology.

21. I'm a Christian, but I love the insights. Great book, by the way! Thinking of giving it another read!

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