The Blank Slate

Introduction The blank slate is a book about human nature. A starting point for this topic is realizing that everybody needs a theory for human nature. Everyone has to anticipate how other people will behave in their surroundings and that means that all of us need theories on what makes people tick. Steven Pinker discusses his take, and the take of philosophers, on three doctrines: The Blank Slate, The Noble Savage, and The Ghost in …

…and religious thinkers. Many of them argued that ensoulment occurs at the point of conception which implies that the blastocyst (the five-day-old ball of cells from which stem cells are taken) is morally equivalent to a person and that destroying it is a form of murder. This means that the most promising medical technology of the 21st century is being debated in terms of when the ghost first enters the machine, nobody knows for sure.