The blank slate, or tabula rasa, is commonly associated with John Lock. According to the philosopher, the mind starts out as a piece of white paper void of all characters, without any ideas. What furnishes the paper is experience.

In lock's time, and in ours, the blank slate had a great deal of emotional appeal; it implied the principles such as the divine right of kings. It could not be treated as self-evident truths, but had to be justified by experiences that people shared therefore could debate. It undermined inheriting royalty and aristocracy who could claim no inherent wisdom or virtue if their minds started out as blank as everybody else's. It also undermined the institution of slavery, because slaves could no longer be considered inferior to anybody

Cognitive science has tried to spell out how many in born mechanisms you need to do the learning that human beings do. They will include some kind of object and number sense that allows us to conceptualize numbers separate from what they innumerate, a set of special representations that the brain uses to keep track of where things are and allow us to navigate in the world, a theory of mind or intuitive psychology that allows us to infer the thoughts and feelings of other people, a language that allows us to communicate our thoughts to others, and executive systems of the brain that integrate information from other parts of the brain to carry out reasoning and decision making.

In 2001, George W. Bush announced that the American Government would not fund research on human embryonic stem cells if scientists have to destroy new embryos to extract them. He came up with this policy after consulting not just with scientists but also with philosophers 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.

The doctrine of the noble savage also had a great

Some common words found in the essay are:
Steven Pinker, Lock According, Noble Savage, American Government, Ghost Machine, , Blank Slate, blank slate, steven pinker, ghost machine, noble savage, deal emotional appeal, deal emotional, emotional appeal, George Bush, twins separated birth, twins separated, identical twins, inner savage, separated birth, identical twins separated,
Approximate Word count = 972
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)