Bipolar
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, December 21 2007 06:09
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Don't buy shares yet. -------------------- Listen carefully because some of your options may have changed. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
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Raven v. Writing Desk
Member # 261
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written Friday, December 21 2007 06:28
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quote:While I agree with many of your statements in this topic, Alec, this one is baloney and you know it. I'm sure there are therapists who try to hide from experience and sweep things under the rug for a quick fix. Those people are quacks, and they are not practicing psychotherapy. The whole point of psychotherapy is to face experience. From your last sentence above I wonder if you were thinking specifically of the treatment of deep psychoses. For those you are right: talk therapy can't help you face experience because there is not enough organizable experience to face, and drugs are essential. But where regular demoralization is concerned, you're way off. -------------------- Slarty vs. Desk • Desk vs. Slarty • Timeline of Ermarian • G4 Strategy Central "Slartucker is going to have a cow when he hears about this," Synergy said. Posts: 3560 | Registered: Wednesday, November 7 2001 08:00 |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, December 21 2007 06:57
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I'll second this. I went through a bleak period once where I really wondered whether I might be clinically depressed. I consulted a psychiatrist, who quickly (and in retrospect quite correctly) concluded that there was no reason to begin taking medication immediately, and suggested I look at counseling. I then consulted one licensed counselor, who just about as quickly concluded that I was quite reasonably discouraged because some aspects of my life sucked, and that I needed practical advice more than soul-searching. He provided some very concrete and feasible suggestions that I wasn't seeing by myself, and a few weeks of consultation with him really helped me weather some tough months effectively. When things had calmed down and I decided that I could actually use some soul-searching after all, I found another counselor who was again very helpful. In one sense he didn't tell me anything I hadn't already thought of by myself. But I had also already thought of many other, contradictory things; I lacked the perspective to have confidence in any one hypothesis. For example, I was frustrated that I wasn't accomplishing enough in my work; but I really couldn't tell whether I was lazy and needed to knuckle down, or overdriven and needed to relax. In short, my small sample of the mental health care industry was very positive. Everybody was very professional, nobody pushed drugs on me, nobody wasted my time with nonsense, everybody was genuinely helpful. -------------------- Listen carefully because some of your options may have changed. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
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Infiltrator
Member # 7298
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written Friday, December 21 2007 07:51
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quote:Its my major -------------------- A rock has weight whether you admit it or not Posts: 479 | Registered: Wednesday, July 12 2006 07:00 |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Friday, December 21 2007 11:32
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What we can do with nanotechnology is already amazing. The limit is, as SoT says, our understanding of what we're doing, not our ability to do it. Personally, I'd happily buy shares in the entire field of nanotech, but don't go looking for sci-fi-esque medicine anytime soon. On Alec and Synergy's little debate: Given how much more we need to do to understand neurochemistry, biochemistry, psychology, and plain ol' biology, and given how much counseling actually helps people, I don't think it deserves disparagement. Even if it's not entirely clear how it helps, it clearly helps, and that's good enough. It's especially good enough for science. Maybe one day everything will be managed with pills, injections, and diet, but it isn't yet. On the other hand, I find Synergies addition of some metaphysical level over the purely physical reality accepted by science to be bizarre. It's harmless as long as it doesn't interfere with real medicine, and it amounts to nothing more than a spiritual belief no more or less outlandish than any others, but it doesn't match with scientifically established reality. Mind over matter works because of neurochemistry, nothing more. Minds are just piles of neurochemistry. —Alorael, who doesn't see any need for there to be more. Anyone who finds existence as a collection of cells shooting molecules at each other depressing needs to think a little harder about how fantastically wonderful it is to be an emergent property of such a bunch of cells. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
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Shaper
Member # 6292
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written Friday, December 21 2007 11:46
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It's true, I've been bandying about what has me most intrigued and impressed of late in my life and learning, and it is basically, spiritual/metaphysical. I also am quite convinced it is very much our reality, and am devoting myself to demonstrating that with the rest of my life. It informs and has altered in some ways how I choose to focus my practice, but it is not the content of my practice. I had already come to the conclusion that belief is the most powerful agency the human being has, before I recently delved deeply into material which got me very excited about how and why that really is so from a spiritual basis. It has actually helped provide a missing piece of what I have been seeking to have more of a basis and simple pleasure around doing what I do how I do it. Previous years had seen more of my belief system wholly dissolved than built. It has been nice to rebuild something that truly thrills me and I fully expect to prove to be practical and applicable, moreso than any other conceptualization or theology I onetime embraced or entertained. I enjoy being bizarre. It's a pretty bizarre universe, I do believe. In a wonderful, non-threatening way. -S- -------------------- A4 Items • A4 Singleton • G4 Items • G4 Forging • G4 Infiltrator • N:R Items • The Lonely Celt • A5 Items • A5 Map Posts: 2009 | Registered: Monday, September 12 2005 07:00 |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, December 21 2007 12:04
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quote:FYT. 'Just' just does more harm than good in sentences like this. It's intended to exclude the dualist or anti-reductionist notion that there is some extra ghostly substance, beside matter, making up minds. But what is wrong with that naive view is not that it overcomplicates mind, but that it oversimplifies it. It is less, not more, than the truth. So 'just' is mostly firing in the wrong direction to be against it. And on the other hand, the substance dualist view is really only wrong as physics. That is, it's almost certainly wrong as a theory of the brain. As a theory of the mind it is almost certainly quite correct, in the following sense. Spirit may not be a rival substance to matter, but it almost certainly makes sense as an alternative category. Mind is not an extra substance in the brain, in the same way that the plot of Hamlet is not an extra kind of ink smeared between First Folio pages. But one can definitely distinguish between story and ink, and the plot of the play is real in a way that is arguably much more important than the reality of any individual spot of ink. Plot is a different category, not an alternative substance, but not an error or illusion either. Similarly mind and brain. And the distinction between category and substance is really only important on the level of physics; in philosophy of mind as such, it's just a shibboleth. I can insist that a dualist find-and-replace 'substance' with 'category' in all their statements. If that's all it takes to make me happy, though, then in an important sense I'm not really disagreeing with them. So just as saying that Hamlet is just ink and paper may be right in one sense, but is not a useful contribution to literary criticism, so insisting on substance monism in psychology is in my view a mistake in emphasis. Of course, insisting on substance dualism is the same mistake, plus a mistake in physics. The substance monists are right. They should just get over it. -------------------- Listen carefully because some of your options may have changed. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
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Lifecrafter
Member # 6388
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written Friday, December 21 2007 19:50
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quote:In a fashion that your own original experience is at variance with, yes. It's a contrived way of putting it, and I'm not aiming to put down counseling, talk therapy, or psychology; I find all of them very useful and for many (e.g. non-pathological) cases they're of primary importance. But that's how it is. quote:Take the caveat above into account - that is, when you're dealing with non-pathological demoralization the demoralization is generally the product of personal experience. The phrase I used was extreme and misleading but basically correct - counseling towards facing experience might find a new way to interpret it or find a way to reject experiences that don't mesh with reality, but on some level that is in fact what it involves. I'm really not arguing it's a bad thing, but it's not all truth and light. In particular I think counseling gets billed in a white-knight fashion a whole lot when compared and contrasted with psychiatry and neurochemistry, but that's just a product of it being longer-entrenched and more familiar. (And, at present, more lucrative.) Both of them involve tinkering with personal experience and memory, as can be readily displayed by some of psychology's darker turns - for instance, the fad for memory retrieval in the 80s and 90s, which lead to a lot of false accusasions of Satanic ritual abuse and widespread disruption of families and distrust - and, in the long run, the worst victims are those who wound up believing in the delusions planted by coercive therapy. If you want to talk side-effects, going through your life being unable to shake the belief that your eminently decent and loving parents routinely secretly (or, worse, with the assent and complicity of the community) molested and abused you in the service of the Devil - well, that one is a doozy, and one that neither required nor usually involved the employment of drugs. Talk therapy, counseling, and psychology in general are part of the same continuum as psychiatry and neurochemistry - not even two sides of the same coin, or an alternative. And they are by no means safer nor more delicate. Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00 |
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Lifecrafter
Member # 6388
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written Friday, December 21 2007 21:57
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quote:The problem is that outside of the sciences nobody actually agrees with us on this. That is to say, a good majority of people strongly and with instinctive hostility reject the idea that they are 'just' neurochemical processes. I'll admit that 'we're just chemicals' has a pop sensibility to it that is perhaps too needlessly provocative. But my opposite number in this discussion is trafficking in the banal and the impossible, glued together by a paste of outmoded metaphysics and dualist precepts. I do hope that explains why I've been using the language I have. I'd also like to emphasize that all of this is the product of an education outside of the sciences, so if my metaphors or descriptions miss their mark I do sincerely apologize. It's something I think everyone owes it to society, their loved ones, and themselves to learn, and in whatever respect I've failed to do so mea culpa. My field is people in the aggregate, not the individual - and let alone her neurons - although the prospects suggested by 'the neurochemical is political' have always intrigued me. (There were, incidentally, some tantalizingly good ground-level psych studies done on right-wing authoritarians . . . just before they became part of the Republican mainstream, and any deeper studies became basically impolitic. Freaking Goldwater.) [ Friday, December 21, 2007 21:59: Message edited by: Najosz Thjsza Kjras ] Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00 |
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Shaper
Member # 6292
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written Saturday, December 22 2007 00:42
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Alec said: "But my opposite number in this discussion is trafficking in the banal and the impossible" Hmm, to claim that a thing is impossible is to claim to have proven a negative, is it not? Are you confident you can make the claim that you have proof that it is impossible that there is a spiritual dimension to being human? Because you're talking again like everything you believe must be fact...by what virtue, I wonder? Because you believe it, and therefore it must be correct? Please demonstrate how you have proof of a negative. -S- -------------------- A4 Items • A4 Singleton • G4 Items • G4 Forging • G4 Infiltrator • N:R Items • The Lonely Celt • A5 Items • A5 Map Posts: 2009 | Registered: Monday, September 12 2005 07:00 |
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Infiltrator
Member # 7298
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written Saturday, December 22 2007 01:53
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quote:Generally scientist and like minded people require you prove your arguments. Unless you have sufficient proof they won't believe you. For example I could claim little gremlins caused the big bang and no one could prove me wrong. This doesn't mean anyone believe because I would lack proof. -------------------- A rock has weight whether you admit it or not Posts: 479 | Registered: Wednesday, July 12 2006 07:00 |
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Shaper
Member # 6292
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written Saturday, December 22 2007 02:12
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I'm not trying to have a scientific discussion here, nor am I seeking to prove anything. I am not a scientist. My realm is ideas, the human soul, the human experience. Just try quantifying that in data. Scientist sorts can become very tedious to imaginative people, because they may demonstrate a complete lack of imagination. What I am noting here is statements of proof of a negative by someone claiming scientific rigor. That I call just as religious belief as religious belief itself. It's an investment in not believing in something or even its possibility, rather than humbly admitting it is possible and just something they have not encountered or been convinced of personally. It's so tiresome how so many here think every discussion here is supposed to be about proving things to one another on some scientific level, as if an online forum can even begin to do that anyway. This is all just role play and exercise for people to play the role they have assumed in life. I exercise what I see myself as being, and the preponderance of sciency sorts do what they do here. You can say you have no interest in dialoging on my level, which is about ideas, beliefs, the subjective, the soul, but asking me to prove you to anything is an impossible request. In fact nothing about anything is proven in these fora. Anyone curious about the concepts I have been referring to here about the creative power of your belief, can reference the writings of Neale Donald Walsch. His writings aren't obscure. His books were on the NY Times best sellers list for almost a year at a shot. That doesn't imply anything in itself, but my point is that these ideas have intrigued millions of people in the last decade. They have hit a chord of resonance or familiarity with a lot of people, yet it is very trippy sci-fi like material about the nature of God, us, the universe. In fact, it has quite blown my mind in a way I never expected to happen in my life again. I've got nothing to prove and no agenda. I just love putting out ideas that I find congruent with the human experience and are meaningful, practical, hopeful, inspiring, intriguing, whatever. -S- -------------------- A4 Items • A4 Singleton • G4 Items • G4 Forging • G4 Infiltrator • N:R Items • The Lonely Celt • A5 Items • A5 Map Posts: 2009 | Registered: Monday, September 12 2005 07:00 |
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...b10010b...
Member # 869
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written Saturday, December 22 2007 02:59
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quote:Oh, scientists have plenty of imagination. They couldn't do their job if they weren't able to formulate hypotheses. What they don't have is the delusion that imagining something automatically makes it true. -------------------- The Empire Always Loses: This Time For Sure! Posts: 9973 | Registered: Saturday, March 30 2002 08:00 |
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Shaper
Member # 6292
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written Saturday, December 22 2007 04:06
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Imagination includes the realm of that which is unseen and unverifiable. Those whose god is science can only conceive of that which they think they can prove in the material, rather than that which they can know by experience, by feeling, and by being. It is disconnect from the body, heart, and soul, and being stuck in the head. It's what the western world has given men to do for their gender role, and we've learned it quite well-be stuck in the head and cut off from other more vital parts of being human. It's also incredibly dead on a human level. I love science. It also makes me shudder to see what undue focus upon it to the exclusion of other elements of life does to the human soul...and to this world. How's it working for us? Not so well. Science, technology, and technocracy does not have the answers for the challenges we have been failing to overcome for millennia now...ourselves, our attitudes, our separtism, our killing of one another. We're just able to do all these things much more efficiently now. The god of science, like the god of religion, is going to be shown how bankrupt and inept, and incomplete it really is in context of what we are actually trying to be. -S- -------------------- A4 Items • A4 Singleton • G4 Items • G4 Forging • G4 Infiltrator • N:R Items • The Lonely Celt • A5 Items • A5 Map Posts: 2009 | Registered: Monday, September 12 2005 07:00 |
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...b10010b...
Member # 869
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written Saturday, December 22 2007 04:42
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quote:2/3 of new biologists are female. This is not a gender issue, however much you might like it to be. quote:I don't see you bringing about world peace either. Just because science can't solve a problem, doesn't mean something else can. [ Saturday, December 22, 2007 04:44: Message edited by: Thuryl ] -------------------- The Empire Always Loses: This Time For Sure! Posts: 9973 | Registered: Saturday, March 30 2002 08:00 |
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Infiltrator
Member # 7298
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written Saturday, December 22 2007 05:13
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quote:No one thing can solve the worlds problems. Their is no formula, person, pill, invention, or hero that will come and save the day. The only thing that can save the world is if society brings its focus to saving world instead of blissfully hoping someone else will. -------------------- A rock has weight whether you admit it or not Posts: 479 | Registered: Wednesday, July 12 2006 07:00 |
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...b10010b...
Member # 869
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written Saturday, December 22 2007 05:43
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quote:Please re-read this sentence until you can tell me why it's so silly. -------------------- The Empire Always Loses: This Time For Sure! Posts: 9973 | Registered: Saturday, March 30 2002 08:00 |
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Shaper
Member # 6292
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written Saturday, December 22 2007 06:07
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quote:Like and dislike have nothing to do with it. I observe. And I observe that we now, in a time of finally examining and redefining gender roles, are inducting women into the horrors that we once relegated largely to the soulless roles for men. Some women have bought into this lie to embrace it, and suffer accordingly. I don't mean by choosing to work in science. I mean by adopting the disconnect from the soul, when it is required for them to play ball in a man's world. I haven't seen the satisfaction of women in the world increasing merely because they now have the option to adopt the typically hollow roles men have filled of finding self identity in work, and safety in their heads. In a sense, women are selling their souls to the devil to do what men have done. The brave ones are entering men's worlds and setting new examples for roles, and not bowing down to that which does not work to create the world we claim we want, and robs one of life. Many or most women I daresay are never yet really afforded the privilege. They may have gained admittance, but they may have to "become men" to do it. It will take more time to erode the juggernaut of male role model conceit in the world. The one that worships the head to the exclusion of everything else that actually gives life color, heart, and joy. The one that has long been suspicious and denigrating of women, who more than anything represent to them that unquantifiable and unstrustworthy thing called intuition and feeling. The spirit of discrimination that we readily point to in religions is just as alive and well in the "secular" world. The bias is just more subtle and institutionalized. All that said, I see this as a grand time of the failure and ongoing dissolution of much that has not worked for us. Enough of us have become fed up enough. Morever, we are facing crises that require us to get in gear or perish, and I believe we shall. We cannot do business as usual any longer. I think it's a great time to be alive. Exciting. quote:You don't see me at all, so I find the comment irrelevant. You have no idea what I do, or what effect on any lives I may have by what I am being or doing. I have a definite and joyful philosophy on what does actually and ultimately create world peace, and I am spending my life seeking to hone it, practice it, perfect it, demonstrate it, be it. I look forward to experiencing the ongoing outplay of my choices. That which works I strengthen. That which does not I seek to alter or discard. It's okay to be "wrong." it's instrumental to finding out what does work. In a man's world, it is essentially not okay to be "wrong." To be so or to admit to being so is taken as a sign of vulnerability, and men have convinced themselves that it is a dog eat dog world with survival of the fittest as the rule. As you believe, so do you make your reality. Happy lot we are for adopting that vision of ourselves, aren't we. Since Darwin, we have enjoyed two very lovely world wars wholly unprecedented prior in millennia of history. As we sow we reap. As we believe, we experience. Problems are solved as soon as we are ready to do what it takes to actually solve them. The first thing we have to admit is our paradigms have been wrong. This we are incredibly and foolishly unwilling to consider for millennia on end. It utterly amazes me how stubbornly and fearfully unable we are to face that what we believe and what we do is not working for us. We keep hammering about in the same broken assumptions. We have to see all ourselves as accountable for having created the world and the issues we inhabit. Every one of us. There is only one of us. -S- -------------------- A4 Items • A4 Singleton • G4 Items • G4 Forging • G4 Infiltrator • N:R Items • The Lonely Celt • A5 Items • A5 Map Posts: 2009 | Registered: Monday, September 12 2005 07:00 |
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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Saturday, December 22 2007 09:08
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Since you are not a scientist, have never been a scientist, and seem to be pretty much entirely disconnected from how science works, I'd appreciate it if you would stop ignorantly bashing science and the scientific process as soulless. I'm not even sure what you mean by the gender struggle in the lab, but I can assure you it's not there. The women who are biologists are women. And there is no crisis. —Alorael, who can't believe he's even arguing this. For all your talk of living in the world you create, you've created a rather bleak, polarized world. "Exciting," you call it. I'd prefer scary and confrontational, and I'll stick with my world, thanks. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
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Shaper
Member # 6292
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written Saturday, December 22 2007 09:34
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Well, see, I talk to a lot of would-be scientists here, and people whose god is clearly science, and I can frequently only describe them as virtually soulless. A subjective observation? Yes. But an honest one in comparison to many other types of people I have known in some capacity in just the online world alone. It is not of course that they have no soul. They just seem significantly out of touch with anything resembling one. All of this has nothing to do with "how science works." And your oblivion to the plight of the male world or what women experience within it is irrelevant to whether it is an actual phenomenon and experience which both men and women suffer. It exists in any field. Spoken like a true clueless white male, though, Alo. "There is no problem." Since you are not a woman, have never been a woman, and seem to be pretty much entirely disconnected from how women work, I'd appreciate it if you would stop ignorantly speaking on behalf of what they are experiencing. -S- [ Saturday, December 22, 2007 09:39: Message edited by: Synergy ] -------------------- A4 Items • A4 Singleton • G4 Items • G4 Forging • G4 Infiltrator • N:R Items • The Lonely Celt • A5 Items • A5 Map Posts: 2009 | Registered: Monday, September 12 2005 07:00 |
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Off With Their Heads
Member # 4045
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written Saturday, December 22 2007 11:51
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quote:You're mind-bogglingly ignorant if you think that scientists think that science can answer every question that can be asked. Scientists can also — in their spare time — be artists or read philosophy or whatever. Of course, they don't write about it in their scientific articles, because those articles aren't about that, but sometimes — when we are incredibly fortunate — they write about it in their popularizing literature. Read Feynman sometime. (Or Hawking, if you want some sense of the soulful joy of scientific discovery.) quote:Good god, man, do you know how much our standard of living has improved in the past few century, let alone since the dawn of modern science with Copernicus? quote:WWI and WWII were not the first total wars in the history of the world (see Sherman's March, the Taiping Rebellion, the Thirty Years War, the Punic Wars, the Peloponnesian War, etc.). The difference was that modern technology — as it does in every respect — made us more efficient. quote: quote:You claim that we can't know you at all, but you also claim to know about our relationship to our souls. You ass. Besides, a "lot"? SoT, Thuryl, Stareye... uh.... quote:Repeat these same words back to yourself. [ Saturday, December 22, 2007 12:02: Message edited by: Kelandon ] -------------------- Arancaytar: Every time you ask people to compare TM and Kel, you endanger the poor, fluffy kittens. Smoo: Get ready to face the walls! Ephesos: In conclusion, yarr. Kelandon's Pink and Pretty Page!!: the authorized location for all things by me The Archive of all released BoE scenarios ever Posts: 7968 | Registered: Saturday, February 28 2004 08:00 |
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Infiltrator
Member # 7298
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written Saturday, December 22 2007 13:36
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quote:I'll admit I wrote it on a bit to little sleep, but I like to see you engineer something and then idiot proof it. Science and technolgy are excellent tools to improve society but like all tools are only as good as the people weilding them. -------------------- A rock has weight whether you admit it or not Posts: 479 | Registered: Wednesday, July 12 2006 07:00 |
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Shaper
Member # 247
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written Saturday, December 22 2007 14:38
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WOOOOOOOOOOOO! -------------------- The Knight Between Posts. Posts: 2395 | Registered: Friday, November 2 2001 08:00 |
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Post Navel Trauma ^_^
Member # 67
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written Saturday, December 22 2007 14:39
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quote:Just because you have some peculiar hatred of science doesn't mean that scientists share your view. Not even female ones. As for science being a male-biased enterprise, although like too many things it has historically been male-dominated, it may surprise you to hear that women are also capable of rational thought, and the female scientists I know would be insulted at the suggestion that they're "pretending to be men". -------------------- Barcoorah: I even did it to a big dorset ram. New Mac BoE Posts: 1798 | Registered: Thursday, October 4 2001 07:00 |
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Shaper
Member # 6292
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written Saturday, December 22 2007 16:39
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Per usual, what I am saying is not being communicated here. I'm not even going to attempt to justify, validate, re-explain, recontextualize what I have meant or the spirit I have spoken it in here. I won't seek to elaborate yet again on the ironies or paradoxes of holding seemingly conflicting ideas and feelings about things, yet the reality of this experience is full of them. The air is rife with projection on all sides, and I'm not excluding myself from that. Words are the most ineffective and treacherous way to communicate. I'm weary of making the unuseful and unappreciated effort here. I don't find myself engaged with anyone I actually enjoy communicating with or seem to have much in common with, though I have made a lot of effort to find that on some meaningful level. That's not a judgement, it's an observation, but it begs me the question, why am I bothering? Must be the perpetual optimist in me to find that which is not readily evident in an unlikely place, but I do not believe I will be endeavoring to do so any more. My kind is not appreciated here, so why be here. I will devote the time to the places I am appreciated and better understood, which is generally in person in real life. I love to communicate thoughts in writing, but this is not the place for me to find satisfaction on a relational level doing so. I have yet to feel even remotely understood or embraced here. It's a cold and sterile room. Yes, soulless. Enjoy it. You can have it back. Over and out. -S- -------------------- A4 Items • A4 Singleton • G4 Items • G4 Forging • G4 Infiltrator • N:R Items • The Lonely Celt • A5 Items • A5 Map Posts: 2009 | Registered: Monday, September 12 2005 07:00 |