Bipolar
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...b10010b...
Member # 869
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written Sunday, December 23 2007 16:47
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quote:Those "intuitive and feeling functions" are not something intrinsic to women; they are an expectation which has historically been placed on women by society to keep women down. In societies that value being emotionally reserved, women are seen as more emotional than men, sure -- but anthropological studies consistently reveal that in societies that value emotional expression, women are seen as less emotional than men. The one and only constant in the traits a culture attributes to women is that they're not the traits held in highest prestige by that society. I don't claim to know all the solutions to the problem of gender discrimination, but making accommodations for a restrictive gender role that's historically evolved to keep women marginalised will only make things worse. -------------------- The Empire Always Loses: This Time For Sure! Posts: 9973 | Registered: Saturday, March 30 2002 08:00 |
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Lifecrafter
Member # 6388
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written Sunday, December 23 2007 17:06
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My favorite story, one that I like to relate in cases like these, is Baby Adam. A team of sociology researchers gave two sets of people an infant each. One got a female infant, one got a male infant. Both groups generally swore up and down they wanted to treat boys and girls basically the same, that they disliked the idea of discrimination by sex, that girls were in almost every regard as capable as boys. They handled the babies for a while and were asked to describe each. They described Adam as a tough little guy, collicky, stubborn, smart. They described Eve, the girl, as tender, sweet, fussy. The only thing they had in common was the way you describe babies in general - cute, little - and even then, only to some extent. Obviously 'pretty' would more likely describe Eve and 'handsome' Adam. The catch? They were the same baby. They dressed up the baby used in the experiment in pink clothes and called him/her (I forget which) 'Eve', and with blue swaddlings he/she was 'Adam'. It's incredible, really, that the basic assumptions we are encouraged to adopt towards gender are so rigidly enforced that all it takes is a slightly different colored shirt to decide that a baby isn't sweet or clever. There's stereotypes for you; and it tells you a lot about all the 'men are from Mars, women are from Venus' stuff that's been so popular in the last two decades. We find the differences we're looking for. (Incidentally, there's a scattering of very interesting scholarship on early accounts of gender change. The earliest narratives in particular are rife with ridiculously rigid gender assumptions, such as the first successful sex-change surgery in the West - I forget who - deciding that he was suddenly attracted exclusively to men when he had an orchidectomy. It's really interesting to consider that stuff like that used to be more or less boilerplate for accounts of transgenderism - and what's more, from the 50s to the 80s admitting 'inappropriate' sexual desire or failure to cohere strictly with certain female norms closed any above-board channels existing for the transgendered. Society is really defensive about gender roles, and everything that challenges them has to be channeled into a defense of them at some level.) Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00 |
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Shaper
Member # 6292
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written Monday, December 24 2007 08:26
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quote:This is, and has always been, my argument here. Look at how I worded the statement, if you are thinking I was suggesting otherwise. -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 # 6785
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written Monday, December 24 2007 10:09
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quote:I once researched drug testing and for psychiatric drugs, there was extreme scientist bias. The so called double blind tests failed because the tested drugs have extremely visible physical side effects that make it impossible not to know who got placebos. So while the actual data shows no improvement over placebo, the companies push a "success" since they can tailor the data since they can see the results during the test. When you add the failure to know how a drug is actually causing an improvement since the illness mechanism is just a guess, you can see why for most cases drug treatment may not be effective. Let's shake things up and see if that helps isn't a great way to practice medicine. It's done because the government and insurance companies find that drug treatment is more cost effective than talk therapy and other time intensive methods. This is changing now that the costs for drug treatment have risen and it's being applied to case where the doctors know it doesn't provide a health benefit, but in the instance of dementia patients will make it easier for workers to deal with patients. Posts: 4643 | Registered: Friday, February 10 2006 08:00 |
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Off With Their Heads
Member # 4045
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written Monday, December 24 2007 11:14
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quote:It is possible to get around this — make your placebo something other than a sugar pill, something that will also have definite effects — but it certainly presents non-trivial challenges. -------------------- 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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Law Bringer
Member # 335
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written Monday, December 24 2007 11:22
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When you're not testing the very first therapy, the control is often another drug. That way you'll get drug effects in both groups, and you're also not guilty of malpractice on the control group. This is especially common with diseases like cancer, but I can't see why you wouldn't do it with psych too. —Alorael, who is dubious about drug companies pushing drugs that aren't better than placebo. It happens, but it happens very rarely. Nobody can credibly suggest that the scientific method results in flawless science, but it's better than anything else that has been devised. Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00 |
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Shaper
Member # 6292
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written Monday, December 24 2007 14:10
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I do hereby concede that others here have made salient and valid points and observations, and that my means, modes, moods, motivations, and convictions can all stand re-vision. I hereby announce my withdrawal from the candidacy for President. ... I have been having one experience. I now choose another. ... ef - Very cool and very interesting. Perhaps you are more in touch with and clear on your intuition than I have yet learned to be with mine. Feeling is the same thing as intuition, as I have been using the term in context of this discussion. Emotion, energy in motion, is a response to feeling/intuition, and not identical to feeling. Your deepest feeling could be seen as always true. Your emotion is an interpretation/response which may or may not match and mirror your feeling/felt sense/intuition. Which I realize is basically repeating what I said previously. -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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Raven v. Writing Desk
Member # 261
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written Monday, December 24 2007 15:04
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Then what IS feeling/intuition? -------------------- 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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Shaper
Member # 6292
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written Monday, December 24 2007 15:32
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Your soul telling you your truth in the language of the soul. -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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Guardian
Member # 2476
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written Monday, December 24 2007 17:21
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My own language does not differentiate between feeling and emotion, we have one word for both. I have learned what the difference is and will point it out, but should it not be correct, I'd like to be told. Emotions move like waves, always changing, having highs and lows, coming and going. 'Feeling' refers to deeper layers than emotion and does not change, is a state of being. Love is the only feeling I am aware of. Someone you deeply love can nevertheless make you terribly angry, but that doesn't change your love, it often doesn't touch it at all. The way you sometimes use that term, Synergy, seems more to refer to 'sensing' or 'feeling into'. 'Feeling into' yourself, 'listening' for something to come up. Is this right? Now feeling and intuition. If what I learned is valid, feeling and intuition cannot be synonyms, as intuition is most certainly not a state of being. Feeling, on the other hand, is not a surprising nanosecond of immediate recognition and clarity. Moreover, having a 'gut feeling' is not the only way people come in contact with intuition. It can just as easily be experienced as 'expanded mind', no emotion or feeling involved whatsoever. You say that emotion is a response to intuition or an interpretation of intuition. I don't understand that at all. Do you assume that every emotion we have should be seen as a response to an intuition that we may or may not be aware of? Also, why should your reaction to an intuition be emotional at all? -------------------- Polaris Rache's A3 Site reformatted 2/3 done Rache's A3 Site, original version Posts: 1828 | Registered: Saturday, January 11 2003 08:00 |
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Shaper
Member # 6292
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written Tuesday, December 25 2007 07:58
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A merry day, of whichever sort it is for you, to all. At the very least, you have every right to be merry and festive today. quote:What language is yours, if I may ask? My use of "feeling" here is focused on feeling as a bodily sensation mostly. More elaboration below. Emotions move like waves, always changing, having highs and lows, coming and going. Yes, sounds good, energy in motion. Moreover, when we move energy, we create effect. Emotional energy is strongly creative energy for what we end up experiencing. 'Feeling' refers to deeper layers than emotion and does not change, is a state of being. Yes, agree, I think, though we can change what we are being too. But in any moment of being, it could be seen as a "steady state" rather than the wave in motion we could describe emotion as being. Am I on the same page with you? What we are feeling tells us truly what we are being. Feeling is the language of the soul, yet it registers in the body, so to know how we are being, we can pay attention to what we feel in our body. The tummy test is said to be the quickest way to do this. It is far from the only way. Emotions are also felt in the body, and this is one reason this whole picture can quickly get confusing. Love is the only feeling I am aware of. What about joy? It has been said that the soul IS joy. Its natural being, feeling, expression is joy and joyful. To whatever degree we do not experience ourselves as being joyful is the degree to which we are cutting ourselves off from experiencing our core, true state. Love and joy could be said to be nearly synonymous, because the one creates the other. Joy leads to love. Love leads to joy. It is probably equally true to say that the soul is love also, just as it is said that God is love. It would be an entire, and perhaps worthwhile diversion, but it could be said that much of what humans think of and experience as "love" is not really what love is at all. So "love" is another word begging definition. Now feeling and intuition. If what I learned is valid, feeling and intuition cannot be synonyms, as intuition is most certainly not a state of being. Feeling, on the other hand, is not a surprising nanosecond of immediate recognition and clarity. Good point. Perhaps it could be said that feeling is the immediate prededent to intuition. The feeling helps to create the intuition, which can flow immediately out of feeling. To pay attention to one's deepest feeling, felt sense, is to find that which constructs our intuitions. I still see them as very closely aligned, if not identical. If I put it this way: intuitions are a felt sense, a sensing about a thing, rather than a cognition about a thing. We can take the intuition we feel in our being/body and use the mind to quickly translate it into a thought, put it into words, or give it meaning. Here we may start to assign incorrect meaning to what we think we are sensing, depending on our belief system about any number of things. I think the very heart or beginning of intuition starts as a felt sense in the body, and that simply is the language of what we call intuition. Much of what we often think of or experience as our "intuition" is the afterproduct of processing intuition with our mind. We are so familiar with, and taught to trust in our mind level of experience, that intuition in its pure state, may seem too simple or alien to what we are used to being aware of and trusting. The trick is to align our mind with what the soul is actually communicating, and not to mistranslate it. I think intuition is still the initial felt sense, and then we flesh it out with our other faculties, which are designed to process our truth into our experience. The only real question is not if we are doing it, but how we are doing it. There is the intuition itself, and then there is how we experience the intuition. Moreover, having a 'gut feeling' is not the only way people come in contact with intuition. It can just as easily be experienced as 'expanded mind', no emotion or feeling involved whatsoever. I entirely agree with the first part. I think if it is experienced as expanded mind, that may be a second tier of experience, as the intuition still starts as a felt sense in your being, which the mind can then appropriate. I'm willing to be incorrect in my understanding here. A fair bit of this thinking is relatively new to me, and I have plenty to explore, experience, and appropriate for myself. Will you tell me more out of your truth and experience on this? I'm largely relaying a model provided in the Conversations With God books, and the one which makes most sense to me and my experience. This all becomes very esoteric, and words begin to become clumsy and fail to describe the reality. There are also so many facets to our reality. I try to not close off to the "both/and" of truth. There can be even seeming paradoxical aspects and experiences to the same truth. I am thinking that what you are saying about different ways of experiencing your intuition are probably just as true. You say that emotion is a response to intuition or an interpretation of intuition. I don't understand that at all. Do you assume that every emotion we have should be seen as a response to an intuition that we may or may not be aware of? That's a very good question, and I'm not sure how I'd answer this entirely. I know I can say that emotion is what we experience as a result of making meaning for ourselves. Whether or not that is based on intuitions a their core always, I can't say. One part of me is thinking that because our Soul/Self/God is always speaking to us, there is a true message about our being always coming forth. If we are stuck in our head or out of touch with our felt sense, our intuition, then the experiences we are having, meaning being made, emotions experienced, are out of sync with the deep feeling being ignored, buried, or misinterpreted. I don't know yet how to picture all the actual mechanics here. However, I could clarify that emotion can be a response to, and interpretation of an intuition, but certainly doesn't have to be. Depending on how we process or translate a felt sense, we may create an emotion from it, which we may confuse as the original "feeling" about a thing. But it is not your original feeling or intuition about a thing...it's your translation of it, once you have assigned it your own meaning. The original feeling/intuition is something you are simply being-aware of a truth about yourself which registers in your body. The emotion is something you are doing by putting that energy into motion - making a meaning for yourself based upon that truth. And like I'm saying, we may accurately make meaning of the core signal, or we may assign a skewed meaning to it. We may not need or choose to make an emotional response to many intuitions at all. Typically, we take (or perhaps even ignore and override) our felt sense, immediately process it with our mind and assign a meaning out of what we think we are experiencing. That meaning leads to us "feeling" a certain way, which in this case is what we are calling "emotion." I may feel afraid or unworthy in a situation, in which my soul is actually communicating an excitement about a challenge, because I have accumulated beliefs about myself, perhaps even on the subconscious level contrary to what I consciously think about myself, that tell me I am no good, not able, not worthy, or not safe. If I were just listening to the pure language of my soul, in, say, my tummy, I would recognize a feeling of excitement, but I have translated it as dread, and I feel threatened, and then sadness, because it seems like something outside my capacity to handle or master, based on my belief about myself in context of that situation. A lot of work in psychotherapy can revolve around exploring with a client the meanings they are assigning to their thoughts, beliefs, and experiences. It can be helpful to see how arbitrary that construction can be, or how it is someone else's meaning and programming which has been appropriated by the self. It can be especially useful to help a client get in touch with her or his own body through mindfulness exercises and the like. It quiets the interpreting mind and outplaying emotions, and helps the client begin to experience what the body is simply communicating and saying. It is a truer barometer of how the client is actually being, and often that being is something the client has translated or projected into something other that what it actually is. I enjoy and employ existential and Gestalt therapy techniques which seek to focus on bodily awareness and have parts of the body even speak, as if they had their own voice. It can be very telling and (re)orienting. Gestalt techniques have the reputation for being some of the most potent, and streamlined, (and even "dangerous") techniques available in therapy, because they can so quickly get a person into layers of buried feeilng. This may get more complicated, because a lot of that tapped feeling is still emotion that has been disowned or stuffed by the person as being too threatening or unacceptable, and it literally goes into the body somewhere. The communication of the soul is our deepest and truest level of self speaking to us though. One may first have to process much that one has not even been able to own for oneself in the realm of emotion, before one is ready to get in touch with that even deeper, simpler, quieter feeling and intuition. A lot can get in its way. Also, why should your reaction to an intuition be emotional at all? It doesn't need to be, and may not be. The point I was making is that when we do have an emotional response, it is an interpretation, and not to be confused with the original feeling. This, because we so often use "feeling" and "emotion" to mean the same thing, as you say your language does? Another word for "feeling" here, might be "sensation" or "sensing," which you were suggesting. And again, the original feeling and the outplaying emotion may be very congruent. It all depends how we are interpreting it, and how much we are getting in our own way. I am curious where you come by your thoughts and interest on these matters? Merry Xmess and Happy Holidaze, -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 Tuesday, December 25 2007 15:41
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quote:Fixed your typo. -------------------- The Empire Always Loses: This Time For Sure! Posts: 9973 | Registered: Saturday, March 30 2002 08:00 |
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Apprentice
Member # 6763
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written Tuesday, December 25 2007 16:32
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quote:Thuryl, surely you are made of win, win the internet, etc. -------------------- --If you lived here, you'd be home by now-- Posts: 14 | Registered: Saturday, February 4 2006 08:00 |
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Lifecrafter
Member # 6388
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written Tuesday, December 25 2007 22:49
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My parents are terrible about believing in mysticist garbage, largely because of a typical staunch liberal Catholic middle-American background for both. But they do have one major caveat attached to that: there is in fact a rationale behind whatever it is that goes on in their world. I've only recently disabused them of a couple of old canards, like the 21 grams one - but at heart, the scientific method is the way to understand the world. Where you are at variance with it, you're almost certainly wrong - and the only even vaguely acceptable way to salvage that is through deference to it. In short, while my parents may believe in ghosts and demons and 'energy' and crap, they believe all of that (a) on the basis of a fairly active imagination and vivid experience and (b) doesn't conflict in any serious way with the laws of nature, and any apparent discrepancies will be mended by a further scientific understanding. They're not professional scienticians. My mother's an artist and my father's a surgeon; he's closer than she is, but he's not in a research position (mostly). But even then, they're not about to try and gainsay every human being with a solid brain between his or her ears between Galileo and the present. That'd just be stupid. Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00 |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, December 26 2007 05:38
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I'd like to play devil's advocate enough to extend a point I advanced a while back, and that seems as though it might be worth considering. (Actually, I'm not sure who's advocate I'm being, since I'm afraid I haven't been reading this thread carefully enough to know whether I'm really supporting anyone else here. Concisely summarizing a long post is a hard intellectual task that no-one here is paid for, so no-one is obliged to do; but conversely, I'm not being paid to figure out long posts, so I don't read them. So maybe I'm nobody's advocate, just an unsolicited amicus curiae.) There are a lot of psychological phenomena, alleged or well substantiated, to which some people refer in terms of simple dualistic theories of the mind. It may be best to draw for these people a distinction they do not draw for themselves, between the causes to which they ascribe the phenomena, and their discussions of the phenomena as such. In my experience, the dualistic theory can often be excised painlessly, leaving a perfectly sound and substantial account, partly in metaphorical language, of some fascinating psychological phenomenology. It seems to me that people who seem to be espousing dualism often only think they are committed to it, when in fact they simply have not thought much about it. They have not thought much about it, because they are just not really interested in the mechanisms underlying mental phenomena. They are actually just as uninterested in spirit as a substance as they are in neurochemistry. And that's okay. Not everyone has to be interested in everything; and neurochemistry is perhaps one of the best things not to be interested in, because our current state of understanding of it is not enough to let us do very much. And so perhaps one should simply overlook references to dualistic explanations, just as one should overlook the malapropisms of a second language speaker. Perhaps they indicate merely ignorance of a different subject, rather than obtuseness on the subject at hand. If I am aware of plausible or established naturalistic explanations for some strange experience, but the experience itself rather than its cause is the topic of discussion, I might better take spiritualistic descriptions as metaphors, rather than try to correct them as errors. There's a point at which this seems to me to be not just courtesy, but accuracy. There are psychoses, for example, that do pretty much anything I would ask of a bona fide demon. It might be the critic of demonic terminology who was being naive in such a case, making too simplistic assumptions about what it must mean to call something a demon. Of course, if someone's demonic picture of psychosis makes them believe that the condition is contagious by touch, this is a serious error. But even then: Is the point that there are no such things as demons, or just that demons are not transferable? -------------------- Listen carefully because some of your options may have changed. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
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Infiltrator
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written Wednesday, December 26 2007 11:24
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How can you tell if a demon-discusser wants to be kept in the dark about neuroscience or not? To follow your analogy of a second-language speaker, if I were uttering malapropisms in a second language, I would at least want those people conversing with me to ask if I would like my mistakes corrected. To presume that I want them ignored seems to me as much of a mistake as presuming that I want them corrected. When a substance monist discusses psychoses with a demon-believing dualist, should the monist start the conversation with "wait — would you like me to explain to you why your demons are really nothing more than chemical imbalances, or should I let your ignorance persist?"? -------------------- 5.0.1.0.0.0.0.1.0... Posts: 508 | Registered: Thursday, May 29 2003 07:00 |
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Raven v. Writing Desk
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written Wednesday, December 26 2007 15:56
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The difference between the second-language analogy and the demon example is as follows. People who have learned a second language imperfectly have chosen to invest time and effort learning the language, so might appreciate further refinement. People who prefer nonscientific conceptual worlds have (in the kinds of situation we're imaging, I think) probably been exposed to scientific theories and have -not- chosen to invest time and effort learning them. So while they might theoretically be interested, it seems pretty unlikely. -------------------- 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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Guardian
Member # 2476
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written Wednesday, December 26 2007 23:10
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I begin to understand what you are commenting on. But man, Synergy, it shouldn't be that difficult for me. You see, I'm old, so I was there when the whole thing started, when one part of me was out in the streets shouting 'Ho Chi Minh' and another part felt puzzled by the redclothed guys with their malas, disciples of a man who later went by the name of Osho. So I went to the bookstores to find out more. I know the whole New Age terminology up and down, I should get what you are talking about quite easily. Ok, I finally grasp why you see your mind as such a troubling and frustrating part of you, clouding and misinterpreting the 'clarity' of your feeling. But, hey, it's just the other way round. In all truth, if you set out to study and explore your inner landscapes, you'll need every ounce (if not more) of a scientist's detachment, mental precision, focus, differentiation, patience and perseverance to not get lost and not be led astray by your own inner vision. You say you use your body to contact your feeling perception. Well, the first thing you come into contact with that way are the tensions and stresses within your muscles created by unpleasant experiences and memories. So, if your 'soul's' message is 'you are safe', your body stores emotional memories that 'know' better, and emotion links with mind to keep you from walking a dangerous, a very dangerous path. Don't bedevil the mind. It is but an instrument. Don't bedevil the blockage. It's there to protect you. You need your mind, and you need detachment from upcoming emotion to recognize the blockage for what it is and to start diagnosing it. Your body 'knows' that there are madmen around that may just shoot you, and of course it's right. There are. Your 'soul' tells you that there is a spiritual part of you that's always safe and asks you to identify more with that. And you need to be precise and differentiate or it gets all messed up. To answer your questions: my native language is german and I'm a psychotherapist, as you may have guessed by now. -------------------- Polaris Rache's A3 Site reformatted 2/3 done Rache's A3 Site, original version Posts: 1828 | Registered: Saturday, January 11 2003 08:00 |
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Shaper
Member # 6292
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written Thursday, December 27 2007 11:47
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Body, mind, spirit (or soul) - all critical, vital, wonderful parts of us by which to have the fullness of our experience. Each serves us brilliantly when in harmony with the other parts. So, I'm not "against" mind, or see it as bad or weak. I love my mind. I use it all the time. It serves me brilliantly, and it gets me into trouble. I perceive we live in a time which has often encouraged the development of mind over other parts, and this could only leave us to some degree out of touch with other vital parts necessary for our full experience and wisdom. When I experience the exercise of mind without the participation of the soul coming through, I may be inclined to describe the experience as "soulless." It feels hollow, sterile, joyless, and , incomplete to me. I feel I experience a whole lot of that in a world that is very much in love with information at present. This has nothing to do with the value or "validity" of the information in itself. Somehow, I feel like quoting a very old Simpsons skit from the days of the Tracy Ullman show. This from the mouth of Homer, before he was a complete moron: " What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind." -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
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written Thursday, December 27 2007 12:51
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quote:Good point. Then SoT's idea is pretty convincing, I think. However: quote:If someone's conceptual world includes such inaccuracies (i.e. inaccuracies like "demons are contagious"), then I think they should be corrected: maybe not in all cases, but certainly in cases where errors stemming from one's dualistic beliefs could negatively impact someone else's life (e.g. if the one holding those incorrect beliefs were a psychotherapist responsible for the well-being of patients). And if they are corrected, then how would the one making the corrections justify those corrections if not by appealing to science? If the point is that dualistic explanations should be overlooked in casual conversation, then that doesn't seem too bad. But I think anyone using such a framework to provide care to other people might be potentially endangering them (or at least not giving them the best care possible) by relying on incorrect assumptions. If mistakes can be corrected within the dualistic framework, then great ("Nurse, demons aren't contagious by touch." "Oh okay, I can touch my mentally ill patients") — but it seems unlikely that someone would simply accept a correction without any explanation. Eventually, to justify the explanation I think one would need to cite empirical studies, and it seems too difficult to keep the dualistic framework when describing scientific research. -------------------- 5.0.1.0.0.0.0.1.0... Posts: 508 | Registered: Thursday, May 29 2003 07:00 |
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Nuke and Pave
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written Thursday, December 27 2007 13:04
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quote:I just wanted to let you know that older immigrants who have been studying English for several years, but still can't speak it well often get embarrassed and confused when people start teaching them English when all they wanted to do was ask for direction or buy groceries. They might be more open to explanations made in private by their relatives, but for a stranger on a street to go into an English lesson would make them very embarrassed and uncomfortable. I know it's not related to the discussion in which you were making an analogy, but just wanted to let you know in case you really do give English lessons to all the immigrants you meet. [ Thursday, December 27, 2007 13:06: Message edited by: Zeviz ] -------------------- Be careful with a word, as you would with a sword, For it too has the power to kill. However well placed word, unlike a well placed sword, Can also have the power to heal. Posts: 2649 | Registered: Wednesday, October 3 2001 07:00 |
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Lifecrafter
Member # 7723
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written Thursday, December 27 2007 14:21
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quote:If we know of naturalistic explanations for certain sicknesses, should we assume that those are the only ones? It may be that "symptoms" that look like mental illness are not symptoms at all. A person might hear voices because of psychosis. Should we assume that's always the case, though? Posts: 701 | Registered: Thursday, November 30 2006 08:00 |
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Shaper
Member # 73
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written Thursday, December 27 2007 14:57
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Unless there's reason to assume otherwise, such as no antipsychotics having any significant effect, yes, we should. -------------------- My Myspace, with some of my audial and visual art The Lyceum - The Headquarters of the Blades designing community The Louvre - The Blades of Avernum graphics database Alexandria - The Blades of Exile Scenario database BoE Webring - Self explanatory Polaris - Free porn here Odd Todd - Fun for the unemployed (and everyone else too) They Might Be Giants - Four websites for one of the greatest bands in existance -------------------- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Posts: 2957 | Registered: Thursday, October 4 2001 07:00 |
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Lifecrafter
Member # 7723
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written Thursday, December 27 2007 17:45
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I don't think "any significant effect" is what we'd have to look for. I'd imagine that drugs would have an effect on a sane person. What we'd have to see is whether or not the drugs worked the same for everyone. If a patient took the drugs, but still heard the voices, that might tell us something. Posts: 701 | Registered: Thursday, November 30 2006 08:00 |
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Off With Their Heads
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written Thursday, December 27 2007 18:40
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I think ADoS meant "curative effect" when he said "effect." I mean, sure, a significant effect of Thorazine is noticeable amounts of CPZ in the blood, but in context, that's clearly not what was intended. You wouldn't expect the same drug to work exactly the same in everybody, because people have different body chemistries. A non-material cause is in principle fine in the scientific method, as long as it can be measured or analyzed in some way. In practice, such explanations tend to answer one question by begging ten more. -------------------- 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 |