John M writes:
> Stathis:
> 1. to Kim's question to Bruno (and your reply):
> I call "reasonable" the items matching OUR (human) logic, even if we
call
> it
> a machine. There is no norm in the existence for 'reasonable', as
Cohen
> and
> Stewart showed in their chef d'oeuvre on Chaos in the imaginary
> "Zarathustrans". We, with our 100 years ahead thinking and Bruno with
his
> 200 should be above such narrowminded limitations.
> 2.to your 'delusion': it is correct<G>.
Yes, but even with a normative definition of "rational"(if that is what
you mean) there are those who are either unable (due to illness, or
because they are infants, for example) or unwilling (due to expediency,
or laziness, or whatever) to be rational. Moreover, this is very common,
not just an exception to the rule.
> )"...The single best test is to treat someone with
> > antipsychotic medication and see if the delusion goes away.")
> is this to implant new delusions and see how the poor fellow reacts?
> We had some intelligent dicussions about 'everybody is crazy' (George
at
> al.) and so "crazy" is 'normal' and the "norm" may be crazy. Are the
> psych-professionals exceptions?
Let me give you a real example. A patient claims that in the last month,
whenever he is away, or asleep, someone comes into his house and does
annoying things, like shifting personal items from one place to another,
putting holes in his socks, opening cupboards that were closed or
closing cupboards that were open, and so on. The culprit must know a lot
about electronic surveillance, because the cameras the poor victim has
installed do not show evidence of intrusion, and the neighbours might
also be involved because they all say they have seen nothing unusual,
even though it is happening almost every day. The patient stops going to
work or socializing, and drinks endless cups of coffee in order to stay
up as long as possible and catch the intruder, but it's no use: the
incidents become more frequent and more brazen. Finally, when the
patient starts talking about homicidal and suicidal impulses, his family
contact the local psychiatric crisis team, who make a diagnosis of
schizophreniform psychosis and persuade the patient to start taking
aripiprazole 15mg mane, which they supervise by visiting daily. The
patient only agrees to this because the alternative would be involuntary
hospital admission: he can explain, in great detail, why he is convinced
that the intruder is real, and to be fair, there is no way the
psychiatric team can prove him wrong, or be completely certain that he
is wrong.
Two weeks later, the alleged intrusions have almost completely stopped,
and our patient is thinking about going back to work again. He argues it
has nothing to do with the medication: maybe the culprit was scared off
by the psychiatric team, or maybe he just got sick of annoying him.
Two years later, the patient has gone through a cycle of stopping and
starting the medication half a dozen times. Within a few weeks of
stopping, the intrusions start up again, and within a few weeks of
recommencing treatment, they stop. He still isn't convinced that he has
ever been paranoid, but to stop his family and psychiatric services from
nagging him, he agrees to stay on the medication indefinitely, and he
remains well.
Given this story, are you still prepared to say that the patient's
reasoning that strangers are putting holes in his socks is just as valid
as that of the psychiatric team or his concerned family? It's worth
noting that his *deductive* reasoning remained intact throughout, so if
you could use this to explain logically where his *inductive* reasoning
went wrong, you might have saved the state the cost of an expensive
antipsychotic.
> 3. You wrote:
> > An unreasonable machine would look like a brain. The minds of living
> > organisms, such as they are, evolved ...<
> Because we know so little about the ways a brain works and assume too
much
> based on our present ignorance to explain everything still unknown.
There
> is
> the terror of physicists forcing their primitive model on the world,
> especially on domains where SOME features can be measured in
established
> 'phisics-invented' concepts by the so fa "physics-invented"
instruments
> and
> read in "physics-invented" units, although the conclusions come from
> 'non-physics-related' activities (mentality, ideation, feelings,
> "delusions", etc.,) all having parallel and physically measurable
> phenomena
> in the neurological "sciences".
> we use the 'brain' as a tool and have no idea how it works and for
what.
>
> In your quoted fragment I feel an equating of brain and mind, which I
find
> at least premature. I don't know what a "mind" may be. I "know"(?) it
must
> be both atemporal and aspatial, while the material of the brain is
> imagined
> (physically) to be space and time related.
The mind is not the same as the brain, of course, but the two are
connected. We know that whenever certain complex physical processes
which we call "brain activity" occur, certain other mysterious processes
which we call "mind activity" also occur. Is that a fair enough
statement?
Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Sun May 28 2006 - 06:26:03 PDT