The physics at that level aren't understood now. If we find something that doesn't fit the laws as they are understood now, the laws are changed. Happens all the time. All the rules haven't been discovered. But they still exist, discovered or not. And things either follow those rules - physics - or don't - magic.

I can empathize with you, marichiko. It's clear you desire to have more in your experience of reality than just matter. You're not alone in this. I used to be more like that myself. But now I can't be included in the "us" that stands in "awe" of stars on a clear summer night. Besides, where I live there is no such thing as "a clear summer's night;" to much smog. Although I have been in northern Quebec on a camping trip and saw the great misty road that is the Milky Way; that was cool. Meteor showers too. I admit that watching a meteor sends a little shiver down my spine.

Alas, when I look at stars I see stars. When I see a vivid sunset, I know it's because of all the particulates in the air.

My "Are we not men?" question was a reference to DEVO, the Ohio band that promoted de-volution, a topic that is somewhere on this string; I acknowledge women, men, and hermaphrodites, of course.

"for starters?" That sounds like you are some professor and I'm the naive freshman who needs direction in understanding the world.

I've read and enjoy E.O. Wilson. His Ants book was great. And Dennet is a good explicator of some of the things we're talking about. And no, I DO NOT have his robotic dog.

For the record, it's true that the only definitive thing one could say about reality is that "something exists." Perhaps we're all pawns in the dream world of some entity we've never met. I'll take my "leap of faith" into the material world. You're lucky to have faith in something greater than matter; that must be comforting.

And there is no such thing as bi-polar disorder or Down Syndrome.

Hope everybody is having a good weekend, materially, spiritually, or otherwise.:neutral:

Re: Re: Re: Antisocial
 

A sort of anal response.

Ban Vular Freudian!

There are only three RULES of the Cellar.

1. Do not try to break the law using the Cellar.
2. Do not try to break the Cellar.
3. Do not be "intolerably irritating".

The meaning of that last item is of course open to interpretation. But basically, if you are a troll, attention whore, moron, spammer, single-issue hammer, or otherwise want to hurt or "test" this community, you WILL be removed and banned.
If you post a link on your first post, expect your message to disappear, and your account to be banned. If you post a message that looks like a pitch in any way, expect your message to disappear. If you post a "real" message on your first post, and a pitch message on your second, expect both messages to disappear. We are extremely effective at this, and we are paying attention.

So, because you know it's stars and particulates that makes it less beautiful? Less awe-inspiring? Alas, indeed, how sad for you that you are not awed by the beauty of these things.

Anal? Why yes, yes it is. Ibram was describing how an asshole acts and posts.:rolleyes:

Instead of denying that it exists at all, I deny the last word. The implications of the word 'disorder' are inapporpriate in this case. It is simply a way to describe someone's behaviour. Plus, we've all seen the bizzar side effects of labeling something a disorder, it becomes an excuse and is used in cases where it doesn't apply, as if to say "well I have a disorder so there's nothing that can be done about how I behave".

Yeah, I think I agree with 9th Engineer. I think it's the actions that make the disorder, not the disorder making you not able to not do something.

I also REALLY hate it when kids my age blame everything on ADD. "oh, sorry, I can't help being a jerk, i have ADD!" "oh, whoops, I have ADD so I can do that!" etc

Every piece of information that becomes generally accepted will be used by someone, somewhere for their own purposes even if they have to twist it to fit. My response to them is, that's a shame but there's no reason you have to be an asshole too. ;)

sad
 

Yeah, I guess that is sad...no sense of awe, no sense of wonder, just ennui. I'm screwed. :(

Hey Ibram. I agree about the ADD. AADD. AAHDD. Add coca cola and stir.

. . . I said "spirituality" - not "religion"!

There is magic and wonder and awesome-ness (my kid's word) all around us, every day. Just because you've broken down the process doesn't make it any less magical, etc. I can recall sitting in a class for certification as a Hearing Conservationist (occupational health) and we went into minute depth about how the ear developed and then worked. I remember thinking, "this is a truly amazing thing! THIS proves a Creative Intelligence!" and I, knowing this feeling of awe would not last, noted it for the precious moment that it was. Science IS the magic.

Oh, and having dealt with at least three bona-fide antisocial personalities I feel confident in saying that they do exsist. I don't express myself very well, I am usually tongue-tied, esp. on this board because I don't like to confront and argue and I (to my complete undoing) go with my gut far, far too often--but! My gut has served me well--it knows things that I don't. Having said that--I have worked in some pretty horrid circumstances with some pretty horrid people. In my experience not every human is "good". I've seen the BPD, the antisocials, the devious and evil. And not just in passing, but up close, every day for hours and hours. I've been spit at, punched, kicked, taken hostage, etc., all the fun things a psych nurse goes through in the regular course of a day for about three years. I came away from that experience with the very real feeling that there are antisocial (or, whatever the diagnosis is now) people and there is evil.

Just my experience.

*mentally ill does not equal evil or antisocial, lest the more aggressively stick-poke of you want to debate. There is a clear difference between a personality disorder and a mental illness, though it is very often that there is both in one person. Personality disorders can usually be overcome with time and experience (Like BPD--and UNlike antisocial) and mental illness is just that --an illness of the mind. Antisocial is an illness of something I can't quite put my finger on but I suspect it's both bio and spirit-based. {if you dispute that premis, recall that ALL addicts are asked to surrender themselves SPIRITUALLY to find respite from their affliction and if they balk, they are labled 'unwilling' to change!}
And by that I mean that I've never found a chapter of Sober Witches or Pagan's Fighting Alcoholism in Ohio anywhere. 'course, I do live in (the sorta) Bible Belt. I don't blame you personally for this. :)

I like your posts. You don't appear tongue-tied and as far as to "your complete undoing" If I can be bravely undone then so can you.:)

You don't have to confront or argue, just speak of your experiences and the opinion you hold because of them.
That's exactly what you did here. Good post. :thumbsup:

I find the statement 'not magical' muddys the soup. [edit- muddys the water I guess is better :P]


It makes much more sense just to say "yes, it is complex, and we don't fully understand it. So my original point stands, logically - unless a rebuttal to the laws of physics is offered.


What do you define as magical? Card tricks? We are not cave men staring at awe at a lightning struck tree. ,,,,well maybe we do stare in awe but we don't bend down and worship a physical act of nature. Most people understand the diffrerence between physics and supernatural phenmenon. No body thinks that a soldier in war just goes bizerk for no reason. We know he went haywire even if we can't explain it in scientific terms.

In regards to the article, I think the kid made a bad mistake. Regardless of the reason, he chose to participate in the rape and murder of innocent people. I'm sure, "in the heat of the moment" whatever that may be, he wasn't thinking clearly...maybe he thought it would never be found out, or maybe he just didn't give a rat's ass. Maybe he just had so much resentment towards the people that he felt his actions were justified. I don't care why he did what he did, or why everyone else thinks he did what he did...I'm just saying that I think he knew what he was doing, even if he wasn't thinking of the ramifications of his actions at that time. I think the poor kids conscious caught up to him, which forced him to act out, or act differently (personality disorder), which caused him to get discharged...and now that the world knows what he did, well hell, he's got a story, he might as well stick to it.

Good Morning
 

That presupposes there are such things as supernatural phenomena. I have not experienced any, and presenting "proofs" for the same would not work.:neutral:

@Pangloss: I'm just grabbing your quote out if convenience:

I reject the word supernatural. There is nature that we understand, and nature that we don't yet understand (and maybe never will). But there isn't anything outside of nature. Nature is simply what is.

That's the difference. ;)

You have hit on a peeve of mine, I hate the term "unnatural", no such thing. It is a cop-out.

I know that when someone does something horrendous like raping and murdering children it bugs the heck out of me when the neighbors say things like "I don't how a person could do this". Plus calling them inhuman monsters, wake up news folks! there are no such things as monters, only people. The guy who murdered 15 people is as human as you.

my point was the lightning striking a tree might have been unexplainable in scientific terms to the supposed cave men but it didn't make it any less scientific.

supernatural was not the right word obviously.


but there 'could be' something outside of nature. No one can know this for sure.

But how can it be outside nature? Wouldnt anything that exist be, technically speaking, part of nature? This includes man-made stuff, too... when a bird makes a nest, do you call the nest outside of nature? Humans are animals too, we're just better with our tools... and more destructive.

Clearly that depends on your definition of nature. Nature, to me, is what is. So, if something is, it is nature. So, in that case, no, it's not possible for anything that is to be outside of nature.

Everything is.

too many ins and outs , is'is and is not-ers :muse:

Come to think of it, can any personality disorder really be called a disorder?

Ritalin Cures Next Picasso

WORCESTER, MA—Area 7-year-old Douglas Castellano's unbridled energy and creativity are no longer a problem thanks to Ritalin, doctors for the child announced Monday. "After years of failed attempts to stop Douglas' uncontrollable bouts of self-expression, we have finally found success with Ritalin," Dr. Irwin Schraeger said. "For the first time in his life, Douglas can actually sit down and not think about lots of things at once." Castellano's parents reported that the cured child no longer tries to draw on everything in sight, calming down enough to show an interest in television.

© Copyright 2006, Onion, Inc.

We are losing sight of something... legally (and rightfully so) if you know the difference between right and wrong, you are sane, period.
Just because it is difficult for some of us to control our tempers does not excuse them from doing so, not at all.
I am dyslexic, have a mental disorder and had a rough childhood... I am not a criminal, worked my ass off and graduated from college with honors. I had to work harder than others to do so and did not care that it was not fair, was just my lot.
We are not all created equal, but we all have the same ability to make choices. That is the great equalizer.

It is simple, perhaps not easy (or as easy)for some, but it is simple.
If we don't know the difference between what is right and wrong, cannot make ethical distinctions, then that person has no business ever being in public anyway... problem solved.

That almost made me sad...then I saw it was from the Onion! :)

Unfortunately, it's one of those Onion articles that tells a real story in a sarcastic way. Stuff like that happens all the time. :(

Stop The Insanity
 

When I read the below this past Sunday, I couldn't help thinking about this string. I think there are some serious flaws in its reasoning, but I'm curious what you guys think. They acutally invoke the "automaton" notion that got so many people stirred up here in the cellar. Have at it:

The Insanity Defense Goes Back on Trial

By MORRIS B. HOFFMAN and STEPHEN J. MORSE
Published: July 30, 2006

IN June, the Supreme Court upheld a narrow Arizona test for legal insanity, which asked simply whether mental disorder prevented the defendant from knowing right from wrong. Last week, a Texas jury used a similarly narrow test to decide that Andrea Yates was legally insane when she drowned her five children in a bathtub, allegedly to save them from being tormented forever in hell.

Many scientists and legal scholars have complained that tests like these, used by the law to determine criminal responsibility, are unscientific. Given recent advances in our understanding of human behavior and of the brain, these critics argue, the legal test for insanity is a quaint relic of a bygone era.

These criticisms misunderstand the nature of criminal responsibility, which is moral, not scientific. On the other hand, legislation that has eliminated or unduly constrained the insanity defense, often in response to unpopular verdicts of not guilty by reason of insanity, is likewise off the mark. Between these two attacks, the concept of the morally responsible individual seems to be disappearing.

For centuries we have had a rough idea of the categories of people whom we should not hold criminally responsible. Early cases labeled them “the juvenile, possessed or insane.” The idea was that only people capable of understanding and abiding by the rules of the social contract may justly be declared criminally responsible for their breaches. Someone who genuinely believes he has heard God’s voice command him to kill another does not deserve blame and punishment, because he lacks the ability to reason about the moral quality of his action.

In an effort to hold most people accountable, and recognizing both the difficulty of establishing what was in the defendant’s mind at the time of the crime and the defendant’s incentive to lie about it, the law sought to establish strict standards for responsibility. As a result, legal insanity tests were drawn quite narrowly. They did not excuse most defendants whose intentional conduct broke the law, even if they might have suffered from mental disorders or other problems at the time of the crime.

The rise of various materialistic and deterministic explanations of human behavior, including psychiatry, psychology, sociology and, more recently, neuroscience, has posed a particular challenge to the criminal law’s relatively simple central assumption that with few exceptions we act intentionally and can be held responsible. These schools of thought attribute people’s actions not to their own intentions, but rather to powerful and predictable forces over which they have no control. People aren’t responsible for their crimes: it’s their poverty, their addictions or, ultimately, their neurons.

Lawyers and policymakers brought these academic explanations into the courts and legislatures, many of which responded to the pressure by expanding the doctrines of mitigation and excuse. Predictably, however, the public tired of many of the broader uses of the defense, especially after John Hinckley Jr. was found not guilty for reason of insanity for the attempted murder of President Ronald Reagan and others. Congress responded by adopting a narrow insanity defense, and many states followed suit. Four states have abolished the insanity defense entirely.

Once we agree that there may be some small percentage of people whose moral cognition is seriously disordered, how can the law identify those people in a way that will not allow the materialism of science to expand the definitions of excusing conditions to include all criminals? That is, if paranoid schizophrenia can provide part of the basis to excuse some criminal acts, why not bipolar disorder, or being angry, or having a bad day, or just being a jerk? After all, a large number of factors over which we have no rational control cause each of us to be the way we are.

The short answer is that we should recognize that the criteria for responsibility — intentionality and moral capacity — are social and legal concepts, not scientific, medical or psychiatric ones. Neither behavioral science nor neuroscience has demonstrated that we are automatons who lack the capacity for rational moral evaluation, even though we sometimes don’t use it. Some people suffer from mental disorder and some do not; some people form intentions and some do not. Most people are responsible, but some are not.

Punishing the deserving wrongdoers among us — those who intentionally violate the criminal law and are cognitively unimpaired — takes people seriously as moral agents and lies at the heart of what being civilized is all about. But being civilized also means not punishing those whom we deem morally impaired by mental disorder. Convicting and punishing a defendant who genuinely believed that God commanded him to kill is not unscientific, it is immoral and unjust.

We should be skeptical about claims of non-responsibility. But, if insanity-defense tests are interpreted sensibly to excuse people who genuinely lacked the ability to reason morally at the time of the crime, and expert testimony is treated with appropriate caution, the criminal justice system can reasonably decide whom to blame and punish.

Wrong insanity verdicts are possible, of course, but wrong verdicts are always possible. We should not respond by abandoning a defense that justice requires. A sensible test for legal insanity, fairly applied, can help prevent the concept of the responsible person from disappearing, either because the law naïvely accepts a cacophony of untestable excuses, or because cynical legislators overreact by permitting the conviction and punishment of blameless defendants.

Morris B. Hoffman is a state trial judge in Denver and a fellow at the Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research. Stephen J. Morse is a professor of law and psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania.

The M'Naughten Rule, or whether the individual suffers from such a defect of reason that they are unable to tell the difference between right and wrong is not the legal standard for insanity in all jurisdictions.

Insanity defenses are actually quite rare. Off the top of my head, it's used in less than 3% of cases, and is not usually successful.

Right or Wrong
 

Much of the discourse about this issue presupposes all people agree as to what is "right" and what is "wrong." Even the most cursory overview of world culture will show that right and wrong are subjective. For some, let's say tradional Ethiopians, FGM is the correct and proper thing to practice. For some Afghanistanies, it is wholly correct for a 13-year-old girl to be the second bride of a 53-year-old man. Look at our own debates about mercy killing (murder?).

I'm not saying we should abandon the prosecution of "justice" because morality is subjective, but we should at least admit that is the case and come up with some universal criteria based upon the nature of the illegal act and its effect on the victim; yes, a more rational approach. Keep morals out of it.:neutral:

Did they try to hide what they did? If so, they knew it was wrong.

I "try to hide", as in keep out of public view and discourse, many of my activities. There's door with a lock on my bathroom, my bedroom and I keep my financial documents under lock and key. Are you implying my activities in those areas are wrong or illegal? Or could they be simply private. What would Occam say?

Ya know what's eff'ed up? In my piddly Dayton, Oh, State Hosp. I had two NGRI on my ward and we had three wards. NGRI is not so uncommon. What is common is public disinterest in the case. I had a woman who set fires in local McDonalds and then, when rescue personnel would arrive, would demand a "get-a-way car" and "a pair of black hose!"...McDonalds was NOT eager for the publicity a trial would engender and the woman was quietly committed. Plus, she was nuts.

It took me a moment's Google-age to determine that NGRI did not stand for National Geophysical Research Institute, of Hyderabad, India. :D

Wouldn't measuring right and wrong based on harm to one of the parties involved be another moral system? Morals can be based on rational thought you know.

There is a local NGRI defense that succeeded. Robert the Crazy Guy who Sleeps on the Porch Sometimes was talking to me about him last night. He was his roommate for a while.

He has pretty much the run of the grounds, and works in the Cafeteria. They have been letting him off grounds to attend church, which was a big amendment in his detention order. He has gotten married while hospitalized, twice. Wife #3 is someone that Richard met online. Wife #2 was a nurse at the State Hospital. She committed suicide about a year after they married. He killed Wife #1 (who was pregnant).

The photograph of him coming out of the house after killing his wife won a Pulitzer Prize.

Morals must be based on rational thought; otherwise they are not morals, but superstitions. Moral behavior is survival behavior, for both the individual and the society.

Wolf, off the top of my head, was this the case of the guy who cut the eyes out of both his daughters with a knife "because he saw the devil there" before surrendering? The older daughter said, "Please don't hurt my daddy," as she groped her way out of the house he was barricaded in.

That is not hiding, that is privacy... if asked what you were doing in the bathroom by the authorities you would not lie... that is the difference.
If they lie about what they did, they know it was wrong, they are not insane. That is what Occam says.