Antisocial Personality Disorder

[wolf]

John Mack, M.D., is a psychiatrist with a long list of credentials, publishing credits, and was (is?) on the medical and teaching staff at Harvard.

He thinks his patients were abducted by aliens.

Having a multi-million copy best seller does not make you a good shrink. Nothing changes the fact that M. Scott Peck writes pop culture crap for the worried well.

No doubt, John Mack is suffering from some biochemical anomaly in his brain function. The aliens messed him up when they did that brain probe on him because they don't understand the biophysics of terrestial beings. :p

Here's the deal, from my perspective.
I'm one of those people with a low heart rate and stimuli threshold.
But, I'm a pacifist and don't like violence. I went through some anti-social stages early in life but made a CHOICE.
Just like I, when I was a bouncer, saw people who were troublemakers stop doing something they were doing when they saw me coming. People who later (as I was throwing them out) told me that it was not their fault because they "were sick", going so far as to show me their meds. People are nuts about clubs in a college town. But, they did not try to hit me, someone they knew was bigger and had others around to back him up? Why, if they were sick and could not help themselves? CHOICE.
If you know the difference between right and wrong, what is expected and what is required and what is not, you have the CHOICE.
Sure, for some it is harder than others, just like for me it is harder to take a shower and brush my teeth & tell my son a bedtime story because I am disabled... but I do it, I choose to.
(BTW. I made a good bouncer because I was a pacifist, it is how I got the job... I have never hit anyone out of anger or first in my life.)

[Ibby]

NEVER hit in anger or first? Not even as a little kid?

No brothers, sisters, or neighbors... I cheated.

[Pangloss62]

If you know the difference between right and wrong, what is expected and what is required and what is not, you have the CHOICE.

"Right" and "wrong" are entirely subjective and culturally biased; this can be shown through a myriad of examples.

just like for me it is harder to take a shower and brush my teeth & tell my son a bedtime story because I am disabled... but I do it, I choose to.

Choosing to do something does not mean the choice is "free," it just means that you get something that you want through the action (healthy teeth, mutual affection with your son) that is greater than what you would get from not acting.

I'm not trying to get you mad, rkzen, but if I say there is no free will I have to defend my position. And as I said before, acknowledging the essential meaninglessness of the world does not have to be a negative thing. Ironically, it's almost a kind of "zen" in itself.

Peace.

I agree with you when you say that acknowledging the essential meaninglessness of the world can be positive , Pangloss . It is a sort of heroism . It is the heroism of the tramps in Waiting for Godot .

[Pangloss62]

He never came, as I recall.

No , he never came , and they never hanged themselves either .

[Pangloss62]

Dr. Pangloss would understand that. So would Doris Day (Que sera sera).

[wolf]

Originally Posted by Buddug

No , he never came , and they never hanged themselves either .

You should really fucking warn people about spoilers.

[Flint]

Don't have time for a thorough read right now, but just hopping in reall quick on the last page. Don't even know where the conversation has meandered, so here goes my "broken record" . . .

Originally Posted by rkzenrage

CHOICE

Okay, choice. Does it occur in the brain? (And by "brain" I mean shorthand for whatever equipment we have that performs this function.) Is the "brain" a physical object? Then, the brain must follow the laws of physics, whether we fully understand them or not, right? Unless there is some "magical" influence which grants humans special excemption from the rules which govern every other particle of energy/matter in the universe.

The actions of our constituent parts must be determined by these rules - unless we are magical in some way. Neurology, Psychology, etc. - they describe the higher level functions of organized energy/matter, the top layer of function. But, the energy/matter they deal with cannot ignore the fact that it is governed by physics. You can't ignore one in favor of the other, and I'm not doing that. I'm saying physics is underneath everything, and physics means things are determined, whether we understand how they are determined or not. And we don't understand it, but we can't ignore it either. We are physical objects - unless you believe that we are magical beings endowed with the ability to defy the laws of nature. We are physical objects. Does that make me think less of myself? Does that make me feel that I am not in control of "myself"? Of course not, because I am operating within the framework of the human "operating system" - which includes everything we are able to percieve about the world as we know it. It doesn't mean I can't be aware of the fact that humans are just another part of the world as we know it.

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Now, many things in this are open to debate. For starters, if I were reading this, I would say my whole argument is too "Newton-esque" and discuss the relationship between conciousness and "reality" as relates to the emerging synergy between science and ancient spirituality.

Of course, I am simply discussing (in this thread) a tiny part of the subject - I really haven't moved beyond the opening line, but people seemed to struggle with that one basic concept so much that I got dragged down into a silly debate.

Some things are intelligently debatable, some things aren't.

I nipped out to buy a packet of fags just after I wrote that last post to Pangloss . I have all this spare time because I am a teacher on holiday , in case you are wondering . On the way out , I met the man who owns the building in which I live . 17th century French building with amazing architectural features . I smiled and shook his hand , and he asked me if I was aware of the tragedy .

His brother hanged himself from one of the 17th century rafters , a floor up from my floor . This happened last Friday , and I did not even know . I was probably spouting the usual Beckett existential crap on a machine at the time .

I remember seeing the brother last week by the letterboxes in the hall . Our family is moving to the Caribbean , and we exchanged polite words about how it is interesting to see differrent places .

Sorry Flint to have piggy-jumped your post , but I have to admit to feeling slightly stunned .

[Flint]

Originally Posted by Buddug

I have to admit to feeling slightly stunned.

Well, at least the phasers are only set to stun!

[Pangloss62]

Hey Flint (and others). Check out the below article. I posted the text instead of a link because one has to suscribe to get it. It relates to this string in that we are finding out more and more just how material the brain really is. It reminds me of another article I read where they stimulated this one area of a woman's brain and all she could do was laugh. She said that when they did this, everything in the hospital room just "seemed" funny; the lab coats, the machines, they all cracked her up. Laughter used to be thought of as one of those precious, almost-spiritual things, but it too is just synapses and chemicals.

Man Uses Chip to Control Robot With Thoughts

By ANDREW POLLACK
Published: July 12, 2006
A paralyzed man with a small sensor implanted in his brain was able to control a computer, a television and a robot using only his thoughts, scientists reported today.

Seven Films Showing Matt Nagle Controlling Electronic Devices Using Thought. The development offers hope that in the future, people with spinal cord injuries, Lou Gehrig’s disease or other ailments that impair movement might be able to better communicate with or control their world.

“If your brain can do it, we can tap into it,’’ said John P. Donoghue, a professor at Brown University who led the development of the system and was the senior author of a report published today in the journal Nature.

In separate experiments, the first person to receive the implant, Matthew Nagle, was able to move a cursor, open e-mail, play a simple video game called Pong and draw a crude circle on the screen. He could change the channel or volume of a television set, move a robot arm somewhat, and open and close a prosthetic hand.

Although his cursor control was sometimes wobbly, the basic movements were not hard to learn. “I pretty much had that mastered in four days,’’ Mr. Nagle, now 26, said in a telephone interview from the New England Sinai Hospital and Rehabilitation Center in Stoughton, Mass., where he lives. He said the implant did not cause any pain.

A former high school football star in Weymouth, Mass., Mr. Nagle was paralyzed below the shoulders after being stabbed in the neck during a melee at a beach in July 2001. He said he was not involved in starting the brawl and didn’t even know what sparked it. The man who stabbed him is now serving ten years in prison, he said.

There have been some tests of a simpler sensor implant in people, as well as tests of systems using electrodes outside the scalp. And Mr. Nagle has spoken about his experiences before.

But the paper in Nature is the first peer-reviewed publication of an experiment using a more sophisticated implant in a human.

The paper helps “shift the notion of such ‘implantable neuromotor prosthetics’ from science fiction towards reality,’’ Stephen H. Scott of Queen’s University in Canada wrote in a commentary in the journal.

The implant system, known as the BrainGate, is being developed by Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems of Foxborough, Mass. The company is now testing the system in three other people whose names have not been released — one with a spinal cord injury, one who had a brain-stem stroke and one with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Timothy R. Surgenor, the president of the company, said Cyberkinetics hoped to have an implant approved for use as early as 2008 or 2009. Mr. Donoghue of Brown is a cofounder of the company and its chief scientist. Some of the authors of the research paper work for the company, while others work at Massachusetts General Hospital and other medical or academic institutions.

The sensor measures 4 millimeters — about one sixth of an inch — on a side and contains 100 tiny electrodes. The device was implanted in the area of Mr. Nagle’s motor cortex that is responsible for arm movement, and was connected to a pedestal that protruded from the top of his skull.

When the device was to be used, technicians connected the pedestal to a computer with a cable. So Mr. Nagle was directly wired to a computer, somewhat like a character in the “Matrix” movies.

Mr. Nagle would then imagine moving his arm to hit various targets, as technicians calibrated the machine, a process that took about half an hour each time. The implanted sensor eavesdropped on the electrical signals emitted by nearby neurons as they controlled the imaginary arm movement.

Scientists said the study was important because it showed that the neurons in Mr. Nagle’s motor cortex were still active, years after they had any role to play in physically moving his arms.

Cursor control was not very smooth. In a task where the goal was to guide the cursor from the center of the screen to a target on the perimeter, Mr. Nagle hit the target about 73 to 95 percent of the time. When he did, it took an average of 2.5 seconds, though sometimes much longer. The second patient tested with the implant had worse control than Mr. Nagle, the paper said.

By contrast, healthy people moving the cursor by hand can hit the target almost every time and in only one second.

Dr. Jonathan R. Wolpaw, a researcher at the New York State Department of Health in Albany, said the BrainGate performance did not appear to be substantially better than a non-invasive system he is developing using electroencephalography, in which electrodes are placed outside the scalp.

“If you are going to have something implanted into your brain, you’d probably want it to be a lot better,’’ he said.

Dr. Donoghue and other proponents of the implants say they have the potential to be a lot better, because they are much closer to the relevant neurons. The scalp electrodes get signals from millions of neurons all over the brain.

One way to improve implant performance was suggested by another paper in the same edition of Nature. In a study involving monkeys, Krishna V. Shenoy and colleagues at Stanford University eavesdropped not on the neurons controlling arm movement but on those expressing the intention to move.

“Instead of sliding the cursor out to the target, we can just predict which target would be hit, and the cursor simply leaps there,’’ said Mr. Shenoy, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and neurosciences.

He said a patient using the system could do the equivalent of typing 15 words a minute, about four times the speed of the other devices.

Other obstacles must be overcome before brain implants become practical. The ability of the electrodes to detect brain signals begins to deteriorate after several months, for reasons that are not fully understood. Also, ideally, the implant would transmit signals out of the brain wirelessly, doing away with the permanent hole in the head and the accompanying risk of infection.

Mr. Nagle, meanwhile, had his implant removed after a bit more than a year, so he could undergo another operation that allowed him to breathe without a ventilator. He can control a computer with voice commands, so he does not really need the brain implant. But he said he was happy he volunteered for the experiment.

“It gave a lot of people hope,’’ he said.