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Gut bacteria may offer a treatment for autism

economist.com

121–130 of 270 posts

Re: Gut bacteria may offer a treatment for autism

#121
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, almost no one in NA justice systems talks about evil. The causality between life events leading to crime is often ridiculously clear, and choice barely factors into it. Believing in evil is its own kind of privilege. I for one have now seen a lot of criminal cases, and I've only seen sick people and people following the path laid before them. No evil in sight, but the concept's very existence allows fo…

The ideas of free will, consequences and deterrence; morality, punishment and justice; mental illness and life choice determinism; all exist in different planes, different parallel reasoning systems about the world - rational, moral, biological/sociological. You can make linkages between the different metaphors of explication, but mixing and matching is a recipe for inconsistency. Worse, if you think mostly in a diff…

I think the people who believe in free will can understand the notion of free will doesn't exist. They just have a problem with their ego and will not let go of the satisfaction the idea brings to them.

Re: Gut bacteria may offer a treatment for autism

#122
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, almost no one in NA justice systems talks about evil. The causality between life events leading to crime is often ridiculously clear, and choice barely factors into it. Believing in evil is its own kind of privilege. I for one have now seen a lot of criminal cases, and I've only seen sick people and people following the path laid before them. No evil in sight, but the concept's very existence allows fo…

Do you consider sociopathy and psychopathy to be sicknesses?

Human events being unfavorable and resulting in sociopathy are as similar to how some linear process will trigger psychopathy. You can make the comparison as well to how an unfortunate person becomes ill of any illness.

Re: Gut bacteria may offer a treatment for autism

#123
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, almost no one in NA justice systems talks about evil. The causality between life events leading to crime is often ridiculously clear, and choice barely factors into it. Believing in evil is its own kind of privilege. I for one have now seen a lot of criminal cases, and I've only seen sick people and people following the path laid before them. No evil in sight, but the concept's very existence allows fo…

They still choose to continue down that path, or to not seek healing. Maybe it would be difficult to make another choice, but impossible? I find that pretty hard to believe.

You're assuming the impossible but what has conditioned into everyone at birth by social norms and which have not always been correct. The free will belief and I say it's wrong by understanding determinism. Every event is of a linear path with all the preceding events & variables from assigned at birth factoring into the proceeding event. People are dragged along a line of fate till death.

Re: Gut bacteria may offer a treatment for autism

#124

Free will is an illusion and thus choices don't exist.

If you assume free will is an illusion, then it would make more sense to treat those who threaten society as faulty machinery and scrap them.

Assuming people can admit and learn from their mistakes means you can focus on rehabilitation and treat them with dignity.

Re: Gut bacteria may offer a treatment for autism

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, almost no one in NA justice systems talks about evil. The causality between life events leading to crime is often ridiculously clear, and choice barely factors into it. Believing in evil is its own kind of privilege. I for one have now seen a lot of criminal cases, and I've only seen sick people and people following the path laid before them. No evil in sight, but the concept's very existence allows fo…

Theres always a choice, and choices have consequences. The kind of people who believe they had no choice are the worst because it shows a total lack of remorse for their selfish decisions. Phrases like “Look what YOU made me do” and “It’s societies fault” are warning signs that they learned nothing and you have a likely repeat offender on your hands.

The problem to me is more an issue of repeat offenders not knowing what they dont know. They can't conceive of a better option, so they choose the option they understand, which is not usually a particularly helpful one, for themselves or others. We expect them to use better tools, but we dont help then find or make them, just punish them for using the wrong ones.

Re: Gut bacteria may offer a treatment for autism

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, almost no one in NA justice systems talks about evil. The causality between life events leading to crime is often ridiculously clear, and choice barely factors into it. Believing in evil is its own kind of privilege. I for one have now seen a lot of criminal cases, and I've only seen sick people and people following the path laid before them. No evil in sight, but the concept's very existence allows fo…

Theres always a choice, and choices have consequences. The kind of people who believe they had no choice are the worst because it shows a total lack of remorse for their selfish decisions. Phrases like “Look what YOU made me do” and “It’s societies fault” are warning signs that they learned nothing and you have a likely repeat offender on your hands.

people can learn, but only after the fact.

Re: Gut bacteria may offer a treatment for autism

#127
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They still choose to continue down that path, or to not seek healing. Maybe it would be difficult to make another choice, but impossible? I find that pretty hard to believe.

It would be pretty difficult to cut off your own right hand, but impossible? No. It just takes a considerate amount of willpower. This kind of discussion leads down a path where we try to quantify something that's incredibly hard to quantify in a vacuum. The question of willpower is also only relevant when you try to find an appropriate punishment for immoral offenses. And because this is hard, every country on earth…

The question of will power glosses over the cause/event resulting in the desire to cut off your own hand. Will power is merely a representation of all the preceding events with starting variables at birth, factoring into if the person will do the action of cutting off their own right hand.

Re: Gut bacteria may offer a treatment for autism

#128
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an extremely articulate and beautiful perspective. How did you acquire it?

I'm probably gonna get downvotes for appearing to bask in this attention (which I didn't expect). In this case it's based on a heuristic. I can't at all model human will so it seems reasonable to start with it as infinite (since it's so vast and appears virtually limitless, the very reason I can't model it in the first place) and model in the constraints. edit: also, I am a Christian and that probably factors into my…

I suspect there's no definition of free will that isn't at least implicitly religious. It seems to me that what most people want free will to be is supernatural - something like a soul that would exempt their identity from being bound to a purely physical universe.

Re: Gut bacteria may offer a treatment for autism

#129

There's no free will :)

I think there is free will, but like most things in life, it is a privilege not everyone has; many people are constrained by invisible shackles. I would wager that evil still exists, but it requires full awareness of what one is doing when perpetrating it, and so it is more rare than we think. (Of course, this is just an opinion.)

You were fated to fall into that belief by all the preceding events and variables assigned to you at birth. Full awareness in a sense makes you the perfect you. Yet, you became who you are by destiny. Evil does not exist in the sense of understanding everything is metaphorically mechanical. You have to blame the complete system when you view something as evil and which nobody every seems to do.

Re: Gut bacteria may offer a treatment for autism

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is free will, but like most things in life, it is a privilege not everyone has; many people are constrained by invisible shackles. I would wager that evil still exists, but it requires full awareness of what one is doing when perpetrating it, and so it is more rare than we think. (Of course, this is just an opinion.)

I share a similar philosophy... that free will is choosing between the options we recognize given by our immutable past. Who we are is mostly an accumulation of chance events and responses running on autopilot. Most moments don't matter, some nudge us in different directions, others snowball into defining our eulogies. Hard work enables us to leverage chance events (if we recognize them) into some probability of succ…

The main counter is you're not choosing when everything is based on the proceeding event with the variables assigned at birth. Nothing is chance when understanding the universe is mechanical in a sense like a clock. Hard work is just a psychological pattern adapted from how you were conditioned with the mindset you developed by fate.
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