171–180 of 189 posts
> Of all the injuries we suffered, mine is the worst. My brain injury has shaken my confidence in my own personality, my own existence. I don't exist. That's the secret. This concept took me years to grok but now I know.
I've been thinking that I'm the only one I know for sure 'exists'
> Of all the injuries we suffered, mine is the worst. My brain injury has shaken my confidence in my own personality, my own existence. I don't exist. That's the secret. This concept took me years to grok but now I know.
Can you expand on this a bit?
A few years ago I got some kind of brain illness. Doctors were unable to come up with a strong diagnosis, which is apparently quite common for such cases. One of the effects of the illness was that I essentially became stupid. I couldn’t focus on anything (even trivial activities like watching television), I couldn’t compose emails, I would get disoriented easily. It was absolutely terrifying not knowing whether or n…
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That's not really very useful. Of course you exist! You share sufficiently many properties with other things that we would say “exist” that it is more useful to consider you extant than non-existent. What you mean might be a more useful, meaningful concept, but what you've said is kinda nonsense. If you don't exist, who wrote this comment? I'd be interested if you could elaborate.
They where probably saying that “I” doesn’t exist as brain doesn’t really work that way and inner voice/narrator is just illusion.
It isn't, it's a physical phenomenon you observe which yields information. But you don't have and should not believe everything it says, let alone believe it is you.
Theoretically you could run something GPT3-like on your personal computer (which is approximately the same kind of a part of you like a finger of yours is), train it on everything you can remember and that would be less you than your inner voice is.
Some schizophrenics apparently have particularly fluent inner voice and too little capacity to perceive it critically.
A family member last year had a psychotic episode that lasted a couple months where they lost contact with reality and became a different person (undiagnosed schizophrenia). After their care, they said the hardest thing is understanding who they were, and who they are now (since the medication does change their personality somewhat).
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> 1. Like any other industry, 90% of medical “experts” are totally incompetent. Yeah, I've come to the same conclusion. When I was a kid it took 2 years to diagnose my, frankly quite textbook, hypothyroidism. Know who first diagnosed it? A friend of my mother's who worked the toll booth at the airport. Her dog had it, you see, so she recognized the symptoms. My mother had to go full Karen mode on a doctor to get them…
Richard Feynman in What Do You Care What Other People Think? says something similar happened with his first wife Arlene who contracted tuberculosis. If we trust his account, then it went something like this: Arlene presented with bumps on her neck and the doctors couldn't figure it out. In his free time Feynman read medical textbooks in the Princeton library, and the first thing in the book is tuberculosis, which it…
As a result the doctor probably concluded he should never listen to the patients' ideas and rather always put the easiest diagnosis which also is a quite common kind of a doctor to meet and is not much better than a totally incompetent one who doesn't even know the most common diagnoses but at least would listen to you as long as you sound reasonable, make the tests and try prescribing the medications you suggest as long as they are in line with the literature.
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This story has a major plot hole. If you were so certain the biopsy was unnecessary and harmful, why didn’t you just refuse it, seek a second opinion (especially as you evidently are portraying the doctor as a villian). Also your last paragraph doesn’t even read well as preteen fall fiction.
Doctors will refuse to do surgery if you refuse their stupid tests that don’t matter
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> 1. Like any other industry, 90% of medical “experts” are totally incompetent. Yeah, I've come to the same conclusion. When I was a kid it took 2 years to diagnose my, frankly quite textbook, hypothyroidism. Know who first diagnosed it? A friend of my mother's who worked the toll booth at the airport. Her dog had it, you see, so she recognized the symptoms. My mother had to go full Karen mode on a doctor to get them…
Same for me. Slightly bulging neck. Itchy calves. Dry skin. Lethargy. Took years before anyone ran the relatively simple TSH test.
Obviously most people wouldn't know they need it but IMHO this has to change. Everyone should be taught basic physiology and diagnostics at school. Every device comes with a basic manual - so every body should. I actually wonder why isn't this already the case in the USA where many people can't afford a doctor. Living some years without insurance taught me I really need to have some basic medical knowledge myself and it actually is easily available nowadays.
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They where probably saying that “I” doesn’t exist as brain doesn’t really work that way and inner voice/narrator is just illusion.
> inner voice/narrator is just illusion. It isn't, it's a physical phenomenon you observe which yields information. But you don't have and should not believe everything it says, let alone believe it is you. Theoretically you could run something GPT3-like on your personal computer (which is approximately the same kind of a part of you like a finger of yours is), train it on everything you can remember and that would b…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doctors will refuse to do surgery if you refuse their stupid tests that don’t matter
This is simply false.