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What If PTSD Is More Physical Than Psychological? Evidence from new study

nytimes.com

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Re: What If PTSD Is More Physical Than Psychological? Evidence from new study

#101

Post by gnaritas »

naasking wrote: post #100
gnaritas wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems you didn't really digest what I said, I understand philosophy just fine. You've quoted one sentence out of context and pretended I said all philosophy is wasting time on unanswerable questions, I didn't. Additionally your last sentence makes it utterly clear you didn't actually read my entire reply as I said philosophy's greatest achievement was science, so to ask if I know science is natural philosophy is a de…

I commented on that specific line because that exact sentiment is all too common, and entirely unjustified.

And I just justified it. "Unanswerable questions" != philosophy, I was critiquing a subset of philosophy, the useless subset, like arguments for God's existence, useless nonsense asking meaningless questions.

Re: What If PTSD Is More Physical Than Psychological? Evidence from new study

#102

Post by nikdaheratik »

rdtsc wrote: post #89
bcarlyle wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of a divide between mind and body is strange. It seems like our consciousness is constructed in such a way that it's very easy for people to forget that we actually have a body connected to our head. Another interesting idea would be to think that mental health problems in part are caused by the systems inside our body that are outside of our conscious control not working properly communicating their discomf…

> The idea of a divide between mind and body is strange. I think that is an important construct. It allows us to abstract the notion of an individual and make it something well above a bag of bones and meat. By "above" I mean something superior, trancendant, more important. A lot of religions have the concept of a soul, and due to Abrahahim religions, the West that concept persisted. Even if people don't believe in a…

It's not just religious traditions that continue this idea. Ancient Greek philosophy kicked this off as well. To be fair, this separation makes alot of thought easier/possible. But considering how much we don't know about the brain or how consciousness works, it may not be the best way to promote mental and physical health.

Re: What If PTSD Is More Physical Than Psychological? Evidence from new study

#103

Post by nikdaheratik »

PeterisP wrote: post #66
rntz wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a permanent change in your psychology did not correspond with some permanent change in your physical person, then what would there be that was causing the change in your psychology? Some non-physical "soul" or "mind"? All psychological facts have physical correlates (in philosophy of mind, this is called "supervenience"). The only limit is our ability to measure things. As our ability to measure our own brains and…

As I said, the question (answered by others) is about structural changes. Any memory is formed by changing something in the brain, but forming this memory doesn't cause any meaningful changes to the general physical functioning of the brain; forming memories and having preferences (and changing them!) is what the brain does; perhaps the quantity of memories affects the structure of the brain or alters its functioning…

The problem with looking it this way is you are ignoring another thing the brain does, which is to link events in memory with emotions, and triggering these emotional responses in turn release all kinds of chemicals that affect the way the brain functions.

Granted this link fades over time (and likely therapy helps), but the body is not always good at handling major stresses and the damage can become permanent.

Re: What If PTSD Is More Physical Than Psychological? Evidence from new study

#104

Post by nikdaheratik »

prutschman wrote: post #83
naasking wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except computer behaviour isn't emergent from its structure, it's emergent from its programming which happens after its structure is fully formed. And neural structure changes during its operation, which most computers don't. They aren't remotely the same thing. Certainly you can simulate this operation of neural structure, but to suggest they are effectively the same is to suggest that cars and mice are effectively…

In order to understand computation it's obviously useful to humans to think in an abstract way about what we're trying to accomplish with a computer, and how. The distinction we draw between computer hardware and computer software is obviously part of that understanding. That said, programming is "merely" inducing specific alterations to the electrical charge distribution in the hardware of the computer. The computat…

No that is completely wrong and it is a common mistake made by people at all levels. The available pathways inside a computer, whether at the CPU level or in memory, or the system bus do not change no matter which program you run (barring exceptional cases of malware which destroy the computer).

What changes when you run a computer program is which pathways turn on and off, and these change based on reading the instruction set, which causes one operational circuit in the CPU to turn on and the results of that operation are stored for the next operation. RAM is simply a series of switches that can be "read" from the bus and passed to parts of the processor.

The only thing that may, arguably, work like that is writing to a storage medium like a hard disk or tape, and even then the circuitry around the medium does not change, just the magnetic or other impression stored on the disk itself.

Neurons are completely different in that they are made up of different connections to other neurons and it is these connections that make up both the storage medium, and the processing medium is what occurs when different neurons fire together.

[edit] The bottom line is that the brain can create new "instructions" on its own by physically rearranging the groupings of neurons. For a computer to do the same requires a new CPU with a different instruction circuit baked into the chip.

Re: What If PTSD Is More Physical Than Psychological? Evidence from new study

#105

Post by [deleted] »

prutschman wrote: post #83
naasking wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except computer behaviour isn't emergent from its structure, it's emergent from its programming which happens after its structure is fully formed. And neural structure changes during its operation, which most computers don't. They aren't remotely the same thing. Certainly you can simulate this operation of neural structure, but to suggest they are effectively the same is to suggest that cars and mice are effectively…

In order to understand computation it's obviously useful to humans to think in an abstract way about what we're trying to accomplish with a computer, and how. The distinction we draw between computer hardware and computer software is obviously part of that understanding. That said, programming is "merely" inducing specific alterations to the electrical charge distribution in the hardware of the computer. The computat…

[deleted]

Re: What If PTSD Is More Physical Than Psychological? Evidence from new study

#107

Post by dang »

gnaritas wrote: post #49

> Physicalism of the mind isn't unanimously accepted in philosophy. Much philosophy is just bad science. Pontificating over unanswerable questions is little more than a waste of time. Philosophy's greatest achievement was science, which is a better way to explore reality because logic alone isn't enough, it needs to be backed by evidence. Physicalism is all that is known to exist, those asserting otherwise have no ev…

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11884291 and marked it off-topic.

Re: What If PTSD Is More Physical Than Psychological? Evidence from new study

#108

Post by Houshalter »

dvtv75 wrote: post #90
dunmalg wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thousands of years of violent human history suggest that designing a better helmet to mitigate TBI is likely to help more people than wishing war would go away.

In the article, if you read all of it, they suggest point to a study that suggests a better helmet may be of no use in preventing the injury. If you search for "animal" in the article, you should find it. On the other hand, if the majority of people who want to join the army understand the dangers they face (in addition to death and dismemberment) then we might find that they held a war, and nobody came.

Having a war where nobody shows up would be great. Sadly wars usually happen because one side shows up and leaves the other side with no choice.
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