Medications that change who we are

> ...Big Five neuroticism...

It's gonna be really hard to deconvolve hormones from environment. Men and women are treated very differently in our culture; men's and women's behaviors are interpreted very differently; the former having a possible causal relationship with neuroticism, the latter having a possible causal relationship with diagnosis. You'd need a fairly large study involving a large number of trans people who aren't on hrt but pass as well as those who are.

When it comes to the Human Organism and Medicine, in spite of all our advances, things are quite complex, interrelated and not fully understood. While there is a lot of "woo woo" in Traditional Eastern Medicine against which we must guard ourselves, there is still a lot of empirical evidence for it though we may not subscribe to the explanatory models behind them. This is why people/hospitals are trying to introduce the reasonably well understood parts of Yoga, TCM, Ayurveda, Meditation into a more holistic approach towards well being.

The point is not to fixate on some well known negatives but take a deeper look at what has worked over the ages and employ them for good effect regardless of the theoretical models claimed for them.

>When it comes to the Human Organism and Medicine, in spite of all our advances, things are quite complex, interrelated and not fully understood.

And I have said, if you read carefully that some of it still works despite this. This is not the point, the point is the black box test still needs to work despite a garbage theory. ANd my point is, not only is the theory wrong, but there is very little overall scientific evidence for the efficacy of the treatment as well.

>there is still a lot of empirical evidence for it though we may not subscribe to the explanatory models behind them.

There is actually very little scientific and experimental evidence behind it. There is some but compared to the body of experimental work that is western medicine the research on eastern medicine is miniscule.

> This is why people/hospitals are trying to introduce the reasonably well understood parts of Yoga, TCM, Ayurveda, Meditation

The above mentioned things like meditation actually have scientific evidence behind them. You can google it.

>The point is not to fixate on some well known negatives but take a deeper look at what has worked over the ages and employ them for good effect regardless of the theoretical models claimed for them.

That is the problem. There is very little scientific evidence for what has "worked" for eastern medicine. The problem with anecdotal evidence is the placebo effect; people are delusional. Some people believe in scientology and who is it for you to say that a belief in eastern medicine isn't similar? The dividing line is scientific experiment. IF an experiment verifies a hypothesis then it is likely to be real. For efficacy of a treatment to be measured you cannot just ASK people, you have to conduct a massive scientific experiment in a double blind study. This simply has not been done yet for eastern medicine. You do not know the "good" just like you don't know the "negatives" because there is no scientific data.

All I can say is when I realized the only thing that prevents me from thinking negative thoughts about people and things around me, being frustrated at everything for petty reasons I end up forgetting shortly after and demolishing my productivity was whether or not I remember to take my medication, it became a major existential crisis for me. I felt powerless to actually change my situation through my own actions rather than chemical rebalancing which I can't just will into existence.

Of course I only have this crisis if I forget to take my medication.

> Is it not abundantly clear that a photon is just a photon? What else could it be?

Well, light can be modeled as either a wave or a particle[1]. When talking about colors, it makes more sense to talk about light using the wave model of light than the particle model of light--not that either way of talking about it is wrong, it's just that the particle model is way more complicated for modeling this particular phenomena.

> "red light" is the photon as well - ie a photon with wavelength between 620-750nm

No. If you're talking about wavelength you should be using the wave model. It absolutely makes sense to say "red light" when you're talking about a wave.

There's no such thing as a red photon because photons don't have color by themselves--red light is made up of many photons, which have a frequency.

It sounds like your argument is basically that you don't know how to represent color with the particle model of light, so you assume the answer is "the mind". Not only can you go learn how to represent color using the particle model, but even if that weren't possible, assuming that anything you don't understand is "the mind" is pretty premature.

> In a sense, you are claiming that this chemical cascade is 2 things: 1: a chemical cascade and 2: the perception of red (i.e. the subjective sensation of looking at red); whereas, I would say the chemical cascade is just a chemical cascade... that's all it is, because of course chemicals can't be chemicals AND sense perceptions - that's the real incorrect leap of faith in your argument.

People who have the chemical cascade experience red. People who don't, don't--even if red light is there (i.e. if they are colorblind). Do you have any reason for believing these are different phenomena?

> You say that I have yet to present an observable phenomenon that is clearly in the mind, but just imagine a red triangle, boom there you have it - that red triangle only exists in the mind. [...]

> If you still disagree with this, tell me where is the red triangle?

It's also in the brain, because the mind is just the brain.

This isn't hypothetical. We can read (very) fuzzy images from people's brains using neural-imaging[2]. I'm not aware of any experiments that specifically has read a red triangle, but I don't see any reason to believe that this image is uniquely in the mind and not the brain.

Again, it seems like you're just defining "the mind" as anything that happens in the brain where you don't know how it happens. And again I'll say, even if we didn't already know how it happens, concluding that this is "the mind" rather than some physical process we haven't yet discovered, is premature.

> it's simply made of qualitatively different material than the brain.

If it's qualitatively different, what are the qualitative differences?

As for the parts of your post I didn't respond to directly: declaring things irreducible, patently absurd, and declaring that you know things, all ex nihilo, is not a persuasive argument.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave%E2%80%93particle_duality

[2] https://news.berkeley.edu/2011/09/22/brain-movies/