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Medications that change who we are

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Re: Medications that change who we are

#281

Post by mrr54 »

kerkeslager wrote: post #141
aldoushuxley001 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your mind and your body are the same thing. That is incorrect, but unfortunately a very common misunderstanding. The mind is highly correlated with the brain but it is not the brain. It’s easy to see this is the case because the brain is made up of a qualitatively different material than the mind. While the brain is composed of biological cells / chemistry / atoms, the mind is composed of things like sense-percepti…

Your argument falls apart where you claim something is abundantly clear, when you can't even clearly describe what you think is abundantly clear. You're claiming red light isn't the perception of red. I can be on board with those semantics, but they are just semantics. In that case, I'd say the phenomenon described by the terms is that red light is the electromagnetic radiation in the long range of the visible spectr…

Do you agree that orange light isn't the same as the perception of orange? After all, the perception of orange can exist without orange light, as demonstrated by the RGB monitor you are most likely using to look at the header at the top of this web page.

The mind is a distinguishable phenomenon from the brain because I can observe other people's brains (although I hope I never actually do) but I can't observe other people's minds.

Re: Medications that change who we are

#282

Post by mrr54 »

_8ljf wrote: post #264
truth_be_told wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you just an ass or are you just trying to get a rise out of people? It is hard to have a conversation when your tone is combative rather than rational. You are trying to employ the "Gish Gallop" and throw all sorts of irrelevant noise to muddy the waters. What do Gwyneth Paltrow, Alex Jones etc. have to do with Medicine?. If you think physicians are looking at Ayurveda/TCM/Yoga etc. only for the money/ego/fad the…

[flagged]

Mate I agree with you but people on HN don't appreciate this sort of way of speaking. Just tone it down a bit. You're making a lot of really good points and it'd be a massive pity to see you banned for making them in a way that is so antagonistic.

Re: Medications that change who we are

#283

Post by kerkeslager »

mrr54 wrote: post #280
kerkeslager wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. Plato doesn't get things wrong because the nature of his rhetoric is presenting provocative dialogue for thinking with. The questions he raises are still relevant: what is good, what is virtue, what is beauty. I'm of the opinion (it's disputable) that the purpose of Philosophy isn't finding "the truth" but in living better. Plato absolutely gets some things wrong. For one, he favored dictatorship (self-servingly…

To be entirely fair, by reading those philosophers listed, you get the parts of Plato that they believe have value . That's not necessarily the same thing as the parts of Plato that actually have value, I'm sure you agree? Of course that Aristotle believes something does not make it true, but also that Nussbaum doesn't believe something Aristotle believes doesn't make it false either!

That's true--what I said was intended as an approximation. I should have added some "most"s and "probably"s.

I think we can say that if one or two other philosophers besides Plato think that something Plato says has value, the chances of it actually having value are higher than a random sampling of what Plato says having value.

Re: Medications that change who we are

#284

Post by tbugrara »

dpark wrote: post #81
aphextron wrote: post #32

>"It turns out many ordinary medications don’t just affect our bodies – they affect our brains." I feel like perpetuating this mindset is the ultimate sin of modern psychiatry and the entire industry of psychiatric pharmaceuticals - your brain is your body. It's not some special thing that sits apart from it. It is an integral part of the whole, no different than your kidneys or liver. People think they can take an a…

> It's not some special thing that sits apart from it. It is an integral part of the whole, no different than your kidneys or liver. Except it is. The brain is a part of your body and the two are tightly integrated. Yet the brain is also not simply another organ. If you lose half of your liver, your personality might change due to the trauma, but you will still be you. If you lose a kidney, you’ll live on as if littl…

You're taking that one line out of context in his post. Yes of course the brain is special because it's the only organ that makes you, you. Just like the heart is special because it's the only major organ that if you removed, blood would stop flowing.

GP's point was that in the context of how medication affects our bodies, the brain and body are more connected than we tend to think. Medication doesn't either only affect our body or our only affect our brain. It affects the entire system.

Re: Medications that change who we are

#285

Post by kerkeslager »

mrr54 wrote: post #279
kerkeslager wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read The Republic . There wasn't anything in there that inspired me to read more of his work. I think Plato and a lot of other early writers should be studied as historical figures, but we should also recognize that they were products of their time. Plato got it wrong more often than he got it right, not because he was stupid (he wasn't), but because he didn't have the benefits of thousands of years of previous…

What makes you think Plato didn't have the benefits of thousands of years of previous thinkers to refine his ideas against? I'm not aware we have any evidence that cultures with oral traditions didn't have thousands of years of history of philosophical thought. They would have dressed them up in stories because that's how oral traditions work but they're still very philosophical.

It would not surprise me if Plato did have the benefits of thousands of years of previous thinkers to refine his ideas against. I'm not saying he didn't, I'm saying we have the benefit of thousands of years more than he did.

Re: Medications that change who we are

#286

Post by dr_dshiv »

kerkeslager wrote: post #283
mrr54 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be entirely fair, by reading those philosophers listed, you get the parts of Plato that they believe have value . That's not necessarily the same thing as the parts of Plato that actually have value, I'm sure you agree? Of course that Aristotle believes something does not make it true, but also that Nussbaum doesn't believe something Aristotle believes doesn't make it false either!

That's true--what I said was intended as an approximation. I should have added some "most"s and "probably"s. I think we can say that if one or two other philosophers besides Plato think that something Plato says has value, the chances of it actually having value are higher than a random sampling of what Plato says having value.

Why then would historians emphasize the importance of primary sources? If you rely on a progression of secondary sources over and over, you get serious misconceptions. Such as, for instance, your notion of the forms as being indicative of a descartian mind/body split. That simply isn't what Plato wrote.

So, as it turns out, not everyone can or should read primary sources. It's only for the select few. But those that do won't be dumber than those that only read secondary sources.

Re: Medications that change who we are

#287

Post by ezequiel-garzon »

kerkeslager wrote: post #272
ezequiel-garzon wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, thank you for your thorough replies, and not just to me. I feel you engage in and know philosophy way more than I do, though I know in philosophical circles this is not supposed to be a problem. My main issue is simply that you labeled "stupid" and "unjustified" a position that indisputably has been justified at length (clearly not to your satisfaction), and that (at the risk of sounding stupid myself)…

> Interestingly, and I'm sure with plenty of precedent, in Wittgenstein's case he came to dismiss parts of his own dismissal later on. Okay, but that doesn't prove that I will reach the same conclusions Wittgenstein did. > I won't get into the philosophical issues themselves (as I'm sure it can only hurt my case:), but you must surely be aware that when dealing with philosophical matters, your, my or anybody's agreem…

Universality and consensus are not goals I have when seeking the truth.

If there is one truth per (willing) mind we might as well call them points of view, no? I won't hide that's a big part of what pulled me to mathematics for my college degree: foundational issues notwithstanding, it is the discipline that, at least on some fundamental notions (such as the number 7 being prime), gets closest to universality and consensus.

I prefer to ask questions where the answer has real-world implications.

You have basically stated that science is more interesting to you than philosophy. We can agree on that, and so can most other people.

Re: Medications that change who we are

#288

Post by jp555 »

creamynebula wrote: post #205
jp555 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do you mean the brain as in what's contained in our skull or also the central nervous system which would include controlling (both automatically and consciously) everything else, as well as sensing all of what we define as reality?

I don't think there is proof that consciousness originates in the brain, or in anything material for that matter.

well that's ironic. :P

Re: Medications that change who we are

#289

Post by netwanderer3 »

kerkeslager wrote: post #274
netwanderer3 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like your analogy and do have a similar view in that the total consciousness level of all humans combined, at any given point in time, creates a separate universe of our own. This total consciousness level has its own rules and principles created by us which also evolves over time. It shapes all of our belief systems, actions, behaviors, etc. throughout various human civilizations in history. It operates almost lik…

How did you come to the conclusion that the phenomenon you are describing is hovering above all of us, instead of resting comfortably inside our brains in the form of neurons?

I was saying that it would be a total level of consciousness from all human individuals combined, and its power is really more than just the sum of each individual. In a sense, this could be considered as the total knowledge that our species has acquired at a given point in time.
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