Scientific wasteland: recent problems with psychiatry • Hacker News Board

Re: Scientific wasteland: recent problems with psychiatry

#31

Post by naringas » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 12:22 PM UTC

didericis wrote: post #25

naringas wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

at one point I decided to disagree with the idea that the mind is just the brain.

What else so you think there is? It seems patently obvious at this point that our brains house our minds, given how manipulating someone’s brain causes them to act much differently and report perceptual and behavioral changes. Your post sounds suspiciously new age to me. I’m aware that our bodies feed into our minds, and that things like hormonal levels, nutrition, gut flora and fauna, etc all have a fairly profound…

> I’m aware that our bodies feed into our minds, and that things like hormonal levels, nutrition, gut flora and fauna, etc all have a fairly profound impact on things like mood

it's pretty much that. the mind is the entire body. although it's mostly the brain it is NOT entirely the brain.

> That doesn’t mean that the night sky or society somehow “is” our mind,

but our mind is formed by what we learn from society (culture) with our brains (the software gets installed hahah)

> while recognizing that it’s all happening within the confined, physical space that constitutes a person’s brain

maybe all the language and the words form within the physical bound of the brain, sure, but the mind more than just what we do with our brains.

In the end, thinking this way has led me to take better care of myself, not just my "brain" (i.e. eating better and exercising the rest of the body a little more)

Re: Scientific wasteland: recent problems with psychiatry

#32

Post by gerbilly » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 2:35 PM UTC

nabdab wrote: post #14

droithomme wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is current consensus that this "subconscious mind" is an actual thing that exists?

No. Nothing of Freuds is actually testable. He asserts that there is a “conscious mind” and “subconscious mind” but only in concept. You might as well try to build an alternative theory of mechanics based on an assertion that all objects have a conscious and subconscious mass, and that gravity actually act on the subconcious mass and only moves the whole because the two are interconnected.

It's trivially false that we can introspectively observe all of our mental processes.

Call it what you will, but there are parts of our minds, whose functioning can be observed but which we don't have access to.

It's so trivial to find examples, and it's really fun: describe to me in detail how it feels to hit a baseball, to perceive the colour red. Tell me about the exact moment that you learned the word "squirrel".

Re: Scientific wasteland: recent problems with psychiatry

#33

Post by SubiculumCode » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 4:22 PM UTC

didericis wrote: post #25

naringas wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

at one point I decided to disagree with the idea that the mind is just the brain.

What else so you think there is? It seems patently obvious at this point that our brains house our minds, given how manipulating someone’s brain causes them to act much differently and report perceptual and behavioral changes. Your post sounds suspiciously new age to me. I’m aware that our bodies feed into our minds, and that things like hormonal levels, nutrition, gut flora and fauna, etc all have a fairly profound…

The concept of Embodied Cognition. This was his point.

Re: Scientific wasteland: recent problems with psychiatry

#34

Post by didericis » Sat, Oct 12, 2019, 11:44 PM UTC

naringas wrote: post #31

didericis wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What else so you think there is? It seems patently obvious at this point that our brains house our minds, given how manipulating someone’s brain causes them to act much differently and report perceptual and behavioral changes. Your post sounds suspiciously new age to me. I’m aware that our bodies feed into our minds, and that things like hormonal levels, nutrition, gut flora and fauna, etc all have a fairly profound…

> I’m aware that our bodies feed into our minds, and that things like hormonal levels, nutrition, gut flora and fauna, etc all have a fairly profound impact on things like mood it's pretty much that. the mind is the entire body. although it's mostly the brain it is NOT entirely the brain. > That doesn’t mean that the night sky or society somehow “is” our mind, but our mind is formed by what we learn from society (cul…

While I think I agree with the spirit of what you’re saying, I take issue with some of the semantics. What you are describing as “Mind” seems closer to “Self” than what I would call “Mind”. I consider the mind to be the abstract entity we use to experience the world. In my view, the mind is very much coupled to the brain.

Tying all of our experiential world to a single organ in the body doesn’t really do justice to the magnitude/scope of that experience, sure. But I think it’s wrong to call that experience “Mind”.

Obviously I don’t want to interfere with your self care, and think it’s very important to have a holistic view of self and your relationship to those around you when trying to be healthy, I just don’t think “Mind” is the right word to use for what you’re talking about.

Re: Scientific wasteland: recent problems with psychiatry

#35

Post by didericis » Sun, Oct 13, 2019, 12:02 AM UTC

SubiculumCode wrote: post #33

didericis wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What else so you think there is? It seems patently obvious at this point that our brains house our minds, given how manipulating someone’s brain causes them to act much differently and report perceptual and behavioral changes. Your post sounds suspiciously new age to me. I’m aware that our bodies feed into our minds, and that things like hormonal levels, nutrition, gut flora and fauna, etc all have a fairly profound…

The concept of Embodied Cognition. This was his point.

Interesting. Maybe my worry about new age stuff was unfounded.

I don’t really like the philosophical direction of the concept, though. It mostly seems about acknowledging that we are fundamentally coupled to our environment, and that our minds are not really designed to function in isolation as a brain in a vat.

That’s all true, but I think it dilutes both the definition of “self” and of “mind”. While we are not designed to function in isolation, the boundaries placed by the more traditional conception of both the self and the mind make them more useful, imo. If we consider the “self” to extend into our environment whenever there’s a dependency, at what point does “self” just become synonymous with everything? It’s going in a direction that makes the concept meaningless. And I don’t think it gives us any insight.

For example, it is incorrect to think of object instances as living in isolation during the runtime of a computer. They are a part of a more holistic state, and interact with are influenced by other parts of that state constantly.

But if you try to think of a program in terms of one giant state blob, reasoning becomes basically impossible. We need to break things down into differentiated modules in order to understand them. Keeping the concepts of “self” and “mind” as tools with which we can differentiate between something like “experiences per meatbag” and “thing doing the experiencing“, respectively, seems important, and the “embodied cognition” idea seems to be trying to get rid of those tools without replacing them.