Dr. Albert Ellis' 'critique' of Capitalism, Objectism


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Bob,

I can use the same quality of argument about physics. People noticed stars as far back as recorded history, therefore cosmology is an ancient science. And so on.

The concept of individual rights (in practice) is only a few centuries old and the concept of a subconscious is even younger. You peg physics to Galileo because of "kinematic and dynamic mechanics," but do not use the same standard for social sciences and psychology.

What a strange desire to be contentious for the sake of arguing, and solely for that.

Michael

I am not being contentious. I am being accurate. I am a stickler for accuracy. Psychology is in pretty much the same shape it was during Aristotle's life time. A bundle of notions rooted in subjectivity. Which is why it is not a science. Neurophysiology is a science. Neurochemistry is a science. Why? Because they deal with things in the public domain of existence and can be checked by witnesses with measuring devices. Some day if the electrochemical activity of the brain can be accurately decoded and matched with internal perspectives then psychology will become a science.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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Some day if the electrochemical activity of the brain can be accurately decoded and matched with internal perspectives then psychology will become a science.

Bob,

Boy, are you behind.

Michael

Nothing in that T.V. blurb indicates a way for a second party to decode this man's thoughts looking at an EEG. EEG's have been around for 80 years. There is not enough resolution of electrical activity collected at the scalp to indicated what is going on deep in the brain.

The short version: there is no objective way for a second party to determined what someone is thinking from an EEG.

No mind reading at this time.

One of the things I used to do with my misspent youth was to do spectral analysis on EEG signals in the hope of extracting useful information about what was being thought. Nothing came of this line of research.

As I say, we have no mind reading at this time. We have to do it the old fashioned way. See what people write, utter and read their body language. Just about what was available to Aristotle.

Psychology is still a pseudo science.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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Some day if the electrochemical activity of the brain can be accurately decoded and matched with internal perspectives then psychology will become a science.

This is not the only way for psycho-logics to become a science. In a science of man one can observe certain behaviours and notice that some lead to rapid progress and cooperation and others lead to wars and unhappiness. By studying the language used in relation to these extremes in behaviour we can draw conclusions about underlying processes. We do this in quantum physics now anyway, we can't directly observe quantum processes.

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Some day if the electrochemical activity of the brain can be accurately decoded and matched with internal perspectives then psychology will become a science.

This is not the only way for psycho-logics to become a science. In a science of man one can observe certain behaviours and notice that some lead to rapid progress and cooperation and others lead to wars and unhappiness. By studying the language used in relation to these extremes in behaviour we can draw conclusions about underlying processes. We do this in quantum physics now anyway, we can't directly observe quantum processes.

A good point. Behavior is external and can be witnessed in an intersubjective manner. In short, external behavior is objective.

HOWEVER, behavior can be faked. Actors do this for a living.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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A good point. Behavior is external and can be witnessed in an intersubjective manner. In short, external behavior is objective.

HOWEVER, behavior can be faked. Actors do this for a living.

Yes, it can in the short term, but those aren't actors we sent to Iraq and Afghanistan, and they are using real bullets. :) People behave certain ways because of what they believe and what they believe can only be expressed in words so it makes sense that we should pay attention to our language and especially our semantic reactions.

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A good point. Behavior is external and can be witnessed in an intersubjective manner. In short, external behavior is objective.

HOWEVER, behavior can be faked. Actors do this for a living.

Yes, it can in the short term, but those aren't actors we sent to Iraq and Afghanistan, and they are using real bullets. :) People behave certain ways because of what they believe and what they believe can only be expressed in words so it makes sense that we should pay attention to our language and especially our semantic reactions.

So, you're primarily about what's in your head?

--Brant

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So, you're primarily about what's in your head?

--Brant

The Real You is your pre-frontal cortex. Ditto for me and everyone else. We are all primarily about what is going on in our heads.

Think of it this way. You body is a moving platform and vehicle for your brain which contains the Real You. Ditto for me and everyone else.

Here is the Dark Side: No one has access to the Real You than you, yourself. Likewise you have no access to the Real Anyone Else. Ditto for me, ditto for everyone else. We are all stuck up in our heads. What we see (i.e. perceive) of others is appearance, and what we believe about the internal states of others is unverified conjecture and at this stage of technology unverifiable conjecture.

Your blood pressure can be read objectively, but not your thoughts or feelings. Ditto for me, ditto for everyone else.

We are all Black Boxes on 1.9 legs (on average). We are essentially blind to each other. None of us have mental telepathy. So make the best of it, be nice.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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Nothing in that T.V. blurb indicates a way for a second party to decode this man's thoughts looking at an EEG. EEG's have been around for 80 years. There is not enough resolution of electrical activity collected at the scalp to indicated what is going on deep in the brain.

. . .

Psychology is still a pseudo science.

Bob,

Your answer is crap and you know it. Wilber essentially said: "I am suspending all emotion and shall do an intentional activity to control my brain via my own thoughts," and he registered the signals. It is measurable and repeatable. That is the basis of science.

By your complaints, logic and math are purely subjective because there is no way to ascertain them, i.e., they are carried out in the brain. What is logic and math to you might not be logic and math for me because I cannot observe what is in your brain. Right-e-o?

Yet you use the standard of logic and math for knowledge of all else.

Double standard time again...

Michael

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Bob is right. The point is not that you can measure things in the brain and correlate those measurements with different brain states. We know that already for many decades, that's nothing new. What he is saying is that we cannot find out what someone is thinking by looking at the EEG signal. We probably never will be able to do that with the standard EEG, as this just doesn't contain the necessary information. It would be like determining what a computer does by measuring the temperature of the processor; that might tell you whether the processor is working hard or doing nothing, but it doesn't give you information about the individual bits and bytes.

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Dragonfly,

Both you an Bob miss the point. Passive brain states are not being measured. The man is saying "I will do this" and then does it. Time and time again with the same results.

We certainly do know what he is thinking at those times. He is thinking on purpose, not randomly. And he has measured results to prove it.

Michael

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Dragonfly,

Both you an Bob miss the point. Passive brain states are not being measured. The man is saying "I will do this" and then does it. Time and time again with the same results.

We certainly do know what he is thinking at those times. He is thinking on purpose, not randomly. And he has measured results to prove it.

Michael

I think you miss their point. When the person connected to the EEG brings the activity level to near zero, it is a case of the person NOT thinking. Bob's and Dragonfly's point (in my view) is that when the activity level is far from zero, one cannot tell the content of thought simply be looking at the EEG values.

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I think you miss their point. When the person connected to the EEG brings the activity level to near zero, it is a case of the person NOT thinking. Bob's and Dragonfly's point (in my view) is that when the activity level is far from zero, one cannot tell the content of thought simply be looking at the EEG values.

Arrrghhh! Smart as paint ye arrrrre!

An EEG tells you no more what a person is thinking than an ECG or a blood pressure reading. All an EEG will tell yoi is if a person has something going on in his brain. There is no way to know what is going on for sure. Only the owner of a brain knows what is going on there, and then only if he is awake and functioning.

In terms of -mental- states we are Black Boxes to each other. When A perceives B, A and only sees (i.e. perceives) the external manifestations of B. A cannot read B's mind. There is no way of doing that with the current technology. And since people lie, one can't rely on what they say, write or on their body language. One must guess what the other is thinking. The only thing one KNOWS for sure is what they themselves perceive directly. Anything else is guess or inference or hypothesis.

Most of the things we claim to know are second hand reports from others which might be true or might not.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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I think you miss their point. When the person connected to the EEG brings the activity level to near zero, it is a case of the person NOT thinking. Bob's and Dragonfly's point (in my view) is that when the activity level is far from zero, one cannot tell the content of thought simply be looking at the EEG values.

Merlin,

I disagree. You not only see the person NOT thinking once he gets to the state, you see him actively willing himself there over a short amount of time. And you see visual proof of it in measurable and repeatable terms.

It is active proof that thought is an action and not a thing (so far).

I am starting to believe that the insistence on ignoring this by the scientifically oriented is more religious in nature than scientific. Wilber's experiment makes a barbecue out of a reductionist sacred cow.

Michael

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Michael,

Apparently you still don't get it. From an EEG you (or an expert) might be able to tell that a person is thinking, but not what he or she is thinking about. Please somebody send Michael an EEG and let him (or an expert) try to figure out if the person is thinking about love, work, philosophy, a mathematical proof, his/her neighbor, his/her next meal, or whatever.

This is my last attempt. I don't know how it could be clearer.

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Merlin,

It's obvious to me that the guy is thinking about shutting down his brain waves. Then he does. This isn't really all that complicated.

What does the movement of sound look like? You can only tell by patterns in molecules that are not sound. What's the difference here?

I never hear people say that you cannot determine what sound really is because it is intangible.

Or how about gravity? Is it measured or not? If so, how? Measuring what the gravity "really is"?

Michael

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I disagree. You not only see the person NOT thinking once he gets to the state, you see him actively willing himself there over a short amount of time. And you see visual proof of it in measurable and repeatable terms.

It is active proof that thought is an action and not a thing (so far).

Indeed thought is. But an EEG (a crude device that can only detect surface electrical activity) provides data that indicates something is happening. Noone knows how to backtrack from the data and figure out what was going on in the brain of the subject. The EEG is NOT a mind reading machine.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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I'm not sure what the argument is about anymore. In psychotherapy the therapist talks to the patient and infers pathological nervous reactions based on macroscopic behaviour and language of the patient. It is mostly about improper evaluation, ie. re-evaluating something that happened in the past with the help of the therapist and this is all done on verbal levels (excluding psychiatric drug therapy). It is not necessary (or possible) to know exactly what the patient is thinking - he must state that as best as he can. What is attempted is to change the thought patterns so they are not harmful any more and relieve the suffering of the patient.

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I'm not sure what the argument is about anymore. In psychotherapy the therapist talks to the patient and infers pathological nervous reactions based on macroscopic behaviour and language of the patient. It is mostly about improper evaluation, ie. re-evaluating something that happened in the past with the help of the therapist and this is all done on verbal levels (excluding psychiatric drug therapy). It is not necessary (or possible) to know exactly what the patient is thinking - he must state that as best as he can. What is attempted is to change the thought patterns so they are not harmful any more and relieve the suffering of the patient.

The patient always lies --- Dr. Gregory House.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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I'm not sure what the argument is about anymore. In psychotherapy the therapist talks to the patient and infers pathological nervous reactions based on macroscopic behaviour and language of the patient. It is mostly about improper evaluation, ie. re-evaluating something that happened in the past with the help of the therapist and this is all done on verbal levels (excluding psychiatric drug therapy). It is not necessary (or possible) to know exactly what the patient is thinking - he must state that as best as he can. What is attempted is to change the thought patterns so they are not harmful any more and relieve the suffering of the patient.

Psychotherapy forever. This is not effective methodology although I'd bet many therapists use it. Talk therapy in which the different techniques do not involve altered states of consciousness is mostly not useful or effective. I spent several years in various settings observing Nathaniel and Devers Branden in action and they blow right by this kind of approach. Schematically: Talk (setting up the situation or problem); Therapy (altered states of consciousness usually using sentence-completion technique); Talk (summing up and evaluating). Changing thought patterns is like a homework assignment. (This is not a comment on Nathaniel's present approach to his psychotherapeutic work.)

--Brant

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  • 3 weeks later...
I disagree. You not only see the person NOT thinking once he gets to the state, you see him actively willing himself there over a short amount of time. And you see visual proof of it in measurable and repeatable terms.

It is active proof that thought is an action and not a thing (so far).

Indeed thought is. But an EEG (a crude device that can only detect surface electrical activity) provides data that indicates something is happening. Noone knows how to backtrack from the data and figure out what was going on in the brain of the subject. The EEG is NOT a mind reading machine.

Ba'al Chatzaf

<AHEM!> This just in (posted to multiple psychology-related lists on yahoo.com):

Researchers can read thoughts to decipher what a person is actually seeing

Following ground-breaking research showing that neurons in the human brain respond in an abstract manner to particular individuals or objects, University of Leicester researchers have now discovered that, from the firing of this type of neuron, they can tell what a person is actually seeing.

The original research by Dr R Quian Quiroga, of the University’s Department of Engineering, showed that one neuron fired to, for instance, Jennifer Aniston, another one to Halle Berry, another one to the Sydney Opera House, etc.

The responses were abstract. For example, the neuron firing to Halle Berry responded to several different pictures of her and even to the letters of her name, but not to other people or names.

This result, published in Nature in 2005 and selected as one of the top 100 scientific stories of the year by Discover Magazine, came from data from patients suffering from epilepsy. As candidates for epilepsy surgery, they are implanted with intracranial electrodes to determine as accurately as possible the area where the seizures originate. From that, clinicians can evaluate the potential outcome of curative surgery.

Dr Quian Quiroga’s latest research, which has appeared in the Journal of Neurophysiology, follows on from this.

Dr Quian Quiroga explained: “For example, if the 'Jennifer Aniston neuron' increases its firing then we can predict that the subject is seeing Jennifer Aniston. If the 'Halle Berry neuron' fires, then we can predict that the subject is seeing Halle Berry, and so on.

“To do this, we used and optimised a 'decoding algorithms', which is a mathematical method to infer the stimulus from the neuronal firing. We also needed to optimise our recording and data processing tools to record simultaneously from as many neurons as possible. Currently we are able to record simultaneously from up to 100 neurons in the human brain.

“In these experiments we presented a large database of pictures, and discovered that we can predict what picture the subject is seeing far above chance. So, in simple words, we can read the human thought from the neuronal activity.

“Once we reached this point, we then asked what are the most fundamental features of the neuronal firing that allowed us to make this predictions. This gave us the chance of studying basic principles of neural coding; i.e. how information is stored by neurons in the brain.

“For example, we found that there is a very limited time window in the neuronal firing that contains most of the information used for such predictions. Interestingly, neurons fired only 4 spikes in average during this time window. So, in another words, only 4 spikes of a few neurons are already telling us what the patient is seeing.”

Potential applications of this discovery include the development of Neural Prosthetic devices to be used by paralysed patients or amputees. A patient with a lesion in the spinal cord (as with the late Christopher Reeves), can still think about reaching a cup of tea with his arm, but this order is not transmitted to the muscles.

The idea of Neural Prostheses is to read these commands directly from the brain and transmit them to bionic devices such as a robotic arm that the patient could control directly from the brain.

Dr Quian Quiroga’s work showing that it is possible to read signals from the brain is a good step forward in this direction. But there are still clinical and ethical issues that have to be resolved before Neural Prosthetic devices can be applied in humans.

In particular, these would involve invasive surgery, which would have to be justified by a clear improvement for the patient before it could be undertaken.

Source: University of Leicester

http://www.physorg.com/news116155837.html

REB

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<AHEM!> This just in (posted to multiple psychology-related lists on yahoo.com):

Researchers can read thoughts to decipher what a person is actually seeing

Roger,

You posted quotes from and the link to the article on both this thread and the EEG thread, in both cases picking up from one of Bob's posts in which he said that the EEG isn't a mind-reading device. Are you thinking that the results cited somehow contradict that an EEG isn't a mind-reading device? The researchers were using "implanted [...] intracranial electrodes," not EEGs.

Ellen

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<AHEM!> This just in (posted to multiple psychology-related lists on yahoo.com):

Researchers can read thoughts to decipher what a person is actually seeing

Roger,

You posted quotes from and the link to the article on both this thread and the EEG thread, in both cases picking up from one of Bob's posts in which he said that the EEG isn't a mind-reading device. Are you thinking that the results cited somehow contradict that an EEG isn't a mind-reading device? The researchers were using "implanted [...] intracranial electrodes," not EEGs.

Ellen

___

No, Ellen. I was arguing the general point. I'm not a non-discriminating idiot, any more than you are a concrete-bound moron, so let's exercise a little charity and move on to the real issue.

Surely Bob is not just arguing (right, Bob?) that EEG's can't be used for "mind-reading," but that electrical/electronic devices in general cannot be so used. I.e., that mental processes are inescapably "subjective" and unperceivable/unidentifiable by outside observers.

Sorry I didn't dot the "i", but I don't think it's all that mysterious what I was driving at.

REB

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