Repression/Emotionalism

[KorbenDallas]

14 minutes ago, BaalChatzaf said:

You might want to read the article in "Wired"  about Aspied  and Autistics.  It is entitled "The Geek Syndrome"  

There have always been Aspies and Autistics in the human race.   Think of the clan Aspie spending all his time in caves drawing pictures of animals on the wall,  or the tribal weirdo among the Clovis People,  constantly trying out different arrow heads and spear heads.   The poor guy was obsessed with flint but it help improve the results of the hunt  so the tribe loved him even if they did  think he was weird. 

Ba'al, there's a new movie called The Accountant with Ben Affleck where the main character has autism yet kicks ass.  Looks pretty good, haven't seen it yet though.

[merjet]

7 hours ago, KorbenDallas said:

Ba'al, there's a new movie called The Accountant with Ben Affleck where the main character has autism yet kicks ass.  Looks pretty good, haven't seen it yet though.

I saw it and give it 3 stars (5 high). It was pretty violent. Trying to figure out some things that didn't make sense boosted my attention.  

It had a gratuitous anti-business aspect. The main character audits a prosthetics-making company for embezzlement. The CEO gets revealed as a bad guy, after it was already revealed that his CFO was the embezzler.

Actuarial science is mentioned as a career the main character considered but didn't pursue.   

The main character uses aliases of famous mathematicians. I recall Gauss and Lewis Carroll.

[anthony]

On 2016/12/05 at 6:04 PM, BaalChatzaf said:

Science requires detailed knowledge, facts, careful analysis of the concepts  and logical consistency.   Science is not,  never was and never will be  a substitute  or surrogate form of mysticism.  Science is about the world. 

 

Query.  Where in our bodies is The Mind  of of what matter and energy does the Mind consist?

Bob, I detect you want to have this both ways. On one hand is your regular disregard of the mind (while hearing from and ignoring countless other thinkers' experiences/explanations of consciousness) - then subsequently, you turn to your usual fallback position - of Asperger's - and your non-recognition of "cues" from others, non introspection (Etc.) You can't have your cake as you please.

I can see that AS would be an affliction, and that there must be allowed a degree of cause and effect here - but let us not over-self-justify (who the f-- is "normal" anyway?). I suggest to you that you've rationalized yourself into your skepticism and in that are not so dissimilar from any empiricist who has..

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

On 12/4/2016 at 6:18 PM, Brant Gaede said:

But how do you know that that's what's there?

--Brant

Brant,

Bob likes to say "I am..." presupposing his own "I."

In other words, he likes to say the trains run on time without a conductor. But if you look, there's always a conductor in his train and that conductor can get quite grumpy.

 

Bob just doesn't know what to call the dude since conductors are not made out of steel.

(Ya' gotta kinda transpose the metaphor to make it work--from steel to meat--but I have no doubt you get my meaning.)

Michael

[anthony]

The more I think about it, the more it seems the quest for normalcy -or normality- (as with the quest for perfection*) is socially imposed/self-imposed cruelly upon men and women as an impossible standard. Neo-mysticism again, ha. From what I've known of "wannabe normals" and "seeming normals", they are no great shakes, and many times, untrustworthy hypocrites. People with individual quirks are usually more honest and characterful and much more interesting. To try to be normal means conforming to a vague, subjective common denominator; anyhow, whatever you see of a person's superficially 'normal' behavior, you can't know what goes on in their minds and probably wouldn't want to.

*Very different is Aristotle's aspiration - Excellence - and sanity/rationality goes without saying.

I like Confucius too: "Better to be a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without".

[BaalChatzaf]

5 hours ago, anthony said:

Bob, I detect you want to have this both ways. On one hand is your regular disregard of the mind (while hearing from and ignoring countless other thinkers' experiences/explanations of consciousness) - then subsequently, you turn to your usual fallback position - of Asperger's - and your non-recognition of "cues" from others, non introspection (Etc.) You can't have your cake as you please.

I can see that AS would be an affliction, and that there must be allowed a degree of cause and effect here - but let us not over-self-justify (who the fuck is "normal" anyway?). I suggest to you that you've rationalized yourself into your skepticism and in that are not so dissimilar from any empiricist who has..

The blind do not see, the deaf do not hear  and I do not comprehend the implicit or take hints.   This is due to the way my software is made.  In addition I am also happy to be shed of the task of reading between lines.  I leave  such matters to you.  There are times when deficiencies produce benefits. 

[anthony]

4 hours ago, BaalChatzaf said:

The blind do not see, the deaf do not hear  and I do not comprehend the implicit or take hints.   This is due to the way my software is made.  In addition I am also happy to be shed of the task of reading between lines.  I leave  such matters to you.  There are times when deficiencies produce benefits. 

Yes, and the blind - uh, vision-impaired - don't go around knocking eyesight. Helen Keller could still, with her impairments, write: "Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature". My kind of girl (no skeptic).

 

[BaalChatzaf]

6 hours ago, anthony said:

Yes, and the blind - uh, vision-impaired - don't go around knocking eyesight. Helen Keller could still, with her impairments, write: "Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature". My kind of girl (no skeptic).

 

I don't knock it at all.  I rejoice that you can handle such matter and I do not have to.  Each of us does what he/she can or is willing to do.  I let the Normals squint between the lines  and figure out what hints means and worry about what was not explicitly said.  Someone has to do that sort of thing,  right?  I leave it to you and folks like you. You can do that sort of thing and I can't. 

[turkeyfoot]

12 hours ago, BaalChatzaf said:

I volunteered for a program that studied the mental processes of elderly people back in 2007.  After multiple interviews and an MRI scan (I still have the images)  the lead analyst Becky Price  suggested that  I  had aspbergers syndrome on the basis  of my interviews, behavior and an anomaly in the area of my brain called the amydala.   In addition I took several clinical questionares designed by  Simon Baron-Cohen  (Sasha Baron-Cone's cousin of Borat fame).  The questionares all agreed  AS with very high probability or possibly ADHD.   The diagnosis tallied with my childhood which had difficulties related to my inability to read body and face language  and my inability to pick up on social queues.  Eventually I learned all this stuff empirically over 4 decades.  By the time I was 40 I could read body language and face language as well as any normal 5 years old.  Better late than never. 

To this day I am literal minded,  I tend to over look very subtle clues and queues,  I cannot reliably infer intentions of others and I still can't take hints very well.  I need to be told things plainly. 

The good news is I was a genius at system design and programming when younger and I had a spooky ability to wreck systems (I could intuit where the weakness were).  I made a lot of money wrecking systems that most people thought were foolproof. Computers came to fear my supernatural ability to feel out weaknesses in the software.  Back in the day when I was point man on systems testing they called me The Destroyer.  It was my AS asserting itself.  I do not make assumptions like normal folks do. 

I was fortunate in meeting my one and only bride who had a thing about very intelligent men.  Lucky me. Fortunately all but one of my children are normal.  Next year it will be 60 years joined at the hip. 

You might want to read the article in "Wired"  about Aspied  and Autistics.  It is entitled "The Geek Syndrome"  

There have always been Aspies and Autistics in the human race.   Think of the clan Aspie spending all his time in caves drawing pictures of animals on the wall,  or the tribal weirdo among the Clovis People,  constantly trying out different arrow heads and spear heads.   The poor guy was obsessed with flint but it help improve the results of the hunt  so the tribe loved him even if they did  think he was weird. 

Nice, Bob. Thx.

I despise the idea that psychiatry/psychology categorizes people into narrow abnormal personality slots and its accompanying psychotropic and dependence driven treatments. 

Recalling what you said about thinking and remembering being unrelated to introspection. Isnt introspection a deliberative effort to chase your thought processes, and if nothing else is based on recall of those memories of your own thoughts and what led to them? If you reevaluate a line of code or numbers, the intention is to again mentally focus effort onto the code and in the attempt will monitor what led you to mistaken answers? Perhaps the calculations are done in a binary sense (right/wrong) and at a different speed given your propensity for solving math/physics problems. I believe introspection is a course of action primarily undertaken due to a desire to self correct mental processes. One makes a mistake first that takes on unwelcome implications, then to avoid further occurrences the relevant content that might be recalled, which led to the mistake, is evaluated. Whatever corrective method you have come to rely on in regard to math is analogous to what is done in introspection.  

Maybe it is your brains calculative speed and mistake avoidance ability and/or the uninterested/unnecessary need to reevaluate an unimportant (social or personal) "mistake" that makes you believe you dont introspect. Thats my .02. You get what you pay for. ;)   

 

[anthony]

14 hours ago, BaalChatzaf said:

I don't knock it at all.  I rejoice that you can handle such matter and I do not have to.  Each of us does what he/she can or is willing to do.  I let the Normals squint between the lines  and figure out what hints means and worry about what was not explicitly said.  Someone has to do that sort of thing,  right?  I leave it to you and folks like you. You can do that sort of thing and I can't. 

Well, thank you. But you've skipped the point, which is I think you make too much of it. One always has the choice to think otherwise, a different way. And so far little of what I've said has touched on emotional relations to other people.

Look, we all play to our strengths, is that not so? Which means we all tend to avoid our weaknesses. If you sense a lack in yourself in one area, it's understandable that you'll always resist going there.  If early you're considered (rightly, wrongly) a "people person" for example, that's where you tend to go interest-wise, career wise, and so on. If you've had an aptitude to draw well and you've always been called "artistic", no surprise that you will be motivated to pursue art. For sciences, and the science-minded especially also. All these preconceptions and influences ~may~ be self-limiting (particularly if one relies heavily on others' judgments of one) equally as much as finding out one has ADD or AS and is not "normal". Whatever "normal" is believed to mean. Useful to know, as it helps explain differences of approach or manner from other people, but ultimately so what? Does it define who you are? and, should you let it?

In attempting to clarify emotions, there are systems of thought I've been focusing on, empiricism-skepticism for one. Objectivity, plainly another. One's "system" is ultimately one's own to choose and (most essentially) to continually put to practice, it's not "given".

Branden: man is self-programable. (Rand: A volitional consciousness). (For myself, and although religion never took much hold, I had a strong need for some undogmatic method and morality to replace god and all that). What I'm getting at, is one doesn't have to take one's pre-eminent talent/ability - or shortcoming - and concentrate only on that at the loss of a fuller experience of living. That's largely what I see in the late 20thC drive to 'specialization': self-limitation (and allowing others to delimit you, which is almost as bad). And those 'splits' and compartmentalizing that have accompanied it. Normal - abnormal. Logical - artistic. Mind - emotion. IQ - EQ. And so on. There's a fatalistic and determinist fallacy in here.

The "implicit" you mention. It is significant, but is secondary. I often think the great task of philosophy is to make explicit what is implicit so that nothing escapes "between the lines". Introspection 'only' requires practise and confidence, and the connectivity from reality to thought to emotion to action becomes gradually clearer. Picking up "signals" from others is good and matters somewhat, and can be improved by teaching oneself to be more observant, but it's not everything. (After all, it's only the few or several chosen individuals we have intimate understanding with in our lives that really count, not the world of people). We primarily deal, 'head to head', with reality, and what's real and apparent.

What each person can and should review and gain power over is HOW to think - which method you choose - and I suggest once more that while empiricism is superb as scientific method, as a philosophy eliminating or down-playing the conceptual consciousness, it bears no relation to the reality of what one is as human and rational. 

 

[BaalChatzaf]

Emotional relations with other people?   I love my wife, children and grand children.  I consider my grandchildren the joy of my life.

For people I don't know well,  my response (in most cases)  is Good Manners. 

Whenever possible I do not let emotions guide my thinking. 

Emotions  and $2.67  will buy me a small coffee and a plain doughnut  at the local doughnut shop. 

[anthony]

OK Bob. whatever you say...

[anthony]

If anyone would like to see what emotions in the pure and elemental state are, I submit that you look no further than animals. In particular, higher mammals and specifically - because we know them well - domesticated dogs. As a friend remarked as we were discussing dogs and their emotions "it's all they have". A good insight and partly true. It got me thinking that animals provide a glimpse into man's past before he evolved into "the rational animal" and how he remains presently - in part. (With a lot more, and a little less). If you know as dog owners do, that a dog is capable of a quite broad emotional range: fear (of course), guilt, jealousy, loss, loneliness, sympathy, protectiveness, compassion, hatred, anxiety, mischievous playfulness ... and more (even "a state of non-contradictory joy"). One only has to attune oneself to a dog's physical signals to become quite adept at spotting his changing feelings and at times, their causes. Obviously, mankind is capable of a much greater range with many more emotional nuances.

Where there are emotions it follows there are values. Clearly, animals differ in that their values are "given" -- instinctual. (Plus, a modicum of learned behavior, which their young instinctively copy from their seniors, or from the training we give them).

A full belly, a value (an empty one, a disvalue), a territory it claims as its own, a firm place in the hierarchy of a 'pack', (human and animal) - and so on. All contribute to the 'well-being' or otherwise which the dog senses, equally with us: automated, lightning fast indicators of its individual "sum of profit or loss".

Man is "a little less" than a dog in that he has to identify "value", think about values, grant them relative importance and and isolate the ones he wants - fully by conscious means, not naturally. He has to seek, earn, create and know how to look after them. Man is the value-adding animal. The more he sees, thinks and knows - the more he values, the more he values - the more he feels. As the end result. The explanation of our much greater and complex emotions is the depth of our cognition and valuing. Dissimilarly, our fine companion, the dog, exhibits full "primacy of emotion". 

[BaalChatzaf]

54 minutes ago, anthony said:

If anyone would like to see what emotions in the pure and elemental state are, I submit that you look no further than animals. In particular, higher mammals and specifically - because we know them well - domesticated dogs. As a friend remarked as we were discussing dogs and their emotions "it's all they have". A good insight and partly true.

A bold (and untestable) assertion to be made by someone who is NOT a   dog.

I pity any extra-terrestrial  explorers who land on this planet,  especially if they look like bugs.

[anthony]

25 minutes ago, BaalChatzaf said:

A bold (and untestable) assertion to be made by someone who is NOT a   dog.

I pity any extra-terrestrial  explorers who land on this planet,  especially if they look like bugs.

David Hume couldn't have put it better! Nor Popper. I shall relinquish my 50 years of inductive dog-experience awaiting the final authority of science. (I suggest too, that dog emotionality is most testable and roughly recall it has been conducted in many ways).

[anthony]

deleted

[BaalChatzaf]

9 minutes ago, anthony said:

David Hume couldn't have put it better! Nor Popper. I shall relinquish my 50 years of inductive dog-experience awaiting the final authority of science. (I suggest too, that dog emotionality is testable and roughly recall it has been conducted).

I have no doubt that dogs,  like some other mammals I know of have emotional drives:  fear,  anger and even love.  The question is:  Is emotion ALL they have going on between their furry ears?

[anthony]

Only dogs have furry ears?...some men also...

Sure, dogs have consciousness, a base level of intelligence and hold percepts, but no self-awareness. They can put two and two together. (They hear the rattle of you picking up your keys - you are going out and abandoning them. Engine in driveway - you've come home! Don't forget too their thousand times better smell and hearing. They can sense-identify and differentiate things we're not aware of).

[BaalChatzaf]

1 hour ago, anthony said:

Only dogs have furry ears?...some men also...

Sure, dogs have consciousness, a base level of intelligence and hold percepts, but no self-awareness. They can put two and two together. (They hear the rattle of you picking up your keys - you are going out and abandoning them. Engine in driveway - you've come home! Don't forget too their thousand times better smell and hearing. They can sense-identify and differentiate things we're not aware of).

Ears are external and can be observed.  Dog-"thoughts".  Can anyone see what is going on at the level of neurons in a dog?  And the problem of perception and qualia holds for dogs as well as humans.  Every person knows what he/she perceives if that person is awake and alive.   No one really -knows- what another perceives.  We can only guess based on external observable behavior. 

[anthony]

1 hour ago, BaalChatzaf said:

Ears are external and can be observed.  Dog-"thoughts".  Can anyone see what is going on at the level of neurons in a dog?  And the problem of perception and qualia holds for dogs as well as humans.  Every person knows what he/she perceives if that person is awake and alive.   No one really -knows- what another perceives.  We can only guess based on external observable behavior. 

WE can draw firm inferences from observable behavior - by the variety and changes of actions with changing circumstances. Before getting to the level of neurons - and even then different brain activity will definitely register. Unlike humans, dogs don't and can't fake emotion. ""Thoughts"" I did not assign to dogs. Instinct-value is what I call the cause of their emotions (as distinct from man's chosen values).

[BaalChatzaf]

2 hours ago, anthony said:

WE can draw firm inferences from observable behavior - by the variety and changes of actions with changing circumstances. Before getting to the level of neurons - and even then different brain activity will definitely register. Unlike humans, dogs don't and can't fake emotion. ""Thoughts"" I did not assign to dogs. Instinct-value is what I call the cause of their emotions (as distinct from man's chosen values).

Suit yourself.  What is going on in Rover's head is private to Rover.  

And observations inferred from observables  are for the  most part  probable  rather than deductively certain. What you are describing is induction, which is not guaranteed to be correct.

[anthony]

2 hours ago, BaalChatzaf said:

Suit yourself.  What is going on in Rover's head is private to Rover.  

And observations inferred from observables  are for the  most part  probable  rather than deductively certain. What you are describing is induction, which is not guaranteed to be correct.

The "problem" of induction, is (apparently) an Empiricist-empirical "problem". It is no problem at all in objectivity as far as I can tell. To gain conceptual knowledge, induction works just fine and dandy. What empiricists overlook, I think, is *repetitivity* for one thing. I.e., induction is not the individual making just one observation, once.

Is it you who likes quoting the apocryphal tale of a scientific-type of man travelling on a train? (Roughly) he makes a statement about the flocks of sheep he sees while passing "I infer that a sheep is white - on one side". I think it's so funny and always recall it.

What can one infer from his claim? Not about sheep, plainly, but about his logic and about him?

Do we take it to assume, if we take him at all seriously, that every time he makes a train journey, he's thinking to himself:

"Those danged sheep! they never show me their other sides!". heh!

My take: He's deranged. He is certainly an adherent of primacy of consciousness. He shows indications of solipsism. He could even believe there's a conspiracy "out to get" him. In a word, he's the perfect skeptic.

[BaalChatzaf]

3 hours ago, anthony said:

The "problem" of induction, is (apparently) an Empiricist-empirical "problem". It is no problem at all in objectivity as far as I can tell. To gain conceptual knowledge, induction works just fine and dandy. What empiricists overlook, I think, is *repetitivity* for one thing. I.e., induction is not the individual making just one observation, once.

Is it you who likes quoting the apocryphal tale of a scientific-type of man travelling on a train? (Roughly) he makes a statement about the flocks of sheep he sees while passing "I infer that a sheep is white - on one side". I think it's so funny and always recall it.

What can one infer from his claim? Not about sheep, plainly, but about his logic and about him?

Do we take it to assume, if we take him at all seriously, that every time he makes a train journey, he's thinking to himself:

"Those danged sheep! they never show me their other sides!". heh!

My take: He's deranged. He is certainly an adherent of primacy of consciousness. He shows indications of solipsism. He could even believe there's a conspiracy "out to get" him. In a word, he's the perfect skeptic.

Even if 1,000,000 repetitions support a hypothesis what is the guarantee that the 1,000,001  th  will?  Answer: no guarantee.  No finite set of experiments will support  a universally quantified proposition defined over an infinite domain.  In the case of finite domains,  the finite domain must be exhausted before a universally quantified assertion over that domain can be asserted as true.

Here is a jug with ten billion  marbles in it which are either white or black.  I pick 1 million marbles from the jug at random.   Can I assert all marbles in the jug are white?  No I can't.  To assert all marbles in the jug are white I would have to look at them all.  

[jts]

1 hour ago, BaalChatzaf said:

Even if 1,000,000 repetitions support a hypothesis what is the guarantee that the 1,000,001  th  will?  Answer: no guarantee.  No finite set of experiments will support  a universally quantified proposition defined over an infinite domain.  In the case of finite domains,  the finite domain must be exhausted before a universally quantified assertion over that domain can be asserted as true.

Here is a jug with ten billion  marbles in it which are either white or black.  I pick 1 million marbles from the jug at random.   Can I assert all marbles in the jug are white?  No I can't.  To assert all marbles in the jug are white I would have to look at them all.  

1.  Does that mean next time I drop a hammer it might not fall down?

2.  In the living of life it is normal to need to make decisions in the face of uncertainty, perhaps by making the best guess one can, perhaps by a not strictly logical process. How does an aspie mathematician / logician handle such situations?

 

[BaalChatzaf]

14 minutes ago, jts said:

1.  Does that mean next time I drop a hammer it might not fall down?

2.  In the living of life it is normal to need to make decisions in the face of uncertainty, perhaps by making the best guess one can, perhaps by a not strictly logical process. How does an aspie mathematician / logician handle such situations?

 

If other forces are acting on the hammer it might not fall the way you expected.  

The same way you should.  By Bayesian Analysis.  Bayesian Inference is the logic of induction.