See this is the kind of attitude that doesn't make you have any friends.
I have plenty of friends.
Psychology used to say that homosexuals were "retards". Do you think that's true?
No, I don't. Neither does any psychologist today. But if we are going to talk about the past and past experiences to criticize, note that Christianity has a very very dark background.
What makes you so sure that I have a neurologic disorder? Did you read the link?
Did you read my post? Where did I said you have one?
And yes, I've read your link I respectfully disagree.
i wonder. what people who believe jesus was the son of God think about all those other classic mythologies where the Gods procreated with humans giving us some of our most heroic characters of literature.
hear my name
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
i wonder. what people who believe jesus was the son of God think about all those other classic mythologies where the Gods procreated with humans giving us some of our most heroic characters of literature.
No, I don't. Neither does any psychologist today. But if we are going to talk about the past and past experiences to criticize, note that Christianity has a very very dark background.
Did you read my post? Where did I said you have one?
And yes, I've read your link I respectfully disagree.
I'm sure you have friends and I apologize. I read some of your comments wrong.
Neither do I think that homosexuals have any mental disorders. If you do not agree with the link it's your business. I'm not saying that what the link said is something carved on stone (as well as for any other information that you might base your "ideas" with). Again, I only posted that to make a point. And I will have to remind you that it is something that I also learned in school.
Again my mistake about what I said. I read your post wrong. What you originally wrote saying, "that doesn't mean he is right." I mistakenly read for "he was probably right." But I stick to psychology not being considered a science. If you want I will provide you with more information. At any rate, it really doesn't matter to me.
As for christianity having a dark dark past, yes I am fully aware. But that topic doesn't interest me because I don't follow christianity. I think I've made mention of that before in here.
This isn't the land of opportunity, it's the land of competition.
i wonder. what people who believe jesus was the son of God think about all those other classic mythologies where the Gods procreated with humans giving us some of our most heroic characters of literature.
Well, there is still large debate about psychology being a science or not. My interpretation of it is that we cannot rely on it too much. So I am not devaluating this study, (I wouldn't have a reason to and I don't have a phd of some kind) I only made reference to this because of a certain person on this board trying to subject my own "spiritual" ecstasies to be explained by some neurologic disorder that I might need to get help for. As the link also states, homosexuality was once also considered to be a mental illness. Trust me. That is a lot coming from someone who does not support a homosexual lifestyle. (not to offend anyone)
Yeah, hey, you and I are definitely on the same side about spiritual experiences being valid. I've had many people try to pathologise my spiritual experience as being illness too. I'm definitely with you. Subjective experience is valid--100%, no matter what. It's your experience.
I used to devalue psychology. But then I healed numerous disorders, and when I got to the bottom of them, I found that the basic psychological principles I once disbelieved were true. But yes, there is a lot of misunderstanding and misuse, outside of and within the field of psychology.
"The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth." ~ Niels Bohr
there is proof of intelligent design all around us!!do you really think this all started with the "big bang"????
"In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot". Mark Twain
"I would rather die on my feet than to live on my knees."
Emiliano Zapata
there is proof of intelligent design all around us!!do you really think this all started with the "big bang"????
I'll take your side here Jam.
The theory of intelligent design in much more intelligent than the big bang theory. Of course it's all theory, and I won't suggest that intelligent design is correct. But, I'm much more willing to invest my chips in the idea that something greater than myself created us as opposed to dumb luck.
I'm not a religious person, but something tells me there's something going on that we'll most likely never be able to comprehend.
"Sarcasm: intellect on the offensive"
"What I lack in decorum, I make up for with an absence of tact."
The theory of intelligent design in much more intelligent than the big bang theory. Of course it's all theory, and I won't suggest that intelligent design is correct. But, I'm much more willing to invest my chips in the idea that something greater than myself created us as opposed to dumb luck.
I'm not a religious person, but something tells me there's something going on that we'll most likely never be able to comprehend.
hmm something that is non existent vs dumb luck. not much of a choice really is it?
hear my name
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
hmm something that is non existent vs dumb luck. not much of a choice really is it?
Well... No one has really disproved either theory. But I do choose to rank them in terms of more likely at the top, and less likely towards the bottom.
But hence the, "Of course it's all theory, and I won't suggest that intelligent design is correct," remark.
"Sarcasm: intellect on the offensive"
"What I lack in decorum, I make up for with an absence of tact."
Well... No one has really disproved either theory. But I do choose to rank them in terms of more likely at the top, and less likely towards the bottom.
But hence the, "Of course it's all theory, and I won't suggest that intelligent design is correct," remark.
and hence my not much of a choice really comment.
hear my name
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
I don't even think it started. I've wasted several hours on here trying to watch basketball while talking about nothing essentially. No time to start now!
"Sarcasm: intellect on the offensive"
"What I lack in decorum, I make up for with an absence of tact."
I don't even think it started. I've wasted several hours on here trying to watch basketball while talking about nothing essentially. No time to start now!
must be an exciting b ball game then.
hear my name
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
ever hear of sri lanka? Or how about those people in japan with the train station gassing?
I knew someone would throw that Japaneese Cult at me. A handful of nuts. And do you know they were doing it actually in the name of Buddha? Or did they just happen to be Japaneese, and therefore Buddhists?
I'm sure you have friends and I apologize. I read some of your comments wrong.
Neither do I think that homosexuals have any mental disorders. If you do not agree with the link it's your business. I'm not saying that what the link said is something carved on stone (as well as for any other information that you might base your "ideas" with). Again, I only posted that to make a point. And I will have to remind you that it is something that I also learned in school.
Again my mistake about what I said. I read your post wrong. What you originally wrote saying, "that doesn't mean he is right." I mistakenly read for "he was probably right." But I stick to psychology not being considered a science. If you want I will provide you with more information. At any rate, it really doesn't matter to me.
As for christianity having a dark dark past, yes I am fully aware. But that topic doesn't interest me because I don't follow christianity. I think I've made mention of that before in here.
No problem, apology excepted.
In college I took basic psychology an introduction and psycolinguistics, both my teachers and text books said it was indeed science. It could also be concluded from all the scientific articles in respected scientific magazines. I also did scientific experiments.
The young women had survived the car crash, after a fashion. In the five months since parts of her brain had been crushed, she could open her eyes but didn't respond to sights, sounds or jabs. In the jargon of neurology, she was judged to be in a persistent vegetative state. In crueler everyday language, she was a vegetable.
So picture the astonishment of British and Belgian scientists as they scanned her brain using a kind of MRI that detects blood flow to active parts of the brain. When they recited sentences, the parts involved in language lit up. When they asked her to imagine visiting the rooms of her house, the parts involved in navigating space and recognizing places ramped up. And when they asked her to imagine playing tennis, the regions that trigger motion joined in. Indeed, her scans were barely different from those of healthy volunteers. The woman, it appears, had glimmerings of consciousness.
Try to comprehend what it is like to be that woman. Do you appreciate the words and caresses of your distraught family while racked with frustration at your inability to reassure them that they are getting through? Or do you drift in a haze, springing to life with a concrete thought when a voice prods you, only to slip back into blankness? If we could experience this existence, would we prefer it to death? And if these questions have answers, would they change our policies toward unresponsive patients--making the Terri Schiavo case look like child's play?
The report of this unusual case last September was just the latest shock from a bracing new field, the science of consciousness. Questions once confined to theological speculations and late-night dorm-room bull sessions are now at the forefront of cognitive neuroscience. With some problems, a modicum of consensus has taken shape. With others, the puzzlement is so deep that they may never be resolved. Some of our deepest convictions about what it means to be human have been shaken.
It shouldn't be surprising that research on consciousness is alternately exhilarating and disturbing. No other topic is like it. As René Descartes noted, our own consciousness is the most indubitable thing there is. The major religions locate it in a soul that survives the body's death to receive its just deserts or to meld into a global mind. For each of us, consciousness is life itself, the reason Woody Allen said, "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying." And the conviction that other people can suffer and flourish as each of us does is the essence of empathy and the foundation of morality.
To make scientific headway in a topic as tangled as consciousness, it helps to clear away some red herrings. Consciousness surely does not depend on language. Babies, many animals and patients robbed of speech by brain damage are not insensate robots; they have reactions like ours that indicate that someone's home. Nor can consciousness be equated with self-awareness. At times we have all lost ourselves in music, exercise or sensual pleasure, but that is different from being knocked out cold.
THE "EASY" AND "HARD" PROBLEMS
WHAT REMAINS IS NOT ONE PROBLEM ABOUT CONSCIOUSNESS BUT two, which the philosopher David Chalmers has dubbed the Easy Problem and the Hard Problem. Calling the first one easy is an in-joke: it is easy in the sense that curing cancer or sending someone to Mars is easy. That is, scientists more or less know what to look for, and with enough brainpower and funding, they would probably crack it in this century.
What exactly is the Easy Problem? It's the one that Freud made famous, the difference between conscious and unconscious thoughts. Some kinds of information in the brain--such as the surfaces in front of you, your daydreams, your plans for the day, your pleasures and peeves--are conscious. You can ponder them, discuss them and let them guide your behavior. Other kinds, like the control of your heart rate, the rules that order the words as you speak and the sequence of muscle contractions that allow you to hold a pencil, are unconscious. They must be in the brain somewhere because you couldn't walk and talk and see without them, but they are sealed off from your planning and reasoning circuits, and you can't say a thing about them.
The Easy Problem, then, is to distinguish conscious from unconscious mental computation, identify its correlates in the brain and explain why it evolved.
The Hard Problem, on the other hand, is why it feels like something to have a conscious process going on in one's head--why there is first-person, subjective experience. Not only does a green thing look different from a red thing, remind us of other green things and inspire us to say, "That's green" (the Easy Problem), but it also actually looks green: it produces an experience of sheer greenness that isn't reducible to anything else. As Louis Armstrong said in response to a request to define jazz, "When you got to ask what it is, you never get to know."
The Hard Problem is explaining how subjective experience arises from neural computation. The problem is hard because no one knows what a solution might look like or even whether it is a genuine scientific problem in the first place. And not surprisingly, everyone agrees that the hard problem (if it is a problem) remains a mystery.
Although neither problem has been solved, neuroscientists agree on many features of both of them, and the feature they find least controversial is the one that many people outside the field find the most shocking. Francis Crick called it "the astonishing hypothesis"--the idea that our thoughts, sensations, joys and aches consist entirely of physiological activity in the tissues of the brain. Consciousness does not reside in an ethereal soul that uses the brain like a PDA; consciousness is the activity of the brain.
THE BRAIN AS MACHINE
SCIENTISTS HAVE EXORCISED THE GHOST FROM THE MACHINE NOT because they are mechanistic killjoys but because they have amassed evidence that every aspect of consciousness can be tied to the brain. Using functional MRI, cognitive neuroscientists can almost read people's thoughts from the blood flow in their brains. They can tell, for instance, whether a person is thinking about a face or a place or whether a picture the person is looking at is of a bottle or a shoe.
And consciousness can be pushed around by physical manipulations. Electrical stimulation of the brain during surgery can cause a person to have hallucinations that are indistinguishable from reality, such as a song playing in the room or a childhood birthday party. Chemicals that affect the brain, from caffeine and alcohol to Prozac and LSD, can profoundly alter how people think, feel and see. Surgery that severs the corpus callosum, separating the two hemispheres (a treatment for epilepsy), spawns two consciousnesses within the same skull, as if the soul could be cleaved in two with a knife.
And when the physiological activity of the brain ceases, as far as anyone can tell the person's consciousness goes out of existence. Attempts to contact the souls of the dead (a pursuit of serious scientists a century ago) turned up only cheap magic tricks, and near death experiences are not the eyewitness reports of a soul parting company from the body but symptoms of oxygen starvation in the eyes and brain. In September, a team of Swiss neuroscientists reported that they could turn out-of-body experiences on and off by stimulating the part of the brain in which vision and bodily sensations converge.
THE ILLUSION OF CONTROL
ANOTHER STARTLING CONCLUSION FROM the science of consciousness is that the intuitive feeling we have that there's an executive "I" that sits in a control room of our brain, scanning the screens of the senses and pushing the buttons of the muscles, is an illusion. Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along.
Take the famous cognitive-dissonance experiments. When an experimenter got people to endure electric shocks in a sham experiment on learning, those who were given a good rationale ("It will help scientists understand learning") rated the shocks as more painful than the ones given a feeble rationale ("We're curious.") Presumably, it's because the second group would have felt foolish to have suffered for no good reason. Yet when these people were asked why they agreed to be shocked, they offered bogus reasons of their own in all sincerity, like "I used to mess around with radios and got used to electric shocks."
It's not only decisions in sketchy circumstances that get rationalized but also the texture of our immediate experience. We all feel we are conscious of a rich and detailed world in front of our eyes. Yet outside the dead center of our gaze, vision is amazingly coarse. Just try holding your hand a few inches from your line of sight and counting your fingers. And if someone removed and reinserted an object every time you blinked (which experimenters can simulate by flashing two pictures in rapid sequence), you would be hard pressed to notice the change. Ordinarily, our eyes flit from place to place, alighting on whichever object needs our attention on a need-to-know basis. This fools us into thinking that wall-to-wall detail was there all along--an example of how we overestimate the scope and power of our own consciousness.
Our authorship of voluntary actions can also be an illusion, the result of noticing a correlation between what we decide and how our bodies move. The psychologist Dan Wegner studied the party game in which a subject is seated in front of a mirror while someone behind him extends his arms under the subject's armpits and moves his arms around, making it look as if the subject is moving his own arms. If the subject hears a tape telling the person behind him how to move (wave, touch the subject's nose and so on), he feels as if he is actually in command of the arms.
The brain's spin doctoring is displayed even more dramatically in neurological conditions in which the healthy parts of the brain explain away the foibles of the damaged parts (which are invisible to the self because they are part of the self). A patient who fails to experience a visceral click of recognition when he sees his wife but who acknowledges that she looks and acts just like her deduces that she is an amazingly well-trained impostor. A patient who believes he is at home and is shown the hospital elevator says without missing a beat, "You wouldn't believe what it cost us to have that installed."
Why does consciousness exist at all, at least in the Easy Problem sense in which some kinds of information are accessible and others hidden? One reason is information overload. Just as a person can be overwhelmed today by the gusher of data coming in from electronic media, decision circuits inside the brain would be swamped if every curlicue and muscle twitch that was registered somewhere in the brain were constantly being delivered to them. Instead, our working memory and spotlight of attention receive executive summaries of the events and states that are most relevant to updating an understanding of the world and figuring out what to do next. The cognitive psychologist Bernard Baars likens consciousness to a global blackboard on which brain processes post their results and monitor the results of the others.
BELIEVING OUR OWN LIES
A SECOND REASON THAT INFORMATION MAY BE SEALED OFF FROM consciousness is strategic. Evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers has noted that people have a motive to sell themselves as beneficent, rational, competent agents. The best propagandist is the one who believes his own lies, ensuring that he can't leak his deceit through nervous twitches or self-contradictions. So the brain might have been shaped to keep compromising data away from the conscious processes that govern our interaction with other people. At the same time, it keeps the data around in unconscious processes to prevent the person from getting too far out of touch with reality.
What about the brain itself? You might wonder how scientists could even begin to find the seat of awareness in the cacophony of a hundred billion jabbering neurons. The trick is to see what parts of the brain change when a person's consciousness flips from one experience to another. In one technique, called binocular rivalry, vertical stripes are presented to the left eye, horizontal stripes to the right. The eyes compete for consciousness, and the person sees vertical stripes for a few seconds, then horizontal stripes, and so on.
A low-tech way to experience the effect yourself is to look through a paper tube at a white wall with your right eye and hold your left hand in front of your left eye. After a few seconds, a white hole in your hand should appear, then disappear, then reappear.
Monkeys experience binocular rivalry. They can learn to press a button every time their perception flips, while their brains are impaled with electrodes that record any change in activity. Neuroscientist Nikos Logothetis found that the earliest way stations for visual input in the back of the brain barely budged as the monkeys' consciousness flipped from one state to another. Instead, it was a region that sits further down the information stream and that registers coherent shapes and objects that tracks the monkeys' awareness. Now this doesn't mean that this place on the underside of the brain is the TV screen of consciousness. What it means, according to a theory by Crick and his collaborator Christof Koch, is that consciousness resides only in the "higher" parts of the brain that are connected to circuits for emotion and decision making, just what one would expect from the blackboard metaphor.
WAVES OF BRAIN
CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BRAIN CAN BE TRACKED NOT JUST IN SPACE but also in time. Neuroscientists have long known that consciousness depends on certain frequencies of oscillation in the electroencephalograph (EEG). These brain waves consist of loops of activation between the cortex (the wrinkled surface of the brain) and the thalamus (the cluster of hubs at the center that serve as input-output relay stations). Large, slow, regular waves signal a coma, anesthesia or a dreamless sleep; smaller, faster, spikier ones correspond to being awake and alert. These waves are not like the useless hum from a noisy appliance but may allow consciousness to do its job in the brain. They may bind the activity in far-flung regions (one for color, another for shape, a third for motion) into a coherent conscious experience, a bit like radio transmitters and receivers tuned to the same frequency. Sure enough, when two patterns compete for awareness in a binocular-rivalry display, the neurons representing the eye that is "winning" the competition oscillate in synchrony, while the ones representing the eye that is suppressed fall out of synch.
So neuroscientists are well on the way to identifying the neural correlates of consciousness, a part of the Easy Problem. But what about explaining how these events actually cause consciousness in the sense of inner experience--the Hard Problem?
TACKLING THE HARD PROBLEM
TO APPRECIATE THE HARDNESS OF THE HARD PROBLEM, CONSIDER how you could ever know whether you see colors the same way that I do. Sure, you and I both call grass green, but perhaps you see grass as having the color that I would describe, if I were in your shoes, as purple. Or ponder whether there could be a true zombie--a being who acts just like you or me but in whom there is no self actually feeling anything. This was the crux of a Star Trek plot in which officials wanted to reverse-engineer Lieut. Commander Data, and a furious debate erupted as to whether this was merely dismantling a machine or snuffing out a sentient life.
No one knows what to do with the Hard Problem. Some people may see it as an opening to sneak the soul back in, but this just relabels the mystery of "consciousness" as the mystery of "the soul"--a word game that provides no insight.
Many philosophers, like Daniel Dennett, deny that the Hard Problem exists at all. Speculating about zombies and inverted colors is a waste of time, they say, because nothing could ever settle the issue one way or another. Anything you could do to understand consciousness--like finding out what wavelengths make people see green or how similar they say it is to blue, or what emotions they associate with it--boils down to information processing in the brain and thus gets sucked back into the Easy Problem, leaving nothing else to explain. Most people react to this argument with incredulity because it seems to deny the ultimate undeniable fact: our own experience.
The most popular attitude to the Hard Problem among neuroscientists is that it remains unsolved for now but will eventually succumb to research that chips away at the Easy Problem. Others are skeptical about this cheery optimism because none of the inroads into the Easy Problem brings a solution to the Hard Problem even a bit closer. Identifying awareness with brain physiology, they say, is a kind of "meat chauvinism" that would dogmatically deny consciousness to Lieut. Commander Data just because he doesn't have the soft tissue of a human brain. Identifying it with information processing would go too far in the other direction and grant a simple consciousness to thermostats and calculators--a leap that most people find hard to stomach. Some mavericks, like the mathematician Roger Penrose, suggest the answer might someday be found in quantum mechanics. But to my ear, this amounts to the feeling that quantum mechanics sure is weird, and consciousness sure is weird, so maybe quantum mechanics can explain consciousness.
And then there is the theory put forward by philosopher Colin McGinn that our vertigo when pondering the Hard Problem is itself a quirk of our brains. The brain is a product of evolution, and just as animal brains have their limitations, we have ours. Our brains can't hold a hundred numbers in memory, can't visualize seven-dimensional space and perhaps can't intuitively grasp why neural information processing observed from the outside should give rise to subjective experience on the inside. This is where I place my bet, though I admit that the theory could be demolished when an unborn genius--a Darwin or Einstein of consciousness--comes up with a flabbergasting new idea that suddenly makes it all clear to us.
Whatever the solutions to the Easy and Hard problems turn out to be, few scientists doubt that they will locate consciousness in the activity of the brain. For many nonscientists, this is a terrifying prospect. Not only does it strangle the hope that we might survive the death of our bodies, but it also seems to undermine the notion that we are free agents responsible for our choices--not just in this lifetime but also in a life to come. In his millennial essay "Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died," Tom Wolfe worried that when science has killed the soul, "the lurid carnival that will ensue may make the phrase 'the total eclipse of all values' seem tame."
TOWARD A NEW MORALITY
MY OWN VIEW IS THAT THIS IS backward: the biology of consciousness offers a sounder basis for morality than the unprovable dogma of an immortal soul. It's not just that an understanding of the physiology of consciousness will reduce human suffering through new treatments for pain and depression. That understanding can also force us to recognize the interests of other beings--the core of morality.
As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty. Yet once we realize that our own consciousness is a product of our brains and that other people have brains like ours, a denial of other people's sentience becomes ludicrous. "Hath not a Jew eyes?" asked Shylock. Today the question is more pointed: Hath not a Jew--or an Arab, or an African, or a baby, or a dog--a cerebral cortex and a thalamus? The undeniable fact that we are all made of the same neural flesh makes it impossible to deny our common capacity to suffer.
And when you think about it, the doctrine of a life-to-come is not such an uplifting idea after all because it necessarily devalues life on earth. Just remember the most famous people in recent memory who acted in expectation of a reward in the hereafter: the conspirators who hijacked the airliners on 9/11.
Think, too, about why we sometimes remind ourselves that "life is short." It is an impetus to extend a gesture of affection to a loved one, to bury the hatchet in a pointless dispute, to use time productively rather than squander it. I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift.
Steven Pinker is Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard and the author of The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate
The theory of intelligent design in much more intelligent than the big bang theory. Of course it's all theory, and I won't suggest that intelligent design is correct. But, I'm much more willing to invest my chips in the idea that something greater than myself created us as opposed to dumb luck.
The big bang doesn't rule out the existence of God. Before the bang happens we don't have any projections, we don't know what's going on. It leaves the possibility, for the people wanting to belive, of a God snapping his fingers and starting the big bang, "starting" the universe.
ever hear of sri lanka? Or how about those people in japan with the train station gassing?
In japan it was a religious group, inspired by some buddhism, but in no way buddhist. wikipedia
I think I agree with Exodus on Buddhism, it's looks like a really laid back religion.
In college I took basic psychology an introduction and psycolinguistics, both my teachers and text books said it was indeed science. It could also be concluded from all the scientific articles in respected scientific magazines. I also did scientific experiments.
The vast majority of the proponents of psychology would (and should) consider it a science.
If you are a monist and believe all our mental faculties and extent of our consciousness to be determined by the physical 'matter' (all be it still allowing for consciousness as an emergent property) of our minds/brain chemistry etc then ultimately psychology is every bit as much a science as biology is.
If you are a dualist and retain the notion that our consciousness and 'essence' is distinct from and not contingent upon corporeal matter then psychology will not be seen as a science. This perspective is now extremely rare amongst the psychological community though.
The main issue why people take truck with psychology being a science stems from the fact that as a discipline it is still in its relative infancy. There are therefore massive areas of psychological investigation which are purely speculative and thereby lend themselves more to the interpretative methodolgy of the social sciences than the empirical approach of the natural sciences.
Comments
No, I don't. Neither does any psychologist today. But if we are going to talk about the past and past experiences to criticize, note that Christianity has a very very dark background.
Did you read my post? Where did I said you have one?
And yes, I've read your link I respectfully disagree.
naděje umírá poslední
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
I wonder about that too.
naděje umírá poslední
Neither do I think that homosexuals have any mental disorders. If you do not agree with the link it's your business. I'm not saying that what the link said is something carved on stone (as well as for any other information that you might base your "ideas" with). Again, I only posted that to make a point. And I will have to remind you that it is something that I also learned in school.
Again my mistake about what I said. I read your post wrong. What you originally wrote saying, "that doesn't mean he is right." I mistakenly read for "he was probably right." But I stick to psychology not being considered a science. If you want I will provide you with more information. At any rate, it really doesn't matter to me.
As for christianity having a dark dark past, yes I am fully aware. But that topic doesn't interest me because I don't follow christianity. I think I've made mention of that before in here.
Islam..lol
Blasphemy probably
I dont know of any murderin Buddhists...Buddhists dont blow their own shit up for Buddha do they? They just smoke a bowl and let it be..
ever hear of sri lanka? Or how about those people in japan with the train station gassing?
I used to devalue psychology. But then I healed numerous disorders, and when I got to the bottom of them, I found that the basic psychological principles I once disbelieved were true. But yes, there is a lot of misunderstanding and misuse, outside of and within the field of psychology.
http://www.myspace.com/illuminatta
Rhinocerous Surprise '08!!!
"I would rather die on my feet than to live on my knees."
Emiliano Zapata
just as a dead body is not by itself proof of murder, 'all around us' is not proof of anything by itself. it just exists.
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
I'll take your side here Jam.
The theory of intelligent design in much more intelligent than the big bang theory. Of course it's all theory, and I won't suggest that intelligent design is correct. But, I'm much more willing to invest my chips in the idea that something greater than myself created us as opposed to dumb luck.
I'm not a religious person, but something tells me there's something going on that we'll most likely never be able to comprehend.
"What I lack in decorum, I make up for with an absence of tact."
Camden 5-28-06
Washington, D.C. 6-22-08
lol Are you trying to tell me that God is playing a really nasty joke on us?
"What I lack in decorum, I make up for with an absence of tact."
Camden 5-28-06
Washington, D.C. 6-22-08
Alright, I'll laugh to that.
"What I lack in decorum, I make up for with an absence of tact."
Camden 5-28-06
Washington, D.C. 6-22-08
hmm something that is non existent vs dumb luck. not much of a choice really is it?
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
Well... No one has really disproved either theory. But I do choose to rank them in terms of more likely at the top, and less likely towards the bottom.
But hence the, "Of course it's all theory, and I won't suggest that intelligent design is correct," remark.
"What I lack in decorum, I make up for with an absence of tact."
Camden 5-28-06
Washington, D.C. 6-22-08
and hence my not much of a choice really comment.
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
lol I'm totally fine with ending it there.
"What I lack in decorum, I make up for with an absence of tact."
Camden 5-28-06
Washington, D.C. 6-22-08
ah but where did it begin?
a truce perhaps.
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
I don't even think it started. I've wasted several hours on here trying to watch basketball while talking about nothing essentially. No time to start now!
"What I lack in decorum, I make up for with an absence of tact."
Camden 5-28-06
Washington, D.C. 6-22-08
must be an exciting b ball game then.
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
No. No, you're wrong again.
"What I lack in decorum, I make up for with an absence of tact."
Camden 5-28-06
Washington, D.C. 6-22-08
No problem, apology excepted.
In college I took basic psychology an introduction and psycolinguistics, both my teachers and text books said it was indeed science. It could also be concluded from all the scientific articles in respected scientific magazines. I also did scientific experiments.
naděje umírá poslední
Interesting read.
The young women had survived the car crash, after a fashion. In the five months since parts of her brain had been crushed, she could open her eyes but didn't respond to sights, sounds or jabs. In the jargon of neurology, she was judged to be in a persistent vegetative state. In crueler everyday language, she was a vegetable.
So picture the astonishment of British and Belgian scientists as they scanned her brain using a kind of MRI that detects blood flow to active parts of the brain. When they recited sentences, the parts involved in language lit up. When they asked her to imagine visiting the rooms of her house, the parts involved in navigating space and recognizing places ramped up. And when they asked her to imagine playing tennis, the regions that trigger motion joined in. Indeed, her scans were barely different from those of healthy volunteers. The woman, it appears, had glimmerings of consciousness.
Try to comprehend what it is like to be that woman. Do you appreciate the words and caresses of your distraught family while racked with frustration at your inability to reassure them that they are getting through? Or do you drift in a haze, springing to life with a concrete thought when a voice prods you, only to slip back into blankness? If we could experience this existence, would we prefer it to death? And if these questions have answers, would they change our policies toward unresponsive patients--making the Terri Schiavo case look like child's play?
The report of this unusual case last September was just the latest shock from a bracing new field, the science of consciousness. Questions once confined to theological speculations and late-night dorm-room bull sessions are now at the forefront of cognitive neuroscience. With some problems, a modicum of consensus has taken shape. With others, the puzzlement is so deep that they may never be resolved. Some of our deepest convictions about what it means to be human have been shaken.
It shouldn't be surprising that research on consciousness is alternately exhilarating and disturbing. No other topic is like it. As René Descartes noted, our own consciousness is the most indubitable thing there is. The major religions locate it in a soul that survives the body's death to receive its just deserts or to meld into a global mind. For each of us, consciousness is life itself, the reason Woody Allen said, "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying." And the conviction that other people can suffer and flourish as each of us does is the essence of empathy and the foundation of morality.
To make scientific headway in a topic as tangled as consciousness, it helps to clear away some red herrings. Consciousness surely does not depend on language. Babies, many animals and patients robbed of speech by brain damage are not insensate robots; they have reactions like ours that indicate that someone's home. Nor can consciousness be equated with self-awareness. At times we have all lost ourselves in music, exercise or sensual pleasure, but that is different from being knocked out cold.
THE "EASY" AND "HARD" PROBLEMS
WHAT REMAINS IS NOT ONE PROBLEM ABOUT CONSCIOUSNESS BUT two, which the philosopher David Chalmers has dubbed the Easy Problem and the Hard Problem. Calling the first one easy is an in-joke: it is easy in the sense that curing cancer or sending someone to Mars is easy. That is, scientists more or less know what to look for, and with enough brainpower and funding, they would probably crack it in this century.
What exactly is the Easy Problem? It's the one that Freud made famous, the difference between conscious and unconscious thoughts. Some kinds of information in the brain--such as the surfaces in front of you, your daydreams, your plans for the day, your pleasures and peeves--are conscious. You can ponder them, discuss them and let them guide your behavior. Other kinds, like the control of your heart rate, the rules that order the words as you speak and the sequence of muscle contractions that allow you to hold a pencil, are unconscious. They must be in the brain somewhere because you couldn't walk and talk and see without them, but they are sealed off from your planning and reasoning circuits, and you can't say a thing about them.
The Easy Problem, then, is to distinguish conscious from unconscious mental computation, identify its correlates in the brain and explain why it evolved.
The Hard Problem, on the other hand, is why it feels like something to have a conscious process going on in one's head--why there is first-person, subjective experience. Not only does a green thing look different from a red thing, remind us of other green things and inspire us to say, "That's green" (the Easy Problem), but it also actually looks green: it produces an experience of sheer greenness that isn't reducible to anything else. As Louis Armstrong said in response to a request to define jazz, "When you got to ask what it is, you never get to know."
The Hard Problem is explaining how subjective experience arises from neural computation. The problem is hard because no one knows what a solution might look like or even whether it is a genuine scientific problem in the first place. And not surprisingly, everyone agrees that the hard problem (if it is a problem) remains a mystery.
Although neither problem has been solved, neuroscientists agree on many features of both of them, and the feature they find least controversial is the one that many people outside the field find the most shocking. Francis Crick called it "the astonishing hypothesis"--the idea that our thoughts, sensations, joys and aches consist entirely of physiological activity in the tissues of the brain. Consciousness does not reside in an ethereal soul that uses the brain like a PDA; consciousness is the activity of the brain.
THE BRAIN AS MACHINE
SCIENTISTS HAVE EXORCISED THE GHOST FROM THE MACHINE NOT because they are mechanistic killjoys but because they have amassed evidence that every aspect of consciousness can be tied to the brain. Using functional MRI, cognitive neuroscientists can almost read people's thoughts from the blood flow in their brains. They can tell, for instance, whether a person is thinking about a face or a place or whether a picture the person is looking at is of a bottle or a shoe.
And consciousness can be pushed around by physical manipulations. Electrical stimulation of the brain during surgery can cause a person to have hallucinations that are indistinguishable from reality, such as a song playing in the room or a childhood birthday party. Chemicals that affect the brain, from caffeine and alcohol to Prozac and LSD, can profoundly alter how people think, feel and see. Surgery that severs the corpus callosum, separating the two hemispheres (a treatment for epilepsy), spawns two consciousnesses within the same skull, as if the soul could be cleaved in two with a knife.
And when the physiological activity of the brain ceases, as far as anyone can tell the person's consciousness goes out of existence. Attempts to contact the souls of the dead (a pursuit of serious scientists a century ago) turned up only cheap magic tricks, and near death experiences are not the eyewitness reports of a soul parting company from the body but symptoms of oxygen starvation in the eyes and brain. In September, a team of Swiss neuroscientists reported that they could turn out-of-body experiences on and off by stimulating the part of the brain in which vision and bodily sensations converge.
THE ILLUSION OF CONTROL
ANOTHER STARTLING CONCLUSION FROM the science of consciousness is that the intuitive feeling we have that there's an executive "I" that sits in a control room of our brain, scanning the screens of the senses and pushing the buttons of the muscles, is an illusion. Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along.
Take the famous cognitive-dissonance experiments. When an experimenter got people to endure electric shocks in a sham experiment on learning, those who were given a good rationale ("It will help scientists understand learning") rated the shocks as more painful than the ones given a feeble rationale ("We're curious.") Presumably, it's because the second group would have felt foolish to have suffered for no good reason. Yet when these people were asked why they agreed to be shocked, they offered bogus reasons of their own in all sincerity, like "I used to mess around with radios and got used to electric shocks."
It's not only decisions in sketchy circumstances that get rationalized but also the texture of our immediate experience. We all feel we are conscious of a rich and detailed world in front of our eyes. Yet outside the dead center of our gaze, vision is amazingly coarse. Just try holding your hand a few inches from your line of sight and counting your fingers. And if someone removed and reinserted an object every time you blinked (which experimenters can simulate by flashing two pictures in rapid sequence), you would be hard pressed to notice the change. Ordinarily, our eyes flit from place to place, alighting on whichever object needs our attention on a need-to-know basis. This fools us into thinking that wall-to-wall detail was there all along--an example of how we overestimate the scope and power of our own consciousness.
Our authorship of voluntary actions can also be an illusion, the result of noticing a correlation between what we decide and how our bodies move. The psychologist Dan Wegner studied the party game in which a subject is seated in front of a mirror while someone behind him extends his arms under the subject's armpits and moves his arms around, making it look as if the subject is moving his own arms. If the subject hears a tape telling the person behind him how to move (wave, touch the subject's nose and so on), he feels as if he is actually in command of the arms.
The brain's spin doctoring is displayed even more dramatically in neurological conditions in which the healthy parts of the brain explain away the foibles of the damaged parts (which are invisible to the self because they are part of the self). A patient who fails to experience a visceral click of recognition when he sees his wife but who acknowledges that she looks and acts just like her deduces that she is an amazingly well-trained impostor. A patient who believes he is at home and is shown the hospital elevator says without missing a beat, "You wouldn't believe what it cost us to have that installed."
Why does consciousness exist at all, at least in the Easy Problem sense in which some kinds of information are accessible and others hidden? One reason is information overload. Just as a person can be overwhelmed today by the gusher of data coming in from electronic media, decision circuits inside the brain would be swamped if every curlicue and muscle twitch that was registered somewhere in the brain were constantly being delivered to them. Instead, our working memory and spotlight of attention receive executive summaries of the events and states that are most relevant to updating an understanding of the world and figuring out what to do next. The cognitive psychologist Bernard Baars likens consciousness to a global blackboard on which brain processes post their results and monitor the results of the others.
BELIEVING OUR OWN LIES
A SECOND REASON THAT INFORMATION MAY BE SEALED OFF FROM consciousness is strategic. Evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers has noted that people have a motive to sell themselves as beneficent, rational, competent agents. The best propagandist is the one who believes his own lies, ensuring that he can't leak his deceit through nervous twitches or self-contradictions. So the brain might have been shaped to keep compromising data away from the conscious processes that govern our interaction with other people. At the same time, it keeps the data around in unconscious processes to prevent the person from getting too far out of touch with reality.
What about the brain itself? You might wonder how scientists could even begin to find the seat of awareness in the cacophony of a hundred billion jabbering neurons. The trick is to see what parts of the brain change when a person's consciousness flips from one experience to another. In one technique, called binocular rivalry, vertical stripes are presented to the left eye, horizontal stripes to the right. The eyes compete for consciousness, and the person sees vertical stripes for a few seconds, then horizontal stripes, and so on.
A low-tech way to experience the effect yourself is to look through a paper tube at a white wall with your right eye and hold your left hand in front of your left eye. After a few seconds, a white hole in your hand should appear, then disappear, then reappear.
naděje umírá poslední
WAVES OF BRAIN
CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BRAIN CAN BE TRACKED NOT JUST IN SPACE but also in time. Neuroscientists have long known that consciousness depends on certain frequencies of oscillation in the electroencephalograph (EEG). These brain waves consist of loops of activation between the cortex (the wrinkled surface of the brain) and the thalamus (the cluster of hubs at the center that serve as input-output relay stations). Large, slow, regular waves signal a coma, anesthesia or a dreamless sleep; smaller, faster, spikier ones correspond to being awake and alert. These waves are not like the useless hum from a noisy appliance but may allow consciousness to do its job in the brain. They may bind the activity in far-flung regions (one for color, another for shape, a third for motion) into a coherent conscious experience, a bit like radio transmitters and receivers tuned to the same frequency. Sure enough, when two patterns compete for awareness in a binocular-rivalry display, the neurons representing the eye that is "winning" the competition oscillate in synchrony, while the ones representing the eye that is suppressed fall out of synch.
So neuroscientists are well on the way to identifying the neural correlates of consciousness, a part of the Easy Problem. But what about explaining how these events actually cause consciousness in the sense of inner experience--the Hard Problem?
TACKLING THE HARD PROBLEM
TO APPRECIATE THE HARDNESS OF THE HARD PROBLEM, CONSIDER how you could ever know whether you see colors the same way that I do. Sure, you and I both call grass green, but perhaps you see grass as having the color that I would describe, if I were in your shoes, as purple. Or ponder whether there could be a true zombie--a being who acts just like you or me but in whom there is no self actually feeling anything. This was the crux of a Star Trek plot in which officials wanted to reverse-engineer Lieut. Commander Data, and a furious debate erupted as to whether this was merely dismantling a machine or snuffing out a sentient life.
No one knows what to do with the Hard Problem. Some people may see it as an opening to sneak the soul back in, but this just relabels the mystery of "consciousness" as the mystery of "the soul"--a word game that provides no insight.
Many philosophers, like Daniel Dennett, deny that the Hard Problem exists at all. Speculating about zombies and inverted colors is a waste of time, they say, because nothing could ever settle the issue one way or another. Anything you could do to understand consciousness--like finding out what wavelengths make people see green or how similar they say it is to blue, or what emotions they associate with it--boils down to information processing in the brain and thus gets sucked back into the Easy Problem, leaving nothing else to explain. Most people react to this argument with incredulity because it seems to deny the ultimate undeniable fact: our own experience.
The most popular attitude to the Hard Problem among neuroscientists is that it remains unsolved for now but will eventually succumb to research that chips away at the Easy Problem. Others are skeptical about this cheery optimism because none of the inroads into the Easy Problem brings a solution to the Hard Problem even a bit closer. Identifying awareness with brain physiology, they say, is a kind of "meat chauvinism" that would dogmatically deny consciousness to Lieut. Commander Data just because he doesn't have the soft tissue of a human brain. Identifying it with information processing would go too far in the other direction and grant a simple consciousness to thermostats and calculators--a leap that most people find hard to stomach. Some mavericks, like the mathematician Roger Penrose, suggest the answer might someday be found in quantum mechanics. But to my ear, this amounts to the feeling that quantum mechanics sure is weird, and consciousness sure is weird, so maybe quantum mechanics can explain consciousness.
And then there is the theory put forward by philosopher Colin McGinn that our vertigo when pondering the Hard Problem is itself a quirk of our brains. The brain is a product of evolution, and just as animal brains have their limitations, we have ours. Our brains can't hold a hundred numbers in memory, can't visualize seven-dimensional space and perhaps can't intuitively grasp why neural information processing observed from the outside should give rise to subjective experience on the inside. This is where I place my bet, though I admit that the theory could be demolished when an unborn genius--a Darwin or Einstein of consciousness--comes up with a flabbergasting new idea that suddenly makes it all clear to us.
Whatever the solutions to the Easy and Hard problems turn out to be, few scientists doubt that they will locate consciousness in the activity of the brain. For many nonscientists, this is a terrifying prospect. Not only does it strangle the hope that we might survive the death of our bodies, but it also seems to undermine the notion that we are free agents responsible for our choices--not just in this lifetime but also in a life to come. In his millennial essay "Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died," Tom Wolfe worried that when science has killed the soul, "the lurid carnival that will ensue may make the phrase 'the total eclipse of all values' seem tame."
TOWARD A NEW MORALITY
MY OWN VIEW IS THAT THIS IS backward: the biology of consciousness offers a sounder basis for morality than the unprovable dogma of an immortal soul. It's not just that an understanding of the physiology of consciousness will reduce human suffering through new treatments for pain and depression. That understanding can also force us to recognize the interests of other beings--the core of morality.
As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty. Yet once we realize that our own consciousness is a product of our brains and that other people have brains like ours, a denial of other people's sentience becomes ludicrous. "Hath not a Jew eyes?" asked Shylock. Today the question is more pointed: Hath not a Jew--or an Arab, or an African, or a baby, or a dog--a cerebral cortex and a thalamus? The undeniable fact that we are all made of the same neural flesh makes it impossible to deny our common capacity to suffer.
And when you think about it, the doctrine of a life-to-come is not such an uplifting idea after all because it necessarily devalues life on earth. Just remember the most famous people in recent memory who acted in expectation of a reward in the hereafter: the conspirators who hijacked the airliners on 9/11.
Think, too, about why we sometimes remind ourselves that "life is short." It is an impetus to extend a gesture of affection to a loved one, to bury the hatchet in a pointless dispute, to use time productively rather than squander it. I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift.
Steven Pinker is Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard and the author of The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate
naděje umírá poslední
The big bang doesn't rule out the existence of God. Before the bang happens we don't have any projections, we don't know what's going on. It leaves the possibility, for the people wanting to belive, of a God snapping his fingers and starting the big bang, "starting" the universe.
In japan it was a religious group, inspired by some buddhism, but in no way buddhist. wikipedia
I think I agree with Exodus on Buddhism, it's looks like a really laid back religion.
The vast majority of the proponents of psychology would (and should) consider it a science.
If you are a monist and believe all our mental faculties and extent of our consciousness to be determined by the physical 'matter' (all be it still allowing for consciousness as an emergent property) of our minds/brain chemistry etc then ultimately psychology is every bit as much a science as biology is.
If you are a dualist and retain the notion that our consciousness and 'essence' is distinct from and not contingent upon corporeal matter then psychology will not be seen as a science. This perspective is now extremely rare amongst the psychological community though.
The main issue why people take truck with psychology being a science stems from the fact that as a discipline it is still in its relative infancy. There are therefore massive areas of psychological investigation which are purely speculative and thereby lend themselves more to the interpretative methodolgy of the social sciences than the empirical approach of the natural sciences.