Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
¡Oh! Pues si no me entienden no es maravilla que mis sentencias sean tenidas por disparates.
User ID: 1525
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
7mo ago
That's nothing new, Heraclitus already claimed that order can emerge out of chaos, and Thomas Aquinas solved the problem for Christianity. This is not Darwin's contribution. As I said, what he contributed was the idea that nature is bound by economic laws, which confirms the prejudices of our times. And he did so by proposing a tautologic explanation that explains nothing at all.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
7mo ago
Well, they may evolve heavy fur or they may go extinct, we can't predict that. Otherwise it would be lamarckism, not darwinism. Unless we could control the environment's conditions, on which case it wouldn't be natural selection but human selection. The tautology is that if dogs survive is because they had traits that allowed him to survive, and if they didn't survive then they didn't have them. So basically no matter the circumstances, Natural Selection is true because it does not explain anything.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
7mo ago
5000 years ago people knew that short haired cats had short haired offspring. Entire empires and civilizations were created out of the concept of inheritance. What people lacked was the theory of genes, but Darwin lacked that as well. Darwin does not explain at all why detrimental traits are passed down, if we were to prove then Darwin's theory would be false. But we cannot prove that things that don't exist are preserved. If something exists then it is 1. Benefitial, 2. Bening, or 3. Extinted/In process of disappearing.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
7mo ago
I mean, yes, but I can't share your conclusion. There's no depth to a tautology. In every conceivable universe everything that has 2 legs doesn't have 3 legs. Do you consider this deep? It is no explanation at all. Truths that are universally true are usually just truisms.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
7mo ago
I think you still fail to understand what a tautology is. Natural Selection does not explain the why of anything. Why do we see creatures with fins? Because they have survived. In other words, we see them because they are alive. What does this explain? You are exactly at the same point where you started. A tautology is, by definition, not an useful explanation. We didn't need to wait for Darwin to know that we can preserve and multiply creatures with desirable characteristics by keeping them alive and making them breed. The "why" of this is explained by genetics, not by Darwin's theory.
Now, how can we know that Natural Selection "selects" something? Because it exists. In your example, all this tells us is that people with sickle cells are not dead. Again, Natural Selection doesn't help us at all, we need genetics to understand why and how that happens. It's not true that we need Darwin's theory to notice atypical populations, this is just basic reasoning, and we certainly didn't wait for Darwin to start using it. Compare this to Lamarck's theory. His theory is not correct, ot least hasn't been proven, but it is not tautological because it explains how species acquire new traits, by a mechanism he called "inheritance of acquired traits", meaning that benefitial traits acquired by the parents are inherited by the offspring. So we could say, for instance, that if a car is blue it is because it somehow changed its DNA to be blue when it realized it would be faster, and then genetically passed on this knowledge. All that Darwin could say here is that where there are blue cars red cars did not survive.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
7mo ago
You are right, if we look hard enough we can find a tautology at the root of all human knowledge, but they are generally useful to study a share of reality. 2+2=4 may mean the same as 4=4, but by changing the terms you are providing new information: That this operation may be written differently. Pragmatically we can use this to explain many things. But when Darwin says that traits that favor the preservation of the species are preserved, no new information is gained. It describes an aspect of reality, but in terms that don't imply anything beyond themselves. Saying that everything that is red is not green accurately describes reality as well, but pragmatically fails at explaining anything.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
7mo ago
What do you mean by self filter? I believe I've only claimed that Darwin's theory is a tautology. For the rest, depends on what you mean by "fine". Should we burn Darwin's books? I guess not. Should we continue believing that the theory of Natural Selection has any explanatory value? Definitely not.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
7mo ago
It is not a metaphor, it's an analogy. And you don't get the point. Of course we can see "natural selection in action", because it is true. The problem is that it cannot be false, so literally everything is proof that natural selection is true. Therefore it explains nothing and no new knowledge is won by this. Watching the car being painted red may be a good enough explanation, but watching the genes of the benefitial traits pass from one generation to the other doesn't change that Darwin's definition of benefitial traits is tautological.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
7mo ago
Of course, you can also see that the car is red with thousands of studies, and in real time...
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
7mo ago
Well, I'm at a bit of a loss here. What do you think engineering is if not the application of natural sciences? It's not the fairy-loving-godmother that engineers things. Claude Bernard would vivisect you for saying that doctors are not scientists, and then Kraepelin and Jaspers would electroshock some sense into your computer for saying psychiatrists are not scientists. Psychopathology could be a bening illusion, but the fact that believing in something that does not exist doesn't hurt anyone is no argument to hold that belief, especially when we can be just as effective without it as we are now.
For the rest, last time I checked the preferred psychotherapies were third wave behavioral therapies like Behavioral Activation and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Even if in practice they apply cognitive techniques, they ultimately are followers of Skinner and therefore assert that neither the mind nor cognitive mechanisms exist. They also sustain that depression is not a brain problem but a behavioral one, and many (like Marino Perez Alvarez) go as far as to question the relevance of psychopathology. I don't particularly adhere to this school of thought but I do agree with their conclusion regarding psychopathology.
Lastly, I don't assert the impossibility of unpacking the blackbox of human cognition. What I said is that we are yet to find definitive proof that it is possible, so it's not time to make claims about what humans are programmed to do or not to do quite yet. I would also say, paraphrasing an scholia by Nicolás Gómez Dávila, that if the universe were so artless as to be comprehensible to the human brain, then it would be immeasurably and unbearably boring, and we would have legitimate reason to feel disappointed. It's hilarious that everytime humankind creates some wacky artifice it believes it holds the key to understanding the universe. It happened with fire, writing, mechanical watches, and now computers, and so shall it be per saecula saeculorum. I guess there are computers everywhere for those with the eyes to see.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
7mo ago
Of course animal brains are special, the fact that they can be simulated doesn't make them less so. The fact that you can take a picture of The Garden of Earthly Delights does not make it any less special. If you really want to be a nerd then no, nothing is made of electrons and quarks. In fact, nothing is made out of nothing and nothing exists at all, and if an atomic bomb were to explode right here beneath my chair nothing would change and everything would remain exactly where it is and where it has always been.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
7mo ago
I don't like this explanation because it supposes a high amount of consciousness on the "elite"'s side, and I don't think that the experts really know what they are doing. In fact, I believe nobody knows, and that's why we have experts in the first place. You can be very good at something or very knowledageable in a specific subject, but what does that really mean? Isn't it all vain in the end? The truth is that people do things because there's nothing better to do, and sitting under a tree to medidate for 75 years isn't really an option for most of us.
For me the best explanation is that we are all very confused and very prone to deceive ourselves, so stumbling upon the correct answer is a matter of luck. And any answer that does not take this confusion into account is cheap and probably false, but it's also easier to ellaborate and disseminate, so opinions held by the masses are usually truisms or gross misunderstandings. It's also quite common that people are intelligent for something and dumb for something else, it happens all the time. I've seen very intelligent people do the following: They like X. One day, X does Y and they remain silent. The next day X's opponent does Y, and they start loudly criticizing X's opponen for Y, without noticing the contradiction. We cannot understimate people's ability to deceive themselves.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
7mo ago
I don't understand why you keep trying to defend psychiatry when nobody's attacking it. I guess you wrote your answer as you read the text because you literally quoted my saying that psychiatry is legitimate. Psychiatry may be quircky and not as epistemologically sound as other branches of medicine, but it is still medicine, still scientific, and still helpful. I would say though that psychopathology is a placeholder. I understand that you have a pragmatic point of view, and you really should. This doesn't really change anything for psychiatrists, and they don't need to worry about this, so I thank you for taking the time to engage in this discussion. But should we really be satisfied by having a placeholder instead of a psychopathology? I don't know if you agree that your belief that depression is a brain disease is just that, a belief, but I believe that's the case because the evidence I've seen is not conclusive. Yes, it's impossible to be depressed without having a brain and depression is something that exists and changes your brain, but here is when it's important to think what comes first. We can agree that treating people with depression should be our first and foremost concern regardless of existential questions, but why stop at that? Why not try to understand what's going on? This shouldn't change the attention and the care we give to depressed people, but it can help us think more acurately about the problem and who knows, maybe even come up with more effective solutions in the future.
Furthermore, I think that believing that psychopathology is something different than a placeholder opens room for all sorts of abuses. Psychiatrists are scientists and know the limitations of their discipline (or at least they should), but psychopathology is being used in all sorts of contexts where it has no business whatsoever, and this is in part because it is an epistemologically bankrrupt concept. Just as a currency undergoes inflation and looses value, concepts that are no rigorous enough are more likely to be overused. Psychologists are the worst offenders here, or maybe it's just my perception because I'm a psychologist myself and of course I know many people in my profession, so I'm surrounded by people who very loudily make all sorts of claims. The best psychologists I know are aware that psychopathology is a placeholder, but most don't or ignore that fact. And as psychologists feel insecure about the scientific status of their discipline they overrely on psychopathology to sell their services.
There is something very funny about the history of psychology, because as you must know computers where made with the specific objective to imitate human thought. But then in the 70's a bunch of psychologists saw computers and were astonished at how much they reasembled human thought, and came to the conclusion that the human mind works like a computer. I'm personally against the expression "Artificial Intelligence" because computers are neither intelligent nor dumb. They do what they are programed to do. An animal, for instance, can be intelligent or dumb because it is directly involved in the outcome of its decissions, and they can be wrong or right. Computers are never wrong, therefore they lack the ability to be implied in their decissions. So even if LLMs resemble human speech, we would be wrong to believe that speaking to an LLM is the same as speaking to a person. In that sense, just the fact that we can treat depression as a brain disease does not mean that it is a brain disease. This is only technically correct because it ignores the problem by fixing over it.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
7mo ago
I don't know if that is a praise of LLMs or an insult to my writing, but I do have to say that no LLM was used here. I did use a translator for some words and expressions because English is not my native language, and I'm aware that using "In conclusion" at the end is standard LLM style, I was aware of that while writing it, but I had to stop somewhere and I was too lazy to come up with something better. However, I think this is evidently not written by an LLM because I make some very bold and specific references, like Descartes' pitches of water. Of course an LLM could write that but you'd have to give it a very specific and long prompt, at which point it's just easier and faster to write it yourself.
Now, I don't think psychiatry fails at anything because its raison d'être is to treat people with mental problems, and it has a significant degree of success at that. It's certainly not perfect but it's way better than it was a hundred years ago and it keeps improving. For the rest, I belive that changing psychiatrists for other professions won't help us understand insanity any better, but it is true that modern society has a tendency to overanalize individuals and in doing so it somewhat justifies morally unaceptable behavior. Psychology is the worst offender here.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
7mo ago
Yes, I agree. But I think that good psychiatry is close to what another person on this thread called "engineering". I don't think there will be much breakthroughs in psychopathology in the future, because as you say it is a non-sequitur. What we can do is give people with... mental problems? the best treatment we can, and in that sense thinking of insanity as an illness has dramatically improved conditions for them. For me the problem is that if we continue creating effective treatments without knowing what we are treating we open up Pandora's box, and who knows what will be considered a disease in the future. This is the characteristic trait of modern society: It falls prey to its own effectiveness.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
7mo ago
Yes, but this does not change the fact that psychopathology does not exist. Of course social dysfunction is a relevant criteria to select the people who will receive psychiatric treatment, but would you say that criminals are all mentally ill? Certainly not.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
7mo ago
Firstly, I don't understand what you are trying to say. I mean, 99.9% of people feel sad at some point in their lives, but is that supposed to make me feel better when I'm sad? The fact that most people have unique opinions doesn't change how I feel, i.e. feelings don't care about your facts. I appreaciate you trying to help but I'd much rather keep being a snowflake and discuss with people on the internets.
Secondly yes, you don't have to understand something to change it, and ultimate causes are a theological issue, not scientific, as Thomas Aquinas divinely demonstrated. The point still stands: Psychopathology does not exist. We do not have a scientific knowledge of mental pathologies. This is an information you won't ever need in your life but people can stop pretending psychopathology exists any time now. On the other hand, if you are content with this and do not feel at least a bit curious about what insanity is and how it works then you are a bore and we don't have anything to speak about.
Lastly, we do know how anaesthesia works, lol. What was that all about? Of course there's no "mechanism", but there is such a thing as anaesthesiology.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
7mo ago
Respectfully, you are missing the point. I agree with what you say, this is why I started by saying this is not an anti-psychiatry post. What I'm saying doesn't change anything in clinical practice. I never said psychiatry doesn't work, quite the contrary. I explicitly say that it exists because it works. I think you have the right mindset by thinking of it more as an engineering practice, you are actually agreeing with me there.
If you think this is just semantics then fair enough, but I do believe the way we speak shapes the way we understand things. This is what it's about, our concept of psychopathology. You mentioned geriatrics, but geriatrics is an epistemologically sound specialization of medicine. What comes first, the loss of muscle mass or aging? In this case we can clearly stablish an object of knowledge even if we can't do anything to stop aging. The same happens with dementia: What comes first, the loss of cognitive function or the proteinopathy? Note that we don't know what causes the proteinopathy, but we do know for sure that Alzheimer's is a brain disease. So I ask again, if depression is a brain disease, then what comes first? Until we can confidently answer that, we can't really say that depression is a "disease like any other". The fact that changing someone's brain is a treatment for depression does not mean anything, because we could also make a carpenter change their profession by messing with their brain, and as I said, both being depressed and being a carpenter change your brain in predictable and observable patterns.
Let's see an example: There's a person who went through a break up and a year after that they still can't get over it, they feel sad all the time, they don't enjoy anything, and they think they won't be able to live without the person they love. Of course this is a problem, of course this person needs help, and thankfully we have the means to thelp them, that's wonderful. But are they sick? Is this because of a problem in their brain? We don't know. Unless we do, on which case you'd have to illustrate. This is a question that nobody is asking because they are busy choosing who gets the zap, as we cannot give psychiatric treatment or psychotherapy to everyone in the world, even though most people culd benefit from it at some point in their lives. But I do believe it is a question worth asking, even if it were only out of curiosity for the human condition.
I never implied this is some sort of forbidden knowledge, and this is what baffles me the most. Even though it is evident that there is no such thing as psychopathology, most people act as if there were. I know this doesn't really change anything but I can't understand it, this is what moved me to make this post. I also never implied psychiatrists are witch-doctors, because even though psychiatry has epistemological issues it is still a legitimate branch of medicine because of the fact that it works. Note that I'm saying that psychopathology does not exist, not that psychiatry does not exist, because it seems as one can exist without the other. I would prescribe you a text by Georges Canguilhem called What is Psychology, it is about psychology but many of the issues he points out are also applicable to psychiatry.
Regarding the blog by Dr. Sisskind, I fail to see how his argument changes anything. He's a psychiatrist (I think?) talking about a working definition of mental illness that serves his profession. If there's anything specific you think is relevant then please point it out. But the article does talk about evolutionary psychology and oh boy do I have something to say about that. I will make a post about it soon, but for now let's just say that it tries to explain something we don't understand using something we understand even less. It is another of those things that I feel like everyone's playing a prank on me by believing it's legitimate. The good thing is I can rest assured knowing that I'll have psychiatrists to take care of me.
I'll end with a fun fact: Psychiatrists are called "shrinks" precisely because they were in love with Freud, or as Chesterton and you pronounce it, Fraud. This is of course a translation issue, and the anglicized version of Freud has long been proved to be a flunk.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
2yr ago
God, yes. That tweet feels like a breath of fresh air among all the "go to therapy" posts.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
2yr ago
But psychology does just that. They take the tools that work and implement them to solve problems. So, they know how to fix problems. What they don't know, is how to understand this problems. As it usually happens with everything, psychology has both good and bad things. The problem is that what good psychology does, is waaay overrated.
Gregor
Fuge, late, tace.
2yr ago
It's definitely dangerous. People are always looking for answers, and there are psychologists out there willing to provide. How to be happy, how to live your life, even the meaning of life. I believe that this whole "go to therapy" thing is just a way of invalidating the other person: "You only say that because you don't do what my psychologist told me it's best, therefore you are irrational, sick, mad, and not to be taken seriously".
And in the end, if you are a jerk, psychology might just not help you. If psychology were a cure for stupidity, then psychologists would be all perfect human beings. My frequent contact with psychologists makes me a firm believer that this is not the case.
I really don't care about spreading my ideas, I wouldn't be in some obscure internet forum if that were the case. I just want to know what other people think, and most struggle to grap the concept of tautology and how it applies to natural selection. I don't see why I'd stop using the term since it is exactly what I mean and there's no better term to express what that. The fact that most people struggle with this goes to show how and why Darwin is so popular in spite of being tautologic, and that's not a fault in my argument. Unless I'm wrong, on which case I'd like to be corrected but that can only happen if I use the correct words to express exactly what I think.
I don't care to come up with an undeniable argument, because people will believe what they want regardless. Look at Richard Dawkins for instance. He stated that even if he saw Jesus Christ descending from a cloud and speaking directly to him, he'd still be an atheist and he would think that there's probably something wrong with his own sanity. There's no such thing as an undeniable argument, and whoever is not convinced by simple evidence won't be conviced at all, no matter how sophisticated the evidence is. I think we can only aspire to invite people to see what we have to say, and those who want to listen will listen and those who don't, won't. We can only convince other people to believe things they already believed in the first place, or things that are vulgar and commonplace.
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