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Dumb Lowtax posted:Oh yeah I don't mean to say that I actually believe any personality disorder to be determined at birth. Just about all non-reflex behaviors are understood to be *both* genetic and environmental. Otherwise childhood abuse wouldn't be a predictor for so many things. Further, it implies they might be reversible. I like to also remind people not to fall for the liberal claim that ALL behavior is socially constructed. That genetically favored behaviors are not real -- as opposed to real yet surmountable with enough education and cognition. None of us can truly think whatever we want in the most open-ended sense. Try overcoming depression through sheer force of will, for instance. It's important to remember that the brain is a fixed machine, kludged together out of parts, and we can see them stand apart when one malfunctions in the presence of drugs or injuries, to very un-intuitive effects. The machine does have hard-wired instincts, just as in animals. Our brains and their independent sub-modules betray a lot of ingrained instincts that can break, that wouldn't break that way if it all our minds did was some pure conceptual mapping of the surrounding environment onto behavior. Even without reading all the strange brain injury stories, anyone can understand that if *all* behavior were socially constructed and arbitrary, we'd be in big trouble. Without gene-induced behaviors we'd all be ripping our own arms off and throwing ourselves down stairs. Everything we do is somewhat genetic. Everything we do is both inborn and not. So the environment might force a behavior disorder on someone at a late age, but when it happens it was always because the genes laid the groundwork for it to be possible in ALL of us in the first place. Groundwork that might not be at all arbitrary but might benefit the gene. Happy Thread has issued a correction as of 10:23 on Jan 19, 2020 |
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Jan 19, 2020 10:09
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| # ? Apr 19, 2024 08:02 |
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Dumb Lowtax posted:I like to also remind people not to fall for the liberal claim that ALL behavior is socially constructed. That genetically favored behaviors are not real -- as opposed to real yet surmountable with enough education and cognition. None of us can truly think whatever we want in the most open-ended sense. Try overcoming depression through sheer force of will, for instance. It's important to remember that the brain is a fixed machine, kludged together out of parts, and we can see them in how they malfunction in very un-intuitive ways in the presence of drugs or injuries. You misunderstand social construction. A bunch of people who claim to be proponents do so too, but still. It needs to be twisted to fit some philosophy of free and equal individuals to get where you accuse it of being. The point is that everything is relational and developing. Things do not exist in and of themselves but only in a web of relations to other things, and as their relations change, they eventually change. As such, every analysis of a thing is a reductive abstraction in some manner, it has to discard a bunch of their real relations and focus on what it considers the most important ones to explain some empirically discovered pattern about them. Biology as a science limits itself to examining relations between biological beings. The biological human being is not the social human being, it's a kind of ape-abstraction of people. Biology would have to become a social science to really begin to analyse human beings as developed in their truly complex social relations. The reason we are concerned about people's behavior in modern society is almost always the social consequences of the behavior, usually complex consequences that are outside the scope of biology altogether. Genetics is just a part of some underlying machinery that produces patterns in possibility and prevents social developments from being completely arbitrary. Referring to genetics is not unlike referring to physics: the possibility-scope of human development is energy-constrained among other things. What social constructivism essentially does is claim that knowledge of people's internal biological machinery is neither necessary nor sufficient to explain people as they really exist in society. It doesn't claim that such biological machinery doesn't exist or matter, but that social sciences can develop a sufficient understanding of the constraints imposed on people's social developments to explain them as social beings without having to refer to biological models, while biology cannot explain people as social beings without referring to the models of social science. uncop has issued a correction as of 11:20 on Jan 19, 2020 |
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Jan 19, 2020 11:04
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I've been working on an effortpost that is somewhat related to this present discussion, but today I wanted to jump in here and share some anecdotes about a psychopath I was in a residential treatment program with. We will call this individual "Bill". A quick explanation of the program/place I met Bill. It was a large homeless shelter in San Antonio called "Haven for Hope", specifically Bill and I were in an (experimental) residential mental health treatment program (In House Wellness Program)in a section of the Haven campus called "Members Side". In order to be admitted into this program you had to be able to document/prove both chronic homelessness as well as a formal diagnosis of mental illness. As a result of this (and a few other factors) the average resident of this facility was (by mentally ill homeless person standards) unusually high functioning and self aware. It was in IHWP that I met Bill. Bill was a formally diagnosed psychopath, but that was not his primary diagnosis. He had a condition called Dysthymia that resulted in him often being asleep/unconscious for around 15-18 hours a day. In addition to this Bill also had a severe back injury from a rodeo accident (he had a rather brief career as a cowboy) that frequently caused him severe pain, however Bill refused to take opioid painkillers because he feared becoming an addict; as a result of these factors if Bill was awake for 6 hours in a given day he probably spent 2 of those hours staring blankly at a wall while rocking back and forth, trying to disassociate from the pain. Bill was an interesting guy and while he was in treatment he made a genuine effort to try and understand how his mind differed from others, it was from my friendship with Bill and the many conversations we had during this time that I have come to form my own impressions of what a psychopath is. One frequent topic between the two of us was our attempts to explain our inner worlds to each other- a schizophrenic trying to explain schizophrenia to a psychopath and vice versa. During one of these conversations Bill asked me to list, in a very detailed way, all the necessary steps to walk out ones front door and start their car. After I rattled off as detailed a list as I could come up Bill put his hand up and asked me "Now at any moment did it matter whether or not the keys wanted to come off the hook? Would it have mattered?" Based on my comments such as these I believe it would be somewhat inaccurate to say that Bill saw people as objects or tools- rather I believe that (when it came to pursuing a defined objective) Bill's brain did not instinctively make the distinction between tools and people. This manifested in a wide variety of ways, from Bill genuinely not understanding why manipulative behaviors were a bad thing ("why wouldn't you tell someone what you know they want to hear if it will get you what you want?") to Bill intuitively keeping detailed internal notes and observations about the behaviors of the people around him*. *Mind you most people bored the living poo poo out of Bill and he was terrible with faces/names, but he was the first one to note the slight change in behavior when a staff member developed an addiction (he also correctly diagnosed exactly which drug the staff member was abusing) One idea that Bill talked about constantly in our conversations was what he called "consequence". He was quite fond of launching into detailed explanations with the phrase "My Mother taught me consequence". What he meant by this was that his behavior was dictated/limited more-or-less by his expectations of what the outcome or "consequence" of a given action was. (e.g. Bill didn't hurt people or steal because if he did he would eventually get caught and the consequence would be jail time.) There was a specific incident that really drove home what consequence meant to Bill. All members of the IHWP program were expected to maintain "medication compliance" (you took your meds 4x daily in front of a staff member who made a note of every pill you took) and to attend three "classes" (group therapy sessions really) per day. On paper both of these requirements were mandatory and strongly enforced, in practice however only medication compliance was strictly enforced. As long as you always took your meds you could blow off classes every single ady and they would not kick you out of the program. (There were many tangible benefits to being in the program, but that is a discussion for another post.) When Bill first entered the program his class attendance was perfect. However- while discussing his concept of "consequence" in class one day he made a comment that amounted to "the only reason I attend these classes is because the consequence of not attending is being kicked out of the program". After this class ended another resident explained to Bill that as long as he took his meds he would not be kicked out. Bill spent about 20 minutes going around the dorm confirming this with several other residents- and he never attended another class again.
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Jan 20, 2020 00:24
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So I'm just posting to say "So long and thanks for all the fish". I am not gonna autoban because I need too much of the material I have posted in my various threads- however I do not intend to post anymore on these here forums. I am going to be relocating all of my threads over to Bread and Roses, and I heartily encourage anyone who has enjoyed my content to register and give the place a spin: https://breadnroses.club/register/
Prester Jane has issued a correction as of 21:29 on Jan 23, 2020 |
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Jan 23, 2020 21:16
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Prester Jane posted:So I'm just posting to say "So long and thanks for all the fish". I am not gonna autoban because I need too much of the material I have posted in my various threads- however I do not intend to post anymore on these here forums. I am going to be relocating all of my threads over to Bread and Roses, and I heartily encourage anyone who has enjoyed my content to register and give the place a spin: https://breadnroses.club/register/ I'll miss you but also come and visit you.
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Jan 23, 2020 21:56
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| # ? Apr 19, 2024 08:02 |
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Good luck, PJ.
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Jan 23, 2020 22:19
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