JoeShipley

Karma: 31

JoeShipley May 27, 2009, 10:13 PM
5 points
in reply to: AdeleneDawner’s comment on: Introduction Thread: May 2009
You certainly prove your chops in your comments, which I always enjoy reading. I was curious: Do you think it is wholly rational to self-diagnose mental/social abnormalities, problems, or diversities?

It seems like it would be a difficult problem to tackle objectively, because:

1) The payoff, one way or another, is pretty intense: Either understanding a label that makes you unique and explains a lot about your life, fitting in a new piece to your identity, or learning of another thing that is wrong. These are intensely personal revelations either way.

2) If you suspect something is seriously different about your brain, you may suffer a confirmation bias in reviewing the data, quick to jump on different topics.

3) The existence of a supportive social groups like the neurodiversity community you listed allow a quick admission into a network of people that seem to understand your problems and eventually will likely respect you and your opinions, which is one of the basic requirements people have for happiness and something that is generally sought after i.e. Maslow’s pyramid and all. This is another element of incentive, subconscious or conscious.

I’m not that you’re wrong—from the things you’ve described, you’re probably right. I’m just curious what you think: self-diagnosis of a brain-related, social-affecting, central-to-personal-identity disorder seems like an extremely tricky position to maneuver through even for absolutely exceptional minds.

JoeShipley May 27, 2009, 7:35 PM
4 points
in reply to: Annoyance’s comment on: This Failing Earth
I don’t think this is the case. It seems like we keep running into problems that are more based on our biological heritage rather than our personal intelligence: For example, limitations in our ability to accept evidence that goes against ‘sacred’ beliefs of a group, the idea that a belief told to you by a trusted peer or authority figure is more valid than something with reputable evidence. This might have been valuable to ancient societies to maintain cohesion, but less so in a world that is increasing piles of uncomfortable evidence against some sets of beliefs.

I think many aspects of our biology seem to stack the deck against us in solving the Big Problems. Conspicuous manipulation in terms of eugenics as they implemented is a horrible crime I couldn’t condone, of course, but it may have been a solution that worked if it brought us more intelligent (not in the terms of high IQ but all-around-intelligent) people. Imagine a curve of capability that increases as our knowledge increases; Having a higher baseline means we reach that much higher in the present, possibly to the necessary critical mass to reach the tumbling cascade of solutions so many people hope to see.

On the last statement, intelligence is certainly not the problem, nor is ‘intelligence’ responsible for the large part of problems that confront us in the first place. Intelligence is just a measure of capability, and we should hope to increase our capability even though it means also increasing the risk inherent in each individual. To hope that our intelligence would stagnate at around the current level is completely defeatist—We aren’t going to solve the problems we’ve created without the intelligence to deal with them.

JoeShipley May 27, 2009, 7:03 AM
5 points
on: Least Signaling Activities?
If the ancient (proto-human) mental construction of ‘self’ was a remodeled and turned inside-out version of the ‘other people’ mental construction, the distinction between signaling to nobody and signaling to yourself may not be on as sturdy grounds as it seems.

The idea seems to make sense: Evolution doesn’t jump in huge strides, so the progress from not-having-a-self to having-a-self must have been a cumulative one. The only place for similar parts to be worked on an advanced is within social behavior with your group, so that at least seems reasonable at the surface. Dennett suggests the role understanding our peers played in eventually training us in how to understand ourselves in ‘Consciousness Explained’, ‘Darwin’s Dangerous Idea’, Dawkins mentions things like this in ‘The Ancestor’s Tale’, and in Clegg’s book ‘Upgrade Me’, he cites a similar human origin story.

So even when you are alone, you are still communicating and possibly signaling to an audience of one, perhaps. You are signaling to the entity you understand to be yourself the behaviors and actions you believe to be socially (personally) acceptable for you to perform within the confines of the private, one person audience.

It may sound strange but with the evolutionary underpinnings the ‘self’ may not be so wholly divorced a concept from the ‘other people’ as we thought. Since these behaviors only seem to indicate a change in expectations rather than a release of all social restrictions and responsibilities, I am not sure that these activities really signal a clearer and more rational state of thinking—just a different audience, different game. Just being alone doesn’t necessarily strip off the animal reasoning.

Perhaps less resources are devoted to the social game and that would be a legitimate reason to trust someone’s reasoning more, but then there are benefits to social reasoning too.