I agree with pretty much everything you are saying, Jesse; unfortunately, I
don't have the time at the moment to respond adequately.
I think it would greatly improve the signal-to-noise ratio on this list if
everybody else kept quiet on this thread until you read my response to Jesse.
Please be patient, I have a lot of stuff to do today.
Waiting is. :-)
--
Mark Buda <her...@acm.org>
I get my monkeys for nothing and my chimps for free.
On Jul 19, 2010 9:04 AM, Jesse Mazer <laserma...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> > Please, seek medical help. If you're right, you lose nothing and might
> > convince at least the psychiatrist you talk to. If I'm right, you get
> > cured. It can't do you any harm, but leaving what looks to me like a
> > serious illness untreated may well do you some serious harm.
>
> Look, I've already seen a psychiatrist and a priest and a therapist and
> they don't see a problem here.
How long ago did you see them? Is it possible things have developed somewhat
since them? You did mention that you told the priest that you're God. But what
exactly does "don't see a problem" mean? Presumably the priest didn't actually
agree that you are God (unless he was a mystically inclined priest who thought
you were just saying that all of us are God), so do you just mean that the
priest didn't try to argue you were wrong? Sometimes when people encounter
someone with a mental problem their instinct may be to try to show empathy and
to guide the conversation in a more human (less cosmic/grandiose) direction
rather than trying to dismantle their ideas through argument...
As for the psychiatrist and therapist, did you also try to explain these sorts
of grand ideas to them? How did they react?
>
> Every animal on this planet has evolved an instinctual means to care for
> its young. Except us. We have no natural instinct. Or do we?
>
> Holy crap. Richard Dawkins doesn't even understand the point of his own
> books. Our sense of humor and our mathematical intuition and our genes
> form an impossible triangular causal loop. Selfish gene, indeed.
Mark, these kinds of sentences and paragraphs are completely solipsistic. Even
if you have some sort of valid insight, you simply haven't provided enough
context and intermediate steps of your reasoning to make it possible another
person could *understand* why you think, for example, that "our sense of humor
and our mathematical intuition and our genes form an impossible triangular
loop". You're just making a lot of grand pronouncements whose only purpose
seems to be to express how excited you are about your own brainstorms rather
than to communicate with other human beings. This is, I think, one of the big
reasons myself and others get the sense of a mental disorder from your
posts--disorders like mania and schizophrenia are associated with losing the
ability to (or no longer caring to) consider the the understanding of other
people, to consider what background context will be shared enough that it
doesn't need to be explained and what context is not shared and *does* need to
be explained (for instance, on this list we can talk of 'quantum immortality'
without explaining what it means, but with most people you'd have to launch
into some background about the many-worlds interpretation before using the
term), in order to communicate in a way that will make some sense to others.
Also, in a person with mania at least, I think this kind of partial
mindblindness is related to being over-optimistic about the likelihood that
others have understood/agreed with what you have said...in the case of the
priest, you seem to have taken his lack of counterarguments as a sort of tacit
agreement (or at least an acknowledgment that he found sense in your
arguments), which may not be true at all. Did you ask him (or others you've
talked to about your ideas) any questions to try to gauge their understanding
of what you were saying? Along the lines of "do you follow" or "does this make
sense to you"?
>
> Back to the point. We don't have instincts to tell us how to care for our
> young. We rely on culture for that. And culture is still really, really
> young. The memes are just getting started! That's it! Richard Dawkins is
> God, then, because he is the source of the idea of the meme. Whee! What a
> marvelous yet annoying thing God hath made. Can't wait to see what's next.
Another example of the same solipsistic communication style here. *Why* does
Richard Dawkin's invention of the concept of the meme make him "God"? It's a
huge leap of logic and once again you seem to be too excited by your insight to
bother with filling in any of the intermediate reasoning that might make this
paragraph meaningful to anyone but yourself (and it doesn't really seem like
you were thinking of the problem of whether others would understand when you
wrote it).
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