Wessely Challenges Government to Ring-Fence Mental Health Spending

[chipmunk1]

In what way is he not right in his head, according to your perspective?

.

He did seem to believe that individuals are not good decision makers and they should be programmed(like machines) and managed by experts like him. So basically he thought no one is capable of making decisions except me, that's why I should be in charge of any aspect of human life and society. A totalitarian society. This is how dictators and megalomaniacs think. Historically it has also been a precursor to mass murder and genocide.

Seriously, who would want to live in a world like that?

Of course he would say a society managed by "science" and of course he would decide what the science was.

Skinner also considered free will to be an Illusion. If that is true why did he believe he or someone like him should make decisions? Or did he believe not having free will was only for others but not him? Or was he being in charge an iIllusion then?

If I met a person telling me all people need to be managed and controlled by me because only people like me can make society function well, i would think that person must have a screw loose. .

https://chomsky.info/19711230/

Skinner assures us repeatedly that his science of behavior is advancing mightily and that there exists an effective technology of control. It is, he claims, a “fact that all control is exerted by the environment” (p. 82). Consequently, “When we seem to turn control over to a person himself, we simply shift from one mode of control to another” (p. 97). The only serious task, then, is to design less “aversive” and more effective controls, an engineering problem. “The outlines of a technology are already clear” (p. 149). “We have the physical, biological, and behavioral technologies needed ‘to save ourselves’; the problem is how to get people to use them” (p. 158).

A “behavioral analysis” is thus replacing the “traditional appeal to states of mind, feelings, and other aspects of the autonomous man,” and “is in fact much further advanced than its critics usually realize” (p. 160). Human behavior is a function of “conditions, environmental or genetic,” and people should not object “when a scientific analysis traces their behavior to external conditions” (p. 75), or when a behavioral technology improves the system of control.

The problem in “design of a culture” is to “make the social environment as free as possible of aversive stimuli” (p. 42), “to make life less punishing and in doing so to release for more reinforcing activities the time and energy consumed in the avoidance of punishment” (p. 81). It is an engineering problem, and we could get on with it if only we could overcome the irrational concern for freedom and dignity.

Skinner tells us to give up the illusion of freedom and do what he says. Give up our freedom for his ideas. Why? Because he said so.

 

[Large Donner]

Skinner also considered free will to be an Illusion. If that is true why did he believe he or someone like him should make decisions? Or did he believe not having free will was only for others but not him? Or was he being in charge an iIllusion then?

If I met a person telling me all people need to be managed and controlled by me because only people like me can make society function well, i would think that person must have a screw loose. .

Exactly!!

Seriously, who would want to live in a world like that?

Someone would.

 

[jimells]

Soldiers are duty bound under the Geneva convention not to carry out illegal orders, the Iraq war is illegal.

But if they follow the Geneva Conventions. refuse orders, and blow the whistle, their lives will be destroyed. Chelsea Manning is a prime example. I have known people who went to federal prison for refusing to be drafted into killing Vietnamese. They paid a very high price for their dissent.

 

[jimells]

Where did you read that? Or did you just make it up yourself?

To initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime. It contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

 

[Hip]

Skinner also considered free will to be an Illusion.

That is a perfectly reasonable philosophical position to hold. Philosophical issues like this never really get resolved or proven, but it is perfect valid to argue that free will may not exist.

I remember reading about Laplace's ideas on free will, or the lack thereof: Laplace pointed out that if you knew the exactly location and velocity of every single particle in the universe, then the future positions of these particles could always be calculated using classical mechanics. In other words, the whole of the future is already determined by the present, and the universe just marches onwards like a mechanical clock, with free will being an illusion. These ideas were much debated in Laplace's time.

Of course, the discovery of quantum mechanics changes this, because with QM, you cannot calculate with any certainty the future trajectory of all the particles in the universe from their present trajectory. That's where QM differs from classical mechanics.

In any analysis of free will, you'd really have to really bring in QM. But we don't yet understand QM very well, so questions of free will are not likely to be resolve for centuries, if at all.



As for the rest of Skinner's writings on how we should organize society, I am not familiar with them, and would not be able comment unless I read a few of his books (which unfortunately I no longer have the brainpower or mental stamina to do).

From my brief scanning of his material, it does not seem any more dictatorial than say any major religion.

 

[Hip]

To initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime. It contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

@Large Donner stated that if a nation goes to war illegally, then all of the actions of the soldiers are against the Geneva Convention.

Which I think is just bullshit.

 

[GreyOwl]

I think PTSD is normal. I think that not suffering ongoing psychological or psychiatric problems after playing a role in, say, combat, where one is expected to function in an environment which is contrary to one's morals and ethics, is a sign of psychopathology.

 

[SilverbladeTE]

On the wider political/social questions
this is why I support Democracy By Lottery
It is the ONLY pratical answer I can see to Humanities woes.

No one should ever get power who wants it
pick folk at random, screen for criminal, illegal issues and genuine current mental health problems
1 term only, ever
Civic duty
rewarded with guaranteed pension/income for life if can't get same quality of job as you had etc (to avoid issues US has with jury duty for example)

no more bloody Elite either, how to deal with that in an ethical way is more tricky but those SOBs are the vampiric parasitic demons who've always screwed things up for everyone, regardless of the system (

 

[Hip]

I think PTSD is normal. I think that not suffering ongoing psychological or psychiatric problems after playing a role in, say, combat, where one is expected to function in an environment which is contrary to one's morals and ethics,is a sign of psychopathology.

Fighting to protect the free and civilized world from being overrun by barbaric tyrants (and there is never any shortage of those) is a moral activity. Soldiers personally sacrifice life and limb to keep the rest of us secure.

Nevertheless, they may still get PTSD. That's because PTSD is caused by stress and terrifying fear, not by moral dilemma.

You may be thinking more of moral injury:

It is what experts are coming to identify as a moral injury: the pain that results from damage to a person’s moral foundation.

In contrast to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which springs from fear, moral injury is a violation of what each of us considers right or wrong. The diagnosis of PTSD has been defined and officially endorsed since 1980 by the mental health community, and those suffering from it have earned broad public sympathy and understanding.

Moral injury is not officially recognized by the Defense Department. But it is moral injury, not PTSD, that is increasingly acknowledged as the signature wound of this generation of veterans: a bruise on the soul, akin to grief or sorrow, with lasting impact on the individuals and on their families.

 

[GreyOwl]

Fighting to protect the free and civilized world from being overrun by barbaric tyrants (and there is never any shortage of those) is a moral activity. Soldiers personally sacrifice life and limb to keep the rest of us secure.

That may be true, but killing a person, for example, whether or not defined by politics as an "enemy", requires a level of dissociation to rationalise, or to not be traumatised by, and that appears to be achieved by few, making this response less common than "normal". I haven't really got any references for this, it's just my pondering.

 

[Hip]

I think it rather depends on your enemy. I would consider myself as someone more on the conscientious objector end of the spectrum, who would get upset even shooting a pigeon. Yet when I hear of accounts of the total inhuman barbarism perpetrated by the morally insane individuals of ISIS or similar barbaric regimes, I'd not only be happy to kill those monsters, but I'd want to do it slowly and painfully. No dissociation necessary.

But I guess if your enemy has been defined purely by political propaganda, and in fact there is nothing really evil about them at all, that could later be morally upsetting. But this is not PTSD, but rather moral injury that we are talking about.

 

[GreyOwl]

I understand the difference, though I suspect overlap is probably more common than has been recognised.

 

[frederic83]

I remember reading about Laplace's ideas on free will, or the lack thereof: Laplace pointed out that if you knew the exactly location and velocity of every single particle in the universe, then the future positions of these particles could always be calculated using classical mechanics. In other words, the whole of the future is already determined by the present, and the universe just marches onwards like a mechanical clock, with free will being an illusion. These ideas were much debated in Laplace's time.

Of course, the discovery of quantum mechanics changes this, because with QM, you cannot calculate with any certainty the future trajectory of all the particles in the universe from their present trajectory. That's where QM differs from classical mechanics.

In any analysis of free will, you'd really have to really bring in QM. But we don't yet understand QM very well, so questions of free will are not likely to be resolve for centuries, if at all.

I think this guy proved that even in classical mechanics, there is indeterminism:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1311.5349

It is a billiard experiment, he says that at one point, when there are too much balls, there is a loss of information, so it is not possible to predict the positions and speeds of all the balls at one time in the future. If I remember, the number of balls must be higher than 4000. He had to use powerful computers and ingenious algorithms to do that.

 

[Hip]

when there are too much balls, there is a loss of information, so it is not possible to predict the positions and speeds of all the balls at one time in the future.

I cannot myself envisage how you would lose determinism in an idealized classical system (although in practice, you can lose determinism very quickly, because chaotic effects cause the future trajectory of the system to be infinitely sensitive to the initially conditions).


You can approach free will from this physical law determinism / indeterminism perspective. But I think a more practical and down-to-earth way to examine free will is to consider the mind/brain as a set of independent elements, each producing its own behavioral response.

So for example, your emotions might urge you behave in one way (make a cutting remark to your boss, because he has been such a jerk recently), whereas your faculty of reason might urge a different behavior (bite your lip, because if you get sacked, you are not going be able to pay your rent), and your faculty of intuition might provide you with a further perspective on the situation (perhaps your boss is having some trouble with his marriage, making him a bit tetchy).

So I think in one sense, we tend to think of free will as having access to a range of independent cognitive elements in our minds, which gives us a lot of scope for a variety of behavioral responses. That I think gives us a sense that we are free to choose our behavioral responses.


But I don't think this really gets to the bottom of the core issue of free will, which is bound up with issue of whether the future is causally determined by the present, or causally determined by some other facet of the universe.

 

[frederic83]

I cannot myself envisage how you would lose determinism in an idealized classical system (although in practice, you can lose determinism very quickly, because chaotic effects cause the future trajectory of the system to be infinitely sensitive to the initially conditions).


But I don't think this really gets to the bottom of the core issue of free will, which is bound up with issue of whether the future is causally determined by the present, or causally determined by some other facet of the universe.

My post was not really about free will, but I wanted to show that indeterminism is present in a classical context, in a non chaotic experiment, it means that it is not dependent of the initially conditions, but it depends on the "number of object" that interact, a threshold number, that researchers observe in the decoherence theory in QM.

For me, free will is the ability to see the consequences of your choices in the future. The farthest you can, the highest free will you have. How does it work exactly, I don't know.
But maybe the present is causally determined by the future, and vice versa. It is too hard for my brain fog

 

[Large Donner]

Fighting to protect the free and civilized world from being overrun by barbaric tyrants (and there is never any shortage of those) is a moral activity.

George Bush.

Soldiers personally sacrifice life and limb to keep the rest of us secure.

Yet we are seeing more and more terror attacks.

 

[Hip]

My post was not really about free will, but I wanted to show that indeterminism is present in a classical context, in a non chaotic experiment, it means that it is not dependent of the initially conditions, but it depends on the "number of object" that interact, a threshold number, that researchers observe in the decoherence theory in QM.

I appreciate your comment was not about free will. I would like to see an easy-to-understand brain fog-proof article about how a high number of objects interacting classically can lead to indeterminism, because I can't really grasp how it could happen. If collisions between classical objects are deterministic, then how can indeterminism arise?

For me, free will is the ability to see the consequences of your choices in the future. The farthest you can, the highest free will you have. How does it work exactly, I don't know.
But maybe the present is causally determined by the future, and vice versa. It is too hard for my brain fog

I sometimes like to think in terms of relative free will. I used to do mindfulness meditation, and I noticed that when I had meditated a lot, it created a mind state that seemed to have access to a wider range of behavioral responses compared to when I had not been meditating, which translates to more behavioral freedom.

When I had not been meditating, my behavioral responses would be more kind of automatic "knee-jerk" responses, and in a way, there was very little free will involved. But after doing lots of meditation, my behavioral responses would be more contemplative and creative, as if I was drawing from a large well of mental possibilities.

When you start doing meditation, you realize just how much of your behavior and your life was really just on automatic. I found it's only when you regularly mediate that you really start to consciously take command of your life.

And that's another aspect in the discussion of free will: whether an action is a conscious action, or whether it is performed just as an automatic habitual "knee-jerk" response.

 

[frederic83]

I appreciate your comment was not about free will. I would like to see an easy-to-understand brain fog-proof article about how a high number of objects interacting classically can lead to indeterminism, because I can't really grasp how it could happen. If collisions between classical objects are deterministic, then how can indeterminism arise?

That is exactly what is not intuitive, and that this guy proved with his experiment. I can't understand it right now, because my brain does not permit it, but the number of interacting objects is important, and if the number is high enough (around 4000 with the balls), you have to inject information (from the outside) inside the system to do the computing, which means nothing actually, because the system should be self consistent.

When I had not been meditating, my behavioral responses would be more kind of automatic "knee-jerk" responses, and in a way, there was very little free will involved. But after doing lots of meditation, my behavioral responses would be more contemplative and creative, as if I was drawing from a large well of mental possibilities.

This creative state would be very interesting to find a cure for CFS
I guess every actions is a mix of prerecorded behavior and free will, and maybe the meditation can help to slide the cursor toward the free will. 100% free will is an illusion in a human body.
I tried mediation but it is impossible for me to do it with the brain fog.

 

[Mark]

I think this guy proved that even in classical mechanics, there is indeterminism:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1311.5349

It is a billiard experiment, he says that at one point, when there are too much balls, there is a loss of information, so it is not possible to predict the positions and speeds of all the balls at one time in the future. If I remember, the number of balls must be higher than 4000. He had to use powerful computers and ingenious algorithms to do that.

This has blown my mind, thank you so much frederic!

Reading the abstract it suddenly and immediately seemed to make total sense to me how non-deterministic behaviour must arrive from any deterministic system, given enough time/objects...but I now seriously doubt whether the way I was thinking about it had ever so much to do with what the paper is actually about.

The key quote for me is this, from the abstract: "...our fundamental hypothesis that physical information has a finite and limited density, responsible for the irreversibility..."

I'm almost certainly misunderstanding this completely, by reading "information density" in terms of "granularity" (completely different I think), so what I took from this is probably a different argument entirely, but how I understood it is this: in this system of hundreds of balls pinging around on a billiard table, we do understand from chaos maths that the tiniest change in position of any one of them at the start - however small - will completely change the behaviour of the whole. But what is the granularity of the cartesian grid within which we are going to define the positions of these balls, when we translate them into our deterministic mathematical model? Are we defining those positions down as far as the planck length, as the smallest possible distance between grid lines, or are we going to go beyond the planck length in our precision? And how far down, in precision, would we have to go, to determine the positions of all the balls accurately enough to predict their future behaviour for ever?

This is not making as much sense in writing as it did in my head this afternoon, but putting it another way: The idea of a deterministic machine, from the beginning, has started from the thought experiment "if we knew the exact position of everything in the universe" but the problem with that premise is the concept of all the things actually having an 'exact' position that can be measured to infinite precision - and that (for reasons I can't yet articulate) seems impossible. Our precision in measuring all the positions would seemingly have to go beyond the planck length...way beyond...for ever...

That may only be enough to explain why it is impossible in practice for us to measure a sufficiently complex real-world system with sufficient precision to predict its behaviour over an infinite time period. But I think what I'm pointing at with introducing the planck length is that reality itself must have the same problem that we would have in trying to pin down the position of objects, and the distances between them, with infinite precision.

I'm still thinking all that through, but I think the matter may hinge on whether or not there is some grid system (which would be a bit like the 'ether' which relativity supposedly forbids) within which all the objects in the universe exist. If we're in a grid, if we're in a computer simulation, then maybe everything would all be deterministic. But if the objects don't exist in an 'ether' - if the 'somethings' just exist within a 'nothing' - then there is an infinite granularity which can't be measured. My hunch is that while the objects seem to have a minimum scale (the planck length) the 'nothing' around them surely doesn't. And no, I can't hold in my head the something and the nothing and the relationship between them, and it all still twists my head, but hopefully something I'm saying is pointing at the moon for someone...

Anyway, that's not what I meant to write about in this reply really; I just wanted to mention this:
http://www.sciencealert.com/physicists-just-figured-out-how-quantum-mechanics-pops-up-in-game-theory
...in which it is mentioned that mathematical models of a school of fish give rise to Schrodinger's equation, and also Couder's oil droplets, eg:
http://www.wired.com/2014/06/the-new-quantum-reality/
(I see there's loads more great stuff about this now, since I was last looking, if you search for eg "quantum oil droplet").

I suspect I'm actually making no sense at all here (so don't take it personally!) but what I think is simple and true connecting all of these angles on the problem is that the supposedly spooky and bizarre quantum behaviours and equations that supposedly apply only at the microscopic level, are now emerging all over the place both in experimental and purely mathematical systems!

What this says to me is that Einstein was right all along, and should have stuck to his guns (and trusted his instincts regarding de Broglie and Bohm's "pilot waves" rather than throwing them under the bus because their theory didn't seem to be compatible with relativity), whereas the Copenhagen interpretation was a disastrous historical error (that's what you get for resolving scientific questions by majority vote!). It now seems clear that it is, after all, quite possible for 'hidden variables', and some kind of description/model of the sub-subatomic world, to give rise to all the quantum phenomena we observe. We don't necessarily have to treat what's inside the quantum system as a 'black box'; we can now start to postulate and describe models of what's inside subatomic 'particles' that would produce all of the maths and the phenomena that we know from quantum mechanics.

The two examples of systems, suggested by the shoals of fish and the quantum droplet, that could explain where quantum mechanical phenomena come from would be, very roughly:
- what we call a subatomic 'particle' is actually a cloud of tinier 'fish' that are bound together
- what we call a subatomic 'particle' is actually a 'particle' coupled with the 'wave' it creates in the ether (or the 'nothing').

Either model can now potentially explain where quantum phenomena come from.

Until yesterday, I was purely focused on the second of these two options, and then I heard about the game theory mathematical model and the shoals of fish...and now, thanks to frederic, I learn of this argument about information density - again, Schrodinger's equation arising from a deterministic mathematical model - and my mind is going a little nuts about this right now (in case you can't tell that from the above! ).

Anyway, since I last read about the bouncing oil droplet a couple of years ago, and saw its devastatingly simple and compelling explanation of wave-particle duality (the 'particle' is a particle riding on a wave, and whereas the 'particle' goes only through one slit, the wave goes through both and creates the interference pattern on the other side, which the particle's trajectory is then affected by), the whole thing appears to have become quite fashionable. That being the case, I think we are now on the cusp of a monumental breakthrough in the understanding of all the weirdness of quantum physics...there's real hope, I think, that all of this is solvable and explainable, and that we'll see that explanation arrive in the next few years.


Since I've got this far without my head exploding, I'll just note that I don't think any of the argument about determinism actually impacts on the free will / consciousness problem at all, even though it appears obvious that it would. I see the question itself as a kind of error of circular reasoning (in a way that I totally can't articulate), because the reason why we are asking the question is to worry about whether we really have moral responsibility and how this should affect our reasoning about ethics, but if we don't have free will then all of our reasoning is out of our control too, meaning that whether we do, or whether we don't have free will, makes zero difference to anything we could ever possibly think about, and we can never know the answer to that anyway. I do really like this idea of meditation and 'degrees of freedom' though...there's something in that. The only place where absolute freedom exists would be a state of being and doing absolutely nothing. As soon as you make a choice you form patterns and constraints which come to control you.

Sheesh, what possessed me to write this almost certainly nonsensical post and make such a fool of myself, at this time of night? I should have just posted the links above and gone back to lurking, so you could all blow my mind some more. I suppose I must have done it because I thought this thread hadn't gone off-topic enough.

 

[Mark]

PS: I think I'll call that post "Something and Nothing"...and I'll try really hard to do no more than lurk on this thread now, and get back to the big (infinite?) pile of work...