muTron the homeless

SorryI hate when someone posts like 3 times in a row, but i did not want to include all responses in one post....

Some religious people claim they exprience the phenomena you listed. Whether they do or not is debatable. Trust me I've been to charismatic churches, The aftermath is hilarious.

:banghead:

Maybe the neurotic theists are mentally ill. Perhaps the rational theists are not?

Jagella

I will try to clear up some confusion on this point. When I listed some of the religious experiences that people sometimes have I didn’t mean to imply that all religious people have these experiences. However, it’s safe to say that all people that have these experiences are religious. Hence, if some religious people say they haven’t had these experiences, then to say that there is a revealing and striking resemblance between religious behavior and the actions of mentally ill people still holds true. The religious people who have not had such experiences may not yet have had them but will someday. Also, perhaps many religious persons are too embarrassed to admit having such experiences. This shame about admitting religious experiences I believe may be an omen of religion’s demise.

Maybe, but I still must feel pity for such people. If I needed to turn to such lunatic behavior to seek some hope in my life, then I’d be a such a wreck of a person that living would be a real burden.

“Rational theists�?? That’s an even more obvious oxymoron than “Microsoft Works.�?

Jagella

Oxymoron

Sorry, I was referring to the demonic beatings (made by good god-fearing xians, no less) in that remark.

Oxymoron

Let's start with a few preliminaries. Firstly, there is an external reality and it is a shared reality. Secondly, we are capable of apprehending certain aspects of said shared reality (hereafter referred to as the World). If you disagree with either of these, go create a thread and debate it elsewhere.

Still here? Good. Now we'd be hard-pushed to discuss the nature of sanity without mentioning brains or minds, would we? I recognise the distinction, of course - not in a dualist sense but in a software / hardware sense. At any rate, I will in general, use the term "brain" when I want to refer to a lump of stuff, and "mind" when I want to refer to what lumps of stuff do. Though I reserve the right to use them colloquially and interchangably where appropriate

So here is the gist of the argument: brains and minds serve specific functions to their host. They do so by employing a particular mode of operation. A mental illness is defined as a malfunction of that mode of operation. (So for example, a heart has a particular rhythm. Other rhythms can be problematic or fatal. A liver has a particular set of chemical duties. The cessation of these can be problematic or fatal). Therefore I intend to demonstrate that if a certain behaviour is indicative of malfunction of the modus operandi of brains and/or minds then logically that behaviour constitutes a mental illness.

So let's start with brains. We've all got them. What are they? They are - literally - neural networks. Trillions of interconnected cells, but far from homogeneous. Many sections perform specialised taks involving bespoke modifications to cell anatomies. It's big, sprawling and complex. And they can be arbitrarily classified: right brain/left brain, and so on. For the purpose of this argument, I consider a quadpartite model of brain/mind: my nomenclature will be as follows:

• Autonomic brain. This keeps us breathing, heart pumping, etc. I'll call this the A-brain. Strictly speaking it is encompassed by other subsystems, so it won't get much mention here, but there it is for completeness' sake.
  
• Reptile brain. This is the bit we inherited from all those ancestors. (Of course if you are creationists who believe the Earth is 6000 years old, is flat, and the moon is made of cheese then I guess you'll look scathingly upon this. Please, there is a forum for such discussions, this is not it). I'll contract this to R-brain. Its role is what I call a 4F Selector: Fight, flight, feed or fuck. It's involved in the really low-level survival tasks that we undertake, and is implemented in areas such as the amygdala and the hippocampus. Its function is to take some input, and output an F (perhaps more than one!). It's really incredibly dumb but hey, dinosaurs were king here for millions of years, so don't knock it (please understand that I do not imply that R-brain is the entirety of a reptile brain. Obviously other functions are required).
  
  R-brain functions by brute force. To select an F, it simply sends a signal to hormone-producing hardware that triggers other systems to produce those reactions we are all familiar with.
  
• Mammal brain. Or M-brain. This is when brains start getting clever, animals start getting social, and require extra processing for those complex situations. Or rather, survival is aided in certain species via group action which is only possible in those species with enough horsepower to spare.
  
• Human brain, or H-Brain. We all recognise that we're special - we have large brains, walk vertically (ill-advised when our tackle is so kickable), have opposable thumbs... we are able to do things no other animal has come close to, and to do this, we need brains capable of manipulating very complex scenarios. Or rather... well I'm not going to jump through every hoop, am I?
  

Since these categories are broad and potentially misleading in the long run, let's just use the following terminology:

• A-brain+R-brain = old brain
• M-brain+H-brain = new brain

But what do brains do? Well, lots of things. In order to focus on the relevant stuff, let us consider the Central Cognitive Mechanism (CCM). This is the data management and processing side of brains - or rather new brains because old brains are concerned with instinctual behaviours, not cognitive ones. Incidentally, this is the simple reason why emotion is unamenable to reason - they're produced by radically different parts of the brain with utterly different agendas. Whilst theists delight in the (oh so very Star Trek) philosophy "is this what you humans call... love?..." - ie that there is something magical and spritual about emotion precisely because it is not amenable to reason, the actual and blindingly simple truth is that two barely compatible systems have been bolted together and our experiences are often the result of the two fighting it out.

Anyhoo, back to the CCM and brains. Brains are very good at remembering things. Actually, that's only partly true. They're also very good at learning things. Our memory architectures are complex, but it's probably beyond dispute that we can remember stuff and learn stuff. The primary mechanism for memory storage and retrieval is associative mapping. When presented with a stimulus, memory retrieves something that could be that stimulus, could be similar to that stimulus, or could even be utterly unrelated to that stimulus. Or - more likely - a combination of the above. This is because the mapping doesn't really care what it associates with what. We can associate apples and headaches, for example. Put "apple" in, you might just get "headache" out. It's that dumb. What makes it really interesting is that it's not just new-brain stuff that gets stored... old-brain stuff gets wrapped into associations, too. Our memory takes snapshots of our systemic response to a stimulus as well as the stimulus itself. So now we associate apples and unhappiness (say) because we're unhappy when we have a headache. Something tells me apples ain't gonna be our favourite food

As well as particular recall, associative mapping allows the owner to perform general recall and conversions between them. For instance, if apples and headaches are associated then red apples are associated with headaches (with some degree of strength) and so are green apples (with some other degree of strength). And if we associate a sting with a particular bee then we also associate stings with all bees and wasps too.

So associative memory is the first building-block of the CCM. What else do we need? Well there's the whole data-processing side to consider. And there's a lot of data to process. Though our new-brains are highly parallelised, it's been demonstrated there is about a 0.5 second lag between reality and our perception of it. And that's after data filtration. Now filtration is important in any processing system because not all data is relevant. If I want to (say) know how many dogs are in a room, there's no point looking at the ceiling (maybe!). So there are a hierarchy of filters designed to prune out unnecessary data. But hold on, who says what's unnecessary?

Time to take a breath and step back. Indeed, it's time to introduce a conclusion of the argument half-way through!

Q: what are new-brains and minds for?
A: for modelling the external world.

That's it in a nutshell. Though we have accepted that we can, in some approximate way (a function of the nature of the external world and of the hardware we use to apprehend it) get knowledge of the World via our senses, it is well understood that what we see is not the external world. It is a highly detailed model of the external world - shortened to a World Model. But be careful, just because there's a lot of detail, doesn't make it an accurate representation of the World. Because firstly there is data filtration - stuff is removed. What stuff? Well the stuff that the World Model deems is irrelevant, of course! Then - somewhat bizarrely - the World Model fills in the blanks! How? By associative mapping, it recalls likely candidates for the missing data... along with all the other crud that is associated with that and the emotions to boot.

Just ask any detective trying to piece together the exact circumstances of a crime that took place on a busy street in daylight. "He was tall" "He was medium" "He was black" "She was blonde" "He ran off" "He drove off" "The car was red" "The car was yellow" blah blah blah. You'd be freakin' amazed how little detail we actually really apprehend and how much we add as a result of our own past experiences. A number of amazing (and hilarious!) experiments performed a few years back demonstrated this beautifully. A subject is invited to take part in an experiment; he walks into a lobby where a tall blonde secretary greets him at a desk, asks him a few questions then gets him to fill out a form. Whilst he's doing that, the receptionist ducks under the desk and her place is taken by a dark brunette hiding next to her. After all that, he is basically shown to a briefing room where he is asked "notice anything odd?" The answer is "no". Do you remember the receptionist? "She was blonde". Over 80% of the subjects noticed nothing unusual because they did not expect secretaries to change. Their World Models, and the World were out of synchronisation.

Why is synchronisation important? Consider a very stupid man who believes he can walk through walls. He tries the first wall in a room, and fails - he gets a feedback signal from the world which is basically "bump-ouch!" This corrective signal really ought to shift the guy's belief that he can't walk through walls, but he is particularly stubborn and concludes that it's just that wall he can't walk through. So he tries another wall. Bump-ouch! Yet another feedback signal. Is the world trying to tell you something, sir? Well no, of course it isn't, because the World is passive and doesn't care if you bump into walls or boil your head. But the moral is that there is a feedback signal and that this is crucial to learning that you can't walk through walls i.e. synchronising one's internal World Model of a wall's properties with the external one.

(Incidentally, the condition where one's World Model is in conflict with the World is called cognitive dissonance. It's not a good place to be, very stressful. Trouble is, the world just keeps sending those feedback signals, and the sufferer just keeps on ignoring them either because they can't or won't acknowledge them.)

These models are powerful things. They need to be - and are - capable of modelling the thoughts and motivations and emotions of other human beings. And - by an identical mechanism - they model the individual themselves (our notion of self-awareness). Our own self-model is based on a considerably more priveleged data-set, of course. And therefore our inferences about others' are hugely skewed by our own experiences. Indeed, our own personal experience vastly dictates not just the filtering of events but also their eventual interpretation. As a part-time psychotherapist, I was once in the position of counselling two girls. The first one said "my parents are divorcing. It's terrible. I just couldn't do enough to keep them together..." A few days later, the second girl told me this: "My parents are divorcing. I'm so relieved, it's been like a cloud over us for years. Now we can make a fresh start..." What was particularly interesting was that these girls were twins.

Moral: how we have seen the world greatly influences how we will see the world.

At this point, let me introduce you to a phrase - it's in quite common usage - GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out. It's applicable to any data processing system - brains included. And where do we get garbage from?

Answer 1: in an associative mapping, just about anywhere. There is no guarantee that associated entities are genuinely connected, relevant, or even useful.

Answer 2: when actually relevant data has been filtered (ie the World Model has deemed it is of no import) when it actually is, and it has been replaced via associative mapping with arbitrary junk. (In this case, a World feedback signal has been eliminated)

Answer 3: when a World Model makes an erroneous interpretation based on a flawed association.

Answer 4: by associatively mapping a specific stimulus to a general stimulus (eg one woman treated me harshly therefore all women will treat me harshly).

So you see, the potential for filling our heads with garbage is awesome. Our world models are limited (they cannot model the World in entirety), our senses are limited and have an overwhelming amount of data to push through a complex pipeline. So we need to know: how does one distinguish garbage from useful stuff? Well clearly, we have a World Model in our heads, and there is an external world. The goal is for the former to accurately represent the latter <so as to aid survival of self (then family then group the species), and likelihood of procreation>. This is only possible by enforcing synchronisation, and the acknowledgement of feedback signals in response to actions.

Does that sound familiar to anyone? Why if it isn't the scientific method! Of course, our detection apparatus and processing power is poor, but it contains all the elements:

• Theory == World Model.
• Hypothesis == "I can walk through walls"
• Experiment == Acknowledge and incorporate feedback signal in World Model ("bang-ouch! == no you can't)

Interesting, huh? "Science" is at the heart of our very human nature. It's the reason we're very good at surviving, as well as why we're able to (say)build spacecraft to travel billions of kilometres to take photographs of things unseen before in Earth history.

One has to feel for the dude who thinks he can walk through walls; but, of course, at least he can get a feedback signal saying "no". Who I really feel sorry for is those theists who invent a god who they insist exists in the World but cannot be apprehended, measured or detected in any way. They have a cognitive dissonance, because their World Model can never receive a "yes" or a "no" and so their belief distorts and twists everything they see and do. And like all suffers of CD, they invent continually more bizarre reasons for their beliefs as the plethora of real signals from the World that actually say "no" fail to make an impression and they focus upon the "yes"'s of other similar CD sufferers, looking vainly to each other for some support of their unsustainable World Models.

So how do they stop themselves spiralling out of control? Answer: invoke faith. Broadly speaking "my internal World Model is correct, it is the World that is wrong". They deliberately break the CCM, the single most amazing and powerful software system ever evolved, trashed.

religious faith = CCM broken + CD = dysfunction = mental illness.
Sanity = correct functioning of the CCM.

Stephen T-B

Wow!

And thanks.

But back to IAsimisI's: " the way you put it is a far cry on how things actually are."

How?

muTron the homeless

These two paragraphs seem at odds.

On the one hand you preface to show that if a certain behaviour is a malfunction of the modus operandi of the brain than that = mental illness. Then you show that there are two barely compatible systems that have been bolted together (reason and emotion).

Does this mean reason is H-Brain and emotion is leftover mammal brain?

Should I be giving my Valentine's cards to my cat and not my wife?

Does this mean we are ALL trying to run Windows and Lynnux at the same time (I'll let Microsoft represent the emotions and Lynnux can be the reason...) effectively making us all a little nuts?

Oxymoron

That's not exactly the point. Behaviour can be driven by instinct or selection. The former is governed by the old brain, the latter by the new brain. Emotion is the by-product of the sledgehammer old-brain firing cascades of chemicals to prepare us for some instinctual response.

(Interestingly, recent research into spindle cells - a new-brain exclusive specialisation of the standard dendrite -has shown that there is a remarkable fast data trunk for instinctual response formed by these cells. We have considerably fewer of them than "ordinary" neurons, but more than any other creature that has them. This allows our reactions to be so fast we can actually respond to things before the CCM has cognised them. Which is why we can drive race cars, fly fighter jets, and participate in other such twitch activities.)

Is your wife a reptile?

In reality we are probably many systems bolted together in a somewhat ad-hoc fashion.

The main choice for humans is between reaction and response. Reaction is old-brain talking, response is new-brain. Sometimes they pull together, sometimes they pull antiphase. There's an AI paradigm called "blackboard" in which several (largely independent) agents vie for the right to perform a task by bidding how well they think they can accomplish it. A selection system then picks the agent that bids highest. This works very well for brains because

(1) it is composed of a collection of agents - specialised areas
(2) it is highly parallelised
(3) selection can be performed by a neural network, of which a brain is a fantastic example. Also notice that because the weights of a network change over time, the way we select agents also changes (and is subject to our influence by feedback).

This paradigm beautifully illustrates the notion consciousness is focus. Consciousness is, if you like, the weighted sum of multiple agent responses to input in a classification neural network. As input changes, so the selection system routes data to the subsystem that bids highest (or rather whose score f(bid*weight) for some activation function f is maximised). (This mechanism explains phenomena such as the Cocktail Party Effect, whereby at a party we can reduce background conversation to a murmur until someones else mentions our name and then suddenly we hear that loud and clear).

Whilst theists would love us to be inscrutably complex (so that only a god could have created us), and philosophers disappear up their own bottoms with questions such as "why is red red?", the basic mechanisms for thought, emotion and consciousness are actually pretty simple.

Anway to directly answer your question: the bulk of my post discussed the CCM which is inherently new-brain. If you like, the old-brain is an agent continuously demanding the right to act, and doing so in a very loud voice. Thankfully, the new-brain selection mechanism is capable of adjusting the network weights over time so as to diminish the deafening effect of hormones telling us what to do. An extension to my theory is that religion is based primarily upon fear and therefore is exclusively old-brain, therefore has a very loud voice relative to the new-brain concepts of reason and choice. The new-brain is really what makes us uniquely human... abandon it - let it be drowned out -then one is nought but a dumb ape at the mercy of ancient survival systems.

Stephen T-B

I think that perhaps Christianity (in particular) feeds off the conflict between Old Brain - which makes us what we are in terms of the four Fs - and the New Brain which makes us what we are in terms of a complex social animal which experiences empathy, the rewards of co-operation (with its associated need to conform and to permit the best interests of the "group" to take precedence over personal interest) and the requirement to suppress or "socialise" our basic "old brain" impulses.
Christianity induces a sense of guilt for these impulses, which I think it imputes to Original Sin, and having established that human nature is basically sinful, preaches the powerful message that we are only redeemed by a god-made-flesh who actually died for our sins.
I think Christianity’s success is due, in part at least, to the fact that it has plugged into the feeling most people have of being not as good as they'd like to be.

Oxymoron

Very much part of the World Model is not only what I consider myself to be, but what I consider I ought to be. And its close acquaintance what I think other people will think of me given that I am this way.

Again, the associative map is at work here: "In situation S, take action A" is represented as a mapping between S, A, and also our subsytems' opinions on what S and A mean in the big picture. Guilt is similar in form to cognitive dissonace: I have a model of what I ought to be doing but what I actually do is different. And yet another associative rule says "people who do action A1 in situation S when they ought to have done A are X" where X is some value judgement. With guilt, the value judgement is unfavourable. Another map entry will give the victim the consequence "people who are X are Y" where Y is some unpleasant consequence.

In short: guilt is easy to induce and can bury itself quite deep. There is a healthy way to dig oneself out of it: notice its manifestation in the "mind-talk" - the continual monologue going on in our head about what's happening - and halt it in its tracks by breaking the associations. (Eg enforcing that it's not true that people who have sexual thoughts are bad). Incidentally, it's absolutely amazing when one examines one's own - or others'! - internal commentaries exactly how much crap there is in there - filled in blanks, erroneous assumptions, spurious and flawed logic and a whole bunch of generally bad value judgements and feelings. The route to happiness is not through Jebus; it's through dealing with the crap that you allow inside your skull and validating it against reality. Reality is the ultimate arbiter of all that goes in in our mental models, anything else is just imaginary bilge.

Stephen T-B

Yes - but Religion is the Great Escape from reality.
It's like "I can't handle reality because it's too, well, it's too real, so I'll make up something I can handle."
Or rather: "I'll let someone else make up something I can handle."

The odd thing is that as you say (or as I thinkyou say), this escape leads to something much worse than reality because it exacerbates the feelings we have of inadequacy and failure.

If Christ (or whetever it is that provides the "Christ template") had preached the virtues of the therapy you suggest, I think people would have been rather happier. On the other hand, his teaching would probably never have caught on because it fails to make us feel guilty - and wallowing in guilt is something the New Brain, as you explain, steers us into.
It seems to prefer Guilt to Reality.