The Theory of Mindlessness - A polemic

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Did someone say sociological frameworks and wider related approaches? Oh- dog ball play ,eyes light up.

If my theory has any emotional basis then it is because I am frustrated with people not finding a thory that fits how my life works or a theory that they can agree on. Because they can't agree on a theory right now. It's about as innocent as a reason as someone could have to pursue their own hypothesis.



I am not hostile about debate. I am challenging your attempt to call what I said supposition.



Too personally? I was extending you a courtesy by replying to your objections, no matter how personally hurtful they felt. I expect to extended the same courtesy until our misgivings are drowned and we can get along with each other. And so far, without fail you have continued to pursue this line of thought. This is pointless is a phrase that is used too often in all the wrong places.

We'll get to scientific proofs soon. I don't have the resources right now. The fact is I am a very small fish. But it is a start. As for your other viewpoints of interest, I will extrapolate slowly through other threads.

Ok the first element of of your argument is you disagree with Baron Cohen approach to empathy . So let's find out what he's up to: Here is his latest project with regards to determining degrees of empathy in us.

http://www.autismresearchcentre.com/project_1_empathy

Why don't you email him and invite him or a member of his staff to debate this area with all of us? You would be surprised what happens when you start contacting guys like this with sensible questions , they do often respond.

[email protected]

Now the research assistant working on this project is Dr. Bonnie Auyang. I just had a scan of her published work and the only thing I find to take issue with, at a superficial level, is the notion of "impairment" - I would prefer her to use the term "difference"when refering to other human beings, but that's my personal opinion and preference.

She can be contacted here , again she may wish to join this debate, if it is polite and sensible.

[email protected]

Now one thrust of your argument , if I understand it correctly is Cambridge University is studying the differences in empathy between NT's and us? You are correct in saying empathy is just a construct
somehting to describe a complex set od interactions and nurological states. I agree with thta part of your statement. TThe Cambridge team recognise this themselves and clearly state they are using the term empathy as averbal shorthand , one we all have a notion of, to describe the area they are researching.

The second strong area of your argument is you make a very poweful observation that in those generally not defined as Autistic by the cambridge team empathy seems to be lacking in some of their behaviours. You quote rates of marital breakdown and general violent, ie non empathetic behavior.

Now they can simply get out of this in one semantic move- ie empathy is not exactly defined so they could expand the term to incorporate negative behaviours within it's catchment. Ie people at war need to second guess their openents , as do couples going through divorce- TOM of another is required.

So if you are going to argue this with them you need a different approach. One approach might be
to try to pin them in the area of our ability to compensate for the lack of standard issue empathy
over a longer period of time by developing understanding , observation and reason and they are only measuring one section of that deveoplment. Also what we mean by empathy might be every bit as valid as the meaning they ascribe to it , and you could maybe argue a plural system, but you might loose this argument because you would have to show it's effectiveness in different tasks, many of them complex social tasks which NT's seem to be able to develop the skills to perform more quickly than we do.
We could also ask the question if our TOM 'apparatus' isn't focused on different slightly areas to NT's
and if this is beneficial to us.

One final general criticism is the use of language and phrases like disorder most of us find derogatory-
which shows a certain lack of empathy on their part , but it also shows none of us AS guys has really picked them up on this so maybe it's ignorance in a bucket , rather than deliberate neagtive labelling.

Now these guys are the top of the tree at constructing for and against arguments about these specific
areas of research. I f you want to argue you case with them, I'm sure they will respond an dwould be welcome here to debate these matters.

Meme.

Last edited by memesplice on 17 Jul 2011, 10:03 am, edited 1 time in total.

I will when I get to empathy. And don't worry, I know he will probably be nice enough to respond: most sane people would be. Remember that I was criticizing the methodology of theory of mind. What I do dislike is the bleeding together of the two concepts, which is what I was mainly highlighting. I will be getting to it though and yes, since I do like to have arguments and ideas that make sense and hold water it is credible that I would contact him. You have my assurance.

Hey, if you get all the arguments as you want them, if you have that debate here , it would be like attending a top martial arts contest and I look forward to it and hope to participate. That would be exciting for me.

So you want to deconstruct the Theory Of Mind concept to test its weakness and strength- excellent starting point.

What you got so far?

I'll see what I can come up with myself. But if there isn't the weakness and you go in with this , then you have just enancted a series of opening moves which they will have anticiapted, and when these guys anticipate stuf you better know how to use you guard. They don't mess around in debate.

Meme.

Whithout any doubt I can say that the way the scientists attempting to apply theory of mind in some relation to religion was at fault. With the same evidence as they had I came to completely different conclusions and some of them quite ugly to behold.

Your post has prompted me to think of Thomas Szasz's very strong critique of psychiatry and pharmacology in general . This is a good starting point, but note to a point it is valid , beyond that point it breaks down. So know the limit, the "reach" of this is you intend to use it.

Basically Szasz argues psychiatry and related disciplines are little more than modified religions themselves. Importantly they contain very similar judgements about -individuals- sane/not sane- save/dammned- clean/unclean etc. He argues that mental illness is itslf a contemporary mythology because it demonizes one section of socitiety. I hear echoes of what you are sayig and what makes you angry about our relative position to the professional groups that label us in this kind of critique an it is supported by some very strong work .


Szasz goes on to develop his strongest point - the group not labelled as mentally ill or defecient are never measured, tested or in any way challeneged over their own deficiencies ( by their own defintion) and left to go about their lives even though their behaviours lead to the same problems and situations mental patients behaviours lead to- they have just taken different routes . Now again, your critique of BCohen runs close parallel to this when you point out divorce rates etc. and you come to more or less the same conclusion as Szasz regading who is determined as proficient and who is not an dyou question the grounds on which this assumption is made.

Now this will lead you into Hacking's critique of TOM applied to AS, however I would caution here, I first looked at the
TOM construct itself and see if there are any inherent weakness in it before moving on to Hacking, because what Hacking
does is adopt another model from a very obtuse lingustics philosopher and say this is a stronge rmodel than TOM - what he doesn't really do is to test TOM for internal weakness enough before adpoting this new model.

The Philospoher in question Hacking borrows from is Ludwig Wittgenstein . Lud wrote a profound work detailing the limits of language and philosophy in understanding- its almost like being able to show why we can't travel faster than light- Its that kind of defined limitation . - Within Lud's theory was something called Form-of-Life

"Hacking rejects ToM in general, not only in the ToM-deficit theory of autism. He replaces it with a Wittgensteinian Form-of-Life (FoL) theory of language and social knowledge. On this view, language and social interaction is a norm-based practice, and such practices cannot be analyzed in terms of internal, language-like “theories” about the domain governed by the norms. Practices cannot be reduced to theories; you cannot learn to rollerskate by reading a book. The ToM notion that we infer people’s intentions based their behavior is a mistake (says Hacking); we intuitively and directly see people’s intentions. He callse these intuitive “seeings” of mentality are “Köhler phenomena” (after the Gestalt psychologist who, Hacking says, inspired Wittgenstein). The intuitive skills of neurotypicals are falsely described by ToM, and so autistics are falsely described as having a deficit of ToM."


So

1. Szasz is very useful to you here to set a general critique of concepts of normality and mentla illness

2. Hacking's citique of TOM is strong- but I caution you to examine TOM for weakness in itself, first.

3. If you are going to use Lud wittgenstien to argue outside Hackings critique ,remember its a painfully difficult work to get your head around.

Yes definitely too personally. How you handled it was a bit arrogant but the two of us are alike so. Your personal work and then you thought to be being called a liar which is being personal about it. I m right you are wrong and you are right I am wrong because this satisfies stuburn arrogance's.

I will be back later today off to do business.

I hope for a sane resolution.

That first sentence on the second paragraph is basically what makes me so annoyed about the autism procedure. Certainly it feels like we are just becoming mental patients not because were are unable but because of the hostile social and cultural atmosphere. I do caution against using it for every disorder.



Yes. I only started jabbing the ToM deficit theory when I saw evidence that tests showed those people labelled as autistic did have basic theory of mind capability and we are talking about the seriously impaired here. I also feel that the ToM theory is a bust, especially since when I was talking to my friend, who is in the same boat as me, we were reading each other better than most people ever have of me. Sometimes it feels like the thory of mind is more dependent upon personality rather than whether someone has autism.



This seems more confusing and possibly a bit too rigid as a theory, this form of life, to be applied directly to reality. Its basic suggestions seem to imply the ToM phenomena as a false guideline. It could be true but I am not given to supposition. I only state things that fit the facts I have seen or read. It would be an interesting route for further study. My gut reaction tells me that it would be somewhat hard to teach someone any discipline if they could not deduce what actions need to be taken from speech and writing. In any case my problem is that ToM has just been used as a 'scapegoat reason' for our problems.

Not necessarily , all models try to make sense of facts, however in the social sciences they tend to make sense of differnt facts and/or give greater signifcance to some facts rather than others. There really is very little 'fact' in the empirical scientific sense at this end of the research field. In neuroscience and some cognative work yes, but when you are dealing with feeling, emotional response, subjective meaning and the full bredth and expanse of human experience it is almost impossible to apply a scientific approach of classification. This leads back to Szasz and your parallel critique- it is possible to build two or more models of the same thing by focousing on different ascepts of the whole. Neither is right or wrong but one may be more useful to understand and approach certain questions at a certain period of time.

The best way I have ever been able to understand what is going on is to borrow a concept from physics . It's called the Copenhagen solution. Their problem was they couldn't measure where particle was going to be, because the act of measurement seemed to be the defining factor as to the particle's location. What they then decided was it was a product of something called wave collapse. The particle existed as a wave ( sort of a wave of probilty) only when the obsever 'looked at it it became a particle and it sort of appeared , "popped" into being in a random location.

This weird bit of physics is very similar to the problem faced by social scientists. All social scientists including you and me, have a strong tendancy to seek and find the things we are looking for perhaps ( and this is the odd bit) for reasons we didn't understand before we started looking and began to uncover what we reagrd as facts. But they are not facts in the true sense.

Give you an example- classic one - Death rates due to suicide ,a fact- er no, depends on whoose recording the causes and why. Mortality rates in a hospital-gotta be a fact-nope, depends on the coding sytems employed, er, what about the effects of poverty , nopie, poverty is relative to who'se experiencing it , oh come on now must be some fact- autistics lack social skills and that's why they are autistic, no again, I have just made a tautology and autistics have varying degrees of social skills ,,, and so it goes

There is no exact science at this end of the research field only strong and weak theories which change in strength relative
to the conditions they are attemptimng to explain. Because we continually evolve, we always need to find new meaning to our experiences and human condition.

It is best not to place too much faith in fact, because like the particle hypothesized in physics, in social science and related field, facts only tend to exist as probabilities , not certanties.

There is always a deductive and final reason and model. When people did not know how the universe was created they said god was responsible. Now they say because we cannot find a theory that fits all we know we can only have models that partially fit reality. The fact is that the real answer is just hard to find, not impossible and possibly unpopular, but it will be true always.

It is impossible ultimately that something comes from nothing so the universe did not originate but is in the constant of creation.

Well yes there is an approach such as the one you are trying to develop. . I know that feeling very well , there has to be something, one unified model where the whole beautiful puzzle clicks together. And knowing it exists drives us crazy.
I doesn't drive me crazy anymore becuse I've more or less fitted the pieces , what I haven't time for I just accept.

Hmm I'm not sure you want to go here,

Edgar mitchel went here and he didn't come back Egdar Mitchell.

Steven Hameroff went 'out there' in his mind and he came back the same as Mitchell.

I think guys like this experienced different aspects of the same thing. It's cognitive deep space, actual or the representation of it in the mind which has the same effect.

Answers the question ,but you can't communicate the answer, and that drives you just as crazy as not knowing the answer
or even being able to formulate the questions to approach it. Now imagine adding that to AS .
If you really want to ,google Hameroff/ Penrose - they have a hard science model - and don't get hung up on microtubles- the critics used the wrong measurement of the gaps . I think this is pretty strong contender in the hard science model you are trying to develop. Everything else could be theoretically fitted around and into this.

Personally I wouldn't bother , If wanted to understand I stick to 'softer' stuff like Howard Becker, and all those guys, but if you want to go into cognitive deep space , please don't get mad at me when you come back if I don't understand what you are trying to tell me straight away. Yep there is a model of human consciousness that can be represented in a variety of different ways that all simultaneously make sense.- I got one model, you'll come back with another. That how it goes.


Meme.

Guy's I'm off to bed-

One bone to chew over- according to Stephen Hawkin-"nothing is a very unstable state" - its dynamic appraently, somehow,

Now how on earth can that be?

It doesn't matter then because as long as it is a unified reason then it makes enough sense to me. You did give one explanation here right?