Because what you call “unreasoning causes” are the physical interactions between molecules in the brain. The definition clearly makes no reference to that. You agree, right?
I’m a fucking assistant professor specializing in schizophrenia at the goddamned University of Toronto. I don’t need a website meant for laypeople to explain the disease to me, and I most certainly do not need you.
No, a hallucination is not a delusion. And that is not what that website says.
The problem here is you have trouble remembering your own arguments. So let me remind you: You consider it impossible that the mind could be the result of physical brain processes, because you consider those “unreasoning causes.” Well, the symptoms of schizophrenia are caused by those “unreasoning causes”, but guess what? The rational thoughts of people without a psychotic or other such brain disease are also caused by the same sort of “unreasoning causes” (physical brain processes).
Or maybe you think rational thinking is caused by an immaterial soul, but in schizophrenia the soul departs the body and only “unreasoning causes” are left?
It’s just very hard to figure what you’re trying to argue. TBH, I’m not sure if you know, yourself.
The statements may be “plain” but the correspondence, particularly when we consider everything that the Mayo Clinic will have to say on mental health, to your view would seem to be poor (and merely asserted, rather than demonstrated).
And I’m afraid that nobody here is interested in a definition of “real psychiatrist” that means “agrees with Lee’s [ill-thought-through and over-simplified caricature] of psychology.”
Addendum:
I had originally decided to let this go, rather than self-censor to get past moderation.
However it then occurred to me that there are larger principles involved.
Firstly that Lee’s “doubt[ing] that [@Faizal_Ali is] a real psychiatrist” simply because he knows sufficient about psychology to reject Lee’s [ill-thought-through and over-simplified caricature] is far more “insulting” than my own accurate, albeit blunt, characterisation of that caricature.
Secondly that in doing so, Lee is displaying the same anti-intellectualism that has been far to frequently on display through events commented on in this thread. I would note that I recently read that the Trump administration’s firings have disproportionately targeted PhD-qualified scientists.
Given these current events I would suggest that it is not only merited, but arguably necessitated, that we give forthright, and even blunt, expression to our disdain and disgust at this trend – wheresoever we see it.
I agree. I don’t like to 2nd guess administrative decisions here, knowing how overworked they are. But it did take me aback that this comment got thru. To say someone is misrepresenting themselves as a medical doctor is a quite serious accusation. At the very least, I would ask that @lee_merrill consider whether a retraction and apology is in order.
It would be interesting to see numbers for Lee’s high-volume, low-integrity, high-bullshit, seemingly LLM-assisted “contributions” to the forum these last several weeks. His vast and preposterous output has likely made moderation effectively impossible. (Yes, this is also due to the willingness of several forum members to engage his disgracefully dishonest blather; I won’t judge others for these choices, and it is still Lee who is the root of the extraordinary wave of pollution.) Moving two of the threads to Side Conversations has likely reduced the moderation workload, but also means that Lee’s graffiti is unfiltered.
So IMO that comment should not have escaped moderation, and yet it is unreasonable to expect our volunteer mods to deal with such vast troves of textual diarrhea, and IMO it is irrational to expect Lee to adhere to (or indeed understand) basal expectations for intellectual discourse. I blame his toxic religion, but that doesn’t matter. What matters to me is this: “discourse” with Lee will inevitably involve outright lying, high-volume bullshit, nearly instantaneous conceptual amnesia, and journeys into actual insanity. That this meandered into a casual and inexcusable slander is not just unsurprising but utterly predictable.
Um, quoting Mayo Clinic is a mere assertion without evidence? I commented on why the Mayo Clinic description of schizophrenia corresponds to my view, your job would be to refute what I said, and show that it does not correspond. I’m inclined to think your statement is what is an assertion without evidence.
But in following comments (yet to be approved by a moderator at this moment), Faizal appears to confirm my view! So it does appear that my view is not an “ill-thought-through and over-simplified caricature”:
“But this does not address what I said, please read carefully: “psychiatrists are not interested in the source of our rational thinking, it’s irrelevant to helping clients.” They are not interested in the source of our rational thinking. But in your statement you imply here that you do not accept thoughts that might be part of their condition, i.e. due to mental illness, to unreasoning causes. You try to help them, to correct their thinking. Just my point.”
Actually, I’m the one supplying evidence, by quoting Mayo Clinic, by quoting Faizal, even! And you have done no quoting in your rebuttal, apart from quoting my doubts about Faizal’s title of psychiatrist, nor have you attempted to defend your characterization of my comments, nor have you given any evidence. Speaking of anti-intellectualism.
And this is not Stadler’s opinion, in the video (have you watched it?) he says papers had been brought to his attention as possible refutations, so he examined them, and found they did not refute his view.
Well, I was addressing Roy’s complaint that he expected Stadler’s referenced studies to be about knockout experiments, also apparently also claiming that Stadler’s view (or the experimenters’ view?) is that only those two knocked-out mutations could be considered to restore functionality, those two mutations were specifically sought, in the experiment.
And Matheson’s comment, you would consider intelligent discussion? And please explain to me how “outright lying”, for instance, is what I am doing. Lying involves knowingly making a false statement, with malicious intent. How do you all know my intent is malicious? I get these kinds of accusations constantly here, which do somehow get past the moderators…
Like @AndyWalsh, I did not watch it beginning to end, but I did fast-forward through it to get the main points. However, I do believe I have watched enough to state that you are wrong. Stadles explicitly says he attempted to find the highest quality papers in the literature that tested the limits of what evolution could accomplish.
If he says something else at a point I missed, please point it out. Otherwise, the question again arises: Have you watched the video?
And, with that, you thought Roy was saying “In any fitness advance, just any two mutations anywhere in the genome will do”?
Jeez.
Yes. His contributions here are always intelligent and valuable.
I find it implausible that someone could possibly be stupid and ignorant enough to write the sort of things you do here and actually believe it. But, sure, maybe I am wrong about that.
When you are claiming a “correspondence”, yes. “Evidence” of a correspondence would require an analysis of a broad range of their voluminous discussion of mental illness, not a single, unrepresentative, disorder.
Which I did, by pointing out that your comparison was far too narrow to draw a reasonable conclusion of a correspondence.
It’s a bit like comparing two paintings, and claiming a correspondence between them because they both show the small outline of a bird in flight in the background.
More formally, your claimed correspondence would appear to be an example of a hasty generalization fallacy.
Yes, but then you’ve already demonstrated that you don’t know the meaning of either “assertion” or “evidence”.
And I already addressed your highly selective Mayo quote here:
No, I did not “quote” from these articles – because my point was that there were many of them – dozens (maybe even hundreds) – too many to quote them all.
The page I linked to above is a literal A to Z of disorders – many of them mental disorders. Out of this myriad you picked a single, very severe, mental disorder as your sole exemplar – which was very unrepresentative – and thus unhelpful for understanding mental illness more generally.
You want quotes? Here’ one from “A”:
Adult attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a mental health disorder that includes a combination of persistent problems, such as difficulty paying attention, hyperactivity and impulsive behavior. Adult ADHD can lead to unstable relationships, poor work or school performance, low self-esteem, and other problems.
Does ADHD render its sufferer “unreasoning”?
Also from “A”:
Avoidant personality disorder
Is very sensitive to criticism or rejection.
Does not feel good enough, important or attractive.
Does not take part in work activities that include contact with others.
Is isolated.
Does not try new activities and does not like meeting new people.
Is extremely shy in social settings and in dealing with others.
Fears disapproval, embarrassment or being made fun of.
Mental health is a spectrum, both in the fact that some disorders are more severe than others, and in that people exhibit more or less severe forms of a given disorder. This means that the spectrum goes all the way from virtually indistinguishable from normal to completely dysfunctional.
Trying to ram this wide and complex spectrum into two pigeonholes, one labeled “reasoning cause” and the other labeled “unreasoning cause”, is to lose a great deal of information, insight and understanding. Which is why I reject this framing, and am fairly certain that the psychological and psychiatric communities do likewise, and for similar reasons.
Your view is that naturalism cannot produce a mind capable of rational thought (of which even the mind of someone with schizophrenia is capable), and therefore the mind was produced by a god or some other supernatural being.
Please quote where the Mayo Clinic says that.
I’d be my bottom dollar that one of two things is the actual truth here:
I did not agree with your point. Rather, you didn’t understand what I wrote.
I agreed with you on some minor point that is not crucial to whatever argument you are trying to make.
Let’s wait and see which it is!
Now, you pay attention: By “unreasoning causes” you mean purely physical processes that are have not been designed by a god or other intelligent being.
My view is that all aspects of the mind, including both rational thought and symptoms of mental illness, are due to such “unreasoning causes.” No god or other intelligent designer is involved at any point.
My statement above does not contradict that view in anyway. The problem is you are so confused that you can’t even understand your own argument.
This illustrates another of your problems: When you think you are “supplying evidence”, all you are doing is quoting things that don’t mean what you think they mean, and which do not add up to a coherent argument for the position you are trying to defend. You have a hard enough time even remembering what that is.
I think it is worth reanalysing @Lee_Merrill’s Mayo schizophrenia quote, in light of the highlighted portion of my comment above:
Schizophrenia is a serious mental health condition that affects how people think, feel and behave. It may result in a mix of hallucinations, delusions, and disorganized thinking and behavior. Hallucinations involve seeing things or hearing voices that aren’t observed by others. Delusions involve firm beliefs about things that are not true. People with schizophrenia can seem to lose touch with reality, which can make daily living very hard.
Please note that the quote is littered with the words “may” and “can” – not “will”. This is implicit admission that even a “serious mental health condition” like schizophrenia can cover a spectrum of severity of symptoms.
I was acquainted with a guy in university (this would be 30-35 years ago now) who suffered from (mild) schizophrenia. He seemed relatively normal and seemed to be coping with life reasonably well. I certainly wouldn’t label him “irrational”. I’m not claiming that he was perfectly rational – but then I wouldn’t make that claim about anybody.
For example, you’ve repeatedly lied and called Stadler a “biologist” when he’s a biomedical engineer, even after you were corrected.
You claimed in the context of Axe’s time at Cambridge he had people working for him. When I challenged you, you offered zero support for that claim.
Hey, that’s yet another lie! Malicious intent is not part of the definition.
The standard is the simpler intent to deceive.
I’m sure that you find all of your own deliberate deceptions (lies) to be justified and not malicious, right? That’s why you added that qualifier? And then you ascribe malicious motives to anyone who dares to challenge your lies, correct?
No, that is a lie. Intent is all that matters. You can’t excuse your own lying by telling yourself your lies are for a good cause.
No, you have zero sincerity. If you were sincere, you would eagerly examine evidence and learn instead of regurgitating hearsay and Gish Galloping.
Your opinion of that is irrelevant to the definition. Your intent to deceive, however, is very clear.
Now you know the motives of others with whom you’ve never interacted! How do you know that? On my side, I didn’t accuse you of lying until I was certain, after multiple tests.
You’ve never met them but know what they are thinking. Sure, Lee, just keep telling yourself that.
So you lie about lies having to be “malicious,” while you tell yourself that you’re not malicious, making your intentional deceptions justified. Neat!
Well, hmm, I’m not sure how looking for preselected mutations doesn’t fit the knockout experiments well. Though I did subsequently mention that any mutation that restored function would be acceptable as well, though they would probably look to see if the mutations they knocked out, happened, before checking for others.
I disagree, some conditions do involve definitely and completely unreasoning causes, such as paranoia. Let’s try Merriam-Webster: “mental illness characterized by systematized delusions of persecution or grandeur usually without hallucinations”. And here is the definition of delusion: “psychology: a persistent false psychotic belief regarding the self or persons or objects outside the self that is maintained despite indisputable evidence to the contrary”. This certainly refers to unreasoning causes for beliefs or conclusions, a mental illness is causing these thoughts.
Faizal claims psychiatrists do not keep this in mind, when they evaluate a person’s thinking or conclusions, which is absurd.
No, this is silly, I’m claiming naturalism is false! It’s an incorrect description of our universe, and in particular, of our brains and thinking and reasoning.
I agree that people with mental illness can for example, know perfectly well how to get to the kitchen, I’ve said this repeatedly. But this is a different topic.
But you didn’t bother to read what I quoted in your comments, or show how I misread them?! Here is again what you said:
Irrational thoughts! That might be part of a condition. Exactly, clearly you must mean a mental illness can cause irrational / unreasoning thoughts and conclusions. Otherwise, why would a psychiatrist ever give a pill to correct brain chemistry? Why not just try and discuss with them? You need to abandon this claim that psychiatrists never consider that a client may have a condition may be what is causing illogical, incorrect thinking. Unreasoning thinking, in the phrase I have been using.
I wish you would ask me what am arguing for, instead of telling what my view is. No, this is not my view, I don’t claim that an unreasoning cause must be a purely physical process undesigned by God, there might be other factors, such as people getting into an illogical rut of thinking, racism comes to mind.
Well, you also must make a distinction between rational thought and irrational thought, such as is found in mental illness, correct? You consider sane people to be real agents, correct? Whom you can take to court and assign to them real responsibility for crimes. And so on. My whole argument has been that people recognize such distinctions, and they go directly against the view of the enlightened materialists, who claim everything, including our thoughts, can be explained by the motion of atoms. This will not get you a “get out of jail free” card in court. This is not, emphatically is not something psychiatrists make no distinction about when they consider a client’s thinking and conclusions. They mean something by irrational thinking, or causes for thoughts, we almost all do. They don’t dump everything into the bag of “unreasoning causes”, including all thoughts. Though some do this, actually, but they are the exception.
I think the confusion is yours, you waffle back and forth between distinguishing between rational and irrational thoughts, and unreasoning causes causing every thought. When the dictionary says: “unreasoning: not moderated or controlled by reason”. Yes, that’s exactly it! You seem to want to have your cake and eat it too, calling all thoughts due to unreasoning causes, “not controlled by reason” according to the dictionary, and then also insisting on rational thoughts, on reasoning thoughts.
Sure, I only insist that mental illness can cause unreasoning thoughts and conclusions. Emphasis on “cause”, mental illness can be the direct and complete cause of disordered thinking. I agree that mental illness does not invariably cause this.
You seem reluctant to step up to the claim I just made, any unreasoning cause to some thought or conclusion illustrates the point I am making. It doesn’t have to be severe, and everybody may be a little nuts! It doesn’t matter, as far as my point is concerned.
Oh. So, if we take your words above at face value, here is your position:
Naturalism is false. But it would be silly to believe that, if naturalism was true, it could not produce minds capable of rational thought.
Is that really what you believe?
No, you need to abandon your belief that you are entitled in any way to lecture an actual psychiatrist regarding what psychiatrists do in their practice. Or that you are capable of understanding what I am claiming. I have never claimed that “psychiatrists never consider that a client may have a condition may be what is (sic) causing illogical, incorrect thinking.”
What I do reject is your repeated claim that the assessment of whether a person is thinking rationally is based on whether their thought are produced by what you call “unreasoning causes”, which is the term you use to describe undirected physical processes such as those involved in evolution.
Oh, so you are not arguing that rational thoughts cannot be produced by purely physical causes, and you do believe they require that they be created by a god or some other such supernatural being? Sorry, I could have sworn that was what you have been arguing all along. Well, I guess I shouldn’t base my understanding of your argument by the words you write in this forum. I guess I’m supposed to, I don’t know, read your mind or something? Please advise.
Of course. I have never denied this. You seem to imagine I have been denying it. Crom knows why.
Well, OK. So you do believe that. Well, sure, people do recognize those distinctions. Again, that is not something anyone here as denied. But the fact that they recognize these distinctions does not, in anyway, support your denial that rational thought can be explained by the motion of atoms. There are a number of logical steps missing from your attempted argument.
There is no contradiction there. You only see a contradiction because you are in a state of perpetual confusion. I believe every thought, rational or irrational, is produced by “unreasoning causes”, i.e. physical processes that are the result of the process of evolution.
Well, I don’t doubt that your eyes looked at the words in those documents. But it is very, very far from likely that you were able to understand them adequately to form a rationally defensible conclusion. Of course, Behe writes his books just for people like you, so naturally you find him convincing.
He did add that qualifier, but also stated (correctly, as it happens) that if a mutation is deleterious enough, they would have to happen so close to simultaneously that calculating the odds of simultaneous mutations provides a close enough approximation.
His error (well, one of them) is in assuming that such traits can only arise by successively selected steps, or (near) simultaneous mutation. There is a very important and common alternative that he deliberately ignores, because he knows it skuttles his argument: Successive addition of neutral/nearly neutral mutations.
Note the word “coordinated” there. That is not what your claim is. The claim you are trying to defend is that any trait requiring more than two mutation cannot arise thru evolution in a reasonable length of time. Not just two pre-specified mutations happening simultaneously in a single individual.
That is waiting for a pre-specified result, which is textbook hindsight thinking.
Where there are no other equivalent sets (in other words, only these two coordinated mutations, as opposed to any possible set of two coordinated mutations).
Humans have small effective population sizes and long generation times.
Life has existed on Earth for about 3.8 billion years, perhaps a bit more.
All of these factors matters quite a lot. So the authors do not in fact state that evolution in general has a two-mutation limit. Heck, even saying it would take 100 million years on average for 2 pre-specified mutations to occur and fix in the human lineage isn’t a limit either. Evolution isn’t “the time since humans split from our common ancestor with the chimpanzee.”
Can you also then acknowledge that ALL the biologists you have interacted with on this forum specifically on this question disagrees with the claim that there’s a 2-coordinated-mutation-limit to evolution?
Yes seriously. It’s a mistake to claim it is a “Darwinian” process if it explicitly involves the absence of selection on intermediate steps.
Yeah that never happened. But even if he didn’t know of any, we know of plenty of examples now.
No intermediate fossils founds since Darwin’s time? LMAO.
What’s next, you’re going to claim any new discovered fossil just creates two more gaps?
What is this Kent Hovind creationist bingo crap you’re pulling now? It’s certainly funny.
Even that is at least partially untrue. Deleterious mutations can fix through bottlenecks/founder events or even genetic hitchhiking, so even in cases where to get further up on a fitness peak requires dipping into lower fitness on the way there, that still wouldn’t prevent the higher fitness from being reached. There are still ways to get there from here.
A single neutral path out of all possible paths, with no alternative paths yielding a similar result. I’m going to have to make a figure to make you understand what I am saying here, right?
Lynch. I know because I read those papers, we even had a thread on it on this forum where I pointed out that Behe misrepresented what those papers say. Read the thread from that post on.
I actually think it’s a bit of a red herring. I wouldn’t say Behe & Snoke’s model is like physically impossible (after all mutations that eliminate function in proteins do clearly exist), but it is a very restrictive scenario and can’t be extrapolated to protein evolution in general.
The two most fundamental problems with Behe and Snoke 2004, is (1) the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy (hindsight thinking), which they themselves indirectly admit in the discussion.
Lynch also says as much in his 2005 response paper:
Second, Behe and Snoke assume that only two specific amino acid sites within a protein are capable of giving rise to a new selectable diresidue function. Given that the average protein in most organisms contains between ~300 and 600 amino acids, this assumption is also unrealistic. Increasing the number of participating amino acid sites from n =2 to just 10 can magnify the probability of neofunctionalization by more than 10- fold
That is, if there are 10 alternative positions in the protein that can participate in a new function, rather than just 2, this radically increases it’s probability of evolving.
And of course this would be further amplified by the consideration of the possibility of some function in some gene, rather than a specific function in a specific gene as Behe and Snoke affirms.
And (2) That their duplicate genes are assumed to be completely unlinked, such that purifying selection is initially absent until such a time that the 800 times more likely null mutation renders one of the copies nonfunctional. Which it would be expected to do 800 times more frequently than it would gain just one of the 2, 3, or more, novel function-creating mutations. When one such null mutation occurs in one of the copies, which is basically inevitable given their assumptions, this then instantly puts the other gene under purifying selection so that the novel function creating mutations, which are assumed to be individually deleterious, are purged away in that one. Now neither gene can evolve towards the new function. Because one has been irrecoverably destroyed by a null mutation, and the other has come under purifying selection against the novel deleterious mutations required in sets of 2 or more before they take functional effect.
The whole thing is rigged to fail. And the above is in fact an absolutely 100% accurate characterization of the model.
Yes, we’ve had all these discussions before around here. Suffice it to say, Lynch is right and Behe is wrong. Behe’s papers don’t support his strange scenario as being something typical for evolution.
LMAO
The caveat they give IS them admitting to having engaged in hindsight thinking. You know how you can describe the same phenomenon with different words or synonyms, so don’t go looking for the term “hindsight thinking”.
