Murder and Philosophy

[Animus]

I find that the more ignorant and less conscious a person is, the less imagination and constructiveness they have. They have a greater propensity for destructive behaviours, including in this case serial killing. No person with a good mind is going to waste their life and others on killing, they won't risk losing their good life. A serial killer is in pain and has a bad idea as to how to get out of it.

In a somewhat similar vein, the idea of there being psychopaths of the common definition, i.e. people who are highly intelligent, immoral and free of suffering, is false. It is a case of misdiagnosis and myth. I have met individuals that exhibited psychopathic behaviours and each of them actually suffered more than the average person. They used techniques to try to counter their suffering such as suppression, or flowing with it in a rage, or scattering their mind into a spin to try to shake their conscience loose. I don't find that very intelligent. One suffered severely from insomnia. Many if not all psychopaths are partly motivated by jealousy of others suffering less than they do, and they want to even things up.

The idealisation of psychopathy is driven by society's desire to believe that the casting aside of morality can lift the burden of suffering. The truth is it doesn't.

There is such a psychopath, it has to do with the production and sensitivity to the neurochemical seratonin (as best as we can understand). There is probably a dampening of the responsivity to corticosterone in the hypothalamus resulting in a lowered stress response. In other words, such people don't feel strongly about much of anything. This results from childhood psycho/physical abuse.

[Animus]

Let us not forget the importance of the frontal cortex as well. We all have an innate inclination to killing, via socialization we learn to stop pulling our sister's hair, and only over time do we grow attached to our siblings. As regards "strangers" or other members of our society which we do not have an emotional attachment to, it is largely the frontal cortex which prevents us from killing them by inhibiting our animalistic desire to do so. The Orbitofrontal cortex is demonstrably deficient in a very high percetange (some 80-90%) of convicted killers. This can result from blunt force head trauma, developmental brain abnormalities or other sources of brain damage.

[Foreigner]

Let us not forget the importance of the frontal cortex as well. We all have an innate inclination to killing, via socialization we learn to stop pulling our sister's hair, and only over time do we grow attached to our siblings. As regards "strangers" or other members of our society which we do not have an emotional attachment to, it is largely the frontal cortex which prevents us from killing them by inhibiting our animalistic desire to do so. The Orbitofrontal cortex is demonstrably deficient in a very high percetange (some 80-90%) of convicted killers. This can result from blunt force head trauma, developmental brain abnormalities or other sources of brain damage.

Is that so? How is that deficiency measured?
I mean when its not so obvious (no one cracked his head open)

F

[Animus]

Is that so? How is that deficiency measured?

functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Positron Emission Tomography

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picren ... obtype=pdf

[Foreigner]

You dont think little Dexter experieced anger around the time when he sat trapped splashing in a pool of his mothers warm blood?

[Animus]

You dont think little Dexter experieced anger around the time when he sat trapped splashing in a pool of his mothers warm blood?

Sure, that was the traumatic experience which dampened his stress response. I'm not saying that Dexter or a real compulsory killer never feels anger, I'm saying its not the primary reason they feel compelled to kill.

[Tomas]

.


-Foreigner-
I've always been of the opinion that a pregnant person ought to have a reasonable amount of time to decide whether to keep it or not, after conferring with partner and family and doctors; what do you think about that?

-tomas-
I see where your drift is, no, I'm not standing out front of the killing field waving a placard.


-Foreigner-
Surely if we people any of us at all, believed that every failed pregnancy truly represented a lost child, surely many thousands of miscarried babies instead of just flushing them down toilets or whatever moms now normally do with them, would be sent off to undertakers to prepare the baby or blob for its funeral along with all else that customarily occurs when a member of the family passes away.

-tomas-
My mother (and father) had two miscarriages, the fetus was discarded via hospital protocol. Should the would-be parent decide a stillborn constitutes a living being, they would be within their rights to grieve and dispose of in whatever manner they so choose.


-Foreigner-
Clearly a loss in the first month or two is quite a different situation for most thinking people.

-tomas-
All people think, I do not care to judge on what level they so choose to think. To each, his own.


-Foreigner-
Which incidentally can be a huge iceberg of a problem for those unfortunate enough to belong to religions that discourage thinking.

-tomas-
I was born and raised in a smallish sect called Lutheran. Martin Luther is presently serving a 10,000 sentence in purgatory. He was not ex-communicated. Whatever peoples' decided to found a religion upon whatever they think it represents is their deal. There's good and bad everywhere, mostly bad, good? - I don't know about. Clearly, one can run the alphabet-soup game defining religion of whatever stripe. It's not so easily defined what is 'unfortunate enough' .. everyone learns something new every day of their life (to the present).

Tell me, you were not ingrained by your parents in any particular "religion", as you put it.?? The yoke is removed each and every night when you fall asleep .. if you go back to the old ways of doing things when you arise .. that does not necessarily mean one is not capable of staying in their mindset ways. That's their deal.

A - Adventist

B - Buddhist

C - Congregationalist

D - Devil worship

E - Eastern (fill in the word)

F - Free Thinker

G - God-fearing-man

H - Hellenist

I - Independent

J - Judaism

K - ?

L - Lutheran

M - Muslim

N - New Age

O - Orthodox (fill in the word)

P - Presbyterian

Q - QRS devotee

R - Roman Catholic

S - Sabbath Keeper

T - Taoist

U - Unitarian

V - Victorian

W - Wiccan

X - ?

Y - ?

Z - Zen


Remember, propaganda begins in the home. Parents are limited in whatever hang-up they had as children and can only think as much as Nature provided them with (smarts). Then the State gets involved. You know the deal from there to age 18. After that the diaper is off and you do whatever you please within the confines of each national government boot-on-your-face. Big Brother is every-where along the way and if you choose to terminate yourself early, a pauper's grave is provided at no charge....

PS - Big Brother, what a beautiful choice!!

[Foreigner]

You dont think little Dexter experieced anger around the time when he sat trapped splashing in a pool of his mothers warm blood?

Sure, that was the traumatic experience which dampened his stress response. I'm not saying that Dexter or a real compulsory killer never feels anger, I'm saying its not the primary reason they feel compelled to kill.

Oh i see, Dexter's main reason for taking pleasure in killing bad people is that he's compelled to kill bad people, hum...and he took a job involving blood work because....no dont tell me...because...he's just built to like working with blood! has nothing at all to do with what had happened to him as a child, right?

[Animus]

You dont think little Dexter experieced anger around the time when he sat trapped splashing in a pool of his mothers warm blood?

Sure, that was the traumatic experience which dampened his stress response. I'm not saying that Dexter or a real compulsory killer never feels anger, I'm saying its not the primary reason they feel compelled to kill.

Oh i see, Dexter's main reason for taking pleasure in killing bad people is that he's compelled to kill bad people, hum...and he took a job involving blood work because....no dont tell me...because...he's just built to like working with blood! has nothing at all to do with what had happened to him as a child, right?

That's not what I said. Keeping in mind that Dexter is a fictional character. Go study how behaviour works Neuropsychiatrically and then it will make sense.

[Animus]

.


K - ?

X - ?

Y - ?

K - Kemetism

X - Xylolaters

Y - Yoga

[Animus]

.


K - ?

X - ?

Y - ?

K - Kemetism

X - Xylolaters

Y - Yoga

Xenophanes would be better

[Foreigner]

Is that so? How is that deficiency measured?

functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Positron Emission Tomography

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picren ... obtype=pdf

So thats how they tell, eh. hum.....how clever of them.
Yet...how do these machines and methods and operators know or determine that their findings are the main cause of a persons bloodthirst and not for instance, developing as a result of extreme thoughts and actions.
I mean, how can they be sure? Idont see how it's possible.

[Animus]

Because conscious awareness of a thought or action actually follows the depolarization of the sensory motor cortex by 300ms. The "thought" or "behaviour" is already determined in other regions of the brain before it depolarizes the appropriate nerve cells for action. Originally Libet (1984) discovered this conscious delay, but recently Hayne's et al have been able to predict "thoughts" and "decisions" upwards of 7 seconds prior.

In other words, we know that the decision is made in frontal cortex and sent to sensory motor cortex, and it only becomes conscious after or during depolarization of the sensory motor neuron.

Lectures: Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain

as author at 5th European Conference on Complex Systems ,
322 views


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Decoding mental states from human brain activity

as author at 5th European Conference on Complex Systems ,
179 views


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Introduction and overview of FMRI concepts and terminology

as author at New Directions on Decoding Mental States from fMRI Data,
755 views


Watch these lectures: http://videolectures.net/john_dylan_haynes/

[Foreigner]

Well they convinced you, didnt they!

[Animus]

Well they convinced you, didnt they!

LMFAO!

Is this like "LALALA I'm not listening"?

I'm convinced because I've personally studied the subject. I've had one-on-one debates with Neuroscientists on the subject.

And, I'm not a fool, I don't believe things just because they sound good or comfort me.

[Animus]

In any case, you gotta ask yourself where those "extreme thoughts" are coming from. Otherwise it is just an arbitrary ending to an inquiry into a causal dynamic. Phenomenologically speaking those thoughts are coming from "the mind" or nowhere. Physically speaking they are coming from the human brain, it is of course the case that when certain activation patterns occur within the brain they correlate to the thoughts of subjects. Inhibition of these brain regions once identified causes the thoughts to cease, excitation causes them to occur. Just as neuroscientists can inhibit speech by applying current to Broca's area - the subject reports getting stuck mentally.

Of course the perception of the brain with which we identify the brain is filtered through the brain and is consequently an incomplete picture. It is also the case that the brain is intimately bound to its environment (and reality as a whole). In other words an analysis which seeks localized or linear causal dynamics will be a failure or only provide limited understanding.

In general you can come to the same conclusions by philosophic inquiry, but I find that observing the brain can also provide significant data for analysis. It allows you to visualize philosophical concepts on a physical medium. Take for example the philosophy of Aristotle's Law of Identity and consequent laws of causation. This correlates with the observable behaviour of nerve cells in the neo-cortex.

It might help to explain briefly how nerve cells work, there are a variety of them but in general they work the same. A nerve cells consists of a cell body, an axon, axon terminal and dendrites (in its most basic form). The cell body contains the nucleus and all the makings of the neurotransmitters. The axon contains microtubules which transfer vesicles (capsules) of neurochemicals from the cell body (soma) to the axon terminal. The axon terminal is the output of the cell, it forms a connection with other cells. In between the axon terminal and the receiving cell is a small gap called the synaptic cleft or synaptic gap. When a transmitter such as dopamine binds with the NMDA receptor on the axon terminal, the terminal releases the contents of its vesicles into the synaptic gap. These chemicals then stimulate receptors on the receiving cell and retrieved by the post-synaptic axon terminal by a process called re-uptake. The dendrites are the receiving end of the cell, which connect to the axons of other cells and transfer the charge to the cell body. Where the cell body forms the axon is called the axon hillock, when the charge in the cell body reaches the activation threshold of the axon hillock depolarization of the cell occurs and the charge flows down the axon to its terminal.

Now that you basically understand how a neuron works, some cells are excitatory and others are inhibitory, such that a cell will receive a variety of excitatory and inhibitory inputs. A cell will depolarize whenever it reaches its activation threshold. When a cell activates in simultaneity with another cell a process called potentiation occurs and the weight of the synapse is adjusted such that the cells have greater influence over each other. In other words, if one fires the other is likely to fire also. Cells are differentiable meaning that they are capable of performing a variety of tasks and do so according to their inputs. Cells in visual cortex are arranged according to the stimuli of the optic nerve and are not strictly defined by genotype. A person suffering impairment of the eyes or optic nerve will have a visual cortex that serves other functions.

This is all that is required to create systems that recognize faces, understand language, logic and so forth. All of these are characteristic of the neo-cortex which evolved in mammals. The phylogenetically older reptilian brain is poorly understood by myself, but it is where you find the core of emotions and the ego. Ultimately the entire brain feeds through the brain stem into the body, so the neo-cortex sits atop largely inhibiting the activities of the subcortical brain, but only to serve it better with higher cognition. This correlates with QRS philosophy quite splendidly as a matter of them being correct. The neo-cortex evolved to serve the egocentric and emotional reptile so that it could make better predictions and construct models of its environment, all for the purpose of securing pleasure (food, sex, etc.) and survival. Therefor it is difficult for people to think outside of their box. Arguably humans and some other primates are the only animals capable of self-recognition in any meaningful way. This correlates with the evolution of the prefrontal cortex which is situated just above the orbits (eyes).

As a side note, a rare clinical case called Aboulia/Abulia (loss of will) has been observed to correlate with impairment to ventral anterior cingulate area 24.

The distilled theory of brain plasticity is called Hebb's Law, named after Donald Olding Hebb. His theory is often summarized as "Cells that fire together wire together, cells that fire apart wire apart." This correlates with the observation of causation in the world and also provides a causal basis for the perception of causation! The contents of our brains, which represent our conscious percepts, are causally produced such that they appear causally connected.

The stuff in those lectures are stage tricks, they are revolutionary, but ultimately its something that should be achievable to right thinking about the brain. All they have done is classified activation patterns which correlate with thoughts and followed the chain back. It is tricky but they pulled it off.

[Animus]

I imagine that the reptilian brain follows the same basic principle, but its inputs are grainier such that it forms vague and dichotomous percepts (emotions). I think it basically takes a contextual analysis of the situation as a whole and references it against a self-model and its desires. The output of the balance between context and desires would be emotions. If the environment contained context unsuitable to desire the reaction would be negativity (disgust, disappointment, etc..).

[Tomas]

I don't see this as a question for philosophy. Check out these fields of study: Criminology, Abnormal Psychology and Neuroscience.

MAOA Gene, Head Trauma, Abuse, Social Stigma, Low Socioeconomic Strata, Acetylation of the Gene CH3, Tumors, etc..

I've better uses for life than that bullshit. Did time at universities, nuff said.

Street learning after all said and done, far outweighs a vast majority of college professors, yap yappin' & awaiting their tenure .. and .. eventual tax-subsidized retirement. The vultures...

[Animus]

Sounds like the words of an intellectual bigot.

[Tomas]

Sounds like the words of an intellectual bigot.

Anything more than a one-liner?

I watched (some time ago now) several of those lectures you suggested Foreigner check out, but after a while .. don't you have anything to add of your own? You put out there about 100 hours of material that apparently, Foreigner dismissed. Tossing out that you've gone head-to-head with a few of those fellows doesn't carry much weight around me, I've been there and done that at many uni's... what others have accomplished and what you've accomplished here are the same.

Kindly don't toss out a bunch of sites to visit, what have you done lately?

Like I said, the vast majority of proffs are losers who couldn't make it in the private area. State-sponsored schools are just that, the almighty-state sponsored.

[Animus]

Anything more than a one-liner?

I've better uses for life than that bullshit. Did time at universities, nuff said.

Street learning after all said and done, far outweighs a vast majority of college professors, yap yappin' & awaiting their tenure .. and .. eventual tax-subsidized retirement. The vultures...

I missed the part where you gave anything but completely vacuous rhetoric.

I'm not interested in penis-fencing with you.

[Animus]

The problem with the "Street smarts" claim is that there is no way of independently verifying it, and it would presumably be ignorant of the neuroscience, physical evidence, and statistical analyses.

We are also met with the problem of who is street smart, and if two people with equal claims to street smarts contradict each other, then who should be deemd the authority?

Perhaps we should all ask Charles Manson for insight into the problem. I bet he is really street smart.

For your information I led a relatively psychopathic childhood, was charged multiple times with assault with a deadly weapon, I felt the compulsion to maim and murder every day of my teenage years. I'm certain I'd be rooming with Manson right now if not for a few fortunate circumstances. As an adult my emotions are relatively inert when it comes to death and violence, a hallmark of psychopathy. So take that "street smarts" crap and cram it up your whazoo. I'm not going to get into a debate over who has or has not experienced the correct series of circumstances to warrant knowledge on what motivates murder.

Stick to the science.

[Tomas]

The problem with the "Street smarts" claim is that there is no way of independently verifying it, and it would presumably be ignorant of the neuroscience, physical evidence, and statistical analyses.

We are also met with the problem of who is street smart, and if two people with equal claims to street smarts contradict each other, then who should be deemd the authority?

Perhaps we should all ask Charles Manson for insight into the problem. I bet he is really street smart.

For your information I led a relatively psychopathic childhood, was charged multiple times with assault with a deadly weapon, I felt the compulsion to maim and murder every day of my teenage years. I'm certain I'd be rooming with Manson right now if not for a few fortunate circumstances. As an adult my emotions are relatively inert when it comes to death and violence, a hallmark of psychopathy. So take that "street smarts" crap and cram it up your whazoo. I'm not going to get into a debate over who has or has not experienced the correct series of circumstances to warrant knowledge on what motivates murder.

Stick to the science.

I had no street smarts growing up on a farm, it wasn't until (we moved to the city and that) I found my girlfriend .. and the awakening happened.

Avoiding big brother was a non starter, where does one hide when only three offers were laid on the table. I latched onto the least of the three evils waved before me and did the incidental tour in VietNam. Killing fellow human soldiers was like deer hunting in Dakotah, it came easy. I returned body broken but never again considered violence against another but in my little world the family circumstances allowed an inner healing to come to pass.

As far as Chuck Manson goes, he was a pawn.

Your teen years were of your own creation, you didn't stop after the first violence, tough shit for you.

Science? - Well then, farewell Animus.

[Animus]

That's right Thomas, I consciously self-created, I knew that if I just turn my handlebars slightly to the right at this very moment, there would be a large truck headed my direction. I knew before hand that I would probably die or be severely injured. I made that decisions with the omniscience of God, right?

And every decision that followed, the decision to split my best friends head open was entirely rational and determined before hand by my amazing God-like knowledge and foresight.

Like I said, I'm not going to get into this debate where you argue that your life experiences qualify you to debate murder, but other's life circumstances disqualify them from the debate.

You can wax lyrical all you want, but the observational evidence still stands.