GENIUS FORUMS

And why would I do that?

i don't think you understand what i am saying, dude.

vicdan wrote:

David Quinn wrote:Your problem is that you have no idea what authentic Zen is, and thus you have no ability to distinguish between authentic Zen and charlatan Zen.

yeah, and my good friend Angus takes sugar with his porrige.

Kids, you are hopeless. You can't even tell apart the singular philosophy of a singular person (Nietzsche), which has a definitive corpus of writing, and the religion created by collective thought, and non-thought, of many individuals over time, and defined by such individuals.

On this basis, we should dismiss science because it is a collective enterprise and because certain idiots have hijacked the word "science" for their own purposes.

Sorry, you still get an F for logic. I think the technical term is "double standard".

In any case, the individual writings of an authentic Zen practitioner are just as individualistic as Nietzsche's writings and should be treated as such. They aren't really part of an overall collective. It is a mistake to think that these individuals have anything to do with the idiotic groups who appropriate their writings and use them to justify their own idiocy.

The 'enlightened masters' justifying atrocities via Zen also drew upon canonical buddhist texts and buddha's words, you know -- and had nice, elaborate, textually justified reasons for what they said.

Anyone who has to rely on texts to justify their behaviour isn't an enlightened master by default.

That's the problem with religions -- every tuppence moron (like yourself) thinks he got The Truth (tm).

A generic response that is lazy and uninteresting.


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vicdan wrote:And why would I do that?

i don't think you understand what i am saying, dude.

My point was going to be that Zen does not, of itself, either argue for or against things like murder, war or genocide. Such things are actually incidental to its purpose. An enlightened person may well decide to engage in any of those things, given specific circumstances. You seem to be operating under the illusion that such things somehow speak against Zen's core teachings.

Also, In Japan one has to take into account the influence of Shinto and the code of Bushido to be able to appreciate the driving psychological force of that period. Just because Zen was used as a justification doesn't mean Zen was that driving force.

Bottom line: such activity doesn't formally argue against Zen and isn't necessarily relevant to it in a broader historical sense, just as it doesn't automatically follow that the Crusades happened because Xianity advocated or inspired it. Inspiration and justification are sometimes unrelated psychological realities. Determining when they are not isn't always easy.

If one examines Zen or Buddhism from the herd perspective it does have serious problems.
Eastern religions have an inbuild defeatism at this level. Even in its obvious religious state in Sth Asia this philosophy appears to hamper the development of individuals that advance society economically. Flowing on from this economic advancement, is an increased organisational capability to handle more complex societies. This occurs because Christianity promotes individual egotism as it relates to the herd, while eastern religions promote individual egotism for oneslef. Herd based egotism becomes the driver for inventiveness, as such inventiveness offers opportunities to promote one's position in the herd heirarchy.

Mind you one cannot empirically say that Buddhism is definitely at fault in relation to the attrocities that have occurred in Sth Asia over the last 100 years or so. Much of that is just the same sort of attrocities that occur as folk move from smaller groupings to larger groupings - from village tribes to larger communities. Although the European world commenced the prevails of such ego-rearrangements much earlier, this offers no certainty, but does offer some probability, that Zenish truths handicapped such reorganisations until influenced by the western world.

I think Victor may be right at the herd level, but not at an individual level, however I don't think one should denigrate zen/buddhism just because of this. A Zen type attitude will be eventually required for all humans, if we are to survive. This is undeniable.

Dan: Also, In Japan one has to take into account the influence of Shinto and the code of Bushido to be able to appreciate the driving psychological force of that period. Just because Zen was used as a justification doesn't mean Zen was that driving force.

Very true, imo.

I've been away from the forums for a while. It's good to see vicdan and danrowden mixing it up. Forgive me if I say anything that has been mentioned in this thread already, but shit, 10 pages already. Who has the attention span to wade through all that? As usual with these threads, the topic is a starting point to be veered away from by around the second or third page. Great minds talk about ideas, lesser minds about events, and the smallest minds talk about people. Why these forums present interesting topics and invariably wind down to pissing contests is beyond me. To wit, the topic is Intelligence and the Desire to Reproduce. What does that have to do with Buddhism or enlightenment? The less likely an offspring of a species is to survive in nature, the more offspring a typical parent of that species is likely to have. It has to be that way. It's natural. The survival of the species depends on it. It has nothing to do with intelligence, you narcissistic bastards. It's economics. People have more children during a Depression, and fewer when there's abundance. A generation with more resources is less transient. Planned Parenthood is the product of affluence, not necessarily intelligence. During a potato famine, it’s Nature, not the Church, that makes the O’Reilly’s have 14 kids they can’t feed. None of this has to do with intelligence, except to the extent intelligence helps one make and hang onto money. While a nation waits with baited breath for the inbred monarchs to squeeze out a single heir to the throne, 34-year-old Shaniqua has 5 kids and 18 grandkids. Money. Resources. Being broke and hungry makes pussy more of a necessity than a luxury. Hugh Hefner, the rich old fuck, has tons of gash around him 24/7 and there’s not a stretch mark in sight. How much of that does he need?
Biologists will tell you that during an especially harsh season, a bird will likely lay more eggs.
Sometimes it seems as though we only think we make decisions.

Shahrazad wrote:

My guess is that Damasio is advocating the psychological equivalent of painkillers (just imagine what it could do for people with phobias or PTSD!), not the excision of emotions from human functionality altogether; and i would bet dollars to donuts on this.

An interesting case he studied had to do with a patient who they (he) helped get rid of the suffering of pain. The patient still claimed to experience the pain, but it didn't bother him at all. So what changed is the emotional interpretation of the physical pain.

Well, yes, in a way it's the equivalent of painkillers but lets look first at the spread of usage of painkillers

People in the United States are living in a world of pain and they are popping pills more than ever to cope with it.

The amount of five major painkillers sold at retail establishments rose 88% between 1997 and 2005, according to an Associated Press analysis of statistics from the Drug Enforcement Administration.

More than 200,000 pounds of codeine, morphine, oxycodone, hydrocodone and meperidine were purchased at retail stores during the most recent year represented in the data. That total is enough to give more than 300 milligrams of painkillers to every person in the country.

And that's without various millions of doses acquired via illegal means. Now before you question the relevance of this consider the context of Damasio's remark in Descartes' Error in Postscriptum that Shah already hinted at describing his experience with a patience of Ameida Lima, a neurosurgeon performing prefrontal laecotomy.

He was a different person. He looked relax, like anyone else, and was happily absorbed in a game of cards with a companion in his hospital room. Lima asked him about the pain. The man looked up and said cheerfully: "Oh, the pains are the same, but I feel fine now, thank you". Clearly, what the operation seemed to have done, then, was abolish the emotional reaction that is part of what we call pain. It has ended the man's suffering .... But the operation seemed to have done little to the image of local alteration in the body region supplied by the trigeminal nerve, and that is why the patient stated that the pains were the same. While the brain could no longer engender suffering, it was still making "images of pain", that is, processing normally the somatosensory mapping of a pain landscape.

There's an endnote I've to include though:

.. it had a negative result as well: the blunting of emotion and feeling, whose long-term consequences are only now being appreciated fully

These long-term consequences I'd like to look into a bit in a next post - I mean it's still an artificial solution, perhaps somewhere on the same blunt scale as a lobotomy. For now another quote just to get the terms straight, from the same chapter:

The results of this intervention illustrate better than any other fact the distinction between pain itself, that is, the perception of a certain class of sensory signals, and suffering, that is, the feeling that comes from perceiving the emotional reaction to that perception

The reason I find this quote interesting is that I think it illustrates the difference in definitions of suffering, feeling and emotion people are using when talking about this subject. The definition of suffering as a feeling that comes from perceiving the emotion might not be perfect but enough to work with. But when he uses the word emotion Damasio already assumes it to include the purely somatic cause as an unavoidable inherent quality. Which is really just a specific way to define emotion and should be taken into account when interpreting his work.

vicdan wrote:how about the studied showing that patients with disrupted emotion facilities had trouble making decisions, making up their mind, etc?.. For example (emphases mine):

After the damage [to the emotion-related brain areas], [subjects] develop difficulties in planning their workday and future...

Yes, so they had brain damage: "Patients with bilateral lesions of the VM cortex develop severe impairments in personal and social decision-making, in spite of otherwise largely preserved intellectual abilities. Before their brain damage, they have normal intelligence and creativity"

They had disrupted facilities, areas where also our emotional states arise from. But this is not near enough to suggest a causal link between emotion proper and decision-making, apart it using possibly some the same 'circuitry'.

The ‘‘Somatic Marker Hypothesis’’ was proposed in order to provide a neural explanation of the real-life decision-making defect of these patients. The main point of this hypothesis is that decision-making is a process guided by emotions....

Emotions defined as somatic marker like Damasio does indeed [hey, after all Bechara is his student and Hanna his wife]. But that becomes awkward reasoning: emotions are first defined as X and X is needed for decision-making so: emotions are needed. All the while perhaps defining emotions in a very specific way. And I'm not the only one making the argument as I'll show further below.

Notice the gambling game mentioned is as much about intuition and estimating as it's about what we normally would call 'feeling'. And the 'wrong' choices could as well be caused by emotion: the appeal of the rewards and punishments that turn out badly. The 'superior' game was played by the ones not affected as much by the appeal. But to jump to the conclusions their rationality was superior because of the presence of emotion counters the observation that in this case the irrational choice was the more 'emotional' one: being lead by immediate reward and punishment.

This ties in with the term "myopia for the future", related to individuals under the influence of alcohol and other drugs. As Damasio writes "almost nothing but the present is processes with clarity". Anyone with drinking experience can attest to that. Since emotions are since day and age compared with alcohol, couldn't it be that our 'Bilateral Lesion' patients are possibly more emotional than the test group? And yes, this would automatically redefine emotion to some extent.

The lack of physical anticipatory responses at the BLVC group being measured also does not have to mean the lack of emotional response that would help them learn or predict. The responses might be a result of learning and predicting, just as easy - the body getting programmed by the rational mind. Again the Damasio group doesn't have much of a case, only a set of interesting results.

And still this is all based on experience with patients with "bilateral lesions of their VM cortex". Do you know what that is? A whole bunch of things are related to damages their: lack of understanding sarcasm, difficulty processing contextual elements, difficulty in moral developments (actually turning them scarily 'utilitarian'), and lots of other behavioral problems. These people are clearly impaired, but to say they are damaged in emotional capacity only is a wild assumption.

Here's another example of how these tests are done: Deficits in Social Knowledge Following Damage to Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex As you could gather from that article is that test cases often consist of people who had suffered "head injury from missiles or shrapnel incurred during the Vietnam War". Furthermore such tests are coming with such great conclusions as "ventromedial patients had difficulty choosing drawings to match an emotion expressed through facial expression, gestures, or body posture". Of course this whole line of testing doesn't make any difference between the capacity of dealing with the complexity of subtexts and the mental state of being affected by it ('attached', 'involved', 'upset', etc).

It has been shown that there is a significant correlation between performance on the GT, the ‘‘betting task,’’ and tasks of delayed discounting thus supporting the notion that these three sets of tasks may engage a common mechanism of decision-making, tied to the VM region [lesions in VM regions impair emotional functionality].

So the only thing proven here is that the mechanism of decision-making was damaged. And that this damage also related to capacity of dealing with emotion. This is a long way to claim emotions proper are part and parcel of decision making itself.

Mind you, this is a fairly coarse examination of emotion, too... we don't know enough about cognition yet to understand in detail just how far emotions reach.

Yup. As Damasio stresses: "To understand in a satisfactory manner the brain that fabricates human mind and human behavior, it is necessary to take into account its social and cultural context".

Here's another view by the way you might find interesting knowing your background: Do machines, natural or artificial, really need emotions (pdf) - by Aaron Sloman, Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science , The University of Birmingham, UK. He has other stuff there too but this presentation summarizes perfectly.

Sloman wrote:Here is the essense of the argument Damasio produced, which many people in many academic disciplines enthusiastically accepted as valid:
There are two factual premises from which a conclusion is drawn.
P1 Damage to frontal lobes impairs certain emotional capabilities
P2 Damage to frontal lobes impairs intelligence
C Those emotional capabilities are required for intelligence

IS THIS A VALID ARGUMENT? The conclusion does not follow from the premises.

This is the same thing I noticed too and tried to explain above. He mentions Susan Blackmore agrees with him only after giving it some more thought.

Sloman wrote:Very intelligent people keep falling for the argument.

Yeah, bring it on Aaron :)

Sloman wrote: A terminological decision to label all preferences, policies, and principles ‘emotions’ would trivialise Damasio’s conclusion.

That's exactly the danger I see in these discussion and it's more real than you think.




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As an interesting aside on the eternal gender discussion that I came across today (real men are holistic?)

Does gender play a role in functional asymmetry of ventromedial prefrontal cortex? (Daniel Tranel, Hanna Damasio, Natalie L. Denburg and Antoine Bechara)

We found a systematic effect of gender on the pattern of left–right asymmetry in VMPC. In men, there were severe defects following unilateral right VMPC damage, but not following left-sided damage. In women, there were defects following unilateral left VMPC damage; following right-sided damage, however, defects were mild or absent. The findings suggest that men and women may use different strategies to solve similar problems—e.g. men may use a more holistic, gestalt-type strategy, and women may use a more analytic, verbally-mediated strategy. Such differences could reflect asymmetric, gender-related differences in the neurobiology of left and right VMPC sectors.

I see you ignored the fact that the decision impairment was accompanied by the decrease in physically measurable correlates of emotions, too.

You are saying that it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, but it could really be a bowl of pudding.

Yes, it could be some other cognitive facility which just happens to be provided by the same brain regions which provide emotional function; and it could be that it's the loss of those other facilities that impairs decision-making, and that those facilities are lost in tandem with emotional function.

It also could be that the microwave ovens work because miniature microwave elves jiggle the water molecules when they see the microwave radiation coming, so that it's the elves, not the radiation, which heats up the water, contrary appearances notwithstanding. However, the reasonable and honest conclusion, based on currently available data, is that emotions are intimately connected to decision-making, and that it's the microwave radiation, not the elves, which heat up your tea.

Bye.

Diebert provided this quote from Descartes' Error:

He was a different person. He looked relax, like anyone else, and was happily absorbed in a game of cards with a companion in his hospital room. Lima asked him about the pain. The man looked up and said cheerfully: "Oh, the pains are the same, but I feel fine now, thank you". Clearly, what the operation seemed to have done, then, was abolish the emotional reaction that is part of what we call pain. It has ended the man's suffering .... But the operation seemed to have done little to the image of local alteration in the body region supplied by the trigeminal nerve, and that is why the patient stated that the pains were the same. While the brain could no longer engender suffering, it was still making "images of pain", that is, processing normally the somatosensory mapping of a pain landscape.

Yes, this is what I was pointing to. Thanks for taking the trouble to look it up.

Diebert said,

They had disrupted facilities, areas where also our emotional states arise from. But this is not near enough to suggest a causal link between emotion proper and decision-making, apart it using possibly some the same 'circuitry'.

OK then, what would you consider enough to suggest that link?

Emotions defined as somatic marker like Damasio does indeed [hey, after all Bechara is his student and Hanna his wife].

What’s your point here with the latter part?

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Shahrazad wrote:

They had disrupted facilities, areas where also our emotional states arise from. But this is not near enough to suggest a causal link between emotion proper and decision-making, apart it using possibly some the same 'circuitry'.

OK then, what would you consider enough to suggest that link?

As long as emotion is defined broadly as some state in which "a monitoring mechanism acquires a tendency to abort, redirect, or modulate some other process or collection of processes" (Sloman), the link becomes obvious. But this type of emotion is not part of the discussion. The only way for neuroscientists to suggest a link for example between anger and proper decision-making is to find a way to disable the emotional reaction to (the cause of) anger like they disabled the emotional reaction to pain.

Or they should document how those who underwent the prefrontal laecotomy suffered from longterm negative effects and how that was not related to the bluntness of laecotomy but because of the principle of the function of the emotional experience.

The fallacy in Damasio's hypothesis is a very simple one. The fact that certain damages influence our emotional capacities as well as decision making or rationality doesn't lead to any meaningful conclusion about how emotion is 'needed' for rationality and proper decision making. It's a wild shot and shows more likely a presupposition about the importance of emotions.

Emotions defined as somatic marker like Damasio does indeed [hey, after all Bechara is his student and Hanna his wife].

What’s your point here with the latter part?

That this research behaves at time like a huge echo chamber where people tend to get lost in. Readers lose the larger picture, for example the obvious fact that it all hinges on suggesting the specific prefrontal damage affects only the capacity to allow emotion and not other crucial processes. Damasio resolves this by implying all involved crucial processes are part of the mechanism of the 'emotion'. This is really a fallacy.

vicdan wrote:I see you ignored the fact that the decision impairment was accompanied by the decrease in physically measurable correlates of emotions, too.

No, I wrote about the lack of physical anticipatory responses during the gambling test. In how far these responses correlate to emotion, that's not clear at all. It's only about the body anticipating the next action only after a pattern had been established. Only people like Damasio insist in including such responses as full blown 'emotion'.

Yes, it could be some other cognitive facility which just happens to be provided by the same brain regions which provide emotional function; and it could be that it's the loss of those other facilities that impairs decision-making, and that those facilities are lost in tandem with emotional function.

It would be safe to assume this could be the case, knowing the lack of understanding of these things. It wouldn't be "some other cognitive facility" though but the facility to deal with subtexts and decision making which could also provide the emotional framework. It doesn't in any way imply that the latter is needed for the first (as hammered on by Sloman as well).

However, the reasonable and honest conclusion, based on currently available data, is that emotions are intimately connected to decision-making,

Well no, it's a conclusion based on some pre-determined idea that what is commonly called emotion or passion are crucial in setting a goal. I provided counter arguments from a cognitive scientist to show you how more people are looking at this more critically. Ignore it if you will, but science isn't so neat and consensual as you are often suggesting it is. It's quite crude, full of bias and politics and more often off the chart than actually on it. You'd better learn to deal with that unless you like your ass to be kicked over and over again when you carry your 'conclusive evidence' to the table in discussions lying mostly outside your competence.

They had disrupted facilities, areas where also our emotional states arise from. But this is not near enough to suggest a causal link between emotion proper and decision-making, apart it using possibly some the same 'circuitry'.

As hard as you may try to dismiss it, the fact that they share the same circuitry is an important point. Showing that there is a correlation between emotions and decision-making (as Damasio has) is quite good, even though it is true that correlation does not equal causation. It is likely that these two things cannot be separated easily, or at all. The suggestion of getting rid of emotions that QRS makes is a dangerous one.

You have showed nothing Diebert, apart from the remote possibility that these two brain functions are completely separate. Victor's tiny elves heating the water molecules apply here. Keep hoping that these elves exist. In the meantime, I'll continue to suggest that getting rid of emotions from the root is terrible advice.

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Shahrazad wrote: You have showed nothing Diebert, apart from the remote possibility that these two brain functions are completely separate.

Perhaps you should read back and this time more carefully. It's easy to miss the finer point and a function being "completely separate" was never an issue. It hasn't been shown by anyone that emotion really can be called a 'brain function' at all. It's a result of several brain functions, that's a more accurate way to say it. It doesn't mean it has to be in all cases and for all times. Behavior is apart from evolutionary also extremly context dependent. Actually most of the emotional expression that were originally talked about were social emotions and they'll have to be adaptive and mixed - just as dependent on the lives being lived as they are on the various neurological causes.

Victor's tiny elves heating the water molecules apply here. Keep hoping that these elves exist.

It's the other way around: the conclusions of Amasio's research become quite close to elves heating water molecules. Substitute the elves with 'emotions' and the boiling water with rational decision making. Introduction of somatic markers do not say much about the function of desire, attachment and frustration in our daily lives.

In the meantime, I'll continue to suggest that getting rid of emotions from the root is terrible advice.

Fair enough, because it is a terrible advice. The only thing to get rid of is the root itself: attachment - false identification. The delusional and ignorant part of our functioning disappears by itself because it lacks nourishment. Which emotions exactly remain and which stay is a matter of detail, a matter of finer definition of what one means with it.

Stoicism is all about the effect of emotions on the reason. Aristotle:'Most men are such slaves to passion that they'd do better in the hands of a more rational master'. Freud is all about how denial comes out of emotion, and notes the ingenuity the neurotic uses in explaining to himself why he thinks the way he does in the face of contrary evidence.

Nobody really uses all the facts, appropriately weighted, in reasoning. Who getsta decide what facts are relevant? Epictetus accepted that most men are too driven by emotion, and it is the duty of the Stoic to do what we now call case management. The Stoic is not without emotion; the diff is that the display of emotion is deliberate; they are tools, not masters. One can be completely rational while spanking. In fact, the Stoic position is, that that is the only correct way to do it.

Marcus Aurelius:"the boy who grows up controlling others, does not learn to control himself." but control what? his emotions. To remain rational despite the display, or for that matter hiding, of emotions. Its not like asceticism or Buddhism, there is no denial of the passions, just their deliberate application as the occasion arises. If your mother misses you, show yourself to her that she mite not be distressed. But as to haw far, how often, there is no hard and fast rule; that's up to you.

Physical or emotional trauma can result in a "lack of affect". But the complete denial of emotions hinders the intuitive understanding of others, so emotion is a useful tool. Stoicism recognizes that affection is necessary in dealing with women and kids. Its not an alternative to reason, but a tool.

I ponder the effect- like I read that Kucha, in the middle of the 1st millenium, had 10,000 Buddhist monks. never mind how many Manichean, Confucian, or Taoist monks there were. So, what happened to the Oriental gene pool with all these dudes who wanted to achieve spiritual enlightenment thru asceticism over the course of the last couple thousand years?

Nobody, Occidental, or Oriental, considered that while the smart case worker women have been trying to set a good example by not having babies, the client classes, as Diebert notes, keep on breeding. When I point this out to Liberals, adding that the social safety net is coming apart as the case loads go thru the roof, the silence is just deafening.

Is this an emotional lack of response? Are they stunned? Ask if Affirmative Action is ok when it comes to the nursing care of their children. <snurk> Funny how this line always gets snipped.

daybrown wrote: The Stoic is not without emotion; the diff is that the display of emotion is deliberate; they are tools, not masters. One can be completely rational while spanking. In fact, the Stoic position is, that that is the only correct way to do it.

A deliberate display of emotion is in interesting case since it removes the usual 'spontanity' associated with the general emotion. It becomes a kind of 'going through the motion' and with that could generate certain sensations that could go along with the motion. But when anger is displayed by facial expression, burning eyes or a physical threatening stance - it wouldn't automatically mean any inner state of anger. As you say: this is about control. To suggest, as some might, that such degree of control would diminish the ability of the motion, its fluidness, would be erroneous. Point in case: the martial arts. When the feeling blends with the motion, becomes one thing - there's only movement but I wouldn't know where the feeling would be found anymore.

One could ask what the difference then is between a mastery of emotion and the idea of the disappearance of it. An intuitive understanding of others I wouldn't call myself an emotional thing although empathy is kind of the first baby-step toward true and adult compassion. This all ties in with the possibility for reason to become more of an intuitive response -by pure repetition, by deepening and contemplation of wisdom. But are we still talking about an emotion in the sense everyone else is talking about it? The forms might be similar but when motivation comes from such a different vantage point perhaps its' time to differentiate more carefully between emotions and feelings, passions, sensations and intuitions.

Diebert, you ever play poker? While the poker face is useful, there's more money to be made in creating signs of excitement or disappointment. I dunno if other cultures have a game where the ability to deceive pays off as well, a skill the Yankees have used to their benefit in negotiations all over the planet.

The skill is also useful in intuiting the emotional state in others; ascetics dont seem to care what others think, and the cultures which have admired it have not gotten very far. None of these celibate moral models seem to have considered the long term effects of their policy. But Epictetus has a comment about a stoic man married to a stoic wife to bear stoic children who will grow up to do what we now call case management. He never imagined that Stoicism, unlike other religions, would plan to take over the world, but that it would always be filled with fools who need more rational masters.

He does admit that the Stoic would do more good without the additional responsibility of a family, but on presented with the abundance of fools we now see, would recognize the need for a eugenics program to reduce the case loads to something that was manageable. Caesar did not support the family of Gallic drunks; he enslaved them, taking them out of the gene pool. Forensic exam of slave skeletons shows the women were too malnourished to conceive. So- the number of such fools Epictetus saw was less than what we see now.

Mahayana-Hinayana; the ultimate expression of the latter would lead to the total extinction of those with the genetic endowment of enuf smarts to achieve enlightenment, and a mass of fools breeding beyond the ability of the ecosystem to support. Which has led to population cycles of boom and bust. Ascetic cosmologies dont see these cycles, think only in terms of enlightening the current generation, whereas Stoicism was willing to apply passion to create the next generation of men who would set a moral model that future fools might benefit from.

Its a moot point all right, at where the display of love which children need, becomes real.

daybrown wrote:Diebert, you ever play poker? While the poker face is useful, there's more money to be made in creating signs of excitement or disappointment. I dunno if other cultures have a game where the ability to deceive pays off as well, a skill the Yankees have used to their benefit in negotiations all over the planet.

Indeed I do, the complex relations between statistics and reading or displaying behavior are instructive and a healthy challenge to master. Many aspects of life seem to revolve around similar calculations but are more hidden - often even to ourselves. Under many romantic and passionate exteriors the interior might be non-stop engaged in surprisingly cold calculations - complex games of hide and seek to foremost getting what one desires or what Nature whispered we should desire. The reasonable but near to impossible approach seems to become aware of the player while not crippling the play.

Diebert van Rhijn wrote:

Shahrazad wrote: In the meantime, I'll continue to suggest that getting rid of emotions from the root is terrible advice.

Fair enough, because it is a terrible advice. The only thing to get rid of is the root itself: attachment - false identification. The delusional and ignorant part of our functioning disappears by itself because it lacks nourishment.

Agreed. One should never try to get rid of the emotions, as that can easily lead to the suppression of them. One should just try to overcome ignorance. If that is achieved, the emotions will fade away on their own, without our even missing them.

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Diebert van Rhijn wrote:

daybrown wrote:Diebert, you ever play poker? While the poker face is useful, there's more money to be made in creating signs of excitement or disappointment. I dunno if other cultures have a game where the ability to deceive pays off as well, a skill the Yankees have used to their benefit in negotiations all over the planet.

Indeed I do, the complex relations between statistics and reading or displaying behavior are instructive and a healthy challenge to master. Many aspects of life seem to revolve around similar calculations but are more hidden - often even to ourselves. Under many romantic and passionate exteriors the interior might be non-stop engaged in surprisingly cold calculations - complex games of hide and seek to foremost getting what one desires or what Nature whispered we should desire. The reasonable but near to impossible approach seems to become aware of the player while not crippling the play.

And is there an IQ test which measures this? I dont think so. But I have seen, both in clinical settings, and on the street, people who were not regarded as intelligent, pull off some beautiful scams. It'd be interesting to see what the bell curve of this kind of intelligence in different races would look like. Academia, and the corporate culture, dont even admit it exists, even tho it is essential in their own struggles for pre-eminence.

That's not true, and this makes me wonder about your claims of psych background. Almost all existing theories of intelligence account for the 'street smarts' and interpersonal facility in some way. The academia very much acknowledges this type of intelligence, as being distinct from the type measured by IQ.

You cant [b[do that[/b] with a paper test Vicdan. Its too dynamic a process that relies on the intuitive skill to read body language. You ever play poker? Ever read about a shrink study of poker players?

IQ and other tests are quantified. Thats what the score is. How do you quantify the myriad of different muscles, voluntary and involuntary, that are in dynamic reaction to the proximity of the intended, or unintended, receivers of the information?

Moreover, different gene pools have different instinctive gestures that communicate similar, or different things to similar or different people in similar or different situations. that's too many variables for even Chi square. That academia acknowledges street smarts exists has not given them a way to map it on a bell curve. They dont have a way to use it to add to, or detract from, the numbers they get from giving people tests on paper.

All they can say is that those who score high on paper can adapt well to groups of others people who also score high on paper. Which promises success in academic and corporate cultures. In terms of the rest of the planet, if we wanted to reduce the rate of environmental degredation and species extinction, then we need to promote the birthrates of those people who are comfortable in the natural environment, and pick up intuitively on what it needs. Partly, that requires a good paper score, cause that's necessary to produce the paper to get the grant money.

There are many others, who also score high on paper, but dont giva fuck about the environment, and only care about their personal advancement in the power structure. Likewise, there are many who are innately caring, but are frankly too dull witted to really understand the complexity of environmental interactions, and can do more harm than good.

Then lastly, there's zillions of stupid motherfuckers who only want as many sons as possible to prove their virility and feed their egos, who seem to be breeding faster than anyone else. Unless we can stop those jackasses, this whole discussion is moot.