arno_v wrote:I just heard some shocking news today. A guy I knew from my sports, but haven't seen in a month or something because the season is over, comitted suicide today. I heard it from some people on MSN and they were all shocked and seemed to care very much. That's very normal since they all knew this guy and his friends, but the strange part is that I don't seem to care. I know it's tragic for his friends and familly and I know that I should feel sorry for them but I don't seem to care really. Even though I always had a quick chat whit this guy when I saw him. Maybe I don't care yet because I can't understand it yet. So CE, could you think of any reasons why I'm so indifferent.
EDIT: When I was talking about this with Ik I came to talk about his rasistic ideas, he was quite proud of it. So I always had some mixed feelings about this guy. Maybe it contributes to the fas I don't seem to care.
In general, many people feel shocked and care deeply when something like this happens
even though they are not really personally moved by the loss of the person. Instead, the major part of the shock is triggered by issues like "how this happen in our town/school/among us/to someone we know", "how could this happen to an ordinary guy like him", "he seemed so normal, like nothing was wrong with him" etc. They are shocked because they illusion of death being far away, is temporarily shattered, and because they are surprised. Not many people expect people they know to committ suicide, committ murder, abuse a child or something like that. Still, looking at statistics, we should in fact all expect somebody we know to do all that. But the thought is unpleasant, so we don't like to think about it.
With this in mind, I can see 3 alternative explanations for you not caring:
1. You were in fact not close to this person, and the others were not in fact close to him either, but they react according to the pattern I describe above and you do not.
2. You are affected by your disliking of this persons racist opinions, so you care less because even if you knew and like him in other aspects, his racism created an emotional distance between you.
3. You are in shock and has not yet, as you say "taken in" what has happened, that the guy is really dead. If this is the case, there will probably be a later point when you get a reaction.
My advise would be to do something that remind you of him, see your common friends, do something you used to do with him, and see how you react.
Cuchulain82]
This thread is the most interesting thread to read through that I have encountered here at GB- this is a great idea CE. [/quote]
Thanks wrote:Earlier in this thread Tom asked about mind/body duality. You didn't ever answer - do you have an opinion? I assume most brain researchers would tend to think that mind=brain and leave it at that, but I would just like to hear an educated opinion (I've tried to think about it and talk to people, but no one I've spoken with was actually a brain researcher)
The mind/body problem is a vast field to start to discuss, so I never answered Tom's question since he ceased posting here at SYM after he finished his Master in Philosophy. If you are interested in that field, I can pick it up again and post something more detailed later. For now, I will fulfill your assumption that brain researchers think mind=brain, because this is my opinion since I have no reason to believe otherwise. I do not believe in any transcendent aspect of the mind, and like most neuroscientist I view "mental" and "physical" events as something that is merely two aspects of the same event. If I decide "I want to watch the football game", that decision is both a "mental" event and a neurochemical event.
When discussion consciousness, as Tom did in his post, it is important to realise that brain researchers divide consciousness into several different aspects based on how we think they are associated with other functions and depending on experiments where you can demonstrate that different aspects of consciousness are separable from each other. Until the 1990's, neuroscientists had little technical possibilities to study consciousness other than in the form of levels of awakeness (ie levels of sleep, wakefulness, levels of coma, etc) but the development in neuroimaging (my own field) made it possible to address rudimentary consciousness questions. It is however a research field in its' infanthood.
Tom]What is at stake is not how we remember things or how we move our limbs - all that seems pretty straight forward. What the problem centres on is raw feeling as some like to call it. Look at an object near to you wrote:
This is more of a philosophical question than a neuroscientific question. Tom and philosophy seems to make a qualitative distinction between qualia and other forms of perception, whereas in neuroscience we do not. There is no reason for us to believe that the relationship between brain events and qualia would have any different properties than the relationship between brain events and other perception. Both qualia and other perception
are brain events.
The question "why do we have qualia" does not differ from the question "why do we perceive this spectrum of wavelenghts as sound" or "why do we have 10 fingers" - it has been selected for during evolution. Personally I think the phenomena of qualia is related to the rest of our ability to abstract thinking, our ability to make symbolic represenations in our minds, to act "as if" and to imagine things "as if" they were real. All this has to do with planning, with the ability to conceptualise time and the future. These skills have probably been necessary for mankinds ability to survive at some point/s in the phylogenesis.
Tom asked:
Tom]
I was wondering what your take on this problem is - or do you see it as a non-problem? a storm in a metaphysical teacup? [/quote]
and my reply is yes wrote:
It seems that these impressions are surplus to requirement. You see a car coming towards you, you jump out of the way. The image of the situation hits the retina, lots and lots of complex of processes take place in the brain - neurones fire all over the place and signals are sent to the muscles to move the body out of the way. Why do we also have all those impressions? Why do people not just go around about their business as normal but with out consciousness?
It may be viewed as surplus compared to the fact that a snail survives well, too. Somebody else on this board referred to mans intellectual capacity as "surplus" for survival, too. What both Tom and the other member fail to address when they view those features as "surplus" is that in biology, nothing is static. Environmental changes demand adaptation from species, and even if it seems like we have more skills than we need to survive in today's society, we probably had just enough skills to hang around during the dry spells before we first left Africa, or during the Ice Ages. When you assess a species, you must always look at in not only in its current context, but from an evolutionary perspective.
Also, I occasionally get headaches, I think from muscle tension. I always get them behind my right temple and they can last for more than a day. Does the fact that I always get them in the same area mean anything?
Yes, it means that either it is not muscle tension headache but some form of migrain, or if it is muscle tension triggered, you tend to squeeze the same muscle/nerve end all the time. In case of the latter, it means you are at higher risk to develop chronic pain from that area since you constantly irritate the same muscle and nerves, so daily stretching and perhaps a visit to a physiotherapist may be a good idea.
