Marat

C. G. Jung once characterized the essence of schizophrenia as the breakdown of the integrity of the wall between the subjective and objective worlds for the patient, since the mind was no longer properly policing that separation. The main symptoms which appear as a result are those of thought insertion -- imagining that the ideas of other people can appear in your own mind without being conventionally communicated to you, and thought broadcasting -- imagining that your thoughts can be heard by others without being spoken aloud. While any kind of stress, whether social or physical, can unmask these symptoms, it is important not to imagine that stress itself is the actual problem, rather than the underlying schizophrenia.

Women are more biologically stable than men, which is the product of evolutionary processes reflecting the fact that genetic experiments with women are more dangerous than those with men, since if a single male survives even a large group can produce an undiminished number of offspring in the next generation, while if a single woman survives the propagation of the group will be severely endangered. This is part of the reason why there are so many diseases which women carry but which affect only men, such as hemophilia. But this stability comes at the cost of women being stuck nearer the middle of the Bell curve when it comes to IQ. If you go to any institution for the severely mentally disabled, you will see that almost all the patients are male. Since male and female IQs on average are about equal, that has to mean that there is a corresponding shortage of female geniuses. If achievement in some field demands extraordinary intelligence, such as being a great composer, males will predominate. But in fields merely demanding a higher than normal intelligence, like medicine, you will find that there are about equal numbers of males and females in training now in Western countries.

This raises the interesting question of how people used to deal with negative quantities conceptually and numerically before the invention of negative numbers, when mathematicians would still have regarded them as ìmpossible quantities,`as many of the quantities generated by mathematical operations have been thought to be (e.g., square root of negative one). There were certainly debts before there were negative numbers, so how we the complex accountancy issues surrounding them numerically treated.

Obviously there are some areas of archeology which are quite data-heavy, but in others where the data are quite thin, overambitious extrapolation from tiny shreds of evidence is an occupational disease among archeologists, since they would have too little to say otherwise. The sort of reasoning can be exemplified by the fact that for a long time ancient historians said that the Roman Emperor Caligula was mad because he led an entire Roman army to the shores of France to collect sea shells, but only later was it discovered that the term 'sea shell' was military jargon at the time for a type of catapult. Inferences as bold as saying that the actions of the Roman army on the northern coast of France at that time were just the rituals required of them by a madman on the strength of a single phrase simply don't happen in modern history, law, or news reporting, because the greater amount of records encourages a higher standard of proof for inferences. The French 'annales' historians have made a lot in recent years of the view that 'the past is a foreign country,' and the ways of thinking of people in the past were so totally unlike our own that we simply can't comprehend motivations and assumptions of historical periods more than a few centuries ago. If this is true, obviously archeology has to fail as a science, since its inferences are based on the unstated assumption that what the artifacts it discovers mean can be determined by what they would mean to people who think like us. But a lot of the 'natural' or 'obvious' thinking of the past seems bizarre by modern standards, so I doubt that we really know how those people thought. For example, Cleopatra seemed to have no problems with marrying her brother. Egyptian priests seemed to find it just fine that if an engaged woman died before being deflowered, they had to have intercourse with the corpse to ensure that it could be 'recognized' on its way to the afterlife. Ancient Carthaginian women seemed to have no problem with burning their newborn children in an oven to please the god Baal. During the medieval controversy over the rulership of the Holy Roman Empire, all the contestants seemed to regard physical possession of the tokens of office, the scepter and the crown, as essential to success, and expended enormous efforts to obtain these even though they could have been very easily faked. In the modern world the claimant to the throne might have pointed out that since these were just symbols of office rather than the actual legal basis of the right to hold the office, they could be neglected, but the synthesis of symbol and reality was simply too strong prior to the 'dissociation of sensibilities' for anyone to make this practical conceptual leap, which would seem so obvious to us. Now that's odd.

You could argue that homosexual incest would lead to instability in families as mother and son competed for the sexual affections of dear old dad, and the legal systems of most countries affirm that state policy favors marriage, which is sometimes cited as the reason why contracts contemplating divorce are not enforced by courts in some countries.

There are left and right parties in the US, but they oppose each other around a focal point shifted far to the right of European politics. Just consider these data: The total amount of GDP taken in taxation in the US is 28%, but in France it is 46%, in Germany it is 40%, and in the UK it is 39%. I think this is the clearest objective measure of the position of countries on the left-right spectrum, at least with respect to economic issues.

The 17th century thinker Gottfried Leibniz tried to excuse God's apparent creation of an imperfect world by arguing that even an omnipotent being would be limited in the sense of not being able to do the impossible, and the type of impossibility which limited God's capacity to create a perfect world was its limited 'compossibility.' This concept refers to the idea that if God creates a planet with oxygen-breathing creatures, he is also stuck with having to supply some method to preserve the ozone layer to keep those creatures alive, since the initial choice compels the second choice. So if God has some good reason for populating the world with beings having free will, then their freedom entails his also having to allow them to make bad as well as good choices, which in turn necessitates the possibility of evil. His conclusion was that God's goodness despite having created an imperfect world was excused by the world he had created being at least the 'best possible world,' although hardly the best world conceivable if it was considered piece by piece rather than in terms of its total 'compossibility.'

Just to try to hone in on objective markers of schizophrenia which could help you with a self-diagnosis, I would like to ask if you have trouble tracking moving objects like hockey pucks or thrown balls in sports, or if during periods of stress you experience anything like auditory hallucinations?

In this whole discussion it is important to keep in mind that the value of an MBA has been considerably reduced over the last few years, since the general theory around now is that too many MBAs did nothing more for their inflated paychecks than promote the speculative investments which resulted in the market crash and ensuing recession. Although when you are young it is easy to misunderstand the point of life in terms of money and career, after a few more decades you will realize that what truly enhances the quality of your life is the sophistication of your intellect, and for that a Ph.D. is infinitely preferable to a degree in buying and selling things at the right price.

I have two objections to archeology's claim to be a science. First, it bases its inferences on data samples which would be considered utterly inadequate to prove the same sorts of assertions in history or in a court of law. A few Egyptian coins of the 2nd century B.C. are found in Massalia, and suddenly archeologists conclude that there must have been significant trade going on between Massalia and Egypt, when in fact the find may have been just a chance event, with some Massalian in the 1st century A.D. having been a collector of old Egyptian coins. Second, its inferences operate on the assumption that peoples in the distant past thought just like us, which we well know is not the case. Often the evidence of beliefs and atittudes even just a few centuries ago is shockingly irrational, illogical, and mysterious in terms of the human motivations which drive our behavior today, and yet when archeologists look at the material evidence of the past, they draw implications from it about how people in the past lived on the basis of the illicit assumption that those people oriented towards their material surroundings exactly as we would. When Egyptologists pompously announce that the tiny, painted, wooden figures in some pharoh's tomb were designed to accompany him to the afterlife so that they could serve him there, I always want to ask, "How do you know that they weren't intended as toys? How do you know that the whole ritual surrounded pharonic burials wasn't accompanied by raucus laughter and performed as a type of parody?" If archeologists 10,000 years from now find nothing of our present culture except a Jerry Lewis movie, they are going to announce solmenly that this cinematic record from the past represents the expected maturation rituals for a young prince in our era.

But lots of sex between consenting adults is perfectly legal even if it involves the kind of duress that might exist between parents and their adult children, such as threatening them with disinheritance, withholding affection, etc. A wealthy but ugly and mean person can get an attractive person to have sex with him/her, and so this operates as a kind of duress, but it is still not criminalized. The wealthy person in this example does not threaten you with disinheritance, but does threaten you with being excluded from sharing his/her wealth by not becoming a partner.

A complicating factor in some of the trade-offs that governments make is that they typically only increase the likelihood that people will die because they pursue some less life-sustaining goal. Thus if the city council decides to raise the speed limit in the city by 10 mph, there will be a statistical certainty that an additional 2 people a year will die in traffic accidents as a result, all just to get traffic through the town a little faster. That trade-off seems foolish, but it is excused on the grounds that no one actually murdered anyone, they just created a statistical certainty of that many additional deaths. But it is interesting that while you will spend life in prison for deliberately murdering just one person, if you are a government official adopting a social policy that with a statistical certainty will kill thousands of people every year (e.g., a study a few years ago showed that there are 40,000 unnecessary deaths a year in the U.S. because the country has not instituted a public healthcare plan), you will face no criminal penalty whatsoever, and will perhaps gain the approval of some political constituency.

The whole genetic exuse for forbidding incest is a non-starter, since people with severe genetic diseases have a full legal right to have as many children as they want, and in their case, the risk of transmitting serious illness is much greater than the risk of genetic problems from incest. I know a patient with polycystic renal disease, which is a horrible and deadly renal disease which 50% of the children of someone with the disease inherit, who nonetheless decided to have a child because she cheerily said "I guess I'm a glass-half-full-type of person!" I felt like asking her how she knew her child would have that same attitude, but I bit my tongue. Unfortunately, most people with polycystic renal disease decide to have children because of the same murderously idiotic cruelty, and the law can do nothing about it.

But the really difficult problem comes when you have to assess the healthcare budget in terms of the concrete trade-offs it implies. If you buy an extra dialysis machine for $100,000 and run it for about $210,000 a year, that will keep another three dialysis patients alive for a year. If you buy an additional helicopter for transporting government officials around that will probably cost you about the same to run it for a year plus a lot more capital investment up front to buy the machine. But since those officials could have gotten around less elegantly but much more cheaply by train, can you really justify the additional expense at the cost of those three human lives? What types of trade-offs would you make if you were the head of a family with one member needing dialysis? Would you buy a better deck for your cottage at the cost of letting that family member die? Of course not, but the government would, given the types of trade-offs it makes of vital healthcare spending against inessential luxuries to enhance the elegance of the public face the government presents. Imagine the program of a partially government-supported performance by the London Philharmonic saying "Tonight's performance of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony was made possible by murdering three dialysis patients, for which the directors of the London Philharmonic are deeply grateful to the National Health Service Budget Committee." That seems so horrific that it is unbelievable, and yet it is really what happens all the time.

A more interesting question is why does it matter? Modern identity politics seems to assume that it must be somehow evidence of discrimination or prejudice if the number of people from any particular group active in any particular area of society is not exactly proportional to their percentage in the general society. But the disproportions could well be due simply to different levels of interest in that particular field by different races, genders, and ethnic groups. Is it discimination which causes so many black males to be basketball stars? Is it discrimination that one survey showed that 60% of psychiatrists in the United States are Jews? If we assume that different cultures have different career interests -- which modern multiculturalism requires us to affirm and cherish -- then why wouldn't they also tend to go into different fields according to the interests which their cultures pre-program them to develop?

In a sense all concepts, including natural numbers, are man-made abstractions which isolate just one aspect of the sensory continuum around us, and highlight one particular feature of it for emphasis for our own conceptual purposes. It is an act of high conceptual abstraction to note the similarity among several objects, which are always dissimilar in some respects, and then impose on them a numerical framework so that they can be compared in terms of the number of times these abstracted similars recur. So negative numbers are not significantly different from any other numbers by virtue of being 'abstract' rather than 'natural.'

Why not extend that argument and legalize all drugs? Until the restrictions created in the U.S. circa 1906, you could buy almost anything you wanted at a drug store, including laudanum and opium, and yet the country still functioned with reasonable social cohesion and efficiency. Since it is perfectly legal in the U.S. today to commit suicide, it makes no sense that something infinitely less harmful like taking dangerous recreational drugs like cocaine, heroin, lsd, etc. should be prohibited by such severe legal penalties.

I agree that we could all regard ourselves as murders for preferring to spend a spare $300 on buying a new tv rather than using exactly the same amount of money to keep a poor person in Africa fed for a year who would otherwise starve. The only way that we could avoid this problem would be if there was a world government which rationally distributed resources to answer the most basic needs of everyone prior to using any to serve unnecessary demands, or if we were all saints. But what if it were determined that some rare and horrible disease, such as Huntington's Chorea, could certainly be cured if America were to invest one trillion dollars in developing a cure? I am sure that the state would refuse to make that expenditure because it would simply be too expensive for the number of lives saved, when compared to other interests of the state, such as polishing the Lincoln Monument. The things the British Royal Family acquired in the past were accumulated on the basis of race privilege (royal birth), conquest, murderous intrigue, exemption of the nobility from taxation for many years, etc., so whatever they inherit from those holdings can be viewed as undeserved. Even inheritance laws generally are suspect, given that a person cannot even legally own his own corpse so as to control its disposition and use after death, with that right falling to the next of kin, so why should he be able to own and direct the disposition of his wealth, which is even less his than his own body?

I think my general point stands, which is that states typically make resource allocations which clearly lead to the death of some of their citizens in order to acheive other goals which do not save any lives in return, but just promote some much less vital interest. Just look up the Amercian 'God Committees' of the 1960s, where because of the shortage of dialysis machines, committees were assembled to decide who lived or who died. None of this murder of American citizens would have been necessary had the tax rate been sufficiently increased to provide free dialysis for all Americans such as has been the case now since 1972. But what did the U.S. gain from killing these dialysis patients throughout the 1960s by devoting fewer economic resources to the purchase of dialysis machines? For each unnecessary White House party cancelled, for each unnecessarily lavish limousine for some Pentagon general, for each unnecessary refurbishing of the interior of the Secretary of State's offices, how many lives among the dialysis patient population could have been saved? Was it really worth murdering Americans to put on a better dinner for Khrushev during his visit to the White House, because that's what it came down to. The situation was pretty much the same throughout the world in the 1960s. For a while British dialysis patients were even sent to Germany for dialysis, since there were more machines in the latter country. I based my original comment on an article I saw in the 'New Statesman' I think in 1978 called 'Bellini or Kidney Machines?' which pointed up the dilemma of government funding trade-offs in Britain between arts funding and health service funding, but don't ask me for the exact citation now! And of course the situation continues today, since all countries with nationalized health services insufficiently fund them, which as a statistical certainly kills some people unnecessarily by long waiting times (cf. the Chaoulli v. Quebec decision of the Canadian Supreme Court) or by restricted provision of expensive treatments for desperate patients. And countries without nationalized health care systems kill even more of their own citizens by choosing to keep taxes low on rich people rather than save the lives of sick and dying patients, so essentially those nations make a collective decision to murder a few poor and sick people just in order to buy an additional yacht for a wealthy tax payer who now pays a lower rate because he is not taxed to pay for a free health service for everyone. In moral terms, how different is this from Nazi Germany deciding to kill some of its own citizens because of their race? I don't think that the taxpayer funding for the Royal Family in Britain can be justified by the fact that the country benefits from income from Crown lands, since there is no color of right for a single family, just on the basis of birth, to have been deemed entitled to those lands in the first place. Since the most fundamental presumption of a just society is that all people are equal, the notion that some are entitled to inherited privileges by birth is just pure racism, albeit narrowly focused than.

If we try to compensate for the fact that civilization generally becomes more barbaric as we go back in time by defining 'barbaric' relative to the general standards among nations at the same time period, then I think the Carthaginians are good candidates for being more depraved than most. They seem to have had special ovens in which they burned some of their own babies as sacrifices to their gods, which even the Ancient Romans found revolting.

There is also an interesting phenomenon that people whose native language is grammatically extremely complex, like Russian, always seem to have an easier time mastering languages whose grammar is simpler, while those who start off with a native language having very little visible grammatical structure, such as English, have a harder time learning a new language. Thus if you go down the complexity gradient, starting out with a native knowledge of Russian, then learning German, then English, and then Spanish, you will progress much further in becoming a polyglot than by proceeding in the opposite direction.

ydoaPs: Your first argument assumes that having free will is a higher value than always having to make perfect choices, which is not clearly demonstrated to be the case. Omniscience alone, even apart from moral perfection, would seem to deny that type of free will which Kierkegaard describes as the pure wilfulness of a rationally imperfectly supported 'leap of faith.' If the God hypothesis were correct, he could have some overriding reason, not evident to us, for choosing to create beings who have the necessary degree of imperfection in knowledge and will so that they are not perfectly constrained in their choices by omniscience and moral perfection and are thus free. God's creative options may be constrained by Leibniz's principle of compossibility, so that a world of morally and intellectually imperfect beings who for those reasons have free will is the best of all possible worlds which could be created. Your second argument, that "free will is necessarily subservient to a being's nature," seems inconsistent with the existentialists' argument that for beings of the level of sophistication of humans, existence precedes essence, so that our 'nature' can only be defined by reviewing what we happen to have arbitrarily chosen as our identity, rather than, as is the case with everything else, our nature being definable in advance, and our choices then predetermined by what we are. Sartre and Heidegger develop this point in detail.

There is a general theory that mind-altering drugs associated with disliked races are the ones which have been made illegal, while those which are not associated with disliked races, such as alcohol, are not. Thus marijuana caused a moral panic in America in the early 1940s because it was used by despised Mexican immigrants but not by Wasps, just as opium use caused a moral panic in San Francisco in 1900 because it was a Chinese but not an Anglo drug. Races and ethnic groups are very much identified by the foods they eat (e.g., English as beefeaters, French as frogs), so if the group is disliked, so is its favorite drug. Society generally can be understood as itself a massive mind-altering drug, since it seeks to induce conformity with certain basic values in the minds of the whole population, and this is part of the reason why it seeks to suppress alternative mind-altering drugs which may liberate people from the mass indoctrination society seeks to impose. But in a modern, tolerant, multicultural society there is tolerance for a number of profoundly mind-altering doctrines which take people far outside the conventional indoctrination system (e.g., belief in strange religions), it makes little sense to object to mind-altering drugs which change people's thinking much less than their alien ideologies do.

Here is a problem in optics: I have often noticed that even when perfectly detailed, miniaturized models of ships, planes, or cars are filmed, they still look fake on camera. What is the physical explanation for this? Could it be something to do with the ratios of the light waves to the object size being unnatural?

There is one key to learning a foreign language well which they never tell you in language class: If you get a girlfriend/boyfriend who speaks only the language you are trying to learn, and the two of you live together for sex months or so, that is amazingly effective in promoting your knowledge of that language. When everything from your emotional life to the management of the joint apartment and the shared finances depends on how well you can say "You keep telling me that guy is your brother but why doesn't he look anything like you?" clearly in her native language, then you have a very special motivation to learn it well. The Austrian-American movie director Billy Wilder said the same thing, by the way, and his English was unaccented and almost perfect.