Marat

I agree. But then why do they still resort to torture or waterboarding, if the latter can really be distinguished from the former at all? Perhaps they just enjoy it or they want to exact vengeance? Perhaps it is a form of counter-terror against terrorist attacks, in the hope that people will be more reluctant to join terrorist campaigns if the thought of potential torture torments their minds? If the purpose of torture is just to scare the enemy rather than extract reliable information, then perhaps it doesn't exist at all, but is only said to exist for its apotropaic effect, and that is why the government doesn't want to release anyone from Guantanimo, since they would then reveal the secret that there is no torture?

The whole theory of scientific revolution maintains that while some of the scientific resistance to novel and challenging experimental results is just empirical scrupulousness, some is also just plain stubborn or defensive. If an explanatory paradigm is suddenly and dramatically changed by some result, all the established figures in the field become neophytes like everyone else, since they are all now alike in having to learn things from the beginning again. When you are chairman of the department and pulling in $300k a year for your absolute mastery of some theory which turns out to be wrong, not only are you exposed as dumb for not having seen it, but your hold on your prestige and money becomes tenuous, and you have to start scrambling to understand a new theory when you thought you could just coast into retirement on what you did 20 years ago. That is all so unpleasant that there is a strong motivation to hunt for something wrong in the defiant experiment rather than admit its validity, even when, in strict science, you should. It is often not just that the experimental result is doubted beyond all reasonable grounds for skepticism, but that it is worked into the existing paradigm via contrived elaborations designed to preserve the paradigm at any cost. If you look at the cycles and epicycles that eventually adorned the Ptolemaic theory of solar system, or the artificial solutions offered to explain away the Michaelson-Morley experiment while still preserving the old aether hypothesis, you wonder how people could have been so foolish as to think these constructions made sense. What is often required is simply a new look at things that brings the old paradigm crashing down, since the experiment itself often fails to speak clearly to its implications. Thus when Galileo dropped two balls of different weights from the leaning tower of Pisa and noted that the timing of their striking the ground failed to correspond to the result predicted by the reigning Aristotelian physics, he had to admit that there still was a difference in the time the balls struck, as the Aristotelians maintained, but that it just wasn't as large as it should have been. Does this result prove anything? It depends on whether you discount the difference as due to an undetected extraneous factor or not, and the experiment doesn't tell you that, but only your own sense of what the small apparent difference must mean.

Caffeine actually is a natural energy boost, since it is found in many beans. There are many other natural energy boosts which are even more effective, such as erythropoietin and prednisone, but you can't get these without a prescription. It used to be possible to buy noradrenalin for injection over-the-counter at German pharmacies, but after the European integration that may no longer be the case. Some claim that ginseng or gotu kola are natural energy boosters, but the effect seems small. Some vitamins and supplements you might try are vinopocetrine, gingko biloba, or solbutiamine, which essentially energize people by improving cerebral circulation.

The old rule is that you can never diagnose anything over the telephone except Kussmaul breathing, and over the internet you can't even diagnose that. However, it sounds as though you might have an ulcer. In any case, it is definitely worth having the symptoms investigated.

Historically, the process was a little more indirect. The allopathic physicians got together under the umbrella of their professional assoction, the AMA, pooled their assets, and 'influenced' the government to declare that anything other than allopathic medicine was a fraud. This closed all the rival schools of medicine and drove their practitioners out of business, with the result that the number of certified physicians went down and fees went up for them.

One of the things done in my place of work is that central line catheters are inserted into the sometimes complex vasculature of the patient. It is often necessary to obtain feedback from the patient while these catheters are being threaded in, but the procedure can be so disturbing to the patient that the patient must also be sedated. So the problem arises, how do you get reliable feedback from the patient while still sedating him? The answer is Versed. This drug allows the patient to space out so that he isn't bothered by anything that is happening and he wakes up without remembering anything that happened. This drug often causes patients to babble away while the catheter is being inserted, since these people naturally become quite voluble. You can easily direct them to talk about one thing or the other, so you can get them to shift the topic of conversation from their first wife's bad breath to their sensation of the catheter just by asking, and they put up no resistance. So from this, it seems that Versed is a perfect substitute for torture, though I am not aware that it has ever been tested or used for this purpose.

The common law subjects commercials to a standard of veracity which allows for what has quaintly been termed 'puffing,' which means that advertisers have some leeway in the claims they make for their products, which don't have to be 100% accurate, unless they are stated as a warranty, in which case the company can be sued if the product doesn't match the description. You have to give them some room, since otherwise they couldn't say "these are the greatest corn flakes in the world!" unless they were prepared to prove that in court.

But once society sets itself up as having the right to assess whose exercise of free will is sufficiently rational or reasonable, or sufficiently based on good judgment, to be permitted, there is then no longer any freedom. In 18th century Massachusetts, for example, people were fined if they didn't go to church on Sunday, since it was assumed to be unreasonable not to pause and take sensible care of your soul on the Sabbath. In 1950, the Hope Commission in Ontario, Canada, determined that the Christian religion should be taught in all public schools as a mandatory subject since it was the best foundation for citizens to learn democratic values (like anti-Semitism, I suppose). It is characteristic of deep value commitments that they attach themselves to presumptions about what is objective, and since objectivity informs what we regard as sensible, if we enforce good sense in people's choices then people will be free only to do what the majority wants, since everything else would be defined as 'unreasonable.'

Can it ever be anything but funny? More seriously, though, some critics have described the Christ figure depicted in the Bible as a rather unpleasantly sanctimonious individual, who fails to have a good laugh at things like his fury over finding money-changers at the Temple in Jerusalem, while yet simultaneously not being bothered about the fact that women are excluded from the Temple on pure gender prejudice.

I think a more sophisticated way for God to have communicated his message, rather than the rather clumsily mythological technique of ensouling a person, would have been to inscribe on the consciousness of every person a sense of divine love, which the person could then either discover for himself through his own goodness or not. That would get rid of a thousand complicating and diluting factors, such as the historical transformation of his message, the problem of the correct understanding or translation of his message, the impossibility of testing at such a great historical distance the genuineless of his prophet, the corrupting influence of church transmission of his message, the inaccessibility of the message to people living in Tibet, the unfair differential in the saving of people near Jerusalem or along the routes of cultural dispersion from Jerusalem, or those living before 30 A.D., etc. But making the availability of the message purer through some more sophisticated method such as suggested here would require a modern mind. Unfortunately, the people who invented the story didn't work out all the complications with the proper transmission of the message, and instead they were satisfied with a rather poor solution.

"Wiener" in German means "resident of Vienna," where I lived for a few years, so I guess I too could proudly claim in Kennedyesque tones, "Ich bin ein Wiener!"

The problem is that when experimental results demonstrate something that challenges a basic theory in a fundamental way, the first response of science is typically defensive, saying "There must be something wrong with the experiment," because there often can be shown to be extranenous variables that have crept into the result, or some benign reinterpretation of the bothersome result can make it fit well enough into the predominant paradigm of explanation once again. If you look for example at the historical debate between the defenders of the predominant phlogiston theory of chemical reactions and those of the new oxygen-combustion theory, for the most part those with the superior knowledge of chemistry in terms of data (as opposed to having the right theory) were the people whom history now labels as having been wrong. The phlogiston-advocates, who were still publishing up to ca. 1800, decades after Lavoisier's result, were also generally the better experimental chemists, though they were misled by using the wrong explanatory hypothesis. Just as it is difficult to find something in a jumble unless you have a clear picture of it in mind before you start looking, so too experiments often fail to speak unless you already have the right theory to explain them. One of the reasons why medicine, for example, is so slow to progress even though it is an experimental science is that no experimental result is ever accepted as final, since they are often so easy to explain away, so contradictions aboud. Thus in diabetology the reigning hypothesis is that hyperglycemia causes the vascular and neurological complications of the disease, but a New Zealand ophthalmologist, Dr. Adams, has demonstrated clearly that the changes in the diabetic retina are identical to the type of damage known to be caused only by autoimmunity, not hyperglycemia. Instead of this result having changed diabetology, diabetology changed it, and it languishes in obscurity, published in an excellent, peer-reviewed journal, but ignored as too disturbing.

"Fraud" for "Freud" -- an excellent pun to encapsulate the contemporary view of his earlier vaunted reputation! In German, where "Freude" is "joy," the pun was always more positive.

Isn't there a saying that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration? Perhaps genius, if it is the kind of genius that is attributed as a characteristic to someone because of his discoveries, is a talent for being so interested in something that the work invested in the 99% perspiration doesn't seem too daunting. The problem of genius is something like that of free will. We attribute free will to people by stipulating that they are responsible for what they do as a result of all the influences that have operated on them, both in terms of internal physiology and external socialization. We could just as easily deny the attribution of free will and just say that a 'person' is nothing other than the locus at which a number of influences external to the person have manifested themselves. Similarly, with genius, on one interpretation it is the brilliance of a single individual, but on another it is the result of the confluence of the work of preceding and surrounding thinkers who have influenced that individual, so 'genius' is essentially just being born at the right place and at the right time. On this view, Newton would have been simply ordinary if he had been born as a contemporary of Shakespeare, but being born in the confluence of influences from Galileo, Kepler, Leibniz, Huygens, Hooke, Wren, and Boyle, he was able to register and combine these influences to become a genius.

With respect to most of the common violations of social mores, society responds in part by seeking explanations of those violations in the possible illegitimacy of the social structures which first create the tensions generating these violations. Thus when poor, inner city children vandalize public property, people are inclined to say that this is just a symptom of the bad effects of social injustice on these children, and the proper response of society to this petty criminality is for social programs to be instituted to relieve poverty among inner-city children. The children may also be blamed, but still there is also a search for exculpatory causes for their misbehavior. But we have now seen repeated instances where prominent males have been subjected to severe public sanction for their violation of sexual norms. Grover Cleveland, Bill Clinton, Elliot Spitzer, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and now Anthony Wiener have all been subjected to public denunciation for straying outside the social sexual rules. Yet in every case, the response is always simply to blame them for violating norms, rather than to ask whether this apparently frequent behavior of norm violation indicates that the norms themselves are unrealistic and perhaps unjust violations of the type of social organization that male sexality requires. Should the lesson of these norm violations be that boys are bad or that the rules are unreasonable?

In a way, both issues are the same. After the Flexner report, the number of medical students in the U.S. fell by half and the salaries of doctors skyrocketed, and the number of doctors per capita has been inadequately responsible to the increasing demand for health services for quite some time. Increase the number of doctors and the waiting lists for treatment will evaporate, the access to affordable medicine will increase, and the only net loss to society will be that doctors will have to confine themselves to owning a cadillac rather than a mercedes.

Stefan, what does post #11 mean? One of the great things about the US is that hate speech is legal -- in contrast to most nannying European states and Canada -- unless it falls under the very narrow terms of incitement to a criminal act, such as shouting racial slurs to an angry crowd on the lawn of some minority member. Not that I approve of hate speech, but I just don't like living in a society which feels that it can judge what is a legitimate negative generalization about a group, such as 'pygmies are bad basketball players,' and what is not, such as 'all men are rapists.' (oops, I guess that is now officially accepted: it is just something like 'all women are stupid' that is hate speech.) On a private forum, of course, you can forbid anything you like to those using it at your license. It seems ironic that words are being censored in a discussion about censorship. Doesn't that violate the Russell-Whitehead theory of types by applying first-order rules to a second-order discussion? Also, why is it that some people get an attack of the vapors when they see the word 'f--k' spelled out, but they are all right with it if they see it as I have just written it? They know what it means in both cases, but it somehow only has its effect if it is literally spelled out rather than just recognized and understood?

I strongly suspect that torture is still commonly used today even though it is known not to be very effective at producing reliable information, and it is also well-established that other, more humane methods such as drugs and keeping people awake for long periods are more effective. The reason for continuing to use torture is pure sadism, both on the part of the governments using it and the people performing the torture, lighly covered by the cloak of its supposedly being necessary. Since the Nazis preferred to use scopolamine over torture, and they were hardly true gentlemen in their methods, I think it must be clear by now that scopolamine is a superior device to making people talk. I have had extensive experience with versed, which usually causes patients to babble so incessantly about everything that comes to mind that it is impossible for physicians to concentrate on even the most simple surgeries. They also tell the most interestingly embarrassing things about themselves, their lives, their perceptions, and their desires, that it is difficult to look them straight in the face afterwards, especially if their 'official' persona is that of a prude. So why wouldn't a harmless drug like versed, which leaves patients sufficiently conscious that they can respond to questions, be suitable for extracting information? It even seems better than torture since it causes patients to forget everything that has occurred while they were under its influence, so they would not know what they revealed or what their questioners knew.

The OP raises the whole question of scientific revolutions, first generated by Thomas Kuhn's 'Structure of Scientific Revolutions' back in the 1970s. The problem is that science operates on two incompatible tracks: One track seeks to bend all new facts back into interpretation according to the existing paradigm of explanation. Facts that don't fit the paradigm are pushed aside by the experimental proceedures generating them being questioned, by the graph being smoothed out, by being ignored, or by being explained away as due to some extraneous variable which was not accounted for. The other track seeks to develop theories strictly in response to the empirical data, whatever it is, and to abandon or revise theories which fail to reflect the data. Which track science adopts in response to any froward datum is always hard to predict. Generally, as the recalcitrant data accumulate, the patience of scientists in respecting the established authority of the existing explanatory paradigm is strained as they contrive ever new methods to repair the theory they already have to match the data. When the strain becomes sufficiently great, they abandon their respect for the existing paradigm, a scientific revolution occurs, and a new paradigm springs into existence. Imre Lakatos has refined Kuhn's ideas to make them reflect more closely what actually happens in this process, which can be observed in the transition from Ptolemaic to Copernican astronomy; from Cartesian particles in motion physics to Newtonian forces operating at a distance; from phlogiston- to oxygen-based theories of chemical reactions in Lavoirsier's work; from subtle fluid to dynamic theories of heat in Rumford's work; and from Newtonian to relativistic physics in Einstein's work.

Similar issues are raised by both polyandry and polygamy. More primitive societies are often characterized by two features: the entire village rather than the biological parents brings up the children, and there is sexual promiscuity. This is so extreme among the Kalahari Bushmen of Southwest Africa that they never even developed the notion that intercourse has anything to do with childbirth, since there was no way to draw specific connections in the general free-for-all. So this marks the extreme of multiple partners for everyone, yet with some stabile structures in place for child rearing. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the modern, Western paradigm of the monogamous relationship, with children reared by biological parents who are required to stay with each other in a stultifying lack of variety that destroys sexuality, limits the range of deep, affective relationships, and encourages folie a deux, Each arrangement has its pluses and minuses as a form of social organization. The more narrow and stabile the partnerships are required to be, the greater the emotional and life-planning security. There is also the psychological benefit of a long-term relationship, which produces its own peculiar sort of knowing and relating to another human being, with its good and bad aspects. These benefits exist for both parents and children. But the downside of these narrow and stable relationships are also evident. People need a variety of sexual and emotional connections, so there is enormous tension between the hard boundaries of these small, confining social units and the natural inclination of people to being open to form important human connections with everyone. Spouses cheat, children run away, and social disruptions ensue when the units fall apart. So why does our society opt for the narrow, stable unit system of social organization? Engels thought it was because of the need to stabilize the control over private property, but there seem to be more factors involved, in that nomadic cultures typically have both private property and polygamy, while agricultural societies and their industrial soceity offshoots have monogamy. I would guess that the more rationalized, bureaucratic, and economically organized a society becomes, the more it needs small, tightly-ordered, stable units as its building blocks, so monogamy becomes predominant.

Was it a problem in animal socialization that was the source of these troubles or was it just that for purely biological reasons, such as better nutrition, for example, the younger rhinos were becoming sexualized at an earlier age, and with this development they were also becoming more aggressive? In humans as well there has recently been a decrease in the age of puberty/menarchy, shifting downwards by several years in comparison with the 18th century, for example, when sexual maturity usually didn't occur until 17. The reasons for this have something to do with better nutrition, but the causes are not entirely clear, and perhaps whatever is mysteriously causing humans to mature much earlier than before is also operative in rhinos. Generally, while animal behavior does tell us something about human behavior, we shouldn't take that too far, since we humans exist not just in a matrix of biological influences but also in a richly-textured cultural matrix which alters our behavior and the effect of biological factors greatly. Our behavior, for example, is from an early age informed by the factually untrue, moral posit that all humans are equal, and this assumption operates on us, our socialization, and our social structures in a profound way, yet there is no way an animal society would have this factor operative in it.

The only rational morality is one based on ethical positivism, that is, on the principle that things are good and should be permitted if they promote net human happiness as measured in concrete terms of the actual material and emotional benefits to real, living people. Nothing artificially constructed as sacred in itself -- apart from its tangible value to real humans -- should be allowed to have any value against human interests. In the context of the present debate, the supposed 'right' or 'claim' of nature to remain intact without human interference is an otiose sacredness-in-itself which can claim no authority against real human needs, so the natural order has no entitlement to resist what humans need to do with it to serve their interests. Of course every action within the scope of promoting human interests has to be subjected to a risk-benefit analysis, and in genetic engineering there are always risks of potentially unintended consequences to human health through unanticpated environmental side-effects. But these costs have to be measured in terms of what human interests they threaten, not in terms of any threat to values which cannot be measured in their satisfaction of human needs. Genetic engineering has been going on for thousands of years, though slowly, through selective breeding of plants and animals. Now technology permits it to proceed more rapidly, but that shouldn't transform the entire ethical evaluation. Perhaps the greatest ethical concern is that up until now, human culture has been able to project its values into the future only through inculcating the values of the present generation in the next generation. But now human culture might soon in theory be able to project its values by redesigning the human genetic code to reflect those values, so that if tall, blonde, cruel, self-interested genuises are now valued, the disposition to be such a human could be build into the genes so that the next generation would have no choice but to represent the values of the present generation. This would limit the freedom of the next generation to change, which is an essential value of a democratic and open society. 'Soft' projection of the values of the present generation through schooling, religion, law, and other cultural institutions leaves more ambit for self-determination in the next generation.

I read an article in the 'Muenchener Medizinische Wochenschrift' sometime around 1986 or 1987 which discussed rare cases of childhood schizophrenia. A typical feature of such patients is that they see people's faces as transformed into vulpine form, complete with fangs, wild hair, and predator facial expression. It is interesting that they preferentially hallucinate these images rather than other distortions, and that the images children drew of what they perceived looked like cinematic wolfmen. Since schizophrenia according to some theorists represents the uncovering of various primitive brain features, I wonder if this preferential hallucination of wolf faces picks up on some instinctive phobia in humans of predatory animals (or Neanderthals)?

Any addiction that makes people less truly human and more like pure, unthinking machines is profoundly unattractive. People who compulsively gamble often seem glassy-eyed and robotic in their pursuit of the empty adrenalin rush they get from taking risks whose potential downside is typically much worse than any potential gains from their success. The general rule would then be that addictions which make people less critically self-aware are most ugly. Using this as a criterion, drug addiction and drunkenness seem to be among the worst addictions, while sex obsession and a preoccupation with chess are not. A math Ph.D. I know once told me that when he is doing math "there is only math going on in the space where I exist, but no self-awareness." However, in cases like this, the potential to return to self-awareness when socially necessary is more available than in the case of drunkenness and drug addiction.

Some report that it is the usual rule in the intelligence field that if an operative is captured, he should try to resist giving any useful information under torture only for long enough to allow the fact of his capture to come to the attention of his agency so that proactive countermeasures can be taken to anything he might reveal. It is expected that the torture victim will eventually give in.