Marat

This raises the interesting problem stated by behaviorism: Although a lizard may look as if it is experiencing panic or excitement when it does certain things, is it really experiencing those sensations subjectively? We can never have direct evidence that this is so. Even with humans, the notion that other people are not just robots who are perfectly constructed to mimic apparently 'emotional' responses when the appropriate events occur, but that they don't actually inwardly feel anything, is only dispelled by a conventional ontological commitment to assume that other humans have the same inner experience that we do. For lizards and other creatures there is no such convention.

The majority of doctors are idiots. Essentially they act like short-order cooks, applying standard recipes to standard symptoms. Beyond recognizing the symptoms and remembering (or looking up in the Merck Manual) the standard recipes, they don't really do much. You have to remember that before the AMA was formed and medical propaganda started boosting the reputation of the profession, doctors were treated and regarded as ordinary tradespeople practising a craft, and they had to make their housecalls at the back door with the butcher, the carpenter, and maid. In part the dumbing down of doctors has been the result of the standardization of therapy by agencies like the FDA and the professional societies, which punish severely the least spark of imagination flickering in any doctor's approach to disease. If you become an M.D. and don't go into research, you'll wonder why you had to study all that science, since you are not allowed to put much if any of it into practice according to your own creative insight. Doctors in certain specialties have never had the experience of curing anyone, and they are just white-coated bureaucrats handing out death sentences. At least refrigerator repair men occasionally get the fridge working again, and they still make housecalls. Most medicine today is just ritualzed and unimaginative 'management' of chronic conditions, suppressing symptoms at any risk from the side-effects of the treatment, pestering patients with repeated and useless tests, which often cause more problems than they could ever help in diagnosis (e.g., use of kidney-destroying dyes in radiological exams), and disciplining the patient to 'get the numbers right' at any cost to the quality of the patient's life.

I wouldn't recommend that anyone be forced to die for their own good! That is a judgment that everyone has to make for himself or herself. However, it does seem reasonable, with a firm eye on the potential horrors of life, to consider before having children that it might be better for them if they were never born, since at least at that stage they can't feel the injury of being made to die when they don't want to, or of having to kill themself if they find life too terrible to endure. The Ancient Greeks had another myth (was it that of Croesus?) whose final lesson was, 'Count no man happy until his death!' meaning that no one could truly say that his life had been tolerable until it was finally over, given the potential of life to impose unimaginable emotional and physical suffering. I've known mothers of extremely sick children who actually exclaim, 'I wish to God I'd never had any children,' speaking not just of how badly the experience of observing suffering at close proximity affects them but of how much they regret having imposed the risk of life on those who just feel trapped in suffering by being alive. If you're outside a medical field you really have to enlist your imagination to understand how awful things can be. I have seen someone born with Progeria, which is a condition of rapid aging, causing deterioration unto death by about age 20, with cataract formation, baldness, loss of musculature, failure to grow, deafness, and failure to grow en route. These children look essentially like tiny plucked chickens with a piping voice and thick spectacles. The true horror of this condition is that the intellect of its sufferers develops with unusual speed, so the children can savor the full terror of what is happening to them with a prematurely adult mind. And that's just one thing can go wrong that takes just a few pages to describe in a standard work like Cecil's Handbook of Medicine, which is itself circa 1500 pages long. Long before you get to page 1500 you think, what are we humans doing to ourselves by existing and making future humans exist ... forever!

It depends on how you define 'English vocabulary.' 'Nous' may, like 'point d'appui,' 'metier,' and 'gnosis,' be part of English in the sense that they are foreign-language borrowings used in high-fallutin' speech, but are they really English? German presents the same puzzle, since in principle it is always ready to adopt any foreign language term as its own, after inventing a gender and plural for it and changing a possible 'y' at the end to an 'ie.' Latin responded the same way to Greek, changing the spelling a bit but borrowing a lot of the much more sophisticated vocabulary. I guess my essential concern would be, does the potential sophistication of your thinking depend on the learned linguistic structures and vocabulary you have stored in your head? For example, Icelandic has a word meaning 'an object which is the same right-side out and inside-out,' but if we had grown up with this term incorporated into the basic structure of our thinking would we be more sophisticated geometers, or have less trouble learning Reimannian geometry and its associated approach to physics? Or does growing up with German as your linguistic orientation to the world give you a capacity to hold more ideas together in juxtaposition when you are thinking about them, given German's capacity to make long sentences because it grammar permits easier cross-references between modifiers and nouns within a sentence?

I once read an internal memorandum of the Prussian government discussing the problem of inflation in the early 18th century. The King was reassured when his ministers told him that most of the population would not be affected, since the majority of people were not really part of the money economy. Thus contracts of employment usually specified tangible things you had to be given or privileges you had to collect your own resources from the environment, rather than actual monetary payments. The famous philosopher Immanual Kant, for example, was paid in part by a yearly provision of wood for heating his house rather than by the money for it, just as country doctors used to be paid in farmers' produce. I suppose we could revert to a trade and barter economy, though there would be enormous disruptions, given that speculation and borrowed wealth cannot be well represented in that system. There was a situation suggestive of everyone going bankrupt at once when the Great Depression occurred in the U.S. and other Western economies. The reponse of people was to accept increased social solidarity rather than, as now happens when just a few people go bankrupt, reacting to the unfortunate with contempt.

We had a thread on this topic earlier, entitled 'Medical Stagnation.' Some evidence supporting the theory that medicine is stagnating is: 1) The FDA put out a panic bulletin in 2008 complaining that for about a decade it had not been receiving signficiant new drug approval applications, but that these were generally just minor modifications of existing drugs to circumvent patent protection. 2) The last major disease overcome in the West was polio, almost 60 years ago. 3) Most drug treatments today just suppress the symptoms of disease but are not curative. 4) Despite huge increases in the basic science knowledge of disease, this accumulated knowledge is not being translated into clinically significant progress. 5) Major diseases are expanding as public health problems rather than coming under control. Thus the number of type 1 and type 2 diabetics is burgeoning, autoimmune illnesses of all kinds are becoming more prevalent death rates for many cancers are not improved (apart from apparently longer survival because of earlier diagnosis), lung cancer deaths are increasing now that the world has largely given up smoking, and new cases of endstage renal failure are skyrocketing -- yet medicine seems powerless to do anything about these problems. 6) Life expectancy in the United States is now ceasing to make gains, and in some population groups in the U.S. it is even declining -- for the first time since statistics on this topic were kept. The 'true' life expectancy, in the sense of the useful lifespan, is probably declining in all population groups with the rise of Alzheimer's Disease. Should people really be counted as alive if they are essentially just brainless zombies wandering about? If this happens to someone at 75 and they live to be 85, I think we should more honestly say that people are now dying younger. 7) I once wrote a history of the development of medical thinking on a given topic and consulted journals from 1980 to 2000. I was always worried that something new would come up that I would not include, but I realized that nothing seemed to have changed between the articles of 1980 and those of 2000, so what was I worried about? 8) To take an example from one field, as a student I was assigned to do a study of renal medicine in 1984, and then again later I dealt with the same subject from 1996 to the present. There is nothing different in dialysis centers, and very little of any significant difference at renal transplant centers, between 1984 and now, and when you listen to talks given by the manufacturers of dialysis machines and the makers of immunosuppressive drugs, they don't plan on there being much different over the coming 20 years. But dialysis technology was developed in 1942, and the first successful renal transplant occurred in 1954. The worst part is that almost no one working in the field seems to notice the stagnation! It is becoming a ritualized trade rather than an expanding science.

Two distinct issues are moving parallel to each other in this thread. The OP asks what organ(s) cause us to feel emotion, while the responses to this question generally address it by looking at the strategic anatomical choke-points whose ligation could cause us not to feel emotion. But to address the OP's question, you would have to respond by pointing the famous 'myth of cerebral location,' which points out that things we usually think of as concerning the brain or expressed by it actually depend in large part on input from the rest of the body. Thus the adrenal glands, the thyroid gland, and the sex glands all have a major impact on how the neurological system and its brain develop the conscious sensation of emotion. You could go even further and say that if the patient were semi-somnolent from a problem with pancreatic or renal function, his emotions would also be entirely different. In essence, there are few if any organs that do not make us feel emotion, either in their normal or pathological states.

You should have a look at the book by Bryan Caplan, 'The Myth of Rational Democracy.' In it he argues that democracy is irrational because it fails to institute policies which would make the market maximally efficient in responding to demand. It is all very pretty and quite economically sophisticated, but it somehow leaves out human beings in its analysis. I say that because all the time it is talking about matching supply to demand, it simply doesn't consider the problem that there are real human needs (such as for medical supplies, in the present case) which cannot always be represented as a demand in the market since people don't have enough money to 'vote' for their need in a way that will make the market respond. Markets exist not to maximize their own efficiency and rationality, but to serve real human needs in the most humane way possible. If they cannot do this, then the market economy has to be limited or abolished.

Anti-discrimination values are moral, whereas the history of cultural influences attempts to be as scientific and objective as possible. Given that values and facts are essentially distinct (vide David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon), ed. by P. Nidditch, 1978, pp. 469 f.), and as a matter of logic you can never derive an 'ought' (as in 'you ought not to use stereotypes') from an 'is' (the facts of cultural history), with a 'Science' rather than a 'Morals' Forum there will always be a danger that the facts will refuse to comply with values, just as Galileo's telescope refused to comply with the Vatican's assumption of what a moral dogma required it to show. I think we can at least agree that since the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Historicism, Cultural Relativism, Positivism, and Existentialism never appeared in Islamic culture the way they did in the West, these historical forces have to have had some impact on the way people generally think in these different societies -- at least if the discipline of cultural history has any claim to objective foundation. And if it is accepted that these undeniably real cultural-historical forces did have an impact in one culture and not in another, then their continuing effects today have to cause a deep gulf in the way the West and the Islamic world think, even granting that within those two camps there are varying versions of Western and Islamic thought, with Lebanon being much more 'Western' in its thinking than Saudi Arabia, and Iran pre-1979 being much more Western than Iran today.

If you want an academic career, learning German early and well is vital. If you want to be a travel agent, learn Spanish. Unfortunately, although German was the main language taught at American high schools until the reaction against all things German shifted the concentration to French in the First World War, German is rapidly disappearing from the high school curriculum, as have Latin and Greek. The loss of the latter two is also a pity, since learning them is vital for building a good English vocabulary, helpful for studying medicine, and excellent for developing a sound understanding of grammar. Also, they help open the mind to deeper critical thinking by exposing students to conceptual structures and concerns different from those of most modern languages. There is no single modern word in any language I know that is equivalent to the Ancient Greek 'nous,' for example, with all its resonances.

Only a psychotic cannot distinguish fantasy from reality, or the supposed 'message' of a game or a cartoon from messages which appropriately guide conduct in the real world. Yet for some reason the modern, psychological rather than rational approach to society assumes that people are the helpless victims of every conscious or subconscious image, verbal suggestion, or influence that permeates through culture. This assumption can then be used to justify all sorts of aggressive social restrictions on the theory that these 'influences' are harmful, whether sociological data can demonstrate them to be dangerous or not (they are too subtle for measure, say the social-control freaks). So we have a new effort to restrict pornography on the theory that it produces subtle intellectual changes in society which operate to the disadvantage of women; censorship of cartoons unless they promote positive behavior; control of violent images on the theory that people are just monkey see/monkey do, input/output machines which have to imitate everything they see. It has been argued that the violence of cartoons performs an important educative role for children in teaching them that although the world can be a dangerous and violent place, they can adapt to it, survive in it, and master it. In contrast, cartoons that only show an innocuous world where nothing bad happens also do nothing to teach children how to respond to a world which actually does have terrible things in it. This theory points to the long history of children's stories to show that earlier culture recognized this lesson and deliberately exposed children to violence and danger through fairy tales to encourage them to feel that these threats could be resisted. Thus consider Grimm's fairy tales: a witch captures Hansel and Gretel and fattens them up to eat them; a deranged dwarf, Rumpelstilski, commits suicide by stamping himself into the ground when he cannot seize possession of a young girl's child; a freakish figure climbs up the hair of a young woman at the top of a tower in exchange for offering her a way out of subservient work; or from other cultural traditions: a wolf blows down the shack pigs are hiding in so as to eat them; a freak hiding under a bridge tries to eat goats scampering across it (Billy Goat Gruff). These stories are not only violent, as many modern cartoons are, but they are also often hideous!

The liberal worldview of the modern West deliberately exists in open interaction with empirical data and remains open to change as part of its essential perspective. It is democratic in the sense that it accepts no doctrine as final, other than the formal, structural principles that people must be guranateed their autonomy and that society must be open to possibility of democratic evolution to new styles of social organization. Their fluidity and openness induces them to prefer an attitude of tolerance to dissenting views. In contrast to this, there are cultures which represent 'comprehensive doctrines' (as decribed by the Harvard social philosopher, John Rawls), which accept certain fixed beliefs as unchangeable and resistant to any empirical refutation. They also embrace a static vision of society rather than the evolutionary view of democracy. Their goal is that people make the right choice, not that they be kept free to make their own choices, so immersion in the one true culture is the defining feature of the good person and the valid life, not openness to critical evaluation of various options. Their certainty that they have discovered the 'right' way for people to live makes tolerance of dissent meaningless for them as a public value. Now when liberalism collides with comprehensive doctrines, each of these opposites has two options for how to react. Liberalism can tolerate the threatening dogmas as just another form of dissent which liberal openness ought to allow, or it can adopt the pose of militant liberalism and attack the comprehensive doctrines as threats to its existence or as assaults on freedoms which have to be regarded as universal human rights. Germany's laws against Nazism, Europe's laws against Holocaust denial, and France's laws against the veil are examples of militant liberalism. The U.S. embraces a more tolerant version of liberalism. Comprehensive doctrines can respond to liberalism either by retreating into their own insular communities, as often happens in immigrant groups in the inner cities of America, or they can aggressive attack liberalism as in the case of radical Islam's suicide bombers. There is an obvious parallel between militant liberalism and radical Islam, though militant liberalism is aggressive but not murderously so. The ultimate way for liberalism to win out is to teach the world relativism before trying to teach it liberalism, since relativism, once you think about it seriously, seems irresistable, given that nearly all truths have to be regarded as to some degree tentative by thinking people.

I think the essence of our disagreement is in your statement that "insisting there is no God prevents the discussion of how things work that we need to have." To me it seems that resorting to the God-hypothesis where the data that we can generally agree exist don't strictly require it is where our confusions begin. If the organization of our experience forces us to posit the existence of some hypothetical structure, such as energy conservation, the interplanetary aether, the fact that nothing happens without a cause, etc., -- by logic and by the strict rule that we posit nothing more than we are absolutely required to posit in order to represent the implications of our empirical data -- then we can be sure that we do not introduce into our thinking any unjustified inferences which may later lead us down the wrong path. The problem with the God-hypothesis is that it seems to go way beyond the available and neutrally agreed upon empirical data available to support it. So once we start admitting things which are not strictly required by the non-controversial data we have, we open an endless regress in our thinking which allows us to posit that in addition to the electrical current explaining how flicking on a switch turns on the light, we can also assert that the electricity fairy is required to carry the electrons, even though we have no specific empirical evidence, and no inference from the empirical evidence requires, that we posit the electricity fairy. Once we say that, why not then add that the electricity fairy has to be carried by the invisible fairy-carrying hare, and so on ... ?

No verbal characteristics of a speech can compare with the utter bombast of Bush arriving in a jet pilot's suit on the aircraft carrier after the illegal invasion of Iraq. The egocentricity of that act surely trumps the self-focus in Obama's address. Perhaps also Obama can find an excuse in the fact that there is an election coming up in which the traditional charge of his opponents -- that the Democrats are weak on defense -- would otherwise have been heard again and again.

There is also a structural problem precluding energy efficiency in North America, and that is the existence of an infrastructure built on the assumptions of 'car culture,' which requires a 6-mile round trip by car to buy a bag of chips (crips) at the mall and get back to the suburbs. The urban centers are ghost towns after 6 PM, since everyone is transported 10 to 30 miles out from work to get to their suburban homes, and the public transportation system is essentially non-existent, and is now being cut back to reduce government debt, with the fuel crisis and global warming now taking second place to the debt obsession. It would cost trillions to tear down that infrastructure laboriously constructed from 1950 to the present, positively designed to waste fuel, and replace it with compact, internally varied urban centers such as Jane Jacobs recommended. Since Europe never lost its livable, concentrated urban environments and its excellent public transport networks, it will always be ahead in energy conservation.

China is not entirely capitalistic, since its government is still officially communist, and it still exercises considerable control in managing the economy, which retains large state sectors. Recently the communist government announced that it would be introducing measures to ensure greater equalization of the distribution of wealth, which is exactly the opposite of what the typical capitalist country would seek to do (e.g., continue the Bush tax cuts for the richest 1% of the population in the U.S.; cut social programs for the poor to pay for the debt created by capitalist risks going wrong in 2008 in the U.K.). India is also a peculiar country, since its economy is still quite primitive, with the nation intersected by absurd internal tariffs, commerce hobbled at every point by rampant bribery and corruption, and a judicial system that can take a decade to settle a minor contract dispute. Until these cultural and political problems are ironed out, and the infrastructure is improved, India is never going to be the economic power-house it should in theory be.

If the US attacked Saudi Arabia, it would be generally offensive to the Islamic world, given that it would probably involve foreign, infadel troops occupying holy sites such as Mecca and Medina. In a general sense the US and the West generally cannot avoid being 'at war' with Islam, given that they represent such profoundly opposed ideologies. On the one side you have a post-Enlightenment, relativistic, scientific, positivistic, historicist, existentialist, materialistic, open-minded world of critical thinkers, and on the other side you have a pre-Enlightenment, dogmatic, religious, self-assured world of people submerged in the pleroma of their culture's values. Even absent the opposition of Christianity and Islam, the tensions between these general attitudes towards life would make their friendly co-existence impossible in an increasingly interconnected global world culture.

Of course monarchs could always get loans, such as those raised, again mainly from Jews, to pay the ransom required by the Duke of Austria for the release of King Richard. I was speaking more of the new availability of loans to private persons for personal liberation. Ironically, the rise of capitalism with its emphasis on borrowing money to finance economic expansion proved to be the downfall of the old landed nobility, since they held their land inalienably, so could not pledge it as security for debt, so if their capital tied up in land was less productive than an equal amount of capital invested in trade and commerce could be, they could not mobilize their land capital as money by borrowing against it. The Bible's prohibition of usery for Christians used to be construed to deny Christians the right to loan money at interest, which is why Jews became money-lenders. It seems rather hypocritical that Christians could not participate in lending as providers of capital but they still felt it moral to participate as borrowers of it. Islam still recognizes all loaning at interest as immoral usery, though Islamic banks use a variety of legal contrivances to pretend that they are not really charging interest for loans.

I assume that it is trivially true that there is a 'creative and controlling force of the universe,' which physicists might describe as the equilibrium point between entropy and enthalpy, or as some implication the conservation of energy, or as a consequence of the Big Bang, etc. It you define the universe as the totality of everything physical, then obviously its creative and controlling force is also something physically present in it as an aspect of it, there to be identified by natural science. The God hypothesis, in contrast, seems to require that this creative and controlling force be something outside of nature, having a different character from it, and somehow acting on it from without. This seems to be how Aristotle, who spoke of a kind of God qua demiurge, as the first uncaused cause of everything, seemed to conceive it. Often, as part of the God hypothesis, that creative and controlling force is also said to be aware of itself. But I can't think of any evidence for moving from the 'creative and controlling force of the universe' described in the first paragraph, which is non-controversially real, to the supra-natural, external, possibly self-aware 'creative and controlling force of the universe' discussed in the second paragraph.

If you go for a long time on such a low caloric intake without apparent or measured weight loss, you should consider the possibility of fluid accumulation compensating for body tissue weight loss. Since the kidneys only stay healthy if the subject keeps them operating by eating (they are one of the first organs to start to fail when people undergo hunger strikes), if your kidneys are starting to shut down because of malnutrition they will lose their capacity to excrete fluids, causing fluid weight to build up in your body, which will make it seem as though you are not losing 'real' weight by your limited diet. If you want to lose weight safely and effectively, there is one diet I have always found successful in overweight patients. Let them eat anything and everything they want every other day, but on the days in between allow them to eat nothing. Their willpower is never exhausted, since they always know they can eat as much as they want by just waiting a day, but they never eat enough on the eating days to compensate for the loss of calories on the fasting days, so they lose weight. In practice such a diet usually amounts to a reduction in caloric intake of about 30% to 40%, since satiety sets in to limit over-consumption on the eating days.

If we take a carbon tax as essentially equivalent in its effects to higher fuel prices, then we already have a real-world model of a developed economy operating under these conditions, and that is Europe, where it is always freezing cold indoors in winter, people read by the window to delay turning on the lights, houses are heated by night-storage heat which draws power at off-peak prices, and the cars look like motorized tricycles and weigh about half as much. In short, people respond by buying less fuel and live in misery as the cost. Whether North Americans would be willing to adapt to that lifestyle after having been culturally educated in a more lavish way of living is something I doubt.

I guess I'll have to move farther away from where I work, but not so far away that I have to drive.

On the one hand loaning money to people is essentially abusive, since the creditors use their surplus wealth to control their debtors, which denies the human equality and autonomy which ethics affirms. People no longer interact as equals, but one person interacts with others via the augmented power of his wealth, while others become subservient since they depend on that wealth being loaned to them. Historically, many people sold themselves into serfdom or slavery in order to escape massive debt burdens, which suggests a functional equivalence between debt -- a usual social practice -- and slavery -- a universal abomination. But on the other hand, without a social system which permits the loaning of money, you have a static world of defined roles, no scope for ambition, and no means to propel talent among those who lack the resources necessary for self-development. As long as the medieval world of defined roles by birth persisted, there was little or no loaning of money at interest, since no one was permitted to become other than what he was born to be. But with the decline of feudal bonds in the 13th century there came the expansion of commerce in the Italian Renaissance, and loaning again became possible as part of the opening up of human personhood to the voluntary adoption of new roles. So just as loaning could be seen as equivalent to slavery above, it can also be seen as equivalent to freedom.

It is not really well known exactly during what periods the Ancient Greeks were making expeditions to Britain. It is generally supposed that there were long contacts between Mediterranean cultures and the tin mines near the Dorset Coast, so the general Greek-British connection was probably a long-term process rather than a matter of a few decisive expeditions, such as the great periplus. I thought the Minoan explosion (of Santorini) was supposed to have occurred around 1200 - 1350 B.C.?

The problem with a starvation diet is that your body will start to break down its own tissues for nutrition, which will produce a variety of metabolic side-effects that are not good for you. Also, it can damage tissues that are important to your overall health and strength. To avoid these problems, the normal rule in hospitals is that a patient your size should be on strict bed rest with 900 kcal/day, not up and walking around. If you want to lose weight you are correct in assuming that it is calorie restriction, not exercise, which is the key to success, but try something less extreme. It has also been noted that cultures which regularly underfeed themselves, like the residents of certain islands off the coast of Japan, have a much longer than normal life expectancy. This is consist with experiments on mice in the 1950s, which showed that mice fed starvation diets before reaching maturity lived longer. For no particular reason other than saving time and being somewhat eccentric, I used to go for up to four days in a row without eating when I was a student. I found that I actually felt slightly better than normal for the first two days after beginning my fast, though by the fourth day I began to lose my ability to concentrate, which was not much help in studying. I have always had a BMI between 18 and 20, so I am not much of an eater even under normal circumstances.