h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

i want a theological/philosophical/political debate. i've been looking all around here for someone i would want to talk to. i pick you! i'm 22 and just graduated with a degree in physics and psychology from carnegie mellon (pittsburgh, PA, USA) and i doubt you'll get blank looks from me.

If your looking to talk about this sort of thing try the forum A1146917 I'm on there a lot and there are plently of other people wiling to chip in and keep things interesting. Sorry it took so long to reply, I've moved house so I've not had internet access for the past month or so.

Is that physics and psychology joint honours? I thought psychology and artificial intelligence odd enough but at least theres some common ground - what on earth possesed you

Hey! I just moved too so the internet's just now up.

I had a justification for it. I want to understand everything, and physics is the most fundamental level of study for everything in the world, while psychology is the most fundamental level of study for everything that involves people (naturally the one contains the other). Otherwise, physics gives me a good technical background (there are those who believe it "teaches you how to think") and psychology has become the subject i'm truly interested in, although it pisses me off how unscientific they can be. They think that explicitly teaching students the scientific method makes up for the fact that most psychological theories are not based on first principles at all. I shouldn't be angry, it's just that psychology is at a level that i liken to physics 100 years ago or longer, and it's faced with the problem that everyone has an opinion about how people are, whereas while people may think at first that heavy objects fall faster than light ones, they won't much care when they are proven wrong.

I'm planning on getting into neuroscience, if i can stomach the whole academic beaurocracy any longer.

I have been visiting the Forum. I think that's how i found your space originally. Z already chastised me for writing in all lower caps.

later

p.s. no honors, physics kind of killed my g.p.a.

I'm not sure I understand the desire to understand everything (Though I have the desire to understand the desire to understand everything) Surely it is only possible to understand everything you can derive from the facts you have available to you and since we don't have any facts available to us it is not possible to understand anything. (If you understand that.)

What you can do is understand everything that would be true given certain assumptions. But since we cannot guarantee that our assumptions are correct then if the motivating factor is an understanding of what is correct making the assumptions undermines the objective.

That physics is considered the most fundamental level f study of everything in the world by you does not mean that it is true, I know a number of people (not myself) who would argue that it is theology or philosophy. Surely there is some other motivation contributing here?

Lets assume for a minute a shared objective reality, that the past happened, that there are no major conspiricies, that the way the world works can't and won't be changed at will by some all-powerfull being and all of the other things that normal scientific people assume I can make some sensible comments which make more sense.

Your right about psychology being unscientific. And your right that it pretends to be by teaching scientific principles and then does not adheare to them. That being said I'm not sure it should be a scientific subject.

I belive in free will. Can't prove it, I simply assume it to be true - if you want to talk about that then say so otherwise I'll leave it at that. As such psychology becomes a nondeterministic discipline. As such it cannot easily be studied scientifically and it makes much more sense to work out how to do things by attempting treatments and working out what works on a statistical level (which seems to be the prevailing approach - though how what to attempt is decided varies)

Can't think of anything else to say, sure there was something...wish I had a working memory.

I'm just more of an empiricist than you are (i think), although I'm more of a theorist than many people I know as well. I'm willing to take assumptions at face value when they reach a level that is no longer the domain of science. I don't want to be like that guy in hitchhiker who discovers every day that a pencil writes on paper.

Interesting what you say about determinism. All physics was determinisitic under classical mechanics, but then there was quantum mechanics, which undid the idea that you could predict the future simply under the laws of physics. Quantum mechanics is probabilistic, but determinism and probability are not the only choices when it comes to how physical systems work. There is also chaos. I'm not sure how much you know about chaos, but I'd be happy to go into it if you like.

Let's compare two systems. One is a big set of gas molecules making up "air." The other is a big set of neurons firing in a brain. If the systems are chaotic, then the individual components of the systems (molecules or neurons) can follow all the rules of determinism, while you are still unable to predict the outcome (i.e., weather, or a choice). Now if you want to say that the weather is unpredictable, but the brain has "free will," then that comes down to consciousness (which, depending on who you ask, may or may not be a scientific problem). But it doesn't prevent either system from being studied scientifically -- it just makes it very, very complicated. I guess i'd rather go difficult and precise over easy and fuzzy.

I will postulate one thing -- free will and non-free will is a dualism like life and non-life. I imagine that we will find there is not such an easy divide between the two as we would like, once we get down to the nitty-gritty of how free will works. (Does a dog have free will? How about a fish/nematode/bacterium/virus?)

And now i'm just throwing something out there that's been on my mind. I'm reading about a lot of evidence available for scrutiny, which as far as I know is simply being ignored most of the time, in favor of various "extra-sensory" abilities of the mind. This really throws a wrench into things because it doesn't seem to fit in with our ideas of psychology OR physics.

On wanting to understand everything: I don't know. I was born that way?

Yikes you got back to me pretty quick - what on earth were you doing up at that time of night.

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Why a predisposition towards scientific methods? Why not take religious assumptions for example? (I personally have the same predisposition and can explain why I feel that way but I've a feeling your answer may be more interesting)

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But psychologists are so good at it! We can study for years to find out things that seem intuative. One of the psychology as a science issues.

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It was my understanding that physics was concerned with tangiable observable effects which we could, at least theoretically, attempt to harness with some benefit to ourselves. This description of quantum mechanics seems to point to an unobservable effect which is of little use to us - though this is probably a rather naive view, I know nothing about quantum mechanics.

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Again I have a laymans view of chaos, I haven't studied physics since GCSE and for some reason they didn't cover it. Though go ahead I'd be interested to find what you have to teach.

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I think I need an understanding of chaos to follow that point.

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Conciousness is not a word I have a good relationship with. Everyone I ask seems to have a different opinion of what is meant by the word so it's not too helpfull for communicating. Free will is both a scientific and a philosophical problem. If psychology/physics ever reached the point that they could predict behaviour perfectly then I think I could accept that as a proof of determinism, however elements like quantum physics would make that impossible as if yoy predicted a 10% chance of action A and a 90% chance of action B there is nothing to say whether whatever action the person does take was a result of some random factor or of their own choosing. So it is probably best left to philosophers

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I thought life and non-life were easy to distinguish...are you a necromancer? But I think I see what you mean, somthing similar to distinctions like sentience and a lack of sentience?

I don't think you can show how free will works - I think that if you could demonstrate any sort of mechanism then it is no longer free will. It seems to be more something that you belive in or not but can't prove either way.

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Its hard to say because there are a lot of odd things which we don't normally think about - for example my housemate (A biosceintist) thinks that humans are capable of echolocation, this being the case we could effectively see through walls etc. (Of couse nobody is that proficient) It does make me wander what extraordinary capabilities people might have that we are not aware of or how they work. A study that bothered me is one wherby a sample of chronically ill people were taken and 1/2 of their names written down and given to a number of churches as people to pray for - the group which had people praying for them had significantly more recoveries than the other. Though I haven't seen the paper only citations so there may be problems with the research. Still.

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I suppose thats as good an answer as any. Why does anyone want what they do?

I believe that I'm up at odd hours compared to you because i'm in the States.

Quantum mechanics is completely observable. You can't study something in physics that you can't observe! However, it is not deterministic. Do you know of the "wave-particle duality" that we now call a quanta? Heisenburg's uncertainty principle? (You can't simultaneously know the position and velocity of a quanta; more precisely, knowing the position more accurately is traded off by knowing the velocity less accurately, and vice versa.) What it boils down to is you can't predict where a "particle" will be, but you have a probability curve that tells you the probability that it will appear in any particular location. Maybe the quanta has free will!

As for chaos -- I'm trying to think of a simple example. The model that I used in lab requires a modest understanding of potential energy wells. I can come back to that. Here's the simple explanation. Consider a simple oscillation such as a pendulum. It goes back and forth in periodic motion. If you set up the conditions correctly, you can put it into chaotic motion -- it goes back and forth, but you don't know which it will do (imagine it returning to the center and then going back the way it came). The path it takes -- back, forth, back, back, forth, etc. -- is deterministic. However, it could take many different paths and you don't know which path it is on. You figure out what path it is on by measuring the initial conditions (say, position and velocity), but you can't know them precisely, because all measurements have some amount of error. Under normal deterministic physics, the amount of error on those measurements won't make a huge difference in the outcome, but under chaos, it DOES make a huge difference, and that is the point. The different paths within that small range of initial conditions have DIVERGENT rather than convergent deterministic futures. This affects air and fluids in the form of turbulence (a dripping faucet can be chaotic or periodic), and I suspect that it may affect the brain. The question is, we know what we can't know from a chaotic system, but what CAN we know?

*We can study for years to find out things that seem intuative. One of the psychology as a science issues.*

I think you may find, upon closer examination, that some psychological postulates were sneered at and then seen as intuitive after the fact. Furthermore, the point of science is to take "intuition" and make it hold up to harsher scrutiny. The other point is that sometimes the intuition is plain wrong, or very distanced from the "whole story."

*I don't think you can show how free will works - I think that if you could demonstrate any sort of mechanism then it is no longer free will.*

I'll ask you a hypothetical question. Let's say you had to make an emotional decision, and I made measurements of your brain's insides, and determined that your amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex were in a power struggle (people do look at emotion in this way), and the amygdala won, giving you a decision. Does that mean that "you" didn't make the decision, but the parts of your brain did? What if i could narrow the decision down to the firing or not-firing of a single neuron? Does that neuron have free will while "you" don't? I think taking the stance of "any mechanism is not free will" is dangerous, because of course there are mechanisms, but I doubt you want to run the risk of giving up the concept of free will once those mechanisms are identified.

I think I take scientific assumptions because they are specifically designed to create a self-consistent model of the world; that is, to methodologically weed out inconsistencies, and that is a logical rather than "intuitive" way to think, and I have natural leanings in that direction. However, at this point in my life I'm trying to balance myself out again.

Echolocation is nothing. I'm reading about evidence that people can view things across the globe, like from St. Petersburg to San Francisco.

I am not ignoring the post up to the end of chaos, I simply am not well educated enough in this area to make sensible comments, I apprichiate the education. Now all I need is to find someone who disagrees with you and compare notes. :P

My source for the psychology comment was a textbook I have lying around here somewhere...can't find it...need to tidy up. Basically it was to do with behaviourism being replaced as the leading area of research in psychology some eminent psychologist was noted as having said that a scientific paradigm has allowed us to find many things and be very sure about them, but these things are either self-evident or so intuative that a 5yr old would already know them. There are those that argue it shouldn't be a science I was wondering what you thought about that.

I have faith that I have free will. This is impossible to disprove. If you could analyse my body and predict perfectly what it does then you still haven't got anywhere. I could follow your predictions for a decade and it wouldn't matter because maybe I would do something different the next day. If this seems a lot like the argument that you can't prove gravity or anything else for that matter it is because it is.

However the difference is acceptable odds. If the cumulative probability of everything I've dropped falling downwards by chance (suppose for arguments sake it has a 50% chance of falling away from earth) becomes < 1% then its worth assuming that things will fall downwards because this helps predict events and build machines that work etc.

If on the other hand you could demonstrate that there is a miniscule chance of free will vs a much larger chance of determinism it is still worth assuming you have free will. The reason is simply that it does not matter if you assume free will and are wrong, because you were always going to be wrong and theres nothing you could have done about it.

Of course there are mechanisms, but as long as you can't prove them to 100% (and with no known fundamental truth of the universe nothing can be proven to 100%) then I can retain my notion of free will and maintain that it is the logical thing to belive in.

I was using echolocation as an example to demonstrate that people can have apparently supernatural abilities where there is some mundane explination that is hard to notice. Maybe the human body can act as a radio tranciever in the right conditions. Maybe there is some undiscovered wave spectrum that the seemingly inactive part of the brain broadcasts on all the time. It would not suprise me to find that people habe fantastic capabilities but I would be very suprised if there wasn't some mundane explination.

I've just noticed that I claim to know something about quantum physics on my space. I wonder why I wrote that (I wrote my space over a year ago my memory span is about 3 days) How odd.

Have you ever heard of quantum tunneling? Quanta can do impossible thigns like move through walls. If all the quanta in a macroscopic object suddenly decided to move through a wall, then the object would, in theory, actually move through the wall. The probability of this happening is so low that you would have to wait longer than the lifetime of the universe to see it happen. Ignoring *that* would be a case of acceptable odds.

I am absolutely not interested in proving that there is no free will. On the contrary, I think at the very very least, it is necessary for people to believe in free will to function properly (try to make decisions, hold people accountable for their actions, etc.). In reality, I think it is a moot point. People make decisions, and studying the brain tells us how they do it.

I have never actually read or heard of a specific argument claiming that psychology shouldn't be a science. Maybe you can be more specific. I think SOME branches of psychology are obvious and unscientific (pointing squarely at social psychology). In social psychology, there's this theory called "cognitive dissonance." It says that people don't like holding contradictory beliefs in mind and strive to change them to fit in with each other. Big whoop. The psychologists didn't explain *why* people are this way, all they did was give it a name and provide some evidence to anyone who may have doubted this. I think that social psychology is trying to do science at too high a level to be able to depend on the lower-level sciences for explanation -- but that doesn't make it an unscientific problem. It makes it a problem that will need to be solved scientifically at a later date.

*I was using echolocation as an example to demonstrate that people can have apparently supernatural abilities where there is some mundane explination that is hard to notice.*

What in the world makes human echolocation "mundane"? Seeing evidence for this would make me incredibly excited. But that is the one thing non-scientists do that drives scientists nuts -- they think that having the explanation is "mundane," while having mystery (otherwise known as a complete lack of knowledge) is exciting. Why? Why does the explanation automatically fall under the mundane? The joy of science is in finding the explanation, and then explaining it better and better.

Belive it or not I had heard of quantum tunneling. I don't see the relevance. Surely you can't be arguing that we can ignore this highly unlikely event but anything more likely might happen?

I don't belive people need free will to make decisions. If the world is predetermined then the decisions will be made or not and people will find that it is determined or not. It simply does not matter.

Generally the arguments for non-scientific appraoches come from the theraputic side. Take Freud (to cite a famous example) there is no way that you can claim that he used rigourous scientific techniques. Many of his theories are based on very little evidence (He developed a theory of childhood development without talking to anyone younger than 30) The one factor I can find in his favor is that neofreudian techniques work. The patients end up becoming (for lack of a better word) saner. Some neo-freudians have argued that it is not necassary to persue a scientific paradigm in order to cure mental disoreders. Consider your example - you take a phenomonon, name it and prove it exists. Suppose this phenomonon is a way you treat person with sympton X such that sympton X goes away from a therapists point of view this is enough there is no need to say why it should be so, only that it is. It depends on whether you think psychology is about working out why people function the way they do. Or simply about curing mental disorders. (Personally I favor the science argument, I'm just playing devils advocate)

Next time you get into an academic library do a search for human echolocation, I think you might be excited. A thing becomes mundane when we are familiar with it, we become familiar with things that we can explain. Take an earthquake, I've only experienced one and had no idea what was going on when it hit. It was all pretty exciting - however if you live in an earthquake ridden area you get used to it and start talking about where each one comes on the ricktor (Theres a word I've never had to type before. Wonder how it's spelt) scale. The explination wouldn't be mundane when we found it, but it would become so in time.

I didn't really have a point with the quantum tunneling, but I think you would be fairly bound to notice if things fell up even <1% of the time.

Well... I agree with you that people don't need free will to make decisions. Why *does* it matter whether or not they make them with free will?

Naturally, I'm more interested in understanding how people work than in treating mental disorders. However, I have been treated for a mood disorder before, a type of depression called dysthymia (so I have some interest in therapy), and I found the methodology neither scientific nor effective.

The earthquakes would become familiar whether or not we could explain them, no?

We'd notice if things fell upwards 1% of the time but < 1% covers 1 < % < 0. The exact boundry depends upon how problematic an exception is. If a treatment fails 1 time in 100 its a reasonable treatment. However if a plane falls out of the sky 1 time in 100 you won't get me on it.

Nothing and everything matters. You cannot say why does X matter, because we can't tell what does and does not matter in the existential sense. You can only say why does X matter in terms of Y. It matters to me if I have free will because without it I am not responsible for my sucsesses and failings. I cannot say if the things I do matter in the existential sense, however I know that if I am not responsible for them there is no chance that I can make a difference if I am then there is a chance, however small, that what I do matters and this is enough to motivate me. Ultimately it doesn't matter if people have free will in the existential sense.

My girlfriend had depression for two years and tried almost every psychological remedy under the sun. It did nothing and as a result she has become very cycnical about psychologists and their practices. (So why she'd go out with a psychology student is beyond me.) Problem is we can't look at individual cases. The statistics say that current treatments are effective in something like 60% of cases, granted not a great hit rate, but a lot better than spontaneous recovery. If using non-scientific would improve treatment (And there are people in treatment who belive it would) should we make that shift at the cost of our understanding of people?

I think things become familiar a lot more quickly when they can be explained. Consider if there was debate raging about whether earthquakes were the anger of the gods or the result of sorcery or the planet rebelling against human influence - would people living in earthquake affected areas find them so mundane? The mere fact that we do not know something is enough to make it seem fantastic. Of course once we work it out it loses some of its mystery - but so far every time we think we have the world figured it surprises us with something new to think about. As long as every answer we find causes us to ask a new question then the world will stay a spectacular place.

Current treaments cause a "response" in around 60% of cases. That means that 40% had NO response. A much smaller percentage of cases acheive "remission," meaning that all the symptoms are gone. I fall into the "response" category, but if it doesn't make me stop wanting to kill myself then I'm still entitled to consider the whole enterprise a failure.

Did she get better?

I don't consider it a trade-off: we can use unscientific treatments and still study people, because the purpose of clinical psychology is to treat people, but the purpose of the rest of psychology is to understand them. Incidentally, I've started using varying levels of science to combat depression, such as meditation, self-hypnosis, yoga, aromatherapy, over-the-counter herbal medication, and self-imposed cognitive behavior therapy (all this after i dumped the shrink), and at this rate I'll never be able to tell what it is that fixed me, but I can always try to figure it out later.

As for being responsible for the things you do -- are you trying to say that your brain might be responsible for the things you do while "you" are not, in the absense of free will? What exactly do you think "you" are? A soul?

I'm not sure it's so hard for people to deal with each other while ignoring gender. I do it most of the time - though I can remeber Fashion Cats (another h2g2 goer) outrage when I wouldn't give her another shot on the pool table because she was a girl. One of the things I like about hootoo is that people tend to treat each other the same regardless of gender, race, nationality and so on.

I'm willing to accept you probably know more about the subject of depression than I do, I had one lecture and a short exam question and that was all. What is meant by response? Is it a posative response? Surely if things get better in any way the therapist is justified in claiming a partial sucsess.

Sort of. She no longer cuts and burns herself and she is much more cheerful in day to day life. However there is a tendancy for her to become withdrawn or depressed as a result of small problems. I'm not sure depression is something that gets better - it seems more like it is suppressed and can come back any time. Still despite the problems she seems to enjoy life on the whole and I'm really enjoying being with her depite the occasional difficulty so I guess you could call that better.

There are a limited amount of rescources to go around, good minds, research grants etc. You can have both but it would be possible to improve one at the expense of the other so to some extent its a tradeoff.

I have thought a lot about what I am. I came to the conclusion that I am a will. I have desires and I impose these on the world using this body. It is not beyond the realms of possibility that there is some other way that I could influence existance but I don't know it. It is not because I belive that I am a will that I belive in free will. Quite the opposite. As I've stated before I think free will is a sensible assumption to make. Along with the existence of the past etc. From this assumption I have to derive what I can about myself. In order to be free I must have control over the way I act on the world. Thus I must have control over my body as it is the only mechanism I have for acting on the world at present. It is not possible that I am a part of this body, because that would create an infinate loop X controls X controls X... Thus I must be something external. As I exist only to manipulate the world or perhaps my perceptions of it I must be the thoughts about what to do, how to do it and why it should be done. Cognito ergo sum has become a bit of a cliche but I think it's true in this case.

A response means that there was some improvement short of remission. Yes, this is a success of sorts.... My treatment made me significantly happy some of the time, which i appreciate, and which helped me realize how unhappy I was used to being... In doing this, the treatment also made my mood less stable (going from high to low rather than staying low). There are also side-effects to consider (note that response does not mean that the positive effects outweigh the negative side-effects). I started to get periods of mania as well as depression. By my third prescription, I was unable to eat while depressed and losing a lot of weight (which is a scary thing when you can't control it). So I can't say it's as black-and-white as even the statistics would suggest.

Depression can get better, but your girlfriend has a form of chronic depression. "Major" depression is episodic, and episodes last around 6 months to a year.

That was an accidental post.. I'm not done..

Right.. "Major" depression, when treated to remission, has a much lower rate of relapse than when treated to a "response" level. It doesn't bring you back down to the chances you had having never had a depressive episode. However, any depression that lasts 2 years or longer is a type of chronic depression and I think it's much harder to get rid of it. I think it's difficult to get rid of but I also think it's possible, and that should be the goal.

Something external, that's interesting... You know, meditation supposedly releases you from the concept of "self."

I didn't say anything about different treatment based on gender, although of course that's fairly rampant in RL (have you studied any social psychology?). It's just one of those things that people like to know, even if they believe in ignoring it, I think. And it's relevant to some things... Depression has a much higher rate among females, for example -- in fact, everyone I know with a mood disorder is female. It's not as if males and females are identical. I don't know where i'm going with this.

I'm not sure I have the right to tell her that the goal should be a complete remission. I don't know how it feels to have had this all of your life. She also has asphergers and is an obsessive-compulsive (particularly obsessive thought patterns seem to lead to depressive episodes) I can support whatever she decides to do and I can suggest things, but she is very resistand to going to see any more psychologists after the last 8 she's had failed her. I agree cure should be the goal but I don't think this is something I can or should make her do. Maybe if some of these alternative approaches you are trying prove effective I could suggest them, I doubt shes made her mind up on all of them.

I have studied social psychology. I have more interest in complience effects than gender differences but unfortunately the uni offers "gender differences" and not "how to get people to do what you want and make them think it was their idea" which I think has much more practical applications.

I'm not overly bothered by knowing a persons gender except where they will take offence by my getting it wrong. I know we're not identical but I belive that how you put yourself across and what you belive in and tell people that you belive in shouldn't change based on who your talking to. Unless your in a job interview, then you can lie as much as you like.

I can't say I always get it right. Sometimes I feel intimidated to say what I feel and sometimes I use schemas before I really know someone but I try to do what I think is right rather than what I'm told is socially correct. I don't know if the thread about chess in the park is still on my personal space, but it's out of date now. I've taken to knocking on doors and challanging strangers to games of cards. Less people will let you into their house than will play a game with you in the park (1 in 6 as opposed to 1 in 3)

I can't remember what I was talking about now. I do get sidetracked don't I?