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Post by maximus on Feb 5, 2012 5:31:26 GMT 10
I distrust Psychology and Psychiatry. They are not hard sciences and I suspect people are just making crap up out of thin air. Everyone has a mental disorder nowadays, which we need some drug to combat that, surprise!, the pharmaceutical industry just happened to develop.
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Post by Tamrin on Feb 5, 2012 6:55:52 GMT 10
I distrust Psychology and Psychiatry. They are not hard sciences and I suspect people are just making crap up out of thin air. Everyone has a mental disorder nowadays, which we need some drug to combat that, surprise!, the pharmaceutical industry just happened to develop. Like all the social sciences, Psychology may be an imprecise discipline but it has a real object of study: Look about you on the web, delusions abound; Look about you in the cities, people babbling on street corners; Look about you at your prisons, some doubling as de facto insane asylums; Look about you at your executives and politicians, psychopaths are overrepresented and are wreaking havoc in society; Look about you and consider your family, friends, neighbours and workmates, for who among them do you need to make allowances? And finally, look at yourself, when I do so I find excrescences on my ashlar. A discipline can be no more precise than its object of study. Still, when its tests and experiments strictly adhere to the principles of validity and reliability, we can be sure it’s a science (which is more than can be said of Evolutionary Psychology).
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Post by Tamrin on Feb 6, 2012 8:27:09 GMT 10
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Post by Tamrin on Feb 6, 2012 9:59:51 GMT 10
To avoid any misattributions, do you believe that humans, unique amongst all animals, lack an inherent nature? The evolutionary line leading to humans appears to be distinguished by less and less reliance on fixed instincts and more and more reliance on flexible social learning. A heuristic model of these trends would suggest that where social learning is adequate, instincts would become a liability, losing out during natural selection. We have passed that tipping point. The question remains as to whether or not our loss of instincts occurred one by one or if the loss was general. Further to my reply, all species are each unique amongst all animals, including our own.
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Post by Tamrin on Feb 6, 2012 10:40:02 GMT 10
This of course is a null hypothesis and one cannot universally prove a negative. However, if mistaken, it is easily falsified by positive proof of human instincts: Until then it stands. The ball is in your court.
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Post by lanoo on Feb 6, 2012 14:13:22 GMT 10
Is sleep an instinct?
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Post by Smithee on Feb 6, 2012 17:11:44 GMT 10
As devil's advocate, I will point out that hunger is a biological urge.
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Post by Tamrin on Feb 6, 2012 20:17:01 GMT 10
Thank you Bros. Lanoo and Smithee, An instinct is an innate behaviour (a response to a stimulus). Hunger is a stimulus: An unpleasant sensation (like pain) — eating is the behavioural response. At birth the suckling reflex (a primitive reflex) addresses the need to eat and resolves the sensation of hunger. Later on, while not eating has biological consequences, how we address that need is learned. Some of these learned behaviours are more efficient than others and are subject to memetic evolution. Sleep is more problematic, its biological benefits are poorly understood but the ill effects of long-term sleep deprivation are known to be serious. Sleep is indeed a response to a stimulus (tiredness) but it is not strictly a behavioural response, rather it is an absence of behaviour (as well as a lessening of consciousness). Moreover, where needs must, sleep can be put off indefinitely and sleep patterns vary widely between cultures (especially between those which have artificial lighting and those which don’t — e.g., consider the medieval nocturnes which both followed and reinforced their contemporary sleep patterns) and the social learning of those patterns begins as infants, possibly carrying over from our experiences in utero (even so, as parents we find most soon need to relearn that pattern ).
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Post by lanoo on Feb 7, 2012 11:16:57 GMT 10
Sleep to a tired animal sounds like what happens to a machine when its battery runs flat.
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Post by brandt on Feb 7, 2012 16:43:19 GMT 10
I distrust things that cannot be measured. I also distrust flat statements that don't account for statistical and practical significance.
Just a short note before falling out for much needed sleep. I was a bit light in my thinking that I would be finished as soon as I thought. Hang with me for a bit longer. More work to do.
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