Posted by alexandra_k on September 23, 2006, at 22:22:07 [reposted on September 25, 2006, at 0:09:10 | original URL]
In reply to Re: the brain » alexandra_k, posted by SLS on September 23, 2006, at 21:32:57
> > What would the emergent properties of mental illness be?
> > The behaviour?
> Yes.hmm... i'm not sure how this is emergence in the sense i specified. emergence is... one of those terms like 'liberty' and 'justice' that are bandied about with no clear meaning. i think someone or other wrote a book on emergence where he outlined maybe 20 different things that might be meant by the term. it is one of those terms that philosophers tend to shy away from using because it is very unclear what it means. i gave the liquidity example because that is probably the clearest example i've found and most people will accept those kinds of (physical) emergent properties.
i'm not sure how behaviour is an emergent property... action might be. in the sense that action only makes sense if you are talking about an agent. behaviour is a term that can be applied more generally so you can talk about the behaviour of kidneys and neurons and hearts and eyes. action seems to just apply to agents. except action seems all bound up in the notion of moral responsibility (ugh) and i don't really want to go there.
> > The only way to change emergent properties is to change the lower level properties that realize them.
> Gosh. That sounds as if you would like to change the biology; something closer to the level of the neuron.the only way you can change high level properties is by changing low level properties. the only way you can change behaviour is by changing biology. but experience changes biology too. if you want someone to learn how to cook you are better off demonstrating to them rather than fiddling with their brain directly...
> > I think we probably do agree. Medication, sure.
> Why?because if i didn't i'd probably lose my lisence. i'm not sure what the evidence based medicine says regarding the efficacy of mood stabilisers for bi-polar. i think it is pretty good - isn't it? but i don't really know. my guess would be that if that is the 'party line' treatment then you should tow the party line if you don't want to lose your lisence... and sure, if it helps most people then you should probably do that.
if the person gives consent. regarding locking the person up against their will and giving them the drug by force... i'm getting a little squeemish now...
> > But... I'd be interested to know why the problem emerged at that particular point in time.> His girlfriend had broken up with him about two weeks prior. After interviewing her, it seems that he was calling her at all hours of the night for the first week or so. Apparantly, he wasn't sleeping or eating.
so relationship went pear shaped. i wonder whether therapy might help the person deal with such things...
> > But you know time is a limited capacity resource and you don't get through as many patients in a day if you actually talk to them...
> But this is your family member, and you have the resources to treat him in any way you feel is best.i don't know you are allowed to treat family members... you should probably refer them on... but if money isn't the issue... therapy would probably help i reckon.
> > > And from the previous post, you neglected to answer my question: Do you think schizophrenia is a biological disorder?
> > I don't think schizophrenia is a natural kind
> What is a "natural kind"?well philosophers have been wondering about that for centuries...
Very roughly... A natural kind is meant to be a kind of thing that is found in nature. According to ESSENTIALISM Members of a kind are thought to be members of a kind in virtue of sharing the same essential properties. For example... Water is a natural kind. All members (or instances, or samples) of the kind 'water' share the same underlying essence (of being H2O).
It has become fashionable to take a more liberal view of natural kinds these days. How come? Because shared essences are hard to come by... For example, typical examples of natural kinds include not only physical properties like mass and change, and chemical properties like gold and water, but also biological properties like lions and onions. Biological kinds don't seem to share the same underlying essence. One might be tempted to think that there is something genetic to determine what kind of thing a living kind is. Unfortunately mutations mean that living things don't share the same essence.
Biologists thus consider living kinds to be historical kinds. Clades (or kinds) are grouped on the basis of evolutionary history (kind of like etiology). Thus we learn surprising facts like 'crocodiles are similar to birds' and 'onions and lillies belong to the same overarching kind / family'.
Some people take a very liberal view of natural kinds where any kind of thing that features in a science counts as a natural kind. E.g., mountains, forests, planets, ecosystems, etc etc.
Boyd's view (that I like) is fairly liberal. He says that in nature we find that certain properties are often to be found clustered together. If we find that a, b, c, d, e, f, and g are typically found clustered together then finding something with properties a, b, c, and d might be highly predictive of that thing also having properties f and g. If this is so... Then he thinks this deserves to be called a natural kind as there are interesting generalisations we can make on the basis of those properties.
Generalisability. That is crucial. If you can't make interesting generalisations... Then you aren't really dealing with a natural kind. Boyd's view is in line with scientific practice but some metaphysicians say it is fairly agnostic on *why* there are such generalisations to be had (realists say the reason for the generalisations are that there is a shared essence).
But anyway...
Thats why there aren't interesting generalisations that are to be had about lots of dx categories. Because they don't 'carve nature at its joints'. They draw a fairly arbitrary circle around things that are fundamentally different. As an example of a non-natural kind...
superlunary object - anything outside the orbit of the moon. (or sun i can't remember)
yellow things
schizophrenia
tree - whether something is a tree or shrub depends on environmental conditions biologists don't consider 'tree' to be a natural / useful kind.> Let's talk about the real schizophrenia. You know, the one with the thought disorder - word salads, hearing voices, delusional paranoia, hallucinations, etc.
Is that a natural kind? Are there interesting generalisations that can be made on the basis of those symptoms?
> > I asked you a question (sort of). Do you think the people with sluggish schizophrenia (the political dissentors in Russia) had a biological disorder?
> I am unfamiliar with this historical event. However, you are portraying these people as having been persecuted for their political beliefs and probably being condemned as being mentally ill so that they could be sequestered. They did not have a biological disorder if it was as you say. And this is meant to teach us what?That there may be aspects of this tied up in the present DSM too...
Fetishes, for example. Some of the sexual disorders... Should have been cast out along with homosexuality. They are there because society disaproves. Sounds like a social problem to me, once again...Is there something biologically malfunctioning in the case of homosexuality? Even if there was does homosexuality count as a mental disorder? Why not?
Has it to do with behaviour that society deems unacceptable?
> Which people do you think this would be true for?
Need to find statistical correlations to see...
I don't know.> Multidimensional thinking. Multimodal approach to recovery.
yeah. though that being said... i think squiggles was onto something in the sense that you don't want to f*ck around wasting time when someone is in crisis and they have had excellent results from treatment x in the past...
poster:alexandra_k
thread:688931
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20060922/msgs/688956.html