Posted by alexandra_k on August 23, 2005, at 18:30:24
In reply to Finally got to read it all - YAY » alexandra_k, posted by Damos on August 23, 2005, at 17:39:56
>If you don't even attempt empathetic understanding how can you ever hope to see how this person sees the world and themself in it. How can you ever hope to see how their view can be true for them. It has to be inside-out. You have to be inside their world to be able to take them by the hand and walk them out.
Or... You can give them their anti-psychotics and just wait for them to come right... Therapy is more expensive than anti-psychotics... Also... Maybe people are a little afraid... Afraid that they will enter in and get lost themselves. Maybe... Some people lack the ability to empathise with different kinds of anomalous experience. People vary with respect to how they find Sass' 'expression of emotional death' line. Some people (philosophers) don't really seem to be able to get their heads / emotions around that one. They can typically be persuaded via a line that goes 'sometimes we talk *boút the living dead and life beyond death and these notions seem to make sense... But they can't seem to think their way into emotional numbness. Bizzare...I guess another point that I forgot to make:
what do the anti-psychotics do / why do they help?
I want an intentional level explanation not a neurological level explanation.
So... On how delusions are produced.
One could try and say that a neurophysiological anomaly produces a delusion DIRECTLY.
That is just to say that delusions are primary and can't be explained any more from the intentional level (so you would have to talk about varieties of brain damage).
Most people don't like this. They find it deeply implausible that brain damage could lead to... Well... Thought insertion in effect :-)
They consider it much more plausible that:brain damage
then anomalous experience
then cognitive deficit
then delusional belief.so... what do the anti-psychotics do then?
Davies said that his line required the anti-psychotics to remidy the cognitive deficit. He looked a bit tentative when he said that so he may want to change his mind in hindsight...
But to me that sounds implausible.
I want to say that the main problem is the intensity, nature, recurrance, of certain kinds of anomalous expeirnece. what the anti-psychotics do is mute the experience. so it is not as anomalous anymore. so attentional resources are freed up back to the contemplation of reality as well as ones experiences.
and so in the circumscribed delusions arising from head trauma we have a very specific or particular kind of anomalous experience. it is 'telling them' (if you like) something particular.
whereas in the case of schizophrenia where people seem to have retreated into their own solipsistic world... thats because their experiences are much more pervasive...
but meds alter experience.
thats what i reckon.
poster:alexandra_k
thread:543149
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/write/20050807/msgs/545796.html