[psych, hist, Patreon] The Problem of Culpability in Mental Illness, Part 3

[siderea]

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Comment Catcher: The Problem of Culpability in Mental Illness, Part 3

[siderea]

This is the comment catcher comment for catching comments.

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Re: Comment Catcher: The Problem of Culpability in Mental Illness, Part 3

[heron61]

Awesome discussion, I'm very much enjoying it. Having considered the meat machines do morality question before, my best answer for how a society should deal with this is utterly pragmatic - work to discover what legal and cultural structures work best at promoting social harmony and reducing misery and violence in a diverse society, and then adopt them - in short transform arguments about is X more moral than Y into discussions of which option produces the better outcomes. Of course, there's an unavoidable moral under-layer to any such project, and from my PoV, that's worth discussing, but should also be built upon general principles - applications (ie laws and social norms) are all about what works best.

Re: Comment Catcher: The Problem of Culpability in Mental Illness, Part 3

[naath]

You have for their own advantage at the expense of society[**] but no corresponding footnote.

Re: Comment Catcher: The Problem of Culpability in Mental Illness, Part 3

[siderea]

AUGH. Thanks. I have generally been having footnote management problems with this one. I wonder where I put it.

Okay, fixed.

Re: Comment Catcher: The Problem of Culpability in Mental Illness, Part 3

[hudebnik]

So how did society not reach the meat-machine conclusion in thousands of years of experience with alcohol? It must have been quite obvious that consuming large quantities of alcohol led to changed behavior (in particular loss of judgment and self-restraint), and most of the world's great religions inveighed against it on that basis, often saying explicitly "voluntarily getting drunk is immoral because getting drunk will make you more likely to do things that would otherwise be considered immoral." How did they reconcile that with dualism?

Re: Comment Catcher: The Problem of Culpability in Mental Illness, Part 3

[nuclearpolymer]

Interesting question. Maybe they thought of alcohol as a sort of external demon (spirits) that you let into your head by drinking? I guess they could avoid the conclusion that a physical stimulus had a mental impact if they thought the stimulus was not purely physical?

Re: Comment Catcher: The Problem of Culpability in Mental Illness, Part 3

[jenavira]

This is mostly educated guesswork, but: remember that Christianity at least postulates that humans are inherently wicked and sinful, unless they exert their will to act in accordance with God's will. So drinking alcohol makes you more likely to do wicked things because it weakens the effect of your will.

...nope, you still run into the question of how it does that. Unless drinking alcohol is in itself bad, and doing one bad thing makes you more likely do to another? Which is circular reasoning, but we have a name for that because it's so easy to do.

I wonder if the decision to call distilled liquor "spirits" has anything to do with this discussion.

Hec sunt vasa regia// quibus spoliatur// Jerusalem et regalis// Babylon ditatur

[siderea]

I'd like to start by saying: (1) wow, I am in a weirdly awesome position to answer that question, and yet (2) I don't know, even though (3) I've been wondering exactly that. This is like a dissertation-level project.

So taking a flying stab at it: poorly? My first flip reaction is to want to say, "Well, if you've figured out how to ignore sleep, ignoring intoxication is a piece of cake."

I suspect a large amount of the answer has been repress, deny, ignore. The whole thing I quote above the French lycée official doctrine I think is really characteristic of how the beings of pure will paradigm has been approached by intellectuals through much of Western history: it's a belief that is often chosen because of its (supposed) consequences. "We have to believe this, or else..." Choosing to believe a truth proposition because you like its consequences is a logical error; it's wishful thinking. Humans are sort of notorious for that.

I think that a substantial amount of moralizing against alcohol wasn't just that alcohol makes you

Re: Hec sunt vasa regia// quibus spoliatur// Jerusalem et regalis// Babylon ditatur

[londo]

Well there's a new interpretation of O Fortuna. New to me, anyway.

Re: Hec sunt vasa regia// quibus spoliatur// Jerusalem et regalis// Babylon ditatur

[siderea]

I have a sneaking suspicion that there is an argument to be made - which I am in no position to make - that the unifying theme of the whole Carmina Burana (and I don't mean the Orff opera) is Confronting Evidence Against Medieval Catholic Christianity. So much that I've encountered in it is, in retrospect, not just "naughty" because it is about doing forbidden, sinful things, but flagrantly atheistic, nihilist, neo-pagan(!), materialist, epicurian, etc.

One begins to get the impression that the compiler(s) may have been having a wee spot of crisis of faith.

Re: Hec sunt vasa regia// quibus spoliatur// Jerusalem et regalis// Babylon ditatur

[londo]

I am reminded of this, which came out last year: http://www.darklyrics.com/lyrics/nightwish/endlessformsmostbeautiful.html#2

(The music for which is, in a colloquial and not-the-technical-term kind of way... baroque as *fuck*.)

Re: Hec sunt vasa regia// quibus spoliatur// Jerusalem et regalis// Babylon ditatur

[nuclearpolymer]

Hah! Right, that whole sleeping thing! It's so normal that it's really easy to forget about it when thinking about brains.

[siderea]

[cont]

I think Western society was able to fend off for so long thinking about and integrating the evidence of alcohol by marginalizing medical thinking and the analysis of the human body as a mechanism. Not just the mind, but the whole body. I mean, ours was a society that pretty much criminalized the study of anatomy. Consider humor theory and blood letting: one of the neat features of humor theory is that it allows for attempts to understand and redress human sickness without having to conceptualize the body in terms of organs; bloodletting, which follows from humor theory, is a therapy that requires absolutely minimal conception of what is happening under the skin.

I surmise that until the modern era, most medical knowledge of the body and medical, materialist perspective was constrained to medical doctors, who were a small, elite population. That sort of contained the problem

[alexx_kay]

Not just marginalizing *medical* thinking. This may be part of why so many religions demonize the human body itself, or even consider the material world to be inherently evil.

Re: Comment Catcher: The Problem of Culpability in Mental Illness, Part 3

[nancylebov]

It seems to me that the idea of being able to "hold one's liquor" (drink without visibly showing effects of alcohol) has fallen out of the culture-- I wonder whether the disease model and/or the ascendency of the meat model has something to do with this

Re: Comment Catcher: The Problem of Culpability in Mental Illness, Part 3

[siderea]

Hmm! Interesting observation.