"the idea that false meories got planted is uncontroversial history"
Certainly, but is this a significant concern for the OP at this time, such that it bears mention in a thread in which he is turning to this community seeking help with a mental health problem. "Dangerous territory" is a strong turn of phrase. I don't know the answer, but I would need evidence that p(damage from discouraging needed help)< p(damage from memory implantation in 2015). Would you mention Tuskigee if he was seeking help for syphilis? Facilitated communication if he was sending an aphasic child to a Speech Language Pathologist? Just my opinion.
"So, sure, lets' put the idea of race to bed and start with killing affirmative action. You're good with that?"
This is the point where I say "politics is the mind killer" and discount all of your politically charged conclusions, then?
"Have you actually seem Somalis? They do not look like the stereotypical African blacks at all."
My point exactly. Yet they are universally considered "black" by people in your and my culture because of the arbitrary (which word I do mean quite literally) choice to see skin color as one of the two supremely defining qualities by which we "know" race. If certain facial features were (just as arbitrarily) selected, Somalis would... (read more)
So there exists a Pure Caucasian, a Pure Mongoloid, and a Pure Negroid out there? Can you identify them? Can you name a rational basis for those morphological qualities by which you know them? Is it a coincidence that the qualities you have chosen coincide perfectly with those that were largely developed by bias-motivated individuals living in Europe, Australia, and North America over the past few centuries? Why not back hair, toe length, presence of palmeris longus muscle, renal vein anatomy, positon of the sciatic nerve relative to piriformis muscle? Among the "grey" how do we know which individuals can be characterized by what (oh let's say percentage) of membership they... (read more)
"That's dangerous territory. Quite a lot of people got talked by their therapist has having false memories of abuse."
I would want to have a hell of a lot of evidence showing a clear statistically significant problem along these lines before I attempted to discourage a person from seeking expert help with a self-defined mental health problem.
"Social science academics are very skewed politically." So shall we discount any concept of expertise based solely on our biases towards the suspected biases of others based on their reported political affiliations? I don't have the time to get my own PhD in every subject. I don't claim they have the gospel truth, but, as I said, it's a good place to start, from which a cursory examination of geographic population variations pretty much puts the the idea of race to bed with very short work.
Tabooing race, I think your paraphrasing doesn't quite capture his question, because inherent in the use of "race" is not simply "genetically similar" but rather the... (read more)
I believe there is a functional definition of amnesia, loss of factual memory, life skills remain intact. I guess I would call what you are calling a memory wipe a "brain wipe". I guess I'd call what you are calling memory "total brain content". If a brain is wiped of all content in the forest is Usul's idea of consciousness spared? No idea. Total brain reboot? I'd say yes and call that good as dead I think.
I would say probably yes to the text only question. Again, loss of factual memory. But I don't rate that as a reliable or valid test in this context.
Should one value the potential happiness of theoretical future simulated beings more than a certain decline in happiness for currently existing meat beings which will result as soon as the theoretical become real? Should one allow for absurdly large populations if the result is absurd morality?
The promise of countless simulated beings of equal moral value to meat beings, and who can be more efficiently cared for than meat, seems to make the needs and wants of simulated beings de facto overrule the needs and wants of meat beings ( as well as some absurdly large sim populations being absurdly over-valued relative to other smaller sim populations). As meat currently exists and simulated... (read more)
When the relevant experts, Anthropologists, say that the concept of race is a social construct with no basis in biological fact they aren't just bowing to some ivory tower overlord of political correctness. We would do well to consider their expertise as a starting point in any such inquiry.
Start anywhere on a map of the Eastern Hemisphere and trace what the people look like in any geographic area relative to the regions beside them and then consider why the term "race" has any meaning. sami, swede, finn, rus, tatar, khazak, turk, kurd, arab, berber, ethiopian, tutu. Or Han, mongol, uiger, kyrgir, uzbek, khazak, pashtun, persian, punjabi, hindi, bangali, burmese, thai, javanese, dayak.... (read more)
I see factual memory as a highly changeable data set that has very little to do with "self". As I understand it (not an expert in neuroscience or psychiatry, but experience working with neurologically impaired people) the sort of brain injuries which produce amnesia are quite distinct from those that produce changes in personality, as reported by significant others, and vice versa. In other words, you can lose the memories of "where you came from" and still be recognized as very much the same person by those who knew you, while you can become a very different person in terms of disposition, altered emotional response to identical stimuli relative to... (read more)
I feel safe saying that nearly everyone reading this will agree that, given sufficient technology, a perfect replica or simulation could be made of the structure and function of a human brain, producing an exact copy of an individual mind including a consciousness. Upon coming into existence, this consciousness will have a separate but baseline-identical subjective experience to the consciousness from which it was copied, as it was at the moment of copying. The original consciousness will continue its own existence/ subjective experience. If the brain containing the original consciousness is destroyed, the consciousness within ceases to be. The existence or non- of a copy is irrelevant to this fact.
With this in... (read 1613 more words →)
"I'm curious whether you're willing to chomp down on bullets."
Since you're happy to go off topic, and your other posts suggest you've definitely got a dog in this fight already, would you agree or disagree with the following statement:
Based on things I've read on the internet (Cochrane) (not to be confused with the Cochrane Library that actually produces meta-analyses, just some guy named Cochrane who can't land a tenure track job teaching physics) regarding brain size and IQ test results, I believe that it is more probable than not that Black People are less intelligent than White People, that the jury's still out on Asian People, and that this is... (read more)