Medical error, misdiagnosis, dealing with the consequences and the medical world

[[ma...]]

Hey, sure, there were slaves everywhere, in all continents, Africa included. And communism also didn't lead to equality but rather to a society where "some were more equal than the others". But I think we need to evolve and the key is redistribution. Instead of some working 8, 10 or 12 hours/day for a salary that is barely enough to survive, whereas the 1% keep the lion share of the rewards, we all could work 4 hours/day for a decent salary. Surely that would hinder "progress" but one doesn't need a new car every year, or more than one car. Some don't even need a car. Thanks for the discussion, I too need to go to work

[[li...]]

Kpin99,

 

'The bushmen might not have abused benzos but they already had benzodiazepine (BZD) receptors in their brains. These receptors have no other function (not that we know of) except respond to benzodiazepines.' Actually, benzodiazepines just happen to bind a a combination of an alpha 1,2,3,5, beta and gamma subunit at the gabaa receptor. It's not as if benzodiazepines were around,waiting for the discovery of Librium and diazepam.

[Guest [Kp...]]

Liberty,

 

I am sure you are right! My mind looks for things sensational and thus, when there is nothing sensational happening in the world, it surreptitiously inserts sensationalism in what it might be reading. I am sure that is what happened this time!

 

I got this information from the Ashton Manual, namely that other than the GABA receptors, there are a  few BZD receptors (this is the terminology she used) that handle "only" benzodiazepines. Do barbiturates and alcohol touch the BZD? I don't know, but going by your comments, I guess they do too.

 

Anyway, thanks for correcting me. I have a list of sensational and spooky things nature does, so I will not miss the loss of this little fact. : )

[Guest [Kp...]]

Chessplayer,

 

I guess I will respond topically to the things that caught my attention. I agree with your analogy that if the mind is thought of as a software algorithm, then non-physical pain, or anxiety, might not require deactivation, as much a debugging of the algorithm that makes it report anxiety. The open question is -- how do we do this? We know a few things that we cannot do -- go back to hunter-gatherer society, install communism or other failed models. The root cause of anxiety is the mind's constant computation of the future, and within it, a fear of death. We need something more effective than psychologists and psychiatric pills to stop anxiety in the human mind. Anyone who can conceptualize a model in which anxiety becomes minimum, will get a million dollars. : )

 

Like you, even I don't have any answers to how this could be done. I'll just go ahead and enumerate a few problems, other than the ones you listed, that stand in front of us as hurdles when we try to create such a model.

 

I think it's impossible for a mind to fully understand itself. Infinite recursion.

 

I used to think so, but now I am not so sure. In fact, I thought self-reflexivity in grammar, was sufficient to render any system godel-incomplete. I even went ahead and applied it to physics and made long posts in that math thread claiming our understanding of reality was in infinite regress. But, later I read a few exchanges in math and physics stacks, in the web, where people had come down hard on Hawking and Penrose for claiming that the theory of everything in physics was impossible (and I had unconsciously assumed that Hawking and Penrose were right). The critics said that godel's theorem applied only to infinite systems and the universe was not known to be one. One person claimed that reality could be like a rubik's cube and thus there was no reason why all laws about it could not be gleaned. I feel they have a point. But instead of taking sides in the argument, I have ended up confused. What do you think? So just because our queries to the human mind are in a reality created by the mind and thus self-reflexive, perhaps it does not automatically follow that we cannot know everything about it -- at least godel's theorem does not imply this about our investigations into the mind or nature.

 

Ancient hunter-gatherer societies avoid that problem by not wanting all that stuff. They "worked" maybe 5-10 hours per week, and that wasn't really work for them, it was fun. Go on a hunt, kill a zebra, and the whole clan is fed for a week. No stress.

 

I feel this is a bait. : ) It is alluring, but I think we will keep running into problems as long as we try to be on the border of jungle and planned settlement (to transcend both, jungle-law and civilization-law). In the theory of language, one current problem for evolutionists is that research shows that human language could not have evolved in a jungle (it can only die in a jungle, not get nurtured there). They believe language was installed overnight in humans by a mutation, or has an alien origin. So when we regress to hunter-gatherer society, we have to ask if they could communicate? If the answer is yes, then I think with language the pandora's box (culture of slaves) will get dragged into "society." This is just my feeling. Then civilization and society would be two names for the same thing.

 

One important point you raise is -- has man made progress from prehistoric times or has remained standstill or has regressed? If judged with the yardstick of anxiety (and other unpleasant diagnostic signals), man has probably regressed. I agree with you that code coolie is an euphemism for slave. I also agree that the hunter-gatherer was probably happier than us (and we live to be happy I guess). But, I'm sure you too realize that we probably cannot use such a straightforward yardstick to measure man's progress. Man's nature is a paradox -- I think this is the most frustrating aspect of his nature. Sometimes pleasure is pain, sometimes pain is pleasure... a bit of socialism, a bit of capitalism, a bit of selfishness and a bit of self-sacrifice. Interestingly, while studying the way viruses replicate, scientists have come up with a "survival of flattest" model (as opposed to fittest).  This is because a virus is puzzling -- it does not care if its host lives or dies. Man is a bit like that (does not care for Earth or denuding forests or...). But at least we know now that survival of the fittest is not the only law in the jungle, for there is a survival of the flattest too that seems to resemble man's model.

 

One more thing; the role the brain plays in the human body very strongly mimics the organizations and structures (governance models) man creates. If we can infer things just by the basis of this similarity (which is not scientific, but we aren't scientists anyway), then we can say that a society that functions like a brain does in a human body is the most just. For instance, we behave like CEOs of our body -- lording over it but without much idea how a cell is functioning. We might lose a finger to, say, a freak immune reaction, and start wearing a prosthetic finger, and if the finger sues us for damages saying that we conspired to have it removed, it would not be much different from my impulse to sue my doctor for damaging me with benzos. The finger could even write an essay, "What is it like to be a finger?" Actually there is a very nice 4/5 part documentary in youtube by the neuroscientist David Eagleman, where he explains the mysteries of the brain. The word CEO that I used to describe the brain is actually his choice of word.

 

Anyway, thanks once again for "rambling." : ) I enjoyed reading your post and I enjoyed composing this post.