5 ms·

I think that deep down, mental illness is not really accepted as something real. We tend to believe in free will and how people are responsible for their own ac

by jokoon 8y ago

I think that deep down, mental illness is not really accepted as something real. We tend to believe in free will and how people are responsible for their own actions, and we tend to apply this to the mentally ill too, and this is exactly why free will is a flawed concept. As long as we do not conceive that mental illness is a thing, we won't tolerate it and the mentally ill will never be able to accept they have a condition, so they will just be a burden to themselves and others. I always relate with human beings knowing they can make errors because of their mental process or even their mental issues, even mild. Lurking on certain subreddits like JusticeServed, I can often see how some people in the US believe in capital punishment and have literally no mercy towards faulty but natural human behavior. I don't live in the US, so I might be biased, but I'm surprised how people can have such hard belief in free will ("you can make it if you want" etc).

PavlikPaja 8y ago
Only that the article says the exact opposite - the participants were LESS empathic if they believed the person's behavior was due to mental illness.
- intralizee 8y ago
  Yah it's a flawed experiment in a sense. Imagine how the majority in the world cannot understand determinism and you conduct a study on empathy. Flawed or results proving something based on the current conditions. Redo the study with people having a deterministic mindset and who understand the fallacy of believing in free will. The balance of empathy will change is my hypothesis from observing others like me that understand free will is a facade. It's like all the studies that try to prove it's better having people conditioned to believe in free will by conducting it on people already with a tainted mindset and who haven't broken out of it in a longterm period.
  - red75prime 8y ago
    If you take free will as some kind of a divine spark, then, sure, it is not compatible with determinism. But there are more useful definitions of it. We need to have a distinction between behavior not under coercion and behavior under coercion, between behavior of a person who can realistically assess circumstances and who cannot and so on.
    - intralizee 8y ago
      I don't think your assertion is valid. What you're describing is accomplished with describing how a person can have a mental illness, be suffering from coercion and or is contrary to the social conditioned accepted norm. Further, persons assess circumstances based on their own reality. We live in a world where the normal people look at the ones outside the circle as ill and try to bring them into the circle by doing whatever it takes by punishment, institutionalizing, and medication. It's silly trying to establish society (a system), perfect as it can become and adding an irrational belief to people; it results in harm to the system.
      - red75prime 8y ago
        > adding an irrational belief Experiments in quantum physics show that usually you can't know exact outcome of a quantum measurement. I don't think that has something to do with free will problem, but your belief in determinism seems irrational too. Yes, there are theories which try to mitigate this inconsistency, but they require quite a bit of mental acrobacy and aren't generally accepted.
        intralizee 8y ago
        Quantum mechanics may possibly be a case of observing determinism but we assume randomness by our current technology. Everything else observable has been fitting the deterministic modal. Also you can have a system that is deterministic but influenced from an outside force and where the outside force executing the alterations is not in the system being influenced.
  - WalterSear 8y ago
    Consciousness isn't an illusion - it's an abstraction layer.
    - intralizee 8y ago
      I don't equate consciousness with free will. I find the way you describe consciousness as an abstraction layer really nice. I'm not sure if I really think it's a real thing though but I also find panpsychism cool. Anyway thanks.
reallymental 8y ago
That's a deep rabbit hole. What about the will of those on JusticeServed? Were they free to decide to be on that? As a naive young person, I hoped that a metal illness was just that, an illness that can be cured. After discovering mine, the curtain was pulled back, revealing the 'trick' all along behind the illusion of cure, was just suppression. Bacteria are killed, sometimes Viruses too. But thoughts, and feelings cannot be cured or killed, they must be suppressed. For 'Free Will', one should be free to control one's will. I can't pass through doors in the first try, or the 20th, sometimes when I'm by myself. Some people cower right before a fight they've prepared for, for months, they knew fight day was coming. Anger kills people, people 'see red'. If these thoughts and feelings are your will, hopefully we find out that they're free, not you.
- intralizee 8y ago
  The reality is you don't have a will, just variables & events creating the person you are in the current moment.
  - fb03 8y ago
    you forgot an increasing pool of state that cannot ever be captured in a reproducible way.
    - intralizee 8y ago
      Such a state doesn't make a person have will over themselves.
      - fb03 8y ago
        it helps form what the person understands as his/her own 'free will'. the Free Will (TM) state machine uses this constantly updated training data to bias its decisions throughout its shelf life. so there are rules (like you stated) but there is also a huge set of data that alters the rule's parameters, to such extent that some times, new rules are created and old ones get discarded.
majos 8y ago
"Reading that, I thought he had never had a chance. Something had been broken inside him at a very young age. This is a dangerous notion because nobody apart from ourselves has responsibility for what we do, we are humans, not creatures subject to forces that drive us here and there without offering any resistance. Unless of course being under the sway of others is part of the human condition, and being a good person is the same as being a lucky person." (My Struggle, Book 6)
deevolution 8y ago
>As long as we do not conceive that mental illness is a thing, we won't tolerate it and the mentally ill will never be able to accept they have a condition, so they will just be a burden to themselves and others. Some people arent capable of acknowledging they have a condition precicley because of their condition..
Brockenstein 8y ago
>I think that deep down, mental illness is not really accepted as something real. We tend to believe in free will and how people are responsible for their own actions, and we tend to apply this to the mentally ill too, and this is exactly why free will is a flawed concept. It is hard when someone is developing mental illness or has hit some tipping point. Once upon a time your friend or loved one was pretty normal, and they've gradually become more erratic, hard to deal with, potentially dangerous even. And most people aren't experienced with how to deal with those issues and they're tough issues. And there's no line when friends, family, society can just take over for a mentally ill person. >we won't tolerate it and the mentally ill will never be able to accept they have a condition There's some caveats to that. Mainly being that mental illness covers a huge spectrum and people at the deeper end may not be capable of acknowledging they have an issue, or even if they can, that admission isn't the thing that will change their circumstances. The identity of self-determination in the U.S. is interesting. There is a lot of truth to how many Americans are just down on their luck millionaires. And how consistently they will work against their own self-interests, because someday they might be wealthy or powerful and they want to enjoy that maximally. And you can see some of these attitudes among many successful people who want to believe it was their effort, their hard work, their genius that made them successful, solely. Or at least those are the biggest factors, while luck, circumstance and opportunity are minimized or completely dismissed. They want to believe if they had to start over they could do it all again and the admission that that might not be the case is not what a lot of people's egos want to hear. So perpetuating that myth of the self being all. That very successful people did it all on their own. That we're all completely totally responsible for ourselves and our circumstances can enable us to feel good about ourselves, and make it easier to blame those who are beneath us on the socia-economic ladder for their own circumstances and not acknowledge that the system is broken, or stacked against some people, that some of us had significant advantages. It makes it very difficult for a lot of people to walk a foot, let alone a mile, in another man's shoes. And that permeates everything in our society, even views of mental illness.
13of40 8y ago
> some people in the US believe > I don't live in the US This strikes me as a really weird thing to casually drop in the middle of your argument. I would assert that if people from the US are over-represented on /r/justiceserved, it's for the same reason they're over-represented on /r/aww: It's an English language forum and 80% of the native English speakers in the world are from the US.
- brynjolf 8y ago
  It is not. It is just that you see very sensitive.

by jokoon 8y ago

PavlikPaja 8y ago

Only that the article says the exact opposite - the participants were LESS empathic if they believed the person's behavior was due to mental illness.

intralizee 8y ago
Yah it's a flawed experiment in a sense. Imagine how the majority in the world cannot understand determinism and you conduct a study on empathy. Flawed or results proving something based on the current conditions. Redo the study with people having a deterministic mindset and who understand the fallacy of believing in free will. The balance of empathy will change is my hypothesis from observing others like me that understand free will is a facade. It's like all the studies that try to prove it's better having people conditioned to believe in free will by conducting it on people already with a tainted mindset and who haven't broken out of it in a longterm period.
- red75prime 8y ago
  If you take free will as some kind of a divine spark, then, sure, it is not compatible with determinism. But there are more useful definitions of it. We need to have a distinction between behavior not under coercion and behavior under coercion, between behavior of a person who can realistically assess circumstances and who cannot and so on.
  - intralizee 8y ago
    I don't think your assertion is valid. What you're describing is accomplished with describing how a person can have a mental illness, be suffering from coercion and or is contrary to the social conditioned accepted norm. Further, persons assess circumstances based on their own reality. We live in a world where the normal people look at the ones outside the circle as ill and try to bring them into the circle by doing whatever it takes by punishment, institutionalizing, and medication. It's silly trying to establish society (a system), perfect as it can become and adding an irrational belief to people; it results in harm to the system.
    - red75prime 8y ago
      > adding an irrational belief Experiments in quantum physics show that usually you can't know exact outcome of a quantum measurement. I don't think that has something to do with free will problem, but your belief in determinism seems irrational too. Yes, there are theories which try to mitigate this inconsistency, but they require quite a bit of mental acrobacy and aren't generally accepted.
      - intralizee 8y ago
        Quantum mechanics may possibly be a case of observing determinism but we assume randomness by our current technology. Everything else observable has been fitting the deterministic modal. Also you can have a system that is deterministic but influenced from an outside force and where the outside force executing the alterations is not in the system being influenced.
- WalterSear 8y ago
  Consciousness isn't an illusion - it's an abstraction layer.
  - intralizee 8y ago
    I don't equate consciousness with free will. I find the way you describe consciousness as an abstraction layer really nice. I'm not sure if I really think it's a real thing though but I also find panpsychism cool. Anyway thanks.

reallymental 8y ago

That's a deep rabbit hole. What about the will of those on JusticeServed? Were they free to decide to be on that? As a naive young person, I hoped that a metal illness was just that, an illness that can be cured. After discovering mine, the curtain was pulled back, revealing the 'trick' all along behind the illusion of cure, was just suppression. Bacteria are killed, sometimes Viruses too. But thoughts, and feelings cannot be cured or killed, they must be suppressed. For 'Free Will', one should be free to control one's will. I can't pass through doors in the first try, or the 20th, sometimes when I'm by myself. Some people cower right before a fight they've prepared for, for months, they knew fight day was coming. Anger kills people, people 'see red'. If these thoughts and feelings are your will, hopefully we find out that they're free, not you.

intralizee 8y ago
The reality is you don't have a will, just variables & events creating the person you are in the current moment.
- fb03 8y ago
  you forgot an increasing pool of state that cannot ever be captured in a reproducible way.
  - intralizee 8y ago
    Such a state doesn't make a person have will over themselves.
    - fb03 8y ago
      it helps form what the person understands as his/her own 'free will'. the Free Will (TM) state machine uses this constantly updated training data to bias its decisions throughout its shelf life. so there are rules (like you stated) but there is also a huge set of data that alters the rule's parameters, to such extent that some times, new rules are created and old ones get discarded.

majos 8y ago

"Reading that, I thought he had never had a chance. Something had been broken inside him at a very young age. This is a dangerous notion because nobody apart from ourselves has responsibility for what we do, we are humans, not creatures subject to forces that drive us here and there without offering any resistance. Unless of course being under the sway of others is part of the human condition, and being a good person is the same as being a lucky person." (My Struggle, Book 6)

deevolution 8y ago

>As long as we do not conceive that mental illness is a thing, we won't tolerate it and the mentally ill will never be able to accept they have a condition, so they will just be a burden to themselves and others. Some people arent capable of acknowledging they have a condition precicley because of their condition..

Brockenstein 8y ago

>I think that deep down, mental illness is not really accepted as something real. We tend to believe in free will and how people are responsible for their own actions, and we tend to apply this to the mentally ill too, and this is exactly why free will is a flawed concept. It is hard when someone is developing mental illness or has hit some tipping point. Once upon a time your friend or loved one was pretty normal, and they've gradually become more erratic, hard to deal with, potentially dangerous even. And most people aren't experienced with how to deal with those issues and they're tough issues. And there's no line when friends, family, society can just take over for a mentally ill person. >we won't tolerate it and the mentally ill will never be able to accept they have a condition There's some caveats to that. Mainly being that mental illness covers a huge spectrum and people at the deeper end may not be capable of acknowledging they have an issue, or even if they can, that admission isn't the thing that will change their circumstances. The identity of self-determination in the U.S. is interesting. There is a lot of truth to how many Americans are just down on their luck millionaires. And how consistently they will work against their own self-interests, because someday they might be wealthy or powerful and they want to enjoy that maximally. And you can see some of these attitudes among many successful people who want to believe it was their effort, their hard work, their genius that made them successful, solely. Or at least those are the biggest factors, while luck, circumstance and opportunity are minimized or completely dismissed. They want to believe if they had to start over they could do it all again and the admission that that might not be the case is not what a lot of people's egos want to hear. So perpetuating that myth of the self being all. That very successful people did it all on their own. That we're all completely totally responsible for ourselves and our circumstances can enable us to feel good about ourselves, and make it easier to blame those who are beneath us on the socia-economic ladder for their own circumstances and not acknowledge that the system is broken, or stacked against some people, that some of us had significant advantages. It makes it very difficult for a lot of people to walk a foot, let alone a mile, in another man's shoes. And that permeates everything in our society, even views of mental illness.

13of40 8y ago

> some people in the US believe > I don't live in the US This strikes me as a really weird thing to casually drop in the middle of your argument. I would assert that if people from the US are over-represented on /r/justiceserved, it's for the same reason they're over-represented on /r/aww: It's an English language forum and 80% of the native English speakers in the world are from the US.

brynjolf 8y ago
It is not. It is just that you see very sensitive.