** Incorrect. I was Pitted because Guin mistakenly thought I had claimed that mental problems don’t exist and that everyone could be healthy if they wanted to be. We quickly established that I was not claiming that, nor had I ever done so.
The question to which I did give that response was approximately “what makes you think you know what therapy is supposed to be about and accomplish?” The basic ideals of the Oath do indeed describe what the therapeutic relationship is supposed to be like and accomplish. There are more specific ethical codes dealing with therapy, but that is the most basic.
** Lie. Several posters (Zoe included) kept demanding that I produce credentials to prove I was a qualified practitioner of psychiatry, which I had never claimed to be. I’ve studied how psychiatry was and is practice as a hobby for roughly ten years now – not to learn to be a therapist, but how the theory of the discipline is put into practice.
** No, there’s plenty of recent research that supports my statements. (Not that Zoe is familar with any of it, but I digress.) That particular claim of hers dates from the time I was discussing the outmoded and currently discarded belief that ADD/ADHD could be diagnosed by the child’s response to stimulant medications. Obviously, if I’m trying to demonstrate that was once claimed, I’m going to need to reference old and outdated textbooks.
In fact, if I’m going to discuss claims that were once made and the objective support they had at the time, I’m gonna need to reference outdated material. They’re called primary sources.
I dispute the claims that I have twisted or lied. Obviously I have denied and implied – what would the point be if I hadn’t denied or implied anything during these “debates”?
I conclude that Zoe’s personal antipathy for me has utterly overwhelmed her ability to read and comprehend discussions on these boards. She is most definitely not a truthseeker.
What you were asked to prove was your claim: “I’m trained as a cognitive psychologist”. And your only response is that other people can’t read. Pathetic.
No, what you asked me to prove was that I’m trained as a cognitive psychologist. Zoe demanded that I prove that I’m trained as a clinical psychologist – which I had never claimed in the first place.
And I suspect that your reading skills are indeed deficient, or you wouldn’t have gotten these two issues confused. (You could just be lying in yet another pathetic attempt to discredit me, but I’d rather give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you’re just incompetent.)
I don’t give out personal information on the boards – we only recently discussed the question of my gender. You should know that by now – just as you should know that I am properly addressed as Aide, not Vorlon.
You are properly addressed as embicile, but that’s beside that point. Why should I know anything about your “gender” (sic). I have never discussed that with you.
I’ll just go on record as saying that TVAA seems to have misunderstood the scope and substance of Lib’s position. I don’t know what else to say that Lib hasn’t already said, so I’ll have to leave it at that.
Except I will say this: TVAA really does seem to ride Lib’s ass about this, which is ill-advised. Regardless of who is at fault, there’s clearly been a communication breakdown between the two. The correct response, then, is to give the other person the benefit of the doubt and stop fighting about it (since it’s obvious that no one is going to be convinced of anything at this point).
So if computers were modelled by a deductive system, then the operation of computers would be limited by Godel’s theorems. However, I have yet to see a proof by you or anyone else that computers are modelled by a deductive system. (The fact that computers can be programmed to manipulate statements from a deductive system does not constitute a proof.)
And that is the totality of what I have to say about this subject in this thread, as I simply have no desire to participate in yet another 8-page trainwreck. I probably shouldn’t have even made this one post, to be honest, but clearly I’m a sucker for punishment today.
Actually, I’ve already posted a response to a similar set of statements in the “TVAA mental illness” thread in this forum. I suggest you go read it.
Your objection is pointless. The “deductive system” in which computers exist is physical law, which describes how one configuration of the computer leads to the next, and the next, and the next. Physics is more than sufficiently powerful to describe arithmetic, which is self-evident to any intelligent person: if it wasn’t, then arithmetic wouldn’t exist for us to worry about in the first place.
And now that I mention it, this is precisely the problem I have with Libertarian.
His knowledge of philosophy and mathematics is broad but very shallow. He lacks any depth of understanding of what logical arguments actually indicate. He can’t cope with conclusions or explanations that he can’t find a ready, pre-existing source for. He can’t even evaluate what he was taught – he just accepts it and moves on.
That is intellectual insanity. It isn’t physics that describes arithmetic; it’s the other way around. Arithmetic exists because of five axioms. It is an abstraction. Nonempirical, in fact.
Rather than start a new thread, I’d just like to interject my opinion about TVAA. He’s a nutjob who thinks he understands Godel’s Incompleteness Thereom but has completely missed the boat. Let me propose an analogy:
TVAA : GIT :: Handy : Medicine
I realize it’s a bit of a hijack, but I just wanted to say it.
Explain how it’s an abstraction, Lib? I don’t get it. It seems to me that one rock, added to one rock, makes two rocks, and it’s pretty concrete, and non-abstract.
The “rock” is concrete, Gadfly; it is the “one” that is abstract. There is much source material available on this from Plato to Kant and beyond, but to convince yourself that it is true, simply try to answer the question “What is one laser printer plus one box of cereal?”.
If a tree falls in the forest, and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound?
If there’s no physical structure carrying out the work of ‘thinking’, are there any concepts? Your abstractions are all physical patterns in your nervous system. Lib. Duh.
Arithmetic can be represented by a physical system, and that physical system follows the laws of physics, so we may conclude that the laws of physics permit configurations which encode arithmetic. It’s that simple.
The “rock” isn’t concrete either, really. It’s just a collection of more elementary things arranged in a particular configuration: the configuration is the rock. If you took the rock apart, and replaced each atom with another atom of the same type (put together in the same way as the original), has the rock changed?
I believe Aide’s point is that the “one” is an “abstract” concept held in your brain, which is a mechanical computational device governed by the laws of physics. If so, the laws of physics encompass abstract concepts, given sufficiently complex mechanisms.
Of course, if you don’t believe that your brain is mechanical, the argument falls down. That is a whole other debate, is the mind the result of brain activity, and is the brain a mechanism? I’m willing to bet Lib and Aide would fall on opposite sides of that debate, and that it would end up in the Pit.
Take another look at the “TVAA mental illness” thread, where this discussion has spread.
Is a multiplication problem abstract or concrete? Without a physical structure to represent the problem – whether it’s the pattern of electrical impulses in a computer chip or the pattern of neural firing, or gerbils running through a maze, or whirls of water molecules in a glass of water, if there’s no structure, there’s no problem.
To perform math, we accept data, perform operations on it, and produce an answer. That’s all just computation.
[1] Whether or not a concept is held in the brain has no bearing on whether or not mathematics is empirical. Vorlon said that all science is empirical. I cited mathematics, which is not empirical. Rather than admit a mistake, he side-stepped into this present business about brain mechanics, which is just as well. Empiricism requires sensory input. If it isn’t something you can see, smell, taste, feel, or hear, then it isn’t empirical. And you can’t do any of those things with [symbol]Ö[/symbol]-1.
[2] The question is not even about whether they are held in the brain, but whether they are synthetic or analytic. Brain-holding is a separate phenomenon from the ontological nature of numbers. Units and dualities permeate the natural universe, and are not dependent on a brain’s recognition to exist. There were particle pairs long before there were brains. All the brain does is attach concrete significance to the abstraction of “pair” and bind it to something it can sense, like particles.
