Hmm AHunter. Since it was stated as an absurd extreme hypothetical I really do not know how that 100% certainty would be achieved. It was merely put out as one extreme pole. Reality of course is not black and white certainties nor complete unknowns but is instead a variety of shades of grey.
I do not get your mind reading machine example at all. If your machine labels a specific target you’d favor restricting rights before a crime is committed but if the target is unidentified but just as likely to be person harmed you would not?
Like it or not our system does have punishment designed to fit not only the crime but the criminal as well. Perceived future risk to society, life circumstances, how much deterrence would be possibly served, etc., all go into determining punishments.
I can agree that the scales should be weighted more heavily on the side of preserving individual rights and overall with your position in applying those standards to the rights of the general pool of schizophrenics who have broken no laws and pose no specific credible threat to others. But I would reserve the right to state that a subset who could be conclusively shown to pose a substantial risk of future violence (oh perhaps a paranoid schizophrenic with past violent acts) should have a different bar than the general population.
I was equating “a specific plan to do in a specific person” with making a threat (it’s not quite the same but I could see extending in that direction) whereas “a generallly threatening demeanor accompanied by imaginations” doesn’t equal a threat or a specific intention and we’re back to predicting what a person might do which I don’t think should be used and could not be fairly used.
This thread reminds of this exchange from Bedazzled:
Stanley Moon: You’re a nutcase! You’re a bleeding nutcase!
George Spiggott: They said the same of Jesus Christ, Freud, and Galileo.
Stanley Moon: They said it of a lot of nutcases too.
In most cases where a person claims they perceive a different reality than everyone else, that person is deluded. If you’re perceiving a different reality from everyone else the most likely explanation is that you’re perceiving a false reality that you believe is true - not that you’re perceiving a true reality that most people can’t perceive.
I would disagree. Everyone perceives reality differently – our brains are designed to filter out all the information bombarding our six senses, except those elements which are pertinent to our interests and desires. For example, my ex-girlfriend was a big fan of spiders. When we were together, I would treat spiders with respect. Nowadays, I make a special point to kill every spider I come across, and I think of her when I do it. (Yes…I’m still rather bitter about our breakup.)
The way I see it, as long as you remain in control of yourself, and don’t stir up any negative vibrations, you have every right to remain connected to the rest of society. It’s when you lose control and require hospitalization (as AHunter3 has publicly admitted about himself) that you lose your claim to being “eccentric” and must admit that you have a mental illness which requires medical treatment, not just for your own safety, but for the safety and well-being of your loved ones. To believe otherwise is potentially dangerous, and downright self-centered.
As David Icke, his theories are sheer crackpottery, but it’s clear he’s expousing them just for attention. At least he’s not drooling all over himself, or threatening to stick a knife in his butt to gouge out the computer chips implanted by the government, or stalking women or small children, or other things that genuinely schizophrenic people do. As long as he remains behind that line, he has every right to express his ideas, just like we retain the right to point and laugh at him.
Ah, that’s what “genuinely schizophrenic people do”! And the vast majority of schizophrenics, who do none of those things, well they just are not true schizophrenics … or Scotsmen even.
Sorry. But I disagree. Reality is not based on belief.
If one person believes that everyone else in his community is secretly a vampire and decides he needs to kill them in self-defense, he’s delusional and needs to be locked up. If another person believes that everyone else in his community is secretly a muppet but that’s okay because muppets are harmless, then he may not need to be confined. But he’s every bit as delusional as the guy who believes he’s surrounded by vampires. Reality is that people are not vampires or muppets and thinking otherwise is a delusion. Just because you can be delusional and remain capable of functioning in general society does not validate the delusion.
That’s not what I’m talking about. (Although, come to think, my neighbors only come out at night and often appear to have blood on their lips…) Sure, if you believe wearing a Superman cape will enable you to fly, you are delusional and potentially a danger to yourself. On the other hand, if you believe Jesus Christ will forgive your sins and everyone else will go to hell, by society’s standards, you’re not delusional. Even those who worship Sarah Palin are not delusional, technically speaking. Because they are merely viewing reality from a different perspective. It’s an idiotic reality, to be certain, but not necessarily a delusional one.
I’ve always been really into science-fiction. I reckon either deliberately, or long forgotten but imprinted on their mind, the likes of David Icke have images from old SF tropes long forgotten. Look at your typical alien. Then look at Munch’s Scream or an old Original Star Trek or a photo of Nikola Tesla around 1932 or a skull. Believers can say aliens resemble those things. I no thinka so.
One of those stories I read in the 60s that was probably written in the 50s is about a man watching a hypnotist act on TV and falls under it. When the subject is told to Wake up so does he. And he sees the real reptiles in charge for what they are and hears what they are really saying. Familiar?
David Icke may sincerely believe it. That doesn’t mean that he never read it one night when he was ten and has long forgotten it. It doesn’t means that the whole time he was growing up wasn’t full of this hidden manipulators and enemy within Cold War, Homosexual, Anybody-with-a-mind-of-their-own Evil hidden control stuff.
There’s a sort of truth in conspiracy theories, but they are not hidden. We are manipulated by and for corporate enterprises that call themselves ‘Capitalist’ but are no more so than Stalin was ‘Socialist’. They meet in groups like Bilderberger and plan world trade, but that’s not some unexplained world domination plot for the sake of it like James Bond villains, it’s because they believe that they have the right way to improve the world so it can be like them. They would hardly plan against their own beliefs in what they value would they?
Worth reading: ‘Them’ by Jon Ronson (also ‘The men who Stare at Goats’) investigating conspiracy nutters including David Icke’s lot. Even when he gatecrashed a top leaders’ ‘Illuminati camp’, while the conspiracy theorists saw the dread Illuminati Owl and Satanic symbols everywhere, he saw the traditional Owl of Wisdom once and a lot of important men behaving like boys, including pissing everywhere, which makes me to wonder whether Margaret Thatcher was ever invited. Silly, important men getting away from the pressure,yes. Satanic :rolleyes:
The phrases used by FinnAgain here aren’t just sentence fragments - they’re references to particular type of logical flaw. For example, hasty generalization refers to leaping to a conclusion which has some evidence to support it, but not all. To take your specific point, the evidence is “These men are mentally ill” and “These men are successful”, from which your apparent conclusion is “These men’s success is due to their mental illness”. But in order to conclude that, you’d need to know that it was their particular mental intricacies that leads to their abilites, and not that they exist but are seperate; or the evidence that no people without mental illnesses of that kind have such abilities; or so on.
Simply pointing out two people doesn’t alone make your point. After all, by your logic, I could find two people with a clean bill of mental health and yet great mental abilities, and declare that clearly sanity and success in those fields are closely linked - in other words, using your own arguments equally makes a point entirely in opposition to the one you’ve made.
Possibly you’ve just left out a bit of the working - you have more arguments, more reasons, but you’ve left them out of your posts considering them unnecessary, but I think the problem on that particular point is that you haven’t “shown your working”. Your argument using those two people is flawed, basically.
That actually would be more like cum hoc. Hasty generalization is more like the claim that since we have two schizophrenics who happen to be geniuses, then schizophrenia (and schizophrenics) might just be some sort of evolutionary leap forward (ignoring that evoution doesn’t work that way anyways).
Even as a hunch, it needs far more evidence to graduate from mere wild guessing.
The rest of your elaboration is spot on though, just wanted to clear that bit up.
Reality may not be based on belief, but our individual experiences of reality are. Objective reality is presumptively out there behind the curtain, but all any of us have are experiences filtered through our perceptions and created in our minds. To some degree they are all delusions.
Society works because most of us overlap our delusions well enough to function together and our delusions correlate well enough with whatever reality is that they do not kill us.
