From: Michael Wiik (mwiik@messagenet.com)
Date: Sat Aug 17 2002 - 10:05:35 MDT
alex@ramonsky.com responded to my comments on button-pushing with:
> Only if it changes anything and / or helps people grow. How competent are
> you at judging when to push which buttons so that the result is beneficial,
> rather than deleterious, to others? You can judge how good you are by
> looking honestly at your results; how many people are a bit smarter now
> because of a button you pushed? How much smarter are you?
I disagree with your basic premise. I promote my competence only in
programming and web development. As a psychologist I'm just an amateur. My
objective by button-pushing isn't intended to help people think *better*, it's
intended to help them think *differently*.
OTOH, I have (apparently) saved three people (that I know of) from committing
suicide. Two of them acknowledged this to me directly, long after the
fact. The third had taken several dozen aspirin tablets in an attempt to kill
themselves (or just perhaps as a cry for help) and I convinced him to let me
call an ambulance. Note that I didn't just call the ambulance. I didn't impose
a solution on him. But neither did I critically evaluate his life to see if
suicide was a logical choice for him. (If he had lost consciousness, I would
have called the ambulance).
> If you really are _that_ good a psychologist then I'd say you have theright
> to do this, because you are competent and you have the ability.
Given the record of psychiatry and psychology, I think it's debatable whether
any are competent at all. It seems to me that the greatest strides in mental
'health' have come from pharmaceutical research.
My psychological education comes primarily from the 8-fold models of the mind
filtered thru Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary. I concentrate on the
initial 4 stages, and am most informed by RAW's _Prometheus Rising_ (which
I and apparently many others regard as his non-fiction masterpiece). One
advantage of his approach is that it's devoid of most psychoanalytic jargon
and seems very easy to understand.
The approach taken in _Prometheus Rising_ divides all people into these
categories, based on an oral/anal (the first two stages) dialectic:
Friendly Strength
Friendly Weakness
Hostile Strength
Hostile Weakness
It's a simple but (imho) very powerful model. It's not entirely original
to Wilson or Leary. Years after reading this I saw a chart with the same
quadrants at a large telecommunications company.
There is more to the book, of course, another powerful concept being 'The
Thinker and the Prover' which divides a mind into two halfs, one which thinks
and the other which interprets all incoming sensory evidence to 'prove' that
what the thinker thinks is correct.
The book's third powerful concept (imho) is that of 'strange loops'. For
this, Wilson examines British intelligence activities in the 2nd World
War. For example, they manage to 'leak' intelligence carrying the meme 'all
your agents are working for us and feeding you bad intelligence' to the
Germans, early in the war. Wilson's theory is that we all have 'strange
loops' operating inside ourselves. We all have ideas which, when carefully
examined, appear to contradict other ideas we hold. As long as these remain
subconscious, we suffer a low-level chronic amount of stress. By pointing
out such strange loops, we open an opportunity for integration and thusly,
increased understanding of ourselves and others.
> If you're not, or you're not sure...or if people are reacting badly and
> feeling worse instead of better then I'd beware the trap of starting out
> hoping to develop new models of cognition and ending up poking animals with
> sticks to get them to make a noise.
I'm not trying to poke animals with a stick, I'm trying to ride a sandworm. I
get out my maker hook, wedge it in a mental crevasse, try to force it open,
and as the worm (or mind) rolls to avoid irritation, get it to see things
differently.
I admit at first some people may react badly. But I think we (on this list)
seem competent enough to integrate such changes into our personality w/o too
much trouble. The ego is a lot less fragile than most people think (imho).
> If you want to roll a thread on introspection or cognition then go
ahead, sounds interesting.
I'm hoping to make it more than interesting. I think folks on this list think
cognitive enhancements will, at each step, help them improve. Like, maybe
we'll be able to remember longer digit strings or something but otherwise feel
exactly the same. But if we look at it as a fitness landscape, then we see
that we have to come down from our local optima to find a higher peak, and I
think that such a process will instead be very, very, painful.
No pain, no gain.
-Mike
---- This message was posted by Michael Wiik to the Extropians 2002 board on ExI BBS. <http://www.extropy.org/bbs/index.php?board=61;action=display;threadid=52772>
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