We have no free will, according to a scientist.

Post Reply New Topic

Yeah, and according to science emotions and feelings are logical, yet there was this Autistic one who went by the name of Albert Einstein who proved that bio-electrical energy was real (E=M*C squared) and he was not just a famous scientist, but also an a**hole, Professor in multiple countries and several other things; not just that either, but his wife and mother also did all of his math when he needed to show proof.

Free will, like happiness, along with love are all ethereal and if tried to truly explain it...well you would first have to love yourself unconditionally and ethereally yourself to really understand that concept.
I have the free will to pat my head and rub my abs, then rub my head and pat my abs, only to go back to writing this post.

Yes it seems likely that the neurotypes have a role in the failure of certain authors and teachers to enlighten me. OTOH there's a well-known gap between the educated and uneducated mind, which I think must be largely environmental.

When a person is well-educated in a subject, they don't just retain facts and ideas, they get used to a particular thinking style, without which the teacher's words would come over as gobbledegook. And it happens the other way round - I sometimes stumble on the nonstandard syntax of people who didn't learn the precise style of English that I learned, and conclude that their words just don't make sense, while another person somehow just understands what they say without much trouble. It's not simply poor comprehension skill, it's a specific mismatch. When we learn comprehension at school, we learn to fathom select styles of communication and others are omitted from the syllabus. The styles we are taught are for some reason deemed superior.

I will say this, for Jung I don't think Jordan Peterson does a terrible job with his concepts and if you ever want to get the high-level from professionals there's a Jungian analyst couple, Steve and Pauline Richards have a channel titled 'Jung to Live By' on Youtube (typically coordinated by a grad student) where they get into the weeds of Jungian psychology and society, intersexual dynamics, etc..

Jung's metaphysics take a panpsychist, perhaps even idealist, view of consciousness in the cosmos and work with that as the ground of being up from which subconscious and conscious mind arise. The specific suggestions that Steve and Pauline Richards clarify is that there's something like a deep lake of subconscious strata where we have processes at different layers with self-aware consciousness at the top and things like Pankseppian and genomic instincts with archetypes floating several layers above that.

That might be part of what makes Jung cryptic to a lot of people, ie. he wasn't coming from a strong emergence or illusionist view of consciousness and that's one of those where, at least for most of my life, it was the case that any 'serious' thinker wouldn't go near that - until recently where it's becoming the rage again with cog sci, neuroscience, and even some pretty well achieved biologists.

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 24 Nov 2023, 10:12 am, edited 1 time in total.

I suppose Freud would have interpreted the little girl's symptom as some kind of sexual hangup.

It seems to me that this is an improvement on Freud's narrow perspective:
A clear-cut cause of obsessive-compulsive disorder has not been pinpointed. It is generally thought that there are a number of factors involved, ranging from biological, to psychological and environmental. While it is known that there are changes in the brains of people with OCD, there is no scan or test that can diagnose it definitively. Diagnosis is based on a comprehensive interview with a mental health professional. Psychotherapy, with or without medication, is often an effective treatment for OCD, particularly cognitive behavioral therapy, a short-term, structured approach that focuses on learning ways of dealing with obsessive thoughts without resorting to compulsive behaviors.

https://www.anxiety.org/does-excessive- ... e-disorder

Some dislike CBT while others say it can work quite well. I have no experience with it. I imagine whether or not it worked for me would depend on the who was delivering it - their personality, bedside manner, etc.

It's always seemed odd to me that the psych professionals so often get seen - and see themselves - as demigods. I suppose lay people expect them to know what they're doing, but when it comes to the mind, I wonder if anybody really does, and the smart ones are aware that they don't, and don't mind admitting it. Still, it seems that many people have to have an all-knowing parent figure to take the lead, and hate to imagine that their chosen guru doesn't know it all. Transference in psychotherapy is said to be quite common, though I've never noticed it with my counsellors (I've never been under a shrink). I've been suspicious of authority figures for most of my life.

Well yes, even your description of why Jung is cryptic, is cryptic to me

Jordan Peterson seems to be mixing politics with psychology, and doesn't look likely to float my boat, at first glance anyway. He appears to have a lot of right-wing fans:

https://pjmedia.com/catherinesalgado/20 ... d-n4924084

It's not high on my to-do list, but I might take a look / listen to something of his, as it's probably not wise of me to judge a book by its cover or to decide on an ad hominem basis that he's a waste of time, though I've not yet found anything by him that looks likely to contain an explanation of Jung. My guess is that his style will be somewhat removed from the dispassionate, scientific style that I seem to need. But it's perhaps encouraging that at least one Christian group is against his ideas, in spite of his Christian tendencies:

https://www.christianpost.com/voices/in ... seman.html

He may turn out to be rather like Alan Watts, who I can relate to strongly in relatively small doses, even though he's not always entirely "sober" either.

This must be the Steve and Pauline Richards channel you're referring to:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzxP4O ... MaqcqCVkGQ

I plan to take a listen to the first of those videos, which seems to be this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbcZv9fAkzk&t=121

I'd prefer a written transcript, as I don't do so well keeping up with realtime lectures, but I'll give it a try.

If you are looking for someone who gets deep into the weeds but from a consistently academic / dispassionate (or at least only gets really animated when he's illustrating some unusual point) is John Vervaeke. He's also at University of Toronto where Peterson used to work, he's a 4E cognitive science guy as well as suggesting that he's a Neoplatonist and is in favor of a modern Neoplatonist revival. He also has a lengthy series of lectures under 'Awakening From the Meaning Crisis'.

Several milliseconds before you randomly decided rub your abs and head your neurons were firing in anticipation of an act that you were yet to decide to do. Freud would posit that the decision to rib yourself was coming from your unconscious before you acted on your thoughts. This is why Freud is still relevant.

This is why the direction Jung took completely ostracised him from his medical colleagues > Freud

I don't think this is true. Sexual factors were only one of the characteristics Freud used in his theories (albeit a strong one) but there are other traits he linked to personality.

I do suspect her mother was experiencing OCD working with "bugs" precipitating the need to thoroughly wash her hands in a manner that is a little confronting. Yes its possible the little girl inherited her mother's compulsion but there is also an element of social learning as her mother never explained the connection between hand washing and germs to her daughter, Secondly the manner she washes was idiosyncratic so even if the 4 yr old connected the dots between germs and washing hands, there is no reason for a 4 year old to unconsciously follow the exact same routine in terms of technique, vigorousness and duration without observing her mother first.
Conclusion: Maybe a bit of both

Yes, psychotherapy requires objectiveness to reduce transference/bias combined with authentic sincerity and empathy for the client. I suspect most therapists struggle with this combination.

I am currently trying to get my daughter registered for the national disability insurance scheme in Australia and the psychologist she is seeing has refused to write a letter supporting my daughter has autism because after 10 sessions she claims she has not "connected" to my daughter yet, but I realise there is literally nothing I can do.

Last edited by Cornflake on 25 Nov 2023, 8:52 am, edited 1 time in total.: Removed offensive threat

We'll never know if my supposition is correct, but an example or two of his non-sexual theories might be useful here. I agree it's not unlikely that some could be found.

To illustrate how far he took sexual factors, I remember reading an anecdote of his in which in his capacity as a shrink he visited a young man who had accidentally spilled milk on his trousers. Freud interpreted that as the boy's attempt to tell him, in the presence of his parents, that he masturbated. Freud didn't offer any corroboratory evidence. Freud had this tendency to overestimate the applicability of his ideas, coupled with a disarming style that has the power to brainwash people. That's the danger, and I think that happened.

The Victorian middle class is remembered as being extremely sexually repressed, and I think there's some truth in that, but I don't think it was as universal or intense as the stereotype suggests. Contrary to the popular myth, they didn't cover chair legs out of sexual embarrassment.

But I wouldn't go so far as to say that he was always wrong.

"The only thing more common than a blind admiration for Freud seems to be an equally blind hatred for him."
https://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/freud.html
That article seems to offer a fairly dispassionate appraisal of where he was right and where he was wrong.

It's a step in the right direction to recognise and avoid such black-and-white thinking, and not to read it into each other's contributions here, but we're still left with the difficult task of measuring the balance - how right or wrong was Freud, and how much good or damage has he done to the mental health profession and to those with mental health problems? I wish I knew.

I stumbled onto this in a Web search:
https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/ ... ?rdt=64488

He certainly has his critics, many of whom say he's very clear, wastes the student's time, and ultimately says nothing.

But he does have support there too. One attractive trait, if it's true of him, is:
"He's also a good role model for thoughtful conversation in that he's a good listener, not dismissive, and very respectful."

I should probably take a look.

We have free will. It's just that precious little people try to take it away from us.

True, this seems like a leap of faith, But here's the genius of Freud. We already know VIctorian era Europeans were horribly sexually repressed, Masturbation was considered ungodly and against biblical scripture.

Thus Freud was perhaps reading the boys mind. The boy likely was at an age where he was masturbating and the sight of spilled milk on his trousers triggered memories of him ejaculating on his trousers in the privacy of his bedroom. The potential ambiguity of the milk on his trousers mean't the boy was compelled to disclose it was milk to avoid the initial shame of what his parents might interpret.

I know this is off topic but it fascinates me how prude the Victorians were. For example beachwear involved petticoats and trousers that covered head to toe

The repression is likely a contributing factor to the rise of psychosexual serial killing that included (but not restricted to) Jack the ripper which involved middle to upper middle class men who probably had to fight enormous cognitive dissonance wanting to have sex but repressing their urges lest they be caught,