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Hussar17
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29 Jul 2015, 12:34 pm

I am an undergraduate at a fairly respectable college, one especially known for churning out doctors. I think like a third of my freshman class was pre-med. I am hoping to pursue a research career, so I take a lot of the same classes as these pre-med students. I like to think I have rather mild Asperger's and I can usually pass as NT pretty well, so I do not have much difficulty meeting new people in my classes, and I have formed a number of study groups with these students.

One thing that has really struck me is how many have eugenics-like ideas. A number of them have said that if people get too old or start to develop dementia, it is more ethical to put them out of their misery. They have also said a lot about race and intelligence (even though many are "stereotypically" liberal), and numerous shots at the supposed intellectual inferiority of the "special" students.

But by far the most concerning have been these students' views on mental health. I have heard people say that people with severe autism lack consciousness, and are therefore not entitled to certain human rights. But by far the most common one I have heard is that it is ethical to abort a fetus with autism, Down's, schizophrenia or the like then have the kid "suffer" in life. Pro-life/Pro-choice arguments aside, I find that a pretty messed up thing to say. A friend of mine was in an abnormal psychology class where students held an online forum on mental health and gun ownership, and the professor had to shut it down because of the violence statements made in opposition.

I love my college and I am doing quite well here (much better than these pre-meds who think I am "unfit"), but these thoughts still nag me sometimes. My school sends hundreds of people to med school, and I imagine a lot of them graduate. I'm not sure these are the kind of people I want to be practicing medicine. But the main reason I made this post is that I am curious of any other students and/or recent alums in the sciences recall similar statements from undergrads, and in particular pre-medical students. Am I the only one who has noticed this trend? Am I just being a little paranoid?



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29 Jul 2015, 7:49 pm

I never knew such opinions were so prevalent among medical students. And we were all taught that doctors are supposed to be so compassionate. I think you have every reason to feel afraid, if this is the future of the medical profession.


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techstepgenr8tion
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29 Jul 2015, 8:27 pm

I hate to say this but if one is practical with their reductive materialism these are the conclusions one is compelled toward.


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ooOoOoOAnaOoOoOoo
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29 Jul 2015, 8:42 pm

It doesn't surprise me at all because doctors can be wolves in sheep's clothing. People want to believe a doctor is always on the side of life but if you look closely, with rationalizations in place, they can be on the side of death. Look at Mengele. He was a doctor. They are the ones who will lead in any such eugenics programs because it's a matter of bioethics which they will be in touch with on a deeper level than those who do not practice medicine.

When do you determine life is unworthy of life? The key is not to kill people though. The key is to come up with enough medical advances for life to be worthy. That way you meet challenges and heal. Otherwise, you are living in the stone ages, pretty much, except now you have plastic.

By and large, most people are against any sort of eugenics programs for seniors and we should all help them but these same folks can turn around and say someone with a medical condition that affects the mind should be terminated in the womb. If you suggest someone with Alzheimer's or dementia be kindly terminated, they turn you into the devil but look at what they say about someone who needs the same kind of medical intervention as the older person suffering from these, only earlier in life. I have noticed this double standard.



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29 Jul 2015, 9:15 pm

If the students at your school are representative of pre med and medical students in general while not surprising it is very frightening indeed. It is why we need Disability/Autism rights movements now more then ever.


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30 Jul 2015, 7:23 am

OK, first up, let's just remember that we tend to notice the loudmouths and not the silent majority, so hopefully things aren't as bad as you think.

I have to disagree with techstepgenr8tion. Empiricism (of which "reductive materialism" is the result) doesn't lead towards immorality at all, quite the opposite - after all, scientists have to deal with the truth, which consistently indicates that disabled people say they are glad to be alive. The scientists I deal with tend to have this sort of attitude towards autism, when it comes up - they want to know more about it, not jump to conclusions and advocate carpet bomb abortion.



techstepgenr8tion
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30 Jul 2015, 5:45 pm

The_Walrus wrote:
I have to disagree with techstepgenr8tion. Empiricism (of which "reductive materialism" is the result) doesn't lead towards immorality at all, quite the opposite - after all, scientists have to deal with the truth, which consistently indicates that disabled people say they are glad to be alive. The scientists I deal with tend to have this sort of attitude towards autism, when it comes up - they want to know more about it, not jump to conclusions and advocate carpet bomb abortion.

Empericism won't always end up in reductive materialism. I said reductive materialism and that's all I meant. Immorality is also a terrible choice of words for framing eugenics and anti-dysgenics. There are a lot of people who look upon a person having less than normal capacities as having a life of suffering, in an already meaningless existence, and they'd strongly believe that in preventing more genetic suffering that they'd be doing the world the highest service.


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Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 30 Jul 2015, 6:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Hussar17
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30 Jul 2015, 5:51 pm

The_Walrus wrote:
OK, first up, let's just remember that we tend to notice the loudmouths and not the silent majority, so hopefully things aren't as bad as you think.


I entirely agree, and I do not think this is a majority viewpoint. But it has come up in a number of circumstances and that any sizable fraction of people may believe this is incredibly troubling. My primary concern is finding out how widespread the phenomenon is, and if it's just an in-house problem for my college in particular.

On a similar note, does anyone know any good speakers in the New England area on this issue? Right now these issues seem to be most prominent in more radical pro-life groups. I am hoping for someone more moderate, so that they will at least be listened to.



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30 Jul 2015, 6:09 pm

Just ask them what they think about 'transgender people', and you will see that most are not that bright.



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31 Jul 2015, 5:34 am

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
The_Walrus wrote:
I have to disagree with techstepgenr8tion. Empiricism (of which "reductive materialism" is the result) doesn't lead towards immorality at all, quite the opposite - after all, scientists have to deal with the truth, which consistently indicates that disabled people say they are glad to be alive. The scientists I deal with tend to have this sort of attitude towards autism, when it comes up - they want to know more about it, not jump to conclusions and advocate carpet bomb abortion.

Empericism won't always end up in reductive materialism. I said reductive materialism and that's all I meant.

Sure empiricism leads to reductive materialism. There's empirical evidence that reductive materialism is true, and there's no empirical evidence that it isn't true. An honest empiricist is presently also a reductive materialist.

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Immorality is also a terrible choice of words for framing eugenics and anti-dysgenics. There are a lot of people who look upon a person having less than normal capacities as having a life of suffering, in an already meaningless existence, and they'd strongly believe that in preventing more genetic suffering that they'd be doing the world the highest service.

Morality is not subjective. Every person thinks they are acting morally, that doesn't mean they are. Killing another person because you deem their life to be not worth living, despite their own desires, is murder, which is immoral.



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31 Jul 2015, 5:48 am

This thread needs some « antagonism» with a « The Trap of Materialism » video-clip...

...with one of the top quotes in response to said video being re-quoted here...

Victor Villagomez (5 months ago) wrote:
Materialism enslaves the human mind so much that we become consumers, and become dependent on materialism. We are no longer an intelligent and independent species. We are afraid to live without cell phones, cars, houses, makeup, money, machines, televisions, fashion and jewelry. No one has intelligent, empathetic and emotional human interaction anymore. Materialism is slavery. Cars, government and machines create pollution. Acid Rain, Deforestation and Global Warming are real. Makeup kills over 300,000 animals each year through testing. Testing creates diseases. Money funds the governments affairs and creates poverty and war for us. Fashion tells us how we should look and live our lives and sexualizes the human body and creates discrimination. Fashion itself is like porn, we dress up for sex appeal and sexual attraction. We become sex slaves. Television and even the radios music feeds us false perceptions about love, life and happiness and feeds us millions of advertisements so we can consume more materialism. Our youth grows up lacking psychological and emotional maturity because they are spoiled in materialism from a young age, and become greedy, undeveloped and dependent. Parents don't know how to teach their children. They just give them materialism, and then hand them over to government and society to raise them. Eating chemical food and pills, polluting the Earth, being a work and war slave, watching television, being a sex slave, buying fashion and making and spending money isn't a life worth living. We are no longer human.

Materialism = Psychological Slavery

Government = Physical Slavery

Society = Spiritual Slavery


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31 Jul 2015, 5:56 am

I think you are confusing materialism (the idea that nothing exists outside of the material world; see also "reductive materialism", which suggests that the entirely of human experience can be explained by physical phenomena, particularly in the brain) with economic materialism (the excessive desire to accumulate material goods). Despite their names, the two are unrelated.



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31 Jul 2015, 6:50 am

From what you wrote, I wonder how much these people think through what they are saying and suspect it's just complaints from stress worrying about getting into med school that these highly competitive people know at some level is wrong but assume is harmless within their groups.

My guess is they don't post on social media or do anything with these ideas....because they want to get into medical school and know it wouldn't look good.

Apparently, everyone wants to go along with the group so no one stands up to the bullying in absentia, only I doubt you're the only one so not even in absentia......one person to say, calmly and firmly, not "I" but "my little sister/brother/child has autism"..... maybe me saying things like that is why I don't have friends, but I think those of your classmates doing this believe it's harmless stress reduction that harms no one.

I do wonder how many of the kids saying this may be registered with the colleges office for services for students with disabilities.....quite a few I suspect.

It's surprising that the type of volunteer activities premed students get involved with isn't helping control this kind of thing.

I'd rather be alone than be part of this kind of group. Don't think they'll change, but doubt they really mean everything literally either.



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01 Aug 2015, 11:32 pm

Hussar17 wrote:
One thing that has really struck me is how many have eugenics-like ideas. A number of them have said that if people get too old or start to develop dementia, it is more ethical to put them out of their misery.


Which has nothing to do with eugenics. Or you are really overestimating their reproductive changes. No, both those cases have more to the with the expected quality of life of said persons, and the question if the cost of keeping them healthy is worth the result.

The_Walrus wrote:
Morality is not subjective. Every person thinks they are acting morally, that doesn't mean they are. Killing another person because you deem their life to be not worth living, despite their own desires, is murder, which is immoral.


No, murder means the unlawful killing of an other person. So in this context if you killed such a person acting within the constrains of a law allowing for the killing of said subject it would be moral, since it would not be murder. I hope this shows that stating just because something is legal/illegal makes something moral/immoral is problematic. Even more so in the absolute sense you seem to do here.



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02 Aug 2015, 6:08 am

The_Walrus wrote:
Sure empiricism leads to reductive materialism. There's empirical evidence that reductive materialism is true, and there's no empirical evidence that it isn't true. An honest empiricist is presently also a reductive materialist.

Dogma. As far as I can tell this is still a political war between fledgeling science and a brass-knuckled church. The outcome is a bunch of fundamentalist believers on one side circling their wagons around dumb-literal readings of books that were never built to be that, on the other you have a field that by its present self-definition is only in business if it can find reductive materialist explanations to things, which wouldn't be a problem except that people have made it an ideology (ie. a philosophy distended to the point of relious behavior). The problem is most people are lazy, they won't read all the way around a topic, and on some corner - to either be in the YEC club or the dead-matter club you have to disqualify mounds of evidence to the contrary on the flimsiest excuses. Where that comes into play with empiricism is that when you have an experience that shatters the reductive materialist paradigm - even on the subjective - it's sensory. Similarly the formula for getting there is repeatable and there are many processes or particular formulas that have held up as tried and true.

To be fair though I'm getting the point of giving up hope on people in this regard - I would have thought that the measurement problem when it gets combined with things like the global consciousness project would have at least stopped the conversation from being one about whether there was a physical 'need' for there to be unified consciousness or experiences beyond the body; after a point it's like trying to dismiss gravity as a hallucination because someone somewhere comes up with a model where they feel the universe doesn't need it, it's causes are unexplained, and everyone accordingly just goes along with it.

The_Walrus wrote:
IMorality is not subjective. Every person thinks they are acting morally, that doesn't mean they are. Killing another person because you deem their life to be not worth living, despite their own desires, is murder, which is immoral.

Yes - in the society that you'd prefer to live in. You also refer to it out of hand as 'killing' another person. I don't know what your take is on the abortion issue but if you believe a fetus is a part of the mother's anatomy or that the population problem is getting out of hand or that we have loads of people who need government help and even institutional care almost from the time they're born - claiming that it's 'immoral' skates on increasingly thinner ice.


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02 Aug 2015, 11:36 am

Sigbold wrote:
The_Walrus wrote:
Morality is not subjective. Every person thinks they are acting morally, that doesn't mean they are. Killing another person because you deem their life to be not worth living, despite their own desires, is murder, which is immoral.


No, murder means the unlawful killing of an other person. So in this context if you killed such a person acting within the constrains of a law allowing for the killing of said subject it would be moral, since it would not be murder. I hope this shows that stating just because something is legal/illegal makes something moral/immoral is problematic. Even more so in the absolute sense you seem to do here.

Fair enough, you got me.

I'd certainly agree that morality exists independently of law, for the most part, and I was not arguing that killing is only immoral when it is legally murder. I would personally define murder a little differently, as "immoral premeditated killing" rather than "unlawful premeditated killing", but I can accept that is neither the dictionary definition nor the legal one.

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
to either be in the YEC club or the dead-matter club you have to disqualify mounds of evidence to the contrary on the flimsiest excuses.

Point to some convincing evidence that we are not just our bodies.

As it is, we know that specific forms of brain damage end consciousness, and others impede it. If stopping the brain's supply of oxygen for a certain length of time reliably ends consciousness (and it does), then that shows that consciousness is something which requires the brain receiving a supply of oxygen, in all life forms we are aware of.
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I would have thought that the measurement problem when it gets combined with things like the global consciousness project would have at least stopped the conversation from being one about whether there was a physical 'need' for there to be unified consciousness or experiences beyond the body; after a point it's like trying to dismiss gravity as a hallucination because someone somewhere comes up with a model where they feel the universe doesn't need it, it's causes are unexplained, and everyone accordingly just goes along with it.

I'm not quite sure I understand this. Are you saying that you feel like you are trying to dismiss gravity, or like sceptics are doing so?

The Global Consciousness Project has so far shown absolutely nothing. I can accept that their methods were never likely to, so we shouldn't read too much into that.

The Measurement Problem is utterly baffling, but if that's your sole piece of evidence for non-physical consciousness then it seems like you're very much in "God-of-the-Gaps" territory.

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The_Walrus wrote:
IMorality is not subjective. Every person thinks they are acting morally, that doesn't mean they are. Killing another person because you deem their life to be not worth living, despite their own desires, is murder, which is immoral.

Yes - in the society that you'd prefer to live in. You also refer to it out of hand as 'killing' another person. I don't know what your take is on the abortion issue but if you believe a fetus is a part of the mother's anatomy or that the population problem is getting out of hand or that we have loads of people who need government help and even institutional care almost from the time they're born - claiming that it's 'immoral' skates on increasingly thinner ice.

I don't believe a foetus is a person.

So are you saying you don't believe in absolute morality?