Kim Jones writes: Bruno,
what would an "unreasonable machine" be like? You seem to be implying they exist, also that they can prove things about their possible neighborhoods and or histories. (?) Kim An unreasonable machine would look like a brain. The minds of living organisms, such as they are, evolved to promote survival and reproduction, and apparently being "rational" is only a minor advantage towards this end. I am sure that even logicians, at least when they are off duty, pluck axioms out of the air according to whim or fashion, hold contradictory beliefs simultaneously or sequentially, decide that the correct course of action is x and then do ~x anyway, and so on. It is interesting that in psychiatry, it is impossible to give a reliable method for recognizing a delusion. The usual definition is that a delusion is a fixed, false belief which is not in keeping with the patient's cultural background. If you think about it, why should cultural background have any bearing on whether a person's reasoning is faulty? And even including this criterion, it is often difficult to tell without looking at associated factors such as change in personality, mood disturbance, etc. The single best test is to treat someone with antipsychotic medication and see if the delusion goes away. This means that in theory there might be two people with exactly the same belief, justified in exactly the same way, but one is demonstrably psychotic while the other is not! Crazy thinking is so common that, by itself, it is generally not enough reason to diagnose someone as being crazy. Stathis Papaioannou --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
