In my opinion, psychology is just a pseudo-science like phrenology or alchemy. The behaviorists have completely destroyed mainstream society and all the personal responsibility that used to be prevalent. Since all major branches of psychology seem to stem from the behaviorist model, most of the theories, postulations and ideas of behavioral disorders are completely wrong.

While I give some credence to the understandings brought forth from the physiological branch of psychology, the rest is just a bunch of whitewash made up of poorly contrived experiments of those seeking a degree in a science with no concrete foundation. Believe me, I have one, and I got my degree by literally making up things when my deadlines were at their end. It wouldn't have been so bad, but some of the things I just shot from the hip, were considered brilliant.

Psychology is the basic science of the diffusion of responsibility, and is nice for call in radio programs, but has no place in any college, university, or other place of higher learning. It is bad for society as a whole, and especially horrible for the people it attempts to treat. At least that's why I left the field.

I'll never be able to reconcile the basic premiss of psychology (that is, that people's behaviour is dependent on motivation, and motivation can be influenced), with philosophy, that is, the branch of philosophy that deals with determinism.

According to determinism, things happen one way only, because everything that happens is the result of a sum total of factors acting on the things that happen. Without cause things don't happen, and things happen only due to the causes that make them happen.

According to the deterministic model, the future is calculable, since the causes that are observed or can't be observed by humans but are there anyway, will make things happen in only one way, and since the causing factors are caused by something else, the linear consequentiality of events is only possible in one way, which is calculable if one is in the knowledge of all factors acting.

So... if a man is acting one way, his action is the resultant of the sum total of the motivations he is evaluating before he decides to act this way or that way. His child will run into the pavement; he will decide to scream, or run after the child, or faint in panic.

Let's say that the best decision in this instance would be to run after the child, but the man has a motivation to faint, which is always his reaction.

He goes into therapy to reduce his tendency to panic.

Whether or not the therapy succeeds in making the man change his behaviour, is interestingly predictable, or would be, according to the deterministic model.

So the man's approaching the psychologist to seek help is predictable.

Which means he never had chance of a choice whether to approach the psychologist or not.

He had never had ta chance to be affected by the therapy in a way that never happened. That is to say, he had no chance of succeeding in therapy to change his fainting-panicing behaviour, if the therapy does not work on him, and he had no chance of failing in therapy to learn a more appropriate behaviour if he does succeed.

So this is a dilemma. If the outcome is one and only one, and it is only possible to have the only one outcome, then does the therapy actually work? Does it have a value in changing the man's behaviour?

If there is power in therapy, then it can change something truly. But to change something truly means to change something that would not change without the application to try to change that thing. Is it possible to measure this? No. The application is predicted to happen by the deterministic model. In other words, the man has the therapy, which apparently changes him, but the change is impossible to do if the deterministic model predicts it's not going to happen.

This is complicated enough, when we consider that therapy changes the outcome of events from the most probable or likely outcome of events had the therapy been not there. This is a conundrum, because for the therapy to be not there, is also impossible.

The picture gets more perplexing than that. If the deterministic model works, then we must also accept it in the molecular and atomic level. So is the therapy successful because the man has decided to not faint, and make some mechanisms work for him that he learned in the therapy? But if he did, then how do the atoms and molecules not carry out their deterministically predictable future? They act in accordance with the laws of physics and chemistry. Yet their eventual movements are determined by a psychological change. But their atomic laws are absolutely not affected by psychological motivations.

The only way to answer this conundrum is that the man's psychological predictability and his body's atoms' physical and chemical predictability both predict the same future, that is, that the man will never faint any more when the child runs to the street.

This is tough. It negates that psychological causation is possible to exist. After all, if it existed, the atomic, chemical and sub-atomic causation would contradict it, if a real change occurred, a real change in the sense that it is a change that was not predictable.

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If we still want to believe that psychology works, in its effort of helping people in therapy, then we can only accept that if we throw away the deterministic model.

So we do that. We say, determinism does not work, because we chose to accept that philosophy instead of accepting the philosophy that determinism works.

What if this is true? that determinism is not a good model?

Well, one corollary, using the assumptions and logic in the foregoing, would be freedom from laws, and an ability to change the course of events, since not everything will be predictable.

But if things are not predictable, then some things happen at random.

If things happen at random, then things happen that had been unpredictable.

Such as an apple falling up from a tree, or the walls of the White House turning into butterflies above our nation, or any other miraculous event could happen, due to the freeness or independence of laws. Independence of laws is what we need, to make the philosophy our own which says things are not predictable, things are not happening in a causal way, in a caused chain of events.

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In conclusion, if things that happen are constrained by laws that govern their way of happening, then it's a deterministic world, in which psychotherapy is an event, which can't happen any way but the way it can, so it's not changing anyone. If we want to make it so that we can believe psychology works, inasmuch as it can truly change people, then we don't live in a deterministic world, but in chaos. In chaos there is no determism, yet we don't see any support to accept that we live in chaos.

I have no clue whatsoever what dualism means. All I know that if Socrates and Descartes are primitive, unsophisticated and beginner-level thinkers, then what am I? Probably a pebble on the beach, or God or some other screwed up existence who can't find its tail.

I would like to meet someone who is not primitive. Please, OP, I ask you to name some non-primitives who are smarter and more sophisticated than S. or D., and by at least a factor of two. I mean, whose IQs are at least three times that of Socrates and Descartes combined.

I was having a hard time in Philosophy class after I got out of rehab. I didn't even think I had a chance in college. But then I got to share some of my acid trips with the professor. Who knew he used to be a stoner? He didn't want me to recite what he wrote on the board but he did want me to try to at least read the material before class. I thought Socrates was a cool guy. Ayn Rand, though, what awesome books she wrote. Camus' work was awesome. This guy rolls this stone up a mountain every day. Heck. I had trouble with rolling joints and this guy could roll stones. I like Descartes work with math with X and Y coordinates. I mean I have been spaced out before but with his help I probably find my point of origin. As far as dualism goes; Sometimes I can still hear the voices. There just not as loud now and with therapy they don't even bother me. Yeah. I guess I am still fragmented.

at their time, they might have been considered smart, or maybe the first to think in a way that was uncommon at that time, but compared to what we know today, they would be maybe at best average by the standards we now use.

Hi! I think people trend with regards to 'hot' philosophies - it always keeps changing. I'm not positive that humans have increased in IQ over time significantly - more so we build on previous concepts and have a better understanding of what works and what doesn't

How's your sunday?

hi beautiful! my sunday is going great! how about yours?
i think they were constrained by what they knew at that time. they could only understand the ideas that were around them, and by what they could see. nowadays we have more available knowledge then they ever had access too.

Danaleeks, I have formed the following OPINION:

1. You make no sense.

2. Your statements of rebuffing other's statements are based on a system of degrading statements to mere opinions, and then claiming logical victory over the other by nullifying the logical value of the other's statements. This practice works for you, just as much as it would work for anyone else, but it is not a valid practice, as it does not deal with any issue directly, it is just a way to vent opinions after opinions, which are unassailable, therefore a dialogue can't be established. In your system of looking at things, communication can be nothing else but a series of monologues of people, with no right or ability to dispute other's claims.

3. Your conversational style mostly does not make a reference to who else's post you reply to, which makes making sense of what you say even harder.

4. You shroud yourself in expressions and acronysms (KMA, dualism, etc.) that are either completely and by you predictably incomprehensible to others, or else that are words that can have many hugely and significantly different meanings, and you don't specify at the first utterance which meaning you use it in. You explain later, but that's too little too late. If you don't communicate clearly in the first place, and find others befuzzled by your statements, please don't make the mistake of thinking that you are superior to us (and I say this as a hypothetical situation, it is not my claim that you feel superior); it is not our ineptitude that we don't understand you due to your hazy and unclear communication style.

5. You make a bold statement and when you are called to defend it against criticism, you shif the relevance of a few words you used, and argue why the shifted relevance is valid. You don't even notice the shift you had made. This makes intelligent dialogue impossible. If you don't know what you say and can transform your own statements so easily, effortlessly and falsely, then please understand that my not wishing to talk to you any more is not of prejudice or personal dislike, it is out of frustration and an unwillingness to show you every time how you went wrong; because my explanation how you went wrong you will tranform again, and the process potentially can continue into infinity, without your understanding me, yourself, or what I am trying to point out in your statements. This is beyond frustrating, and clearly not worth the effort on my part at all.

6. Without speaking for anyone else, I find understanding you, agreeing with you, or even disagreeing with you is way too much effort, way more than it would be worth. I also find that you may or may not be saying anything of substance, but to see whether you do or not presents so much mental work that it, again, is not worth doing for my personal considerations of why I am on forums and message boards.

7. Therefore I shall never talk to you again, and I shall skim over your posts, as they are, to me, valueless and contribute nothing.

Danaleeks, I have formed the following OPINION:

1. You make no sense.

2. Your statements of rebuffing other's statements are based on a system of degrading statements to mere opinions, and then claiming logical victory over the other by nullifying the logical value of the other's statements. This practice works for you, just as much as it would work for anyone else, but it is not a valid practice, as it does not deal with any issue directly, it is just a way to vent opinions after opinions, which are unassailable, therefore a dialogue can't be established. In your system of looking at things, communication can be nothing else but a series of monologues of people, with no right or ability to dispute other's claims.

3. Your conversational style mostly does not make a reference to who else's post you reply to, which makes making sense of what you say even harder.

4. You shroud yourself in expressions and acronysms (KMA, dualism, etc.) that are either completely and by you predictably incomprehensible to others, or else that are words that can have many hugely and significantly different meanings, and you don't specify at the first utterance which meaning you use it in. You explain later, but that's too little too late. If you don't communicate clearly in the first place, and find others befuzzled by your statements, please don't make the mistake of thinking that you are superior to us (and I say this as a hypothetical situation, it is not my claim that you feel superior); it is not our ineptitude that we don't understand you due to your hazy and unclear communication style.

5. You make a bold statement and when you are called to defend it against criticism, you shif the relevance of a few words you used, and argue why the shifted relevance is valid. You don't even notice the shift you had made. This makes intelligent dialogue impossible. If you don't know what you say and can transform your own statements so easily, effortlessly and falsely, then please understand that my not wishing to talk to you any more is not of prejudice or personal dislike, it is out of frustration and an unwillingness to show you every time how you went wrong; because my explanation how you went wrong you will tranform again, and the process potentially can continue into infinity, without your understanding me, yourself, or what I am trying to point out in your statements. This is beyond frustrating, and clearly not worth the effort on my part at all.

6. Without speaking for anyone else, I find understanding you, agreeing with you, or even disagreeing with you is way too much effort, way more than it would be worth. I also find that you may or may not be saying anything of substance, but to see whether you do or not presents so much mental work that it, again, is not worth doing for my personal considerations of why I am on forums and message boards.

7. Therefore I shall never talk to you again, and I shall skim over your posts, as they are, to me, valueless and contribute nothing.

Good grief ahahhahahahaha

but she is hot though, you gotta admit...

I broke my word already, I read some posts of Danaleeks's in another forum on this site... and she made a lot of solid sense there.

I don't know what to say... is she out of her depth in philosophy? Because in pscychology she certainly displays solid, up-to-date knowledge. And she disseminates that psych knowledge clearly and vividly. Not one vague or misleading concept or argument in her texts. Her thoughts are well organized in those other posts. Hm.