You know, when i was reading this thread, I came to think of
Osmium Steele's thread my daughter

I do not have kids of my own, but should I lose one of them. I would not have my memories of that child erased.

Markus

In a way many of you guys avoid to adress the original question. The hypothetical description implies that the procedure is risk-free. and the original question posted was

"so - if you could have a specific memory deleted... would you?"

No talk of general memory deleting. No talk of brain damage and risk for it involved. No talk of that it is enforce don you which memory gets deleted. The context is that you can freely chose which memory to delete, and whether to have any deletion taking place or not at all.

I ask the question differently, to illustrate the differences between the original object of the question, and the object to which many of you replied.

Can you imagine any sort of memory or experience that may be - in any sense you see worthwhile to define for the purpose of this question - so harmful or damaging or suffering-inducing to you that you wish you could just extract and delete it and not suffering from it and not being affected from it, assuming it could be done without any further health risk or chance for personality change involved?


Feel free to consider an experience of loosing a loved one. Having physical pain, or an accident. Getting raped. Witnessing disaster or humans suffering. And take into account in which way such experience may affect you in the present or your life after these experiences, how they defined them in good or bad, or may have turned you into a suffering wreck or a psychopath. Whatever.

That is the tricky part in this hypothetical question, isn't it. To what degree do not on ly comfortable, positive experiences, but also negative experiences define us for good or bad, and when is traumatization of such a nature that we would be better off if we never had experienced it? Obviously, a very subjective,. individual choice to make. Or not? I dare not to give a general answer, nor do I dare to exclude the chance that a general blueprint could be imagined.

BTW, such scenarios already are a reality. Although rather rare, hospital doctors can give you descriptions of syndroms, injuries and diseases where surgical procedures in the brain or drugs to be given to battle a serious problem, can lead to lasting personality changes, changes of habits, tastes, likes and dislikes, and loss or replacement of cognitive abilities. Often the patient is aware of the decision to be made, and plays an active role in it. So why does the one agree to procedures having such consequences, and another not? That would be a third way to ask the original question, maybe.

Skybird, I reject your view that past trauma renders every individual a suffering wreck or psychopath, which seems to be your general belief, both stated in this thread and in others. Painful memories are part of who I am as well. I would not have the procedure done.

EDIT: The procedure theorized is something I would compare to mental liposuction. As real liposuction will remove fat and make you thinner, it will ironically, not make you any healthier. Your plaque build-up, cholestorol, diabetes, etc, will remain. You've addressed only the superficial. This theorized procedure will remove your bad memories, leaving only a bland euphoria. It sounds like a less traumatic lobotomy. It's not something that I would be comfortable with.

Thats something you read into it. I cannot recall that I made any quantitative assessment that allows the conclusion that I think every traumatization leads to utmost existential breakdown. As a matter of fact traumatization can come in many shades, forms and grades of severity. Thats why studies seriously researching on them often do - at least should - include the definitions of grades or diagnostic keys on which the researchers based when categorizing different grades of traumata.

Yes. I hinted at that myself two posts above. But pain can have different degrees of intensity, from pain you can bear, to pain that makes you breaking down and loosing your mind and senses, and/or leads to social and psychic handicaps that let your social life collapse and turn your life into a mess, even lead to changes in your personality. I think one of the links I gave in the thread on PTSD even illustrates cases they examined where traumatization that became chronic and got not treated led to both physical changes in the brain structure (loss of grey matter in the brain, with possible decline of IQ as well although that is not always the case), and lasting personality changes.

That extends the original question of this thread here by a whole new dimension. Are you still "yourself" if your suffering is such that it already has turned you into a different person?

A liposuction it would be if memories get extracted for the mere purpose of heaving it easy, for comfort, in other word: for reasons that would fall under the label of luxury. But when memories get extracted that are so traumatizing that they affect your cardiovascular health, your personality, your brain, your IQ? I think then it more compares to the extraction of cancer tumurs in a fight for your very life, or to lessen incredible physical pain.

I read about this American idiot of a senator who recently should have said that when a women got raped and gets pregnant, then it was God's will (no religious debate intended, mind you). I now try to imagine the victim of such an attack. And when (and why) some victims may wish they could just "forget" that memory of such an attack, while others maybe would not. Can a clear criterion be given that decides when such a memory helps you to realize your "real" nature, and when it hinders you? Can one really say that easily "But that experience of having gotten raped just defines her what she afterwards is, after the rape?" That would sound as bright an answer to me as the remark of that senator.

You're substituting philosophy for science.



Again, this is philosophy substituted for science, but I will play along. Clearly the only time that man is not shaped by his experience is when he is in the womb. Is the ultimate goal then to return man to his native prenatal state? It's the only time that you're not going to have suffering.


The comparison is that it is an unnatural method for extracting the unwanted. As it is natural to have memories, to wipe the memory to remove those memories is unnatural in the almost Orwellian sense. What of the repeat criminal offender? Can we alter his brain to make him a law-abiding citizen? What of the pedophile? Or the white supremacist, who holds views that are destructive to the running of society. What of your image of the Muslim? Can we alter his brain to make him a non-Muslim? Those things could be done for the common good, and the individual in each case could be made into a happy, productive model citizen.

That's quite a Pandora's box that you're eager to kick open.

Strawman argument.

That's clinical fact. Traumatization can come in different grades of severity. Some are light, others are heavy. Don't even try to argue with me on this, I know it better than you. And active clinical practitioners know it better than you anyway. I have seen people with traumatizations that had pushed them into catatonic conditions for days and weeks, as if they were schizophrenic. Light cases of traumatization also suffer, but in kind of an automode or ghostmode can run the needs of everyday life. Between the two extremes, a wide variety of intensities and syndromes is possible. By diagnostic keys according to DSM or ICD, the keys and possible symptom list to be checked for may be the same. But the intensities by which symptoms form out, can vary tremendouslya, can find their very individual modulation.

Suffering from a hurting dent, is one thing. Suffering from having seen how your village got wiped out and the victors torturing you for three days afterwards, destroying your soul, is something very different. The pain of a woman giving birth to her child again is something different. And a given small quota of mothers start to hate their child due to their experience during birth. (This is not the depression up to 15% of mothers after birth may fall into, or the inability of some rare mothers to accept and love their kid, it remains to be a foreign object to them. I'm talking about some mothers learning to hate their kid for the rest of their life for the pain it has caused them during birth. Rare, but happens. Can lead to very ugly family histories. I know one such example).

Different also is the way you react to aversive stimuli of differing intensity. And what makes one man yell out in anger and trying harder, makes another guy already break down and give up, seeking salvation from his suffering.

Should I tell you what it was like to spend almost 60 hours, almost in one piece, in one with a girl who had suffered something like what I described above, war, destruction and torture? She was as well as catatone since weeks and had not spoken for as long when she arrived with us. Difficult to handle without her breaking down, hitting and immediately collapsing when one touched her by acident or to lead her the way to a chair, a new room, the plane, whatever. No relatives. She got fed by injections, initially the RC did it by force in Bosnia, since on locaiton they were lacking the resources, time and personnel to adapt to her special conditions, they already struggled to just keep her physically alive. The heaviest traumatization case I have ever seen, and one thing I still find it hard to remmeber. A walking corpus, with dead eyes. A zombie. No pleasant story, and one of the toughest things I have ever gone through. 60 hours of silent company, no words spoken, no intruisve eye contact, no sudden movements, no nothing, just by thtav trying to communicate that I would not do anything to her or agaiunst her will, that I was no threat, no origin of suffering. Heartbreaking. Whatever it was that has been done to her, it was not nice. The reward?

Don'T dare to compare this fate to the suffering of man "outside mother's womb" as you put it, this suffering called ordinary life. That would be philosophy indeed, brought up from t he comfort and safety of your chair - and YOU have brought it up, not me. You are so fixiated in your anger on me and your desire to debate me into a corner, that you seem to not knowing what you are talking many more. But this stuff I know better than you. From theory. From good teachers that I always seemed to have had the luck to find. And from practice.

Take away the body, and man is no more. Change the brain's chemistry or EEG patterns, and the owner feels different emotions, has same perceptions interpreted differently by the brain. Hallucinations become reality, signals by your retina are not recongised by the brain, your eyes see, but your brain says youz are blind. Your emotions - are in your brain. Your behavior - is in your brain. Cognition, intellect - in your brain. Perception: in your brain. The world: in your brain. Your world. Change the brain by physical or chemical intervention, and you change the person, the personality, the schemes of deciding and behaving.

That girl I mentioned, surely would have had her experience deleted from her memory, if that were possible, and be given back her former life, if that would have been possible. And then comes Takeda telling her that she should stay with her nighmares, because they are what has turned her into the walking corpus she now was? As if that were a desirable state...?! Who do you think you are that you tell this or other victims of crushing events to live with it? That US senator I mentioned earlier, the one saying pregnancy even from rape being a gift by God for woman - is he a relative of yours...??? Torture victims wanting to just beeing dead, in order to lose the memory of what was done to them and their loved ones - they just are craving for returning to what you call a prenatal status? What'S next - calling them weaklings and cowards, maybe? It seems you are a blessed man and life so far has saved you from realising how grim and unforgiving it can be if things turn nasty. And I mean really nasty.

Really, man, come back to your senses. You get blinded from your own fuming.

"The" memory? The scenario starting this thread was more specific, if only people would care to read more precise. And I explained what it meant, and that was not the undiscriminatory cleaning of the memory, but whether one could imagine to have a precise special memory taken away due to the consequences, most likely of aversive nature, it has caused in life. If that were an option he could chose, that is.

People can be hit so hard that that is a desirable option indeed. Because the alternative would be to die, for example. Well, I have some people on my mind who without doubt would be better off if we could relieve them from the memory haunting them.

And I have two bad memories of my own life on mind that are related to events that I would prefer to make undone. But I cannot. Needing to remembering them, does no good for me, and has not turned me into a better being either. I can bear the memory now, and I lived beyond the events, yes. But a benefit from those experiences there is not, I need them as much as an appendicitis. Sure, there are other memories, from times before the final events spoiling them. These are good. Don't want to miss them But the memory of how it ended I could live without more happily, maybe. At least i could bear them now. But not everybody is so "luckily" struck by fate. Some get it really heavy. And then your wisdom would sound like right from the ar$e.

Let me reformulate the original question of the topic starter once again. Imagine to have memories of events that have destroyed you. I mean that really destroyed you, leaving you in the dust of this cosmic highway. I do not mean experiences that made you suffer but you was strong enough to endure it and to bear what fate threw at you. Fate broke you. Your spirit is gone. So is maybe your life will. You are ruins and ashes, and wish to be dead just not to need to remember anymore. When confrontation therapy has no chance to do any good for you and explanations explain nothing anymore and drugs keep you vegetating but not living, and meanings have no meaning anymore - would you stay that way and enjoy being yourself, this precious new self you are now and that seems to be so precious to you no matter any imaginable circumstances, that wreck I described - or would you try your chances to find some relief and maybe regain the strength to live on by having the event you remember and that has destroyed you so severely being removed from your brain'S RAM?

Do you refuse a cancer tumour being extracted because actually it is a part of your body, your own cells?

I don't know, and the hypothetical scenario and original question in no way was about this.

Ironically, you here open the door to philosophy for sure, while you accused me of having done that when mentioning different intensity grades of traumatization. Funny.

And so it is me playing by your rules, and I say this:, neurological and brain research shows the possibility - not more, not less - that indeed criminal behavior of certain types may be linked to genetics. And why not, when our behavior is determined by the processes in our brain. But brain is not exlcusively affected by genetic dispositions, but also by learning and experience and other stimuli. However, genetic dispositions, for neurochemical abnormalities or even just individual characteristics, maybe play a bigger role than we feel comfortable with finding out. Which would raise questions about free will. And questions on free will raise questions on our responsibilities for our actions and decisions. Indeed, some constellations of strong correlations, even causal links between neurochemical specifications and certain diseases and psychologial abnormalities, are known to exist. The question is: is all human behavior to be traced back to neurological conditions preset by genes, or not. If it is, there hardly would be free will in deed. Not pleasant for the robot to find out he actually is just a robot running a program. On the other hand we know thatg hormones play an incredibly important role in you emotional states, do control our readiness to show this ore that behavior and reaction, their influence is hard to be overestimated. And sexuality only being the most obvious example. And the most authoritative endocrine gland - again resides inside the brain.

Genetic dispositions deciding criminal behavior, yes, that would raise moral problems, namely for jurisdiction. In extreme: could one sentence an offender for a crime he committed if by his genes he had no choice than to do what he did? If pedophilia were found to be a genetic predisposition, we still are right to defend ourselevs and our chidlren and takr actions against these people, no doubt. But could we still morally judge them for natgure having turned them into what they are? Homosexuality can be a learned habit but it most likely also gets created genetically - and we have stopped to accept the moral condemnation of homosexuals, and now say they are what they are and have same rights to be here like others. - For the record: no, I did not attempt to claim that homosexuality were a crime like pedophilia. I wanted to illustrate a moral dilemma if pedophilia were found to be genetically influenced as well. Usual consensus today is that experiences in early childhood are responsible for forming out sexual perversions like pedophilia. Once implanted, sexual habits are almost impossible to be revised, they remain to be a dominant motive in all life. That'S why I rate pedophilia as incurable.

I did not until right now. You went beyond the parameters for the original scenario, while just. Not me. You. And many people before have answered to issues of the scenario that it originally did not include or asked for.

Unbelievable.
Considering to what former passage's content this reply was coming from you,

I read about this American idiot of a senator who recently should have said that when a women got raped and gets pregnant, then it was God's will (no religious debate intended, mind you). I now try to imagine the victim of such an attack. And when (and why) some victims may wish they could just "forget" that memory of such an attack, while others maybe would not. Can a clear criterion be given that decides when such a memory helps you to realize your "real" nature, and when it hinders you? Can one really say that easily "But that experience of having gotten raped just defines her what she afterwards is, after the rape?" That would sound as bright an answer to me as the remark of that senator.

that senator and you MUST be close friends, if not even twins. If I would have read the ending first and saw this comment at the very beginning of wasting my time here, I would not have cared to reply to you.

You know what, from now on leave me alone, you haughty hypocrite. I'm done with you.

Better reference.
http://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/3x...troyhd0504.jpg

And that's what everyone says when they've run out of real arguments.

He never said that. He only said that he wouldn't do it himself.

Look in a mirror lately, Mr Pot?

Skybird, it appears that that you just cannot have a discussion with anyone that disagrees with you. You resort to argumentative fallacy and fall into the trap of victim mentality. You tell me how I am fuming and how angry I am, and yet the only one I see getting worked up is you, with your passive-aggressive syntax and attempts to put words in my mouth via strawman tactics as you have done now four times in less than 24 hours.

I would suggest that, for the sake of your own temper, you refrain from discussion on the forum until you are able to handle disagreement in a mature manner. You'll thank yourself.

Like you know more about how to play a guitar and do not need me - a non-player of any instrument - to tell you about it, I do not take lesson by Takeda or yopu or August on how to diagnose different grades of traumatization, and whether traumatization can have different grades of severity or not.

Because, you see - I know this better for sure. Yes. And I will not apologize for knowing it better than him. Than you. Than August. There are many practicioners out there who know more about traumata and therapy attempts than I do, no doubt. Still, also beyond doubt is that you three are none of them.

Context, man, context. Not a strength of yours when picking some word cadavers serving your intention from my postings and using them to your liking, but trying nevertheless to refer to the context may sooner or later have a training effect.

Would also help to fight the impression that you use this kind of distortion and/or distraction tactics intentionally.

Sure. I can only recommend to you doing so.

Possibly true, but I would never presume to resolve an argument on a subject I know about by simply talking down to the other person and telling him I know better. If you can't present facts, just shout louder. That's what you did this time, and you can't get out of it by wishing it away.

Doesn't matter. You gave up trying to show facts and stooped to talking down to people. I've seen other people do it here, and it showed how shallow they were as well.

That's easy to say when you make up your own context. You already have a long record of picking and choosing from the things I've said to suit your arguments, and now you want to do it with others by shouting "context". Did he say that or not? If so, I owe you an apology. If not, then you are once again trying to argue with what you want somebody to have said, not what they actually said. That's called dishonesty.

You argue with what he didn't say, claiming that that was what he meant, and then accuse me of distortion? Interesting.

So I'm a haughty hypocrite too? How so? I'm not the one who talks down to people and tries to lecture them, and when they still have the audacity to keep arguing try to shout them down by bragging about my credentials.

I do look in the mirror every day, and I'm my own worst critic.

If I have something I wanted to forget, Id do it. (of course, not for something simple)

But I don't have to worry about it, as my brain likes to forget things without any procedure!

People discuss history on internet forums all the time, Subsim included. Every now and then I come across comments that make me, a person studying the subject and making living related to it, roll my eyes. Some make me gnaw my teeth and some just cause me to burst into uncontrollable laughter.

Yet if I want to make these feelings public (which I have in here too in some cases), the last way I would do it would be chastising them. Is it because I also study pedagogy and wouldn't act like that in a classroom either? No. It's simply because history, pedagogy, international relations, media studies, museum studies and the various foreign languages are not the only things I have learned in the university.

While I didn't necessarily agree with you on everything, I thought you had the right method in this thread with August. How you now lost it and came up with the quote above is beyond me. You can do better than that.

It's one thing to erase the memory in an individual....but...

What about their friends and relatives that know what happened to them?

Do they walk around on eggshells trying not to let slip any details of the event that was erased?

Do they erase from the patients memory the ..erm.. memory that they had a procedure that removed a memory?

What if the patient comes across a picture of the themselves linked to a report of the traumatic event in a newspaper or other media?

I voted no, because the human brain is very adaptive and removing the memory does not stop the patient using reason to work out what happened.

Cheers

Gary

Hottentot, you need to be aware of the context when I gave that snappy reply. I cut Takeda short, brutally short if you want to see it like that - and that was exactly what I wanted. Why?

Takeda said:
He says that this and that "were my view. It isn'T and never was, and I have never, nowhere said that, also not in the thread with August on PTSD.

So I replied to that:

Mind you, just days ago I explained that I have some practical experience with traumatization, and have had some more theoretical input on it from a specialist as well than just having studied general psychology. I also gave August links to some example studies that supported my arguments.

So, Takeda put soemthing into my mouth, I corrected that, by argument and in calm reaosnable tone. Takeda replied:

Pardon? Have I missed something? Wrong party, maybe? I replied:

How much more attention am I expected to spend to this kind of having a "discussion", and taking it serious as if it were of any compoletence on this detail of the generla mess created in here? I do nnot boast, I do not hide that I even do notn work as a psychologist, I just have said before, this and that are my qualifications for asssessing this detai, and from experience and theory, from both, I just know it better than you.

Read all the postings in chronological order, and see how it degraded more and more, and finally ended with Takeda'S snappish reply to the situation of a woman being raped that I quoted as an illustrative exmaple. "Strawman argument", he called that. Well. That left me speechless, and that was when I immediately lost any interest to deal with him any longer. Take note to the many other sidelines of the "discussion", and judge yourself. As I see it, I tried to keep things together. Some people got engaged and ignored the basis of this thread from their first posting on. Did not even take the time to correctly understand the original scenario. They just transported their anger on me from another thread, saw that I was here, and here we go again.

Sorry, I deliberately refuse to see such inconsistent and emotionally derailed chain of pseudo-arguments as somethign that I have to take serious for all time to come and must forever deal with respectfully and as if being of equal value. It's exactly like with Steve's old argument with me, and that is why somewhere else I compared the two, him and Takeda. And Steve also expects me to endlessly react and react to the same inconsistent chain of argument that he has started in a debate two or more years ago, which is why it makes me smiling, it just is that the longer it lasts the more manipulative his angry replies have become when I remind of it, since he sees he cannot bring me around by just repeating his view of things again.

Sorry, Hottentot, but every patience has limits. Mine was reached on that given detail when I gave that sharp reply to Takeda with the clear intention to cut it short at that point. I do not apologize for that, i do not feel bad for that, and same situation same conditions given, I would do it again. Takeda knows much more about musical history and composition and such, that's his profession. The issue discussed here, was part and special focus of my profession. And I probably indeed know the basics of it better than some layman who - even worse - engages me in a state of angry emotional arousal and in the aftermath of a different confrontation in another thread. I gave him repeated and sober, factual, calm replies to some really unqualified, partially unfocussed comments. But after some iterations, it has to end.

I see where you are coming from, and appreciate you writing your point of view down in such detail. Believe me, I have been there and done that, so it's not me you should be apologizing to at least. I would even dare to say that it's worse in my case, representing a discipline where anyone literate can claim to be an expert (at least in his/her opinion) and even back it up for a moment reasonably well with some book he/she read recently. When was the last time you heard someone claiming to be a "traumatization buff"? Compare to the amount of "history buffs" on various forums.

But that's exactly what has taught me that sometimes it's better for everyone if you just quietly roll your eyes, nod and save yourself the trouble. I accept that people have silly ideas of what studying history is on serious level. I accept that they insist on being right with their ideas. When possible, I will gladly engage them in a discussion, but maintain that we are talking from different foundations. Likewise I wouldn't approach Takeda on musicology and expect that we have equal starting position in such discussion. I try not to lecture, nor come across as arrogant, but neither will I try to discuss the subject as anything I wouldn't normally discuss it as, that is, an academic subject with academic language and methods.

If our worlds simply won't meet in such discussion after I have said everything reasonable I have to say, then I have no reason to take it personally. If anything, it might amuse me a little. Much like a real fighter pilot would probably be amused with me trying to insist I'm an expert on this subject, because I can start up an F-16 in Falcon 4. Much like a mathematician would be amused with me trying to discuss mathematics based on what I learned in high school. In these cases I simply nod and let people believe in what they want. Meanwhile I'll rather go back to creating the history that they can then discuss.

Skybird, once again, the only one who is angry here appears to be you. I suggest that you grow up. You demand respect, but give none. Also, I suggest that if you desire to end discourse with me, you should start by refraining from talking about me. Otherwise, I will be forced to reply and I am certain that you have been around long enough to figure out how that's going to end, because if you want to strap on the gloves, we can do that and you're going to lose.

You owe me an apology. I will never recieve it. You cannot bring yourself to see your actions as wrong. Ego simply does not permit it.

Unbelievable, your amount of haughtiness and self-righteousness. I feel slightly ashamed that I allowed to be deceived by you for so many years. My fault.

Your failure was your poor argument technique. Your reliance on fallacy to make your argument is what did you in. Even when you have a good point, your poor understanding of discourse negates that point. I would suggest reading up on argumentative technique. It will do you a lot of good.

Take, for example, your comparison of me to that senator. I never said or implied anything of the sort, and yet you wished to frame me as the senator. That's a classical strawman. Some light reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

You've done it several times over our discourse as well. It, in fact, is one of your favorite techniques. Unfortunately, it is a dishonest technique. Take what I said about what I said about what I percieved to be your view on trauma by contrast. I said that it was my impression. I never claimed full knowledge. Therein lies the difference.

I've seen too many students with your attitude, Skybird. You are so convinced that you know everything that you are unable to see the your own error, or try to put yourself in the other's shoes. It does make me sad, and I speak in kindness to you when I say that I wish there was more that I could do for you. You have so much potential as a human being and as an intellectual, but it is squandered by your stated attitude. That makes me sad, it really does.