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(About 65% of the subjects in Milgram's obedience experiment obeyed despite great conflict. Not saying that proves any point I am making, but that influenced the numbers I pulled out of my ass.)

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Originally posted by Fremdfirma:

And here's where imma raise some hackles...

If you allow them to grow and flourish according to natures design, you wind up with a human being, obviously - HOWEVER, if you crush those impulses, twist and warp them, substitute something ELSE, something artificial, is the resultant creature actually a human being ?
I mean, if the potential still exists, but they no longer have any way to ever realize it...
Then what are they ?

I don't mean in physical form either - lesse if I can get it across.
Take a wolf cub, freshly born, and treat it like a dog, till it reaches adulthood.
Sure, it may still have the FORM of a wolf, it may still be a correct definition of species...
But is it still a wolf, really ?

Once you have taken all the essence of what a human being really is away, crushed it out of them and twisted them into something else much in the fashion Orcs were derived from Elves, according to Tolkien - then it is my opinion that what remains is something not-quite-human, almost a machine in human form simply following its programming.
Believe me, the powers that be have spent endless years and resources trying to develop just that, and affected much social, legal and political influence in both public consciousness and the public education system trying to achieve it, which is where yon jackboots come from and the core of my resulting disrespect for them and any notion of their own personhood given how willing they are to deny that of others.

So I think the question here, is WHAT MAKES US HUMAN ?
If not form and function, if not DNA and species - what then ?

Cause I think that's really the question we're getting at here.

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If someone lacks empathy, for example, on what basis would they be upset at the death of another, except out of sheer self-interest? (For example, the other is a direct benefit.)

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There is a difference between "the human norm" (i.e. the majority) and "everyone"... unless of course you are considering those outside of the norm to be non-human?

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Originally posted by BYTEMITE:
But if Milgram were anywhere near close to true, you wouldn't have had 60% of soldiers on both sides of the war in WW2 unable to even so much as fire their weapons in combat, despite being ordered to by an authority.

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Originally posted by HKCavalier:
Hi ever'body,

Time for a new tack.

How's about can we think in terms of disease and health? Is it at all possible that there is an optimal mental health that is common to all human beings that includes a functional empathetic response? Can we even agree that, barring some kind of maladaptive weirdness or dastardly intervention, human creatures do not themselves enjoy being murdered and/or raped? And if that is true, then people with a functional empathetic response would not feel fine about murdering and raping their neighbors (even when social forces, i.e.: their own psychological surival overrides their empathy)? Can I at least get a mumbled and unenthusiastic "hrm, I suppose so" from the opposition? Can any of you hard science fans agree that mental health is not purely culturally based (any more than, say, cancer is)?

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Originally posted by canttakesky:

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This would seem to be nonsense as if 99% objected, such cultural practises would never have taken place.

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"99%" of Holocaust concentration camps residents objected to being murdered, but yet they were. It's called "weapons" or more generally, "force."

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Originally posted by Magonsdaughter:
Well I'm blushing. Thank you.

I'm in the conflict resolution industry - so I spend a lot of time thinking, talking and reading about human behaviour and its puzzling, contradictory nature.

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Just a caution not to make sweeping statements about... well, anything... but most especially about "human nature".

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They are most definitely still human.

The main problem I have with your theory is by having one like that you make room for other people to have similar yet opposite theories of their own about you, dear citizen. "They can't think for themselves, they are weak, they are easy to keep down, they don't deserve freedom, they're more like sheep than human..." Either one feels like a way to rationalize and justify one's hatred of others. "They're not even human..."

And this: "... the powers that be have spent endless years and resources trying to develop just that, and affected much social, legal and political influence in both public consciousness and the public education system trying to achieve it, which is where yon jackboots come from and the core of my resulting disrespect for them and any notion of their own personhood given how willing they are to deny that of others."
Wouldn't that make you have some sympathy for them, the pawns of TPTB? You make it sound like they had no choice...?

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Originally posted by 1kiki:
Byte, it's not JUST about pain. Why you mention only that one word of all the other words I posted, I don't know. Read further. In fact they DO feel physical pain. What they don't feel --- are the emotions.

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. They also don't feel loss the same way we do. They feel frustrated. They feel angry. They feel cheated. They feel like they lost some con and want revenge. But they don't feel grief.

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There are some, however, who seem to have set as their life task to extinguish the painful demands of conscience. At the same time, some of these people take sadistic delight in the pain of others. There is some research that suggests a capacity to distance oneself from the trauma of violence, particularly the trauma incurred when inflicting violence, is, in part, hard-wired genetics. There are people born to be comfortable with violence.

There is also research that indicates that severe trauma, particularly early in childhood, leads to unpredictable neurological changes--some children develop into timid and fearful adults, others are resilient and compassionate. Yet others are exploitative, manipulative or even further--feral conscienceless beings who have seemingly disappeared from the community of men and women. For them, other people are objects of use that move in and out of their field of perception. Their capacity to form attachments to others is minimal or even absent. When contact with another human being engenders a feeling of sensitivity or vulnerability, their reaction is often a deep and profound pain, the pain felt by the exile upon tasting the scent of home on the wind, a pain so deep that they may respond by trying to extinguish that which causes the feeling, which is usually the capacity for sensitivity, or even, in the most extreme cases, the human being who evokes the response.

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Originally posted by Bytemite:
You people with your trust. I try to tell you what I am, and you think just because I'm POLITE that I'm a nice person.

I said that I was not born with empathy or morality, I used to not have guilt or regret, I'm very impulsive, and I enjoy physical fighting - you could probably call me bloodthirsty.

So yeah, all of those qualify me as a psychopath. And that's not even going into the other obvious tells from back when I was a kid, which I don't really want to discuss. And that's not because I'm ashamed of them, but rather because for the time being, I want to keep your confidence and I've seen how other people react to learning them.

Don't tell me I need to read a damn book. I've lived it.

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So are you manipulative, Byte? Do you have a whole lot of superficial charm that use for your own gain at the expense of others. Do you take pleasure in hurting animals and or people?

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And I think there is such a thing as a Sociopathic Spectrum, with some being able to internalize the desire to avoid harming others or erect one's own moral framework.

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Originally posted by Bytemite:
And I'd also say that there's a difference between someone who's a sociopath because they're born without a moral center in their brains (as discussed in the above debate), someone who became a sociopath because of internalizing and emulating abusive treatment, and someone who's a sociopath because they have a lot of chemical imbalances (hi everyone!).

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My visual processing is measurably scrambled. My mind jumps from one thing to the next. I get easily overwhelmed.

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Well, no, you don't fit in all THAT well, not even here with its cast of characters!

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