Humans are machines

"Humans are nothing more than machines that, at some point, came to believe they are somebody"
~ Rob Kauffmann

"People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul."
~ C.G. Jung

I've done extensive research on human psychology, and came to the conclusion that there are no such things as madness or mental illness, they're just different states of neural function, the only true mental pathology is that which is caused by physiological damage or malfunctioning.

How do we even come to define mental illness to begin with? For example, take a child that demonstrates an active behavior and constant reluctancy to settle down or pay heed to adults' orders. In most developed countries, this kind of behavior has been put under the light of mental illness as "hyperactivity". Now, we label the child as dysfunctional, and come to turn such an intrinsic aspect of it's personality against him, making it a source of frustration, angst and anxiety. If he is teased or chastised or constantly harassed (its not necessary to be aggressive interaction) enough, he's gonna develop what we call, a "complex", where the kid will be so afraid and anxious to show such behavior, due to previous, traumatic expiriences, that will be constantly on guard of harassment or potential harassment.

I define anxiety as the capability of an individual to predict undisirable situations and is not immediately capable of avoiding, facing or fixing them. Or more succintly, a person sees a problem or a potential problem that will affect him, but the solution to it is uncertain. Fear replaces anxiety when the percieved danger is present or expected to be imminent or very likely to present itself.
We feel fear and anxiety ALL the time, in such short intervals that were never aware of it, thats because we think far faster than we are aware of, and just because most mental and neural processing isnt translated into verbal language, doesnt mean its not there. So we wander civilization, constantly calculating appropriate behavior, and being very rigidly suppressed by our own mind, our unconscious mind.

This speaks volumes of how vastly relative, human thought, culture and reaction to it, can be, and how our brains go to immense lengths to calibrate our senses and interpetation of social stimuli to operate within a society:

What do we call a person who kills someone in a society? a murderer, and we punish and sometimes do so by killing, but what do we call the very same person who kills thousands in a war? a hero, and we reward with the medal of honor. (And I need to stress the fact that this is a pronounced contrast)

"Inter arma silent leges"

Ancient latin for: "in times of war, the law goes silent"

Law and codes of conduct are vastly, if not completely, built upon social psychology, and thus, culture. Take for example that ancient goths, vicigoths and ostrogoths believed that kings were to rule by nature, and that a man under his rule that "severed" their subordination to him was considered unnatural and deviant, just as our kid with hyperactivity. And this, as many other cases, is another example of culture-born, anxiety and stress, and how we come to view and prescribe "mental illness".
Even behaviors that are labelled as the worst and most condemndable are not subject to a "universal" interpretation. Take for example, bestiality or cannibalism. There are and have been entire societies that exercise(d) cannibalism, yet it's individuals are not subject to the same social treatment nor do they exihibit, even remotely, the anxiety, angst or remorse that is expected to deeply disturb a "civilized" individual, since such behavior is, to put it briefly, accepted and even reinforced. Again, demonstrating relativity to psychology.

This may be exemplifiedd by a pair of words: "love war".

In its literal sense, it relates to the fact that most individuals will wear down psychologically by constant conflict, even if they remain physically unharmed. But then, there are the others, those who actually enjoy conflict, such persons that do feel psychologically indifferent or even invigorated by physical and/or non-physical conflict, and will or may pursue such situations. What is punishment for us, is reward for them.
Culturally we generally come to view such tendencies as psychotic, but the example speaks volumes of how relative is the source from which different people derive what we call "joy".

Hell, lets go even further. The flexibility of brain plasticity permits humans and even animals to develop personalities that are wholly of a different species (well of course, up to a point). Such is the case of Feral Childs, and this reveals a very interesting fact about homo sapiens: it is still very capable of attaining a mental state that is considered wholly animal, and coming to believe, they are an individual of such society, and this is called "adpoting surrogate personality", but the personality developed and constructed by the expirience and interaction with an animal society is no more surrogate than that which is acquired within most human societes. As the first quote says, we are literally machines that develop a world-view of itself and its sorroundings that is molded completely by learning. Culturally, we would label such individual as mad beyond recognition, but i stress it again, its only a mental state, a state that's akin to an different operative system.

If an individual deeply enjoyed murder or cannibalism, or beastiality or whatever act most cultures fiercely condemn, be it by verbal, physical, visual, concrete or abstract persecution and vexation, but having never come in contact with such resistance, then the individual would carry on their behavior, never associating it with potential anxiety, repression, stress or danger, or in a more simplistic way, never feeling bad about it. And, in a society, to avoid such behavior, we literally, mentally torture ourselves, as if our brain became our trainer, remembering what is socially rewarded and punished, and doing it itself, through grief and pleasure, to keep us in line.

So to conclude, stop weighting human thought against western culture, or any cutlure for that matter, it does little to aid us and does lots of hindering to our advancement of our understanding of the workings of what is nothing more than a biological processor.

This is a beautiful post, one I enjoyed reading.

To me I come across those views frequently in psychiatric literature. Those deemed mentally ill, or people as a whole are viewed as somehow defective, animalistic or subhuman. Without a doubt those who come up with these theories have an air of superiority, somehow believing they have made the ultimate discovery. Omnipotence prevails in psychiatry, and the entire discipline promotes control of other people at any cost. The justification comes again from a perceived superior who grants himself the right to make God like decisions against any person.


Psychiatry is entirely built upon what a single person or a group of people to see society, other people and everything in between to look like.


The greatest down fall of psychiatry is its very own philosophy. A philosophy that blinds itself to its own limitations. Take any typical psychiatrist: they reach false conclusions. Everything is a disease, everything such as attention, emotional intelligence, imagination ect is somehow a defect. Everything they can not understand is not an indication to warrant further research, but rather attributed to something horrible be it chemical imbalance, developmental disability or childhood abuse they have no proof of. Psychiatry is nothing more than biased, relative opinion which is used to make life changing decisions. If the criminal justice system worked without tangible evidence every one would either be in prison or no crime would ever obtain justice.

no such things as madness or mental illness, they're just different states of neural function

Hi elchapetas
This is where our differences begin.
Awareness is not exclusively a neural function, despite the interaction with psychotropics.

Your research of the literature has been restricted to articles
written by devotees of the unsane conformist religion of Materialism.

The most potent absurdity in the Materialist doctrine is that consciousness is bioChemistry.
Think about it - the huge range of mood and perspective, of meaning and Purpose,
all that out of a kilogram of electronic spaggetti.

While ever you use this nonsense as your fundamental premise,
all of your reasoning must be spurious
because it is based in a religious fallacy.

Sorry to pop your balloon, elchapetas
but until the premises from which you reason are accurate and complete,
the outcome is necessarily dysfunctional.

Yes, there are parallels between the body and a biological machine,
but to conflate the two, to dismiss our potential for freedom of awareness,
by saying that I am merely a machine
falls Way sShort of accounting for my lifetime of achievement in Applied Ontology.

The good news is that you need to Start Fresh,
not by selecting from the opinions of others,
but by direct personal experimentation with your own dynamics.

By whatever means, put an hypothesis to the test . . .
but untested hypotheses are untested hypotheses,
to coin a circular argument.

At least, your post demonstrates that you are not afraid of intellectual work.

Regards from the Cruxx

Cruxx wrote:

no such things as madness or mental illness, they're just different states of neural function

Your research of the literature has been restricted to articles
written by devotees of the unsane conformist religion of Materialism.

Regards from the Cruxx

This is where our differences begin, you make assumptions that are tantamount to offensive.

Hi elchapetas

So a criterion of Reality is that it not offend your self-importance.?
No wonder you find me offensive.

Any excuse is better than recognising that you have blundered
missing the big picture
by assuming that Materialist dogma defines the universe.

Which sort-of proves my suggestion that your high-falluting essay defining human psychology
is missing what is needed to be useful.

Which of my disclosures are you labelling as assumptions ?

Offensively Yours,
the Cruxx

Cruxx wrote:Hi elchapetas

So a criterion of Reality is that it not offend your self-importance.?
No wonder you find me offensive.

Any excuse is better than recognising that you have blundered
missing the big picture
by assuming that Materialist dogma defines the universe.

Which sort-of proves my suggestion that your high-falluting essay defining human psychology
is missing what is needed to be useful.

Which of my disclosures are you labelling as assumptions ?

Offensively Yours,
the Cruxx

Oh no mate, you're damn pretentious. I havent even mentioned materialism, you've built that picture of me all by yourself and went with it, and now you push further... i mean who do you think you are??

Of course i didnt mean humans are machine in the sense of a factory machine, theres a world of difference between a human and an industrial machine.

I meant machines, or computers in a far more profound sense, but still as mappable as 1 and within the boundaries of analogous as well as digital lecturing.

If somebody did blunder here is you and your, blurry, quasi-metaphysical gibberish:

"While ever you use this nonsense as your fundamental premise,
all of your reasoning must be spurious
because it is based in a religious fallacy.

Sorry to pop your balloon, elchapetas
but until the premises from which you reason are accurate and complete,
the outcome is necessarily dysfunctional.

Yes, there are parallels between the body and a biological machine,
but to conflate the two, to dismiss our potential for freedom of awareness,
by saying that I am merely a machine
falls Way sShort of accounting for my lifetime of achievement in Applied Ontology. "

You just threw a bunch of platitudes and utter nonsense, i mean you said absolutely nothing. "religious fallacy"... seriously?

"Yes, there are parallels between the body and a biological machine,
but to conflate the two, to dismiss our potential for freedom of awareness,
by saying that I am merely a machine
falls Way sShort of accounting for my lifetime of achievement in Applied Ontology."

I could answer this with your own writing:

"Sorry to pop your balloon, curxx
but until the premises from which you reason are accurate and complete,
your conclusion is necessarily dysfunctional."

And to begin with, I never rejected the notion of freedom of awareness, you're just defining that: something is a machine, therefore, it cant have freedom of awareness... there another blunder shiningly brought into perspective.

You know what? Answer whatever you want, dont want to discuss any further.

Cruxx wrote:

no such things as madness or mental illness, they're just different states of neural function

Hi elchapetas
This is where our differences begin.
Awareness is not exclusively a neural function, despite the interaction with psychotropics.

Your research of the literature has been restricted to articles
written by devotees of the unsane conformist religion of Materialism.

The most potent absurdity in the Materialist doctrine is that consciousness is bioChemistry.
Think about it - the huge range of mood and perspective, of meaning and Purpose,
all that out of a kilogram of electronic spaggetti.

While ever you use this nonsense as your fundamental premise,
all of your reasoning must be spurious
because it is based in a religious fallacy.

Sorry to pop your balloon, elchapetas
but until the premises from which you reason are accurate and complete,
the outcome is necessarily dysfunctional.

Yes, there are parallels between the body and a biological machine,
but to conflate the two, to dismiss our potential for freedom of awareness,
by saying that I am merely a machine
falls Way sShort of accounting for my lifetime of achievement in Applied Ontology.

The good news is that you need to Start Fresh,
not by selecting from the opinions of others,
but by direct personal experimentation with your own dynamics.

By whatever means, put an hypothesis to the test . . .
but untested hypotheses are untested hypotheses,
to coin a circular argument.

At least, your post demonstrates that you are not afraid of intellectual work.

Regards from the Cruxx

Actually i should have started from here: good job missing the whole point of the article

I agree with this. I think the view of someone's brain wiring as disordered is biased. I think for most mental "disorders" people suffer from them only when they are made to believe that people suffer from the condition they have.

I have some examples from my experience. When I was younger, I tried to break my "bad habit" of pacing, which is one of my stims, to no avail. With the exception of alleged lack of social skills, I saw other autistic traits as good, but I saw stimming as something that made someone subhuman. Nowadays, I would not say that I suffer from my autism.

Another example is when I noticed my schizotypal thinking (which was before I knew about schizotypal personality disorder) and tried to repress it. I think I did that in response to social skills classes that taught that being weird is bad. Because of that, my schizotypal thinking became only a source of anxiety. Nowadays, I don't see schizotypy as a source of suffering.

On the other hand, even if I didn't know that people are said to suffer from generalized anxiety or major depression, I would still say I suffered during the times I had those conditions. While GAD was more of a nuisance for me, depression was probably the worst experience I ever had.

Also, I find that most scientific studies on mental conditions arbitrarily call any difference a deficit. I also find the fact that an individual is assumed to have a chemical imbalance when there is no evidence problematic. Maybe there is a difference in the way neurotransmitters are balanced, maybe there isn't, but either way, it is a bad idea to tamper with the way the brain wires itself. Also, saying that someone has a chemical imbalance implies that the way the chemicals are balanced is disordered.

Instead of calling neurological differences disorders, why not we call them different neurotypes?

@Cruxx: How can the mind be caused by something other than the brain? And doesn't the fact that psychotropics interact with awareness show that it is a neural function?

Also, when I observe myself, I can easily conclude that I am just a machine. I experience myself as receiving input, relating the input to memories I stored, and then creating output. Even when I have seemingly mystical experiences, I still observe the same thing.

You don't have to use the actual word to be a materialist, elchapetas. Duh.
It is entirely self-evident, obvious even.

Going ballistic with indignation says something ... about your lack of discipline,
about your failure to comprehend a differing perspective,
and confirms my original thought about how careless you are
in your choice of language and imagery.

Nasty little rant, not worth a specific reply.
Agreed that it would be futile to discuss anything with you.

Just dropping in to remind everyone to keep it civil and stay respectful. I understand topics can get heated with posters having different views but also don't forget to take a moment to cool down when things become heated. This goes for all posters.

If you feel the need to debate intensely PM is best as long as both of you remain civil. This is a good thread with good discussion and I want it to remain open.


Thanks!