661. Comparing Disturbed Characters And Chimpanzees

661.  Comparing Disturbed Characters And Chimpanzees

I already mentioned George Simon before (entries 615, 618 and 629).  After having read his book 'In Sheep's Clothing' with unencumbered fascination, I just finished reading another of his books:  George Simon: Disturbed Characters.  

As far as he describes and analyses disturbed characters, it is also an excellent book.   But it seems that between the two books, he has relapsed into the grasp of religion.  He preaches submission under a god as an important ingredient of his suggested alternative to being a disturbed character.  This is annoying.  

I also disagree with his claim, that there is a free will, which gives people an option to either be a disturbed character or not.    

Two other books already mentioned are:
Martha Stout:  The Sociopath Next Door (entry 137)
Robert Hare:  Without Conscience (entry 160).         

All these books implicitly consider socially acceptable, considerate and responsible behavior as the baseline of what can be expected of all sane humans.   They have no answer, why and due to what reasons disturbed characters are deviant from such an baseline.

I doubt, that the qualities constituting this assumed baseline, are sufficiently frequent to justify this assumption.   With a realistic view at the amount of atrocities regularly forced by beings of the species homo sapiens upon suffering human victims, the ability to live by little or not harming others is only found in a minority.   Only they have the privilege of deserving to be called true humans.   Even they are not born like this but get there only after a long process of maturation and socialization. 

My explanation of disturbed characters is derived from looking at the power of instincts and at different levels of the evolution of cognition and rationality.

1. Human evolution as a process.  
 

Phase 1: 
There were early ancestors, who just like animals were automatically and fully driven by instinctive urges, which had evolved for optimizing procreation.  Due to lacking any mental capacities for comprehending the consequences of behavior, instinctive behaviors of animals are not at all impacted by any awareness for harming, hurting and suffering.  

Phase 2: 
The cognition started to evolve.   Rudimentary intelligence became a powerful tool supporting and serving instincts.   But instincts still continued to completely determine the entire behavior, including the overall goal of breeding.  
 

Phase 3:  
The unique human theory of mind evolved.   This capacity of anticipating or evaluating the effects of behavior upon others or upon the own person in the future with the additional help of a memory gives a unique option only to human.    The unique ability to act in defiance of instincts, to override momentary instinctive urges in favor of cognitively preferred alternative behavior is the decisive distinction between humans and animals.    This includes also the unique ability of humans to prefer and decide to not procreate as the result of a cognitive evaluation and perception of the own identity.    Only humans can be childfree by choice.   There are no childfree animals.  


2.  Chimpanzees

Chimpanzees and humans started to evolve separately about 6 million years ago.   Either the common ancestors had at this time already reached the threshold towards phase 2, or chimpanzees continued to evolve at a slower pace in the same direction as humans.   Today's chimpanzees are a good illustration of phase 2.  They show some amazing skills, which nevertheless always serve instinctive goals.  

In entry 648 I presented the chimpanzee Ayumu, who does better than humans on a task requiring fast perception and short term memory, as can be seen in this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPiDHXtM0VA
 

While Ayumu's abilities are amazing, they yet are only isolated and not connected to any higher cognitive control.  He only does the task, because he is immediately after every run rewarded with a treat.   He cannot apply his talents for any abstract or generalized goal.  

Solving the elaborated and complex task on the screen is not different from the more simple achievement of other chimpanzees using tools to get food as is shown here. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Cp7_In7f88
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaEDeRJKN0s

But chimpanzees also kill and are aggressive.  
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/26/baby-chimpanzee-killed-at_n_1629318.html

They are even cannibals
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uU1zUzXkTtw

Other amazing skills and behaviors have also been observed in chimpanzees, but they have never reached any ability as found in humans in phase 3.  Ultimately the chimpanzees are completely determined by instincts, and all their amazing capacities only support these instincts.    No cognition has evolved, which would enable them to act in defiance to instincts by consideration or empathy.


3.  The evolutionary level of disturbed characters

I think that the human evolution is in a state of transition.   The evolution of instincts has been established millions of years ago, while the cognitive evolution is still continuing.   I see the determination of the behavior as distributed along a bell curve between phase 2 animals at one end and phase 3 humans at the other.   The majority of people are somewhere in the middle.  They are acting by the combined impact of both subconscious instinctive urges and some cognitive control. 
 

Whenever persons, mostly men, commit atrocities of any kind like murdering, torturing, raping, cannibalism, slavery, they seem puzzling, when compared with what is required and expected from humans.   But if they were instead compared with animals, they would appear as healthy and sane chimpanzees. 

I consider severely character disturbed persons, including those labeled psychopaths and sociopaths, as beings, whose cognitive evolution has relapsed, failed or is delayed and retarded.    In spite of belonging genetically to the species homo sapiens, they are not less animals than are the chimpanzees.   Their cognition only suffices to serve their instincts and to enhance their being a hazard.  But their cognition is insignificant as a determinant of personal goals.    

Chimpanzees use skills to acquire food.  Disturbed characters have a more advanced cognitive knowledge about other human and their behavior, but they use this knowledge also only as a tool.   They succeed to get more than food, they also abuse woman, gain power or pursue other instinctive and selfish goals.   While chimpanzees just lack rationality, these disturbed characters are instead determined not only by instincts but also by irrational beliefs, which serve to excuse and allegedly justify the consequences of instinctive behavior.  

It is a very sad and unfortunate reality, that the survival of the human species depends on the worst and most devastating forces in people, their instincts.   
While the extreme disturbed characters are a hazardous minority, the same instincts are virulent to a lesser degree also in the subconscious mind of the majority of the non or less disturbed people.   This lesser degree of the impact of the same instincts leads to an unfortunate bias towards too much tolerance for and condoning of harming others.  Many damaging behaviors are thus considered as still in the scope of normality, in spite of the extreme suffering of the victims,   Their suffering is not recognized as an outrage, but as unavoidable collateral damage.   


4. Distinguishing animals from humans

It is an unfortunate fallacy, that the distinction between humans and animals has always been only drawn along the genetic borders between species. 

 
In the christian tradition, humans are believed to be special, because a god allegedly created them to be so, and thus, there is a thinking taboo to reconsider and recognize anyone as an animal, no matter how much he behaves as one. 
In recent times, some people are debating, if there is really any decisive distinction at all. 

But to my knowledge, nobody has ever suggested, that the quality of being human, let alone of being more or less human, is an individual trait of the level of the individual cognitive evolution..
   
I claim:  To be considered as human requires more than the genes of homo sapiens, it also requires sufficient cognitive control over the instincts.  

This has far reaching implications.  

The concept of a general human dignity and basic human rights can rationally only be valid for humans, it is a fallacy to automatically attribute and assign it to all members of the species homo sapiens.   When someone acts like an animal, he should be treated as one.   An animal with the liberty only suitable for humans is too much of a hazard.    

The home of chimpanzees is in the wild, but in the zoo or lab, they are for good reasons kept in cages.  
http://www.ippl.org/gibbon/a-tragedy-in-eden/

If extremely disturbed characters would be recognized as animals lacking the basic human capacity of cognitive control, then this could lead to realistic methods of dealing with them.  Once disturbed characters have done serious harm, they should be recognized as animals and treated the same as dangerous chimpanzees.   The need to be protected against becoming a victim is independent of the species of the animals, which are dangerous predators.

The innate predisposition for instinctive or cognitive determination is not carved in stone, but malleable by education and social influences.    Socialization can enhance the cognitive control over instincts, when there is something to enhance.   When there is no rationality and cognition as a constituent personality trait, then no upbringing can convert an animal into a human, no matter the genetic species.   

All children start as instinct driven beings, they need socialization to develop the capacity to use cognitive control, when this talent is innate.    
When a chimpanzee is raised like a child, as in the tragic case of Moe, this does not stop him from biting off someone's finger.  
(http://www.theflamingvegan.com/view-post/Chimpanzees-as-Pets-When-Something-Goes-Wrong).  
I doubt, that a completely instinct determined disturbed character could ever become more human than Moe, no matter the quality of education.   Such a child may not bite off fingers, but bully other kids instead, before committing worse atrocities as an adult.    

Any person is entitled to be given the benefit of the doubt to be human, until he behaves like an animal and thus demonstrates, that he is an animal.   Committing atrocities as an animal forfeits the privileges reserved to humans.  Treating and considering an animal nevertheless as if he were human is an unjustifiable slap into the face to his victim(s).  


4.  The brain

Brains scans have shown differences between the brains of psychopaths and those of non-psychopaths.  

"So, once again there’s some convincing evidence that the brains of psychopaths not only work very differently from those of non-psychopathic individuals, but also may even be ‘wired’ differently than most human brains."
http://counsellingresource.com/features/2013/05/06/abnormal-brain-psychopaths/

I wonder, what would be discovered, if the brains of psychopaths were compared with the brains of chimpanzees.

590. There Is Nothing Wrong With Being Opinionated

590.   There Is Nothing Wrong With Being Opinionated

I have been criticized in a derogatory way as someone opinionated.    I am opinionated, because it is my choice and there is nothing wrong with it.  

Opinionated means literally to have an opinion or even more literally to have the trait of being someone with opinions.  Cognitive individuals have an identity and personality, which includes values, attitudes and opinions.  Nobody can be a thinker, mature and an intellectual without having opinions.   

Only instinct driven animals are entirely void of opinions.    To be able to have opinions is a result of the evolution of cognition.   

Becoming more and more opinionated is an automatic side effect of learning and maturing.    While pondering over a variety of topics, over a structured and logical way of putting them into blog entries, I am developing my own opinions.    Thus I am in the process of getting more and more opinionated and I consider this as beneficial.   

There is a real problem, but not at all about having opinions or not, but about how some people develop, acquire or elaborate them or fail to do so.

   

A qualified method to derive opinions includes being informed about all important facts together with the awareness for one's own real needs and inclinations.   This means using logic and reasoning and also introspection.  This includes reconsiderations, whenever new information becomes available.

It is not possible, that everybody can have a qualified opinion about everything.   Rational people are realistically aware, when their access to sufficient information is too limited. 

I dislike and avoid:

• People, who do not to invest time and efforts for thinking and deriving qualified opinions, no matter if they are too stupid, too superficial, too hedonistic, too intellectually lazy or not bothered for any other reason. 
• Gullible people, who are influenced to imitate other people's opinions without any own evaluation, who therefore are unable to explain, why they prefer any specific opinion.   They are also a hazard, when they force unpleasant behavior upon others as a consequence of acting upon imitated opinions.
• Opportunists, who adopt and change opinions according to the prospect of the most benefits, even when they are not aware of this.
• Frauds, who have a goal for which they pretend to have opinions in contradiction to what they genuinely think.

 
I like people, who have qualified opinions and who do not hide them.   Such people can be either easily recognized as mentally attractive by affinity or easily avoided as being aversively different.    

I have no mission to convince anybody of my opinions.  My mindmate to be found is someone, who has developed the same or similar opinions before finding this blog and being attracted by affinities.  

510. The Remedy For Grumpiness

510.   The Remedy For Grumpiness

In entry 507 I described the Cassandra effect.   It is the experience of mostly women, who are aware of something going wrong in their relationship, and who suffer, because they are not taken for serious and they are powerless to prevent the catastrophe.

Grumpy old people are the counterpart of Cassandra in their concern about the development of society.  The grumpy old men are more visible, because of their more aggressive and angry way of expressing their grumpiness.  There are also grumpy old women, but they tend to be more silent about it. 

The grumpiness of sane people is different from dementia. Being a nuisance or not is a question of mental health and of self-control, it is not a question of age.   

This entry is about sane grumpy old people with comprehensible reasons to be grumpy.

Grumpy old people are much more alive and healthy than are docile old people.    Feeling grumpy is an indication of the awareness, that something is not as it should be.   Grumpiness is the logical, reasonable and comprehensible reaction to perceived real grievances.  

Grumpy old people are those, who

• have lived a long time and have observed and experienced the changes of society with open eyes.  
  They have grown mature.   They have gained the wisdom to evaluate, what has improved and what has deteriorated.   
• have self-confidence and independence in their thinking.  
  They recognize grievances.  They are critical and outspoken.  They reject detrimental social norms.    They are not easily gullible to manipulations.
   

Blaming people as if being grumpy were a defect is a misconception, which does not lead to a solution.  Those who do the blaming are usually immature youngsters.  Old people cannot change a society dominated by those, who are younger and less mature.   They need a way to live in this situation without suffering.

Being lonely, especially being intellectually lonely is a sufficient and logical reason to become grumpy.   I have mentioned intellectual loneliness before.    An apistic and skeptic can feel intellectually very lonely between religious people.   

But a person, who sees the world with over six decades of life experience can feel intellectually lonely too in a society, where the influential power of the media and the political power over life are all dominated by people, who are much younger.

Only the removal of the reasons for being grumpy is a rational remedy.  It is a huge emotional relief to be able to share the own world view and the agreement about what is going wrong with likeminded people.   

The best remedy is the emotional safe haven of a bonded relationship with someone in the same age group sharing the same attitudes and the same world view.  

A happy person has no reasons to be grumpy, and a grumpy person lacks happiness.

Therefore I am willing to accept a grumpy old man as a potential partner.   If he is my mindmate, he will not remain grumpy.   Knowing me will end his grumpiness. 

476. Irrational Beliefs As A Symptom Of A Brain Dysfunction

476.   Irrational Beliefs As A Symptom Of A Brain Dysfunction

I claim:    A person with a brain developed to the full adult evolutionary potential of human cognition is able to be apistic and free from irrational beliefs. 

Gullibility to irrational beliefs is an unavoidable temporary state during childhood, as long as the brain has not yet fully developed.   Without any further detrimental influences or factors, people grow out of such beliefs as a consequence of the maturation of the brain.   When irrational beliefs cannot be influenced by rational reasoning or by contradicting experiences, this indicates, that this person's brain is not working at full human mental capacity.    Something is dysfunctional or deviant. 

I have been attributing this dysfunction to either immaturity of the brain, very low intelligence or to a delusional mental illness. In the latter case, the delusion is maintained by some urge and need overriding rationality and it works as a shortcut around the inhibitions of the frontal lobe.    I was also considering weak rationality, but only recently I found out, that the concept of weak rational thinking has a name.  It is called dysrationalia and described in this article:
http://www.magazine.utoronto.ca/feature/why-people-are-irrational-kurt-kleiner/

It seems that religious beliefs are like fever.   Fevers are frequent, because there are many different illnesses, of which fever is an observable symptom.   
Irrational beliefs are so widespread, because they are observable symptoms of very different forms of dysfunction of the brain. 

344. Reinforcement of Gullibility

344.   Reinforcement of Gullibility

In entry 343 I speculated that gullibility had been adaptive at some past period of evolution, while by now, consequencity has become a much better adaptation, but that people during childhood pass through a phase of gullibility, before the brain has fully matured to be able to function with consequencity.  

The following is a further elaboration.  

1.   When people are stuck in the gullible reactions to influences while having reached an age, when they should have matured enough for consequencity, this can be due to two different reasons:

1.1.   Gullibility is due to ignorance and the absence of the ability to know any better.  
When describing in entry 342  the levels of consequencity, I focused on dealing with emotions.   More generally there are different levels of the ability of thinking.  

Level 1. 
Concrete thinking.   Simple contingencies, like thunder following a flash are understood.   But in the absence of a clear concept of pseudocontingencies and coincidences, often irrational behavior is applied for the purpose of creating a contingency.
Level 2.
Abstract thinking.   This means the understanding of the difference between coincidence and contingency, also by detecting contradictions with the accumulative storage of previous experience.  This enables extrapolation into the future by estimating probabilities. 
Level 3.
Complex thinking.  This means deriving a consistent value system and ethical guidance from the abstract thinking in level 2.   Internal and external stimuli requiring behavior are processed in accordance with it.  

For those, who have not or not yet developed levels 2 and 3 of consequencity, gullibility is the only way of coping in social interactions.      Only Level 1 and gullibility are not mutually exclusive.  

1.2.   Gullibility is reinforced, when it becomes virulent as a consequence of some severe psychological trouble, which impedes a person either in reality or in his subjective perception from fulfilling important needs by consequencity, especially emotional and immaterial needs.   The person remains stuck in a gullible state (entry 343), while the ability to act by consequencity exists in the brain, but is deactivated.    This gullibility is often in contradiction to evidence and basic reasoning.    The stronger the unfulfilled or unfulfillable needs, the more people are gullible and susceptible to uncritical submission under external influences. 

2.   Gullibility determines the perception and acceptance of being the target of any influences.   How the behavior of the gullible people is influenced depends upon the availability, strength and kind of the influences.
2.1.  In pre-media times, usually people were exposed to one set of influences only, one religion and the rules of one society.   Depending on their gullibility and on how much the external influences contradicted their true personal needs and inclinations, their only choice was between fully conforming, externally resisting and risking punishment or external submission in spite of better judgment and different wishes.
2.2.  Since traveling and books became available, and even more with TV and the Internet, for gullible persons life is a warehouse of influences to choose from.    While they cannot resist to have a strong need to fulfill by being gullible, they are free to choose, what belief suits them best and there are countless religions, cults, quackeries.    For every trouble, there is a belief as a pseudo-remedy.      

3. Gullibility and self-improvement are mutually exclusive.   Self-improvement as the path of maturation requires consequencity of level 3.  Only awareness for rational procedures based upon understanding and influencing real contingencies allows change.  Gullibility and the belief into fake change impede real change.

Gullible people, who turn to religion or to woowoo in the hope of self-improvement are confounding self-improvement with self-modification.    They move from being taken advantage of and manipulated as the puppet of one influence to being the puppet of another.   I know of the case of someone, who after the upbringing in a less extreme christian family first choose to become a mormon, then a buddhist, then a believer in NLP and then a taoist.   Nothing of this ever helped him to solve the problem, which caused his wish to improve.  

343. Maturation and Evolution

Maturation and Evolution

This is a further generalization of my speculations in entry 328.  

I speculate, that the maturation of an individual is the process of passing through the phases of evolution.   In the best case, maturity means reaching level 3 of consequencity as described in entry 342.  
A child is born as an animal and it continues as such, until the acquisition of language enables the gullibility of the preschool infant.  Rationality is developed during schooling, and level 3 can be reached by the end of puberty.

But intelligence, brain peculiarities, extreme detrimental influences, traumatic experiences and such can disturb and distort the development.  Under such unfavorable circumstances people get stuck in an earlier phase, while only sane and mentally healthy people reach full maturity.    Robots (entry 341) have been stuck at an early age nearest to the phase of being instinct driven animals, while the puppets (entry 341) have been stuck at some time during the phase of gullibility.

Also people can get stuck in limited areas of the mind and of cognition, as if the mind were fragmented.  

• Religious and woowoo believes are usually acquired during early childhood, while scientific and skeptical thinking is acquired much later at university.   In the best case, skeptical thinking can replace the obsolete gullible believes.   Instead there is quite often the phenomenon of scientists believing in a deity without even acknowledging the contradiction.   It is as if in some part of the brain, the development had been stuck, while in another, it had continued.  
• There is the same unacknowledged contradiction, when men are otherwise highly cultivated, educated, even sensitive enough to be teachers, authors, therapists, but they are promiscuous and ruthlessly use women's bodies as disrespected commodities.   In one part of their brain, they are stuck in the phase of being animals, while other parts have been developed much further.    

People determined by consequencity are able to get aware of contradictions.  They experience cognitive dissonance as a corrective enabling them to eliminate contradictions.   Those who are partially stuck, are mindblind and void of cognitive dissonance.