Is the internet a form of sensory deprivation? Are we torturing ourselves? I think so, as a general rule. I think if you use the internet much, it’s important to take special notice of the information provided by your senses of smell, touch, etc. - so that we remain whole, and grounded, and remember that our ability to communicate in a place like this is highly compromised.
If it is…then not all sensory deprivation is torture, or at least I’d wanna argue that.
If communication continues to become more and more like it’s begun to become, then I think it should be the case that people grow more accustomed to it through more exposure. If that’s a good idea, then it really can’t be torture. More like tough love. But I don’t even know if that’s accurate, because a lot of people enjoy it. I mean…if some people were getting waterboarded 2 or 3 times a week and paying someone to do it to them I wouldn’t care as much about people getting waterboarded in secret prisons. I’d be like, “oh no…so you’re telling me that they’re making the prisoners use twitter and post on message boards and learn to use predictive text! That’s outrageous!”
Haha. Thing is, sensory deprivation can be calming, too. I wonder what determines whether it’s calming or torture…
Self reporting about otherwise unverifiable internal feelings.
If you’ve ever cybered with someone, you would know the internet is used to compensate for deprivation, not to deprive the senses.
Unverifiable? If a form of torture is severe enough, we call it torture. Because of the observable effects. Same if something calms.
I get your point, and I don’t disagree with the main thrust of it (assuming I’ve understood you). But the senses are definitely, in general, deprived. Compare your time at ILP with time spent on a hike in a true forest, or at the ocean.
Some of us talk online because we live in the middle of nowhere. Regular people aren’t around.
I know. Again, I understood your point.
What if I was being, “tortured” and behaved as though I was being calmed?
Then you’d fool people.
Maybe, but more importantly I would create a problem for their behaviorist model of determining internal mental states.
Well there’s gross mental states and subtle mental states. And there’s gross states that are masked. And subtle mental states that are dramatized.
Behaviorists are content to wear blinders, and ignore some kinds of data. Imagine a behaviorist at ILP - so easily fooled. You could write something perfectly nice, and they’d be naive enough to think you actually felt nice when writing it.
I just feel the need to force every discipline to come on out and explain the whole universe with something derived from it’s basic principles. Like what you say about some people being content to ignore some data. Let’s just go ahead and press that issue and see if we can’t come up w/ a less-flawed rule or something.
Sounds reasonable. Unless someone, say a behaviorist, says “let’s start with such-and-such assumptions, and see where that leads”. I think that’s ok. More and more I’m thinking life is just one big experiment, but you never get to reach any conclusions.
I’m pretty sure that x=x, but that’s about it.
I’m sure of far more than that, but I can and do change my mind. I don’t think of knowledge as a fixed state - I think of knowledge as something you do. So the whole idea of 98% sure, or whatever, seems kind of nonsensical to me. I don’t think you have to restrict yourself to x=x.
Its something I’ve been trying to work on.
Behaviorism’s easy to avoid. You need to turn the is-ought problem around to the ought-is problem.
The question isn’t whether or not you know what someone’s internal mental state is, and how you ought to care about it.
The question is whether or not you ought to care, so how it’s entitled to the benefit of the doubt.
Risk assumption is a subjective value judgment, so we need to make sure nobody’s forced to assume risks they don’t consent to by being misinterpreted.
Otherwise, we’re taking our own judgment in assuming risks for granted.
Sorry, I didn’t see this thread.
(I just started my own thread on similar topic).
Check out some of the information I found in my thread on the effects of internet use.