Wednesday, January 16, 2013

What is truth?

I think one of the biggest distinctions between different sociopaths is if they believe in truth or not. Freud said, "A man who doubts his own love may, or rather, must doubt every lesser thing." I feel like this has been true in my life. I grew up watching my narcissist father give overblown displays of emotion. Consequently, it was not only hard for me to take any displays of emotion seriously, it was hard for me to credit the very existence of those emotions in other people. It took me a long time to recognize the inner emotional worlds of others -- it was hard for me to even think certain emotions outside of my personal experience were legitimate and existed in the world. And once you doubt something as big as that, I think it is easy to, as Freud says it, doubt every lesser thing.

And it's easy to live that way. It's easy to assume that the world and society is just one big collective delusion and nothing you do matters. But it's also hard to live that way. Why would I want to live in that world? Oh, for sure there is freedom. And that must seem like it would be great to people -- to be able to live in a world in which you absolutely couldn't care less? But what is the point of freedom -- freedom to do what? Why choose between one action and another if nothing I do matters? Once you get past the initial evolutionary pleasures of dopamine responses in the brain, or you get accustomed to them, what more is there? I'm sure it's great and I don't mean to be too down on it. It's just not my personal preference, given the choice.

And believing in meaning and truth constrains my behavior in a way. I can't believe there is truth and then act in total disregard for it all of the time -- there would be too much cognitive dissonance. Or it would devalue truth to me -- how important is truth if I could ignore it so easily and often? But I can imagine that if you were sociopathic and did not believe in an objective truth or any sort of grander meaning to life, then your behavior wouldn't be constrained in those sorts of ways. Maybe you wouldn't be as conscientious because there would be nothing to measure your behavior against.

Pontius Pilate asks Jesus Christ, "Art thou a king then?" Christ replies, "Thou sayest that I am a King. To this end was I borne, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth: every one that is of the truth heareth my voice," to which Pilate retorts, "What is truth?" Christians, including Francis Bacon in his On Truth, criticize Pilate for his lack of faith -- Pilate, not believing any particular thing, was able to order the crucification of a man based solely on the whims of the crowd. Nietzsche, on the other hand, praises him for his uncommon wisdom and that the statement is "the only saying that has any value" in the New Testament.

I feel like there are some sociopaths who would respect Pilate -- choose that path -- and others who would rather not. I don't think there is anything about sociopathy that compels or exalts one position over the other. But if you do think like Pilate, you're probably more likely to act like him, which is why I think that sociopaths who question the existence of objective truth behave differently than those who believe in truth.

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

How to spot a liar

A reader sent me this interesting and relatively short Ted video about how to spot a liar.



She mentions two "rules":
1.  Lying takes two -- person who lies and person who chooses to believe the lie. "Everyone is willing to give you something for whatever it is you're hungry for. If you don't want to be deceived, you have to know what it is that you are hungry for." Lying fills in the gap between our wishes and our fantasies.

2.  We're against lying, but we're covertly for it. It has evolutionary value to it. Babies will fake a cry. Trained lie spotters get to the truth 90% of the time, everyone else 54%.

There was an interesting discussion halfway through about how an honest person vs. a dishonest person would deal with being confronted. This one was interesting, if anything, in learning how to lie better. Falsely accused people are furious throughout the interview, not peppered here and there was a rational detailing of events.

Lying is an interesting thing to me. I don't really think about it that often. I don't think of people as liars or truth tellers. I don't even generally think of things I have said as lies or truth. I think it's probably because I have a deeply relativistic sense of the truth. I understand more than most people perhaps that everyone has their own different reality, including me. I don't think most of the "lies" we hear or say from day to day are intentional, but just reflect the "liars" distorted view of the world. I understand that for the most part, it is difficult if not impossible to determine an objective Reality in any given circumstance so I take everything with a grain of salt. Or I take it on faith perhaps, but always with a healthy dose of doubt that will trigger when new information becomes available to me, in a Bayesian updating sort of way. I assign a likelihood of accuracy in my mind, like whether my parents are actually my parents is 98% likely to be true, based on what I know about them and me. Or sometimes a long story someone has told me is 80% true, true in some parts and not true in others and it isn't exactly clear which is which. I am sometimes (often?) wrong in my assessments. And it is true that sometimes people are intentionally But when someone has gamed me, I'm often delightedly surprised that they have managed to do it. It makes life more interesting to think that anyone could be trying to trick you at any moment, but most of the time it's not true or the stakes are so low that it just seems like the sort of toll we have to pay to live in a world of collective delusion.

Which is not to say that we shouldn't learn people's tells, because we can learn so much about a person from the way they see the world, whether they are aware of their deceit or not.

Monday, January 14, 2013

Brain scans

From a reader:

A friend sent this to me and I thought you would be interested. It's about the mainstream acceptance of neuro imaging, and some of the potential pitfalls that I was not previously aware of.

Here are selections from the article:

Fancy color pictures of brains in action became a fixture in media accounts of the human mind and lulled people into a false sense of comprehension. (In a feature for the magazine titled “Duped,” Margaret Talbot described research at Yale that showed that inserting neurotalk into a papers made them more convincing.) Brain imaging, which was scarcely on the public’s radar in 1990, became the most prestigious way of understanding human mental life. The prefix “neuro” showed up everywhere: neurolaw, neuroeconomics, neuropolitics. Neuroethicists wondered about whether you could alter someone’s prison sentence based on the size of their neocortex. 
***
Fancy color pictures of brains in action became a fixture in media accounts of the human mind and lulled people into a false sense of comprehension. (In a feature for the magazine titled “Duped,” Margaret Talbot described research at Yale that showed that inserting neurotalk into a papers made them more convincing.) Brain imaging, which was scarcely on the public’s radar in 1990, became the most prestigious way of understanding human mental life. The prefix “neuro” showed up everywhere: neurolaw, neuroeconomics, neuropolitics. Neuroethicists wondered about whether you could alter someone’s prison sentence based on the size of their neocortex. 
***
The real problem with neuroscience today isn’t with the science—though plenty of methodological challenges still remain—it’s with the expectations. The brain is an incredibly complex ensemble, with billions of neurons coming into—and out of—play at any given moment. There will eventually be neuroscientific explanations for much of what we do; but those explanations will turn out to be incredibly complicated. For now, our ability to understand how all those parts relate is quite limited, sort of like trying to understand the political dynamics of Ohio from an airplane window above Cleveland. 
***
Which may be why the best neuroscientists today may be among those who get the fewest headlines, like researchers studying the complex dynamics that enter into understanding a single word. As Poeppel says, what we need now is “the meticulous dissection of some elementary brain functions, not ambitious but vague notions like brain-based aesthetics, when we still don’t understand how the brain recognizes something as basic as a straight line.”

Important stuff to remember when we read articles promising that psychopath brains are X or Y, explaining Z.

Sunday, January 13, 2013

Earthly delights

From a reader:


This detail from Bosch's curious painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights, reminds me of a dangerous lady whose favourite painting it is. The penetrating beak, the huge mouth, the underbelly being feasted on by hommes moyens sensual who are on their way to self destruction and especially the grasping hands. She is a sociopath or psychopath making a successful career in a big tobacco company. 

The picture she says is "as much about contemporary New York as Holland centuries ago". She has stared for hours at every detail trying to imagine the story behind each figure and to learn as much from it as she can, because sociopaths are only interested in knowlege they can use. 

Everyone in the painting is suffering or will suffer as a result of their weaknesses, except the pitiless satanic creatures who efficiently administer the punishments and are enjoying their task. Victims, the lady is convinced, want to be victims. 

The Satanic agents are the only pure figures, although possessing, one supposes, all the deadly sins themselves.  They are evil yet not corrupt, are in fact incorruptible. They are sociopaths, in fact, who are curiously inhuman. They seem, like the lady in question, oddly to transcend their nationality and social class and even their sex.

I would be informative to know what the painting means for her but all she says is, 'How enjoyable it is to be eaten'. 

She also tells me only bad women are attractive. 

Saint Augustine said
Since love grows within you, so beauty grows. For love is the beauty of the soul. 
St. Augustine was right but he was playing on the opposing team from the lady and he was talking about beauty not sex appeal. 

Cesare Pavese had a germane point when he said it was only possible to love without reservation a completely selfish person because only a completely selfish person will always remain objective and not alter to please you. 

Saturday, January 12, 2013

Psychopaths more attractive?

Sort of.

A study led by Nicholas Holtzman and Michael Strube at Washington University in St. Louis found that people with personality traits known as the "Dark Triad" -- narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy -- were better than others at using clothing, makeup and hairstyles to make themselves look attractive, Scientific American reported Tuesday.

They had people take diagnostic tests and took photos of them both in their normal clothes/make up and plain clothes:


Researchers found that in the first group of photos -- in which subjects wore their own clothes and makeup --subjects who scored high marks for the Dark Triad were typically rated as more attractive than subjects who scored low marks for these traits. This was also true of subjects who scored highly for psychopathy alone.

However, in the second group of photos, in which subjects were forced to wear plain clothing and no makeup, there was no correlation between physical attractiveness and "dark" personal traits.

As Julie Beck of PopSci writes, these results suggest that "mean people are just as ugly as the rest of us, they're just better at fooling everyone into thinking they're hot."

Is that what it means to have a good personal sense of style? You're just "fooling" people? Sounds like sour grapes to me.
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