All for love or fear...?

[The Dawktor]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/commen ... 829662.ece

In his recent Times column comedian Frank Skinner was lambasting the British Medical Association for pussyfooting around on the dangers of alcohol. In his piece he said an interesting thing (bolded below): I felt this was a thought-provoking statement- what do you all think about this single sentence?

The British Medical Association published a report on the dangers of drink this week, but assured us the organisation is not “anti-alcohol”. Well, it bloody well should be.

Alcohol is directly linked to more than 60 medical conditions and costs the NHS millions of pounds every year. The casualty departments are full of drunks. They also contain the sober victims of alcohol-induced violence, drink-driving and various other horrors of secondary drinking. I gave up alcohol on September 24, 1986, but it’s still quite possible I will end up in hospital or the morgue because of someone else’s drinking.

My dad, an enthusiastic patron of public houses, often said: “If you knocked down all the pubs, you’d have to build a lot of lunatic asylums.” A friend recently said to me that if there was a genuine attempt to stop people drinking, there’d be rioting in the streets. Clearly, this is a dependency culture. Alcohol is killing people in a variety of ways but a large part of the population can’t face life without it, so the carnage is allowed to continue.

All our decisions can be roughly broken down into things we do because of love and things we do because of fear. The BMA’s reluctance to condemn drink as firmly as it condemns tobacco is not based on the love of those in its care but rather the fear of the outrage if people were told they should face life head-on, without the soothing softener of alcohol.

People need booze to make themselves and their acquaintances seem more exciting. How many parties or nights in the pub have been rescued by booze slowly oiling the social machine? There are pills that do the same job. Would it be OK to use them in the same way? If you turned up at a friend’s dinner party and she casually handed out sedatives, wouldn’t you feel a bit weak and pathetic?

I’m starting to sound like an old-fashioned Temperance League member, but it irks me that alcohol is seen as a social necessity, an ice-breaker. You get drunk with a new workmate or neighbour in order to bond with them. It loosens people up and makes them more gregarious. Well, what’s going on here? Are we saying we need a mind-altering drug to enable us to reach out to another human being or give us the courage to speak in a group? Shouldn’t we deal with that?

We’re back to love and fear again. Why do you drink? Is it because you love the people you’re with or because you’re slightly afraid of them? Is it because you’re unhappy with who you are and so feel the need to change yourself — even if it’s just a little bit — with the aid of alcohol?

I often sat with friends, the lunchtime after the night before, discussing our drunken exploits. The thing Steve said to the bloke at the chip shop, the way Darren fell off the bus. None of us had the guts to say: “But it wasn’t really us, was it? It was us made more colourful by a drug. These things we did — our displays of courage and eccentricity — only happened because they were induced by chemicals. We sit here shining our puny badges of rebellion and celebrating our maverick lifestyle, but deep down we know it’s all a sham — an alcohol-induced charade.

“Who are we when unaided by intoxicants? What stories concerning the real, unaltered us are worth telling? If there is none then we must stop taking the easy option — the short-term fix — and strive to make the real, unaltered us worthy of the tale.”

Of course, I never said that or anything like it because I was keen to continue the charade; to tell the stories and enjoy my part in them.

I was a heavy drinker. I have been known to wake up in a pool of my own urine in a place I didn’t know. So-called social drinkers will read this and say, “His case is different; he had a problem”, but anyone who is reluctant to face social gatherings without the aid of alcohol should be asking themselves why.

I got drunk, ultimately, I suppose, because I was afraid of being sober. The social drinker is afraid of being sober and of being drunk. He seeks a cosy middle ground where social situations are made that little bit more manageable, that little bit easier to navigate. It is double self-deception; it is neither a real world nor one that is free from dependency.

The Government may consider public health less important than alienating voters and rich brewery owners or losing the revenue on alcoholic drinks, but the BMA should forget about cosmetic changes, such as banning advertising and happy hours, drop the niceties, come down at least as hard as it did on tobacco and say what needs to be said: alcohol is a dangerous drug dressed up as a warm and reassuring companion. It temporarily kills who you really are and replaces it, in varying degrees, with a chemically created persona — that’s when it’s not literally killing you, making you ill or terrifying those around you who are not similarly benumbed.

We can’t trust the people to decide for themselves because their dependency — often not readily apparent and so easily denied — obviously clouds their judgment. We need the BMA to provide impetus for a great national sobering-up.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

"We always choose the thing that pleases the most or hurts the least."

[The Dawktor]

So-choosing a middle-ground option is a fear of the worst option?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

So-choosing a middle-ground option is a fear of the worst option?

It's all pluses and minuses and the bottom-line is the choice driver.

[Drewish]

Some times I jsut do things because I think they'll be really funny

[Bella Fortuna]

Some times I jsut do things because I think they'll be really funny

When is that?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Some times I jsut do things because I think they'll be really funny

And that pleases you.

[Drewish]

Some times I jsut do things because I think they'll be really funny

And that pleases you.

Man, if 'love' and 'fear' can be broken down into liking stuff and disliking stuff, then I think the quote is correct. I however hold the terms 'love' and 'fear' to mean very tangible things and would not delude there meaning so much.

I also sometimes like to be a pompous ass to inflate my own ego.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Some times I jsut do things because I think they'll be really funny

And that pleases you.

Man, if 'love' and 'fear' can be broken down into liking stuff and disliking stuff, then I think the quote is correct. I however hold the terms 'love' and 'fear' to mean very tangible things and would not delude there meaning so much.

I also sometimes like to be a pompous ass to inflate my own ego.

Which pleases you. It's an easy system.

[Drewish]

So what about the random decisions that people make, or when people are missinformed and do things that they think will please them or keep them safe from harm, but actually don't?

[Xamonas Chegwé]

What about the things that people do because THE HYPNOTOAD DEMANDS IT!

[Gawdzilla Sama]

So what about the random decisions that people make,

In computer science they say there's no such thing as a "random" choice. Same for people, they make choices based on factors that they're not necessarily aware of.

or when people are missinformed and do things that they think will please them or keep them safe from harm, but actually don't?

They made the choice based on "most pleasure" or "least pain" regardless of the correctness of the information available to them.

[Drewish]

So what about the random decisions that people make,

In computer science they say there's no such thing as a "random" choice. Same for people, they make choices based on factors that they're not necessarily aware of.

I'm not saying that free will exists as an absolute (I know it's just nerve cells firing in the end.) but I'm saying that it exists in practicum and that not all decisions relate to the higher level goal of 'get good' and 'avoid bad.'

What I mean to say is that all conscious decisions may be said to follow from this theory, however, not all decisions are conscious, and the underlying physical wiring that might lead one to make one (seemingly) random choice over another are unknown to us (often even to the person them self.) Therefore, even if a decision is not random in the absolute sense, we are (by virtue of the impossibility of constant full brain scans) effectively black boxes to one another, and are therefore entities of free will for all practical purposes.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

So what about the random decisions that people make,

In computer science they say there's no such thing as a "random" choice. Same for people, they make choices based on factors that they're not necessarily aware of.

I'm not saying that free will exists as an absolute (I know it's just nerve cells firing in the end.) but I'm saying that it exists in practicum and that not all decisions relate to the higher level goal of 'get good' and 'avoid bad.'

What I mean to say is that all conscious decisions may be said to follow from this theory, however, not all decisions are conscious, and the underlying physical wiring that might lead one to make one (seemingly) random choice over another are unknown to us (often even to the person them self.) Therefore, even if a decision is not random in the absolute sense, we are (by virtue of the impossibility of constant full brain scans) effectively black boxes to one another, and are therefore entities of free will for all practical purposes.

I think we're on two different tracks here. If you have free will, it doesn't exclude making decisions based on most/least. It just means you get to decide what is most/least.

[Drewish]

I think we're on two different tracks here. If you have free will, it doesn't exclude making decisions based on most/least. It just means you get to decide what is most/least.

But most/least implies a higher brain function as it relates to purpose and goal. Certain aspects of thought operate like how the primitive reactions of microorganisms do, heuristically where the resulting outcome would tend toward a beneficial outcome, but arriving there through emergence rather than by conscious thought or design. And it would follow that random variation is still at play, even within the human mind. Meaning that certain basic synapses would in fact not be beneficial, as failure and misstep are part of evolution, resulting in decisions that may in fact not be connected to most/least.