So... ive been thinking... on the nature of good and evil... and thuman consciousness lately, therr was a bit of that in one of the other tales. Anyway a bit on the human psyche and the nature of good and evil.
It is so easy to define good and evil in terms of black and white with definate impenatrable boundies, yet so few of us actually sit down and realize that this isnt the case, even given the fact that we all intuitively know that good and evil exist in every person. Our experiences with people define our perception of their moral integraty and act as the basis of our catagorization of people into good and bad. Yet our experiences with people are so very limited, restricted to the subset of interactions we have had with these under controlled, civilized, and ultimately artificial conditions. To what extent do these situational and social conditions dictate our behavior? I

For example, what drives a father to hold hostage the emergency ward of a hosptial to save his son? What drives the husband to steal to feed his family? To kill? When you hear of these stories, people will go "oh he was obviously desprate, thats why he did it" or "he was unstable" and at the same time serial killers are described as "he was always so nice". And most importantly people say "I don't understand how he could do that".
So lets break this down:
A man kills another man out of greed.
A man kills another man- this is wrong.
A man kills another man so he can survive- is this wrong?
A man kills another man to protect his wife- this is "justified".
As most people would agree the last two are "justified", but the more important question is in this man's shoes COULD you kill the other man? The WOULD you is completely irrelavent, until you are standing there holding that gun, backed into that corner.

With this example I am trying to illustrate two points:
1. What are YOU capable of given the right situational pressures?
2. [and by extention] What do you really know about a person?

Our society is so solidly based around the concept of individualism and self, yet if you really really think about it how many masks do you wear?
So what do we really know about each other, if under every set of circumstances and every situation you are a different person?
I know I wear a few.

Unknown Carefree - 16 years, 6 months, 8 days ago

So a real tale. A few years back, a friend of mine got me a spoiler for my car. As a birthday present. Now my car is a peice of junk, so my friend was like "I'll install it for you, instead of paying someone to do it". Now my father owns a mechanic shop so i know a few mechanics that WOULD have done it for free anyway. But my friend insisted... anyway so he installs this "magical spoiler" that would make my junky car 'so hot i would get laid' his exact words. So he goes to install it...and ends up wrecking my trunk instead. So for my birthday I had to repair my trunk. Now the thing is the spoiler he got me feel off the back of a truck, and it wasnt even for my car type. Therefore thats why it didnt fit and he ended up wrecking it. Jackass huh?
Unknown Carefree - 16 years, 7 months, 27 days ago

So I have been told I am being impersonal in my tales... so I'll post just one personal one...
So for those of you who didn't know - im a science-type person. Anyway so for the last 10 months I've been working on a project- I did surgeries to extract certain tissues, I treated the tissue, prepared it, and took really really good care of it. Anyway so when it came time to do the analysis of the tissue I had to do immunohistochemistry- for those of you who don't know what it is, it is basically a visualization technique that visualizes a protien of interest- anyway for the last 4 months i have used up most of this tissue I have carefully and painstakingly prepared and kept. Now the visualization did not work, and I found out last week through a series of experiments that it was because the antibody i was using was a dud. So 10 months pissed down the drain. Thats my life- interesting isnt it? Now you know why i dont talk about it :P cus no one finds it interesting.

Unknown Carefree - 16 years, 7 months, 28 days ago

So one quote for "how", one for why". I couldnt find the one for "do we?" But basically if all thoughts, memories, and sensations are represent by neurons and bursts of neuronal activity then can we think, feel, be- without this? All medical and scientific knowledge would say we couldn't. HM, and SM are classical examples of memory-loss and the loss of the ability due to brain damage. Therein lies the basis for the arguement "Are we just the result of coordinated bursts of activity, is human consciousness and behavior a result of this coordinated, yet random activity? Or is this activity resultant from our own existance?" Another way to think about it is - Does the human soul actually exist?

I should point out I really do hope and believe that the human soul does exist- otherwise this all would be rather pointless. Life I mean.
Unknown Carefree - 16 years, 8 months, 27 days ago

The function of the brain, simply stated, is to transduce multimodal sensory information emanating from both the external and internal environments of an organism, integrate & process it, and produce an adaptive motor response to reflect the particular situation and state in which the organism finds itself.
Clayton Dickson - one of my neuro profs.
Unknown Carefree - 16 years, 8 months, 27 days ago