i love how the guy that believes in 911 conspiracies, NWO one world socialist governments etc has the audacity to question other people's mental health!

trancer, in a nutshell:

quote:

Originally posted by Renegade Haha, oh you want to go down that path do you? You believe in the NWO, that 9/11 was orchestrated by the government and you support Ron Paul: do you really want to explore the psychology of other people? Just for fun, why don't we explore what might make your mind tick? First of all, you seem largely incapable of creative or novel thought. Basically all your posts here are just the unparsed regurgitation of other peoples ideas. You're like the man in Searle's Chinese Room: receiving information from one side and passing it out the other with seemingly little conscious reflection. Second of all, you seem to have a very narrow (one might almost say, obsessive?) scope of interest. Basically all your posts in this forum have been on the same extremely narrow field of subjects. I am going to speculate that your interests and behaviour outside of this forum are similarly narrow and obsessive. Third of all, your world-view seems extremely inflexible and does not appear to have advanced or changed one iota in all the time you've been posting here. With everyone else here - even among posters I find myself continually disagreeing with - I can identify changes (for better or worse) in what they believe. Can you name one thing, in the five years or so that you've been posting here, that you have changed your mind about? I doubt it. All these factors are indicitive of strong left-hemispherical cognitive dominance. And I'm not talking about hemispherical dominance in that "oh, I just did a test on the internet which says I'm right-brained which means I'm creative!" sense, I'm talking about you having a cognitive pathology which renders the potential for normal, sane thought impossible. Hence, the things you believe. In chapter 7 of this book, the neurologist VS Ramachandran discusses people who have suffered trauma (usually during a stroke) to just the right side of their brain. Some of these people regularly engage in extreme, almost comical moments of cognitive dissonance and denial (he discusses one such instance in this video). Among other things, the left-hemisphere is responsible for the creation and maintenence of a "holistic" world-view: what we might call, in Freudian terms, the "ego". Under normal circumstances, the left-hemisphere is tempered by the functions of the right-hemisphere, which - using cognitive process closely tied to the emotional centers of the brain - is capable of "over-ruling" the left-hemisphere when it becomes clear that the world-view it has created is at odds with reality. When - as is the case with stroke patients - the right-hemisphere is incapable of performing these functions, extreme delusions (completely unrecognisable to those who hold them, of course) become impossible to resist and these patients can come to believe, for instance, that their paralysed arm is not actually paralysed and that it belongs to their father. The left-brain, left to its own devices, is capable of confabulating a picture of the world that at no point intersects with reality and it is incapable of realising the discrepancy. But this is a fairly extreme example. I don't think (correct me if I'm wrong) that you are a stroke victim suffering from trauma in the right parietal lobe. From your posts here, I think it's likely that your problem is an undeveloped rather than a damaged right-brain. There is increasing evidence that our beliefs and our capacity to distinguish truth from falsehood are shaped by the emotional centers of the brain. This study, for one, offers direct neurological support for the idea ("While many areas of higher cognition are likely involved in assessing the truth-value of linguistic propositions, the final acceptance of a statement as 'true,' or its rejection as 'false,' seems to rely on more primitive, hedonic processing in the medial prefrontal cortex and the anterior insula"). The child-psychologist Stanley Greenspan has developed an entire theory of cognition based around the importance of emotional development to higher cognitive functions such as reason and self-control. To put it simply, emotional interaction allows for the capacity to link actions or behaviour with specific outcomes, which potentiates symbolic thought, which potentiates language and reason. Children denied (or incapable of) such emotional interactions often suffer deficits in higher-cognitive thought that fall into consistent and predictable patterns. On page 237 of this book, Greenspan outlines the sort of cognitive deficiencies that people with abnormal emotional development typcially display. Let's see how many of them apply to you, shall we? I think this speaks for itself. You believe in a plethora of conspiracy theories that practically define "magical and irrational thinking". I'm not sure how impulsive you are, but your propensity to regurgitate information without comment, summary or even redaction suggests a severe lack of reflectivity concerning the information you encounter. You seem to believe that everyone can be classified either as an enlightened freedom-fighter (you), or as mere "sheeple", complicit by their inaction in the conspiracies around them (me and everyone else). There appears to be very little nuance in your dichotemic conception of the world. You seem to only notice and comment on information that can be squeezed into your narrow, conspiracy-based paradigm and the scope of your thought and reflection appears to be extremely narrow. Again, wide-ranging reflection, which takes a number of diverse possibilities into account, is not an ability I can ever remember you ever demonstrating. As I have already said, "you seem to have a very narrow (one might almost say, obsessive?) scope of interest. Basically all your posts in this forum have been on the same extremely narrow field of subjects". So, based on all this, I think it's fairly clear that you have a psychological construct consistent with abnormal right-brain, emotional development. The question (and this is where it gets fun) is how this abnormal development may have occurred? I can think of two possibilites. The first is that you suffer from some form of ASD: in other words, you are psychologically impeded from engaging in the sort of social interaction necessary for healthy psychological development. This would explain your narrow, obsessive range of interests and your ability to memorize and regurgitate a lot of information without reflection, but it doesn't explain your emotion-laden responses when people call you on your bullshit. Personally, I think a better explanation is that you have only ever enjoyed a small, narrow range of social experiences: in other words, you are socially impeded from engaging in the sort of social interaction necessary for healthy psychological development. Maybe you are a loner, maybe you have only ever allowed people who share your world-view into your social-circle. Either way, this is consistent with the abnormal range of emotional interactions that create the sort of cognitive problems you display and it is also consistent with your extremely negative perception of other people (or, should I say, "sheeple"?). So remember, everyone. Next time you get attacked by Trancer-X, don't take it personally: he only acts that way because he doesn't have any friends.