Are Any Of Your Interested/fascinated By Sociopaths?

i guess i have that mindset to where it fasinates me to comntemplate how things work do what they do ... what makes them tick. and the most intriguing (and difficult) question of why. i think when people ask "why" that they are really asking "how" many times. its very much a hacker mindset, but i tend to apply this type of thinking everywhere and it most definitely extends to psychology and other things as well. anywhere that theres a system, there are rules that determine the behavior of that system ... i often seek to know exactly "why" the rules sre the way they are, instead of perhaps some other way that ought to accomplish the same end result.

 

Some serial killers likely have low neurotransmitter production, perhaps even non-functional parts of their brains, which we can find 'rules' in however alot of serial killers usually have traumatic chilhood experiences. I'm not sure enviornmental stressors like that can really be accurately described with relating it to computers.

 

Charles Manson the only serial killer never to kill anyone.

r0llin what is BTK? I know you'll answer and I'll be like oh yeah derrh

Mally, I've read into Dennis Nilaon as he was meant to be the UK version of Dahmer. he was the same in that sense though, alone and killed for the company.

 

BTK stands for bind torture kill. It was the nick name they gave to Dennis radar, the killer. I highly suggest reading about him, his story is fascinating.

 

Manson's messiah complex, hate and use of psychedelic drugs as basically brainwashing tools is what I find fascinating about him. Particularly as this came in the midst of the counter culture promoting love and peace with the same drugs in the 60's.

 

i can relate it ... the environmental stressor, or other life experience is similar to adding a piece of code to the program. this of course changes the behavior of the system. think of a hypothetical computer program, that modifies it's own code according to the external events which occur. i think our brain is something like this, just an extremely complex system that no one quite understands yet but is in fact deterministic in nature.

imagine an algorithm, where the set of "rules" included one based on the condition of a certain event, and in the case of that event occurring an algorithm would be applied which changed the very rules themselves at the same hierarchical level that included this "rule" in a recursive fashion.

 

Yes, but applying something to a computer...would there be different outcomes with each computer. I do not think man is that predictable as a work out theorem....as if you case studied 10 idifferent individuals with the same environmental factors and circumstances exactly...there may be 10 different outcomes with each different individual.

 

So in other words, I think each person is a unique blue print...no duplicates.

 

If we alter the code in the same way on a pair of computers will they not display the exact same outcome?

Two children being abused in the same way will not necessarily display the same or even remotely similar outcomes. I don't see the computer analogy as practical or beneficial when discussing stuff like serial killers.

If the brain is deterministic, I think we are talking about a level of determinism which will likely not be grasped for centuries. The brain's plasticisty is the X-factor here, it's not like a system that keeps the information it receives all in the same state and changes it until it's introduced to new information. You could shake your head real hard right now and there is a chance you just altered your brain structure in some significant way beyond the parts that lit up to go "Shake head."

 

Moonglow more or less addressed the same question

 

and so it is with machines as well, theyre behavior depends on exactly what software has been installed ... by whatever means. predicting the precise behavior is only possible if you know everything about the system and all of its quirks ... and even then its tricky

our minds of course are very complex abstract systems, perhaps with some features we dont yet see in software because software hasnt quite reached the same levels of abstraction yet and is of a different nature to serve a different goal. the higher and more levels of abstraction ... the more unpredictable the behavior becomes. small pertubations at the lowest levels of abstraction can set off an avalanche of effects that eventually reach the higher levels of the hierarchy leading to effects that appear to be random or possibly non_deterministic in nature.

 

It's easier to google the traits of serial killers than try and work it from a genetic code.

Pyromania
Bed Wetting
Animal Cruelty

The three main traits serial killers portray at least a decade or so ago when I was interested. :d

Then it comes down to other sub traits such as

Broken family
Labouring job
Not the brightest student at school
Etc
Etc.

 

I understand that...but do you think computers will ever have self motivation......self determination.....will of own self all by itself as a computer?...no programmers......just its own self determination?

 

i would have to say that i feel the outcome of this experiment would greatly depend on the state of the system prior to the modification and also what code these computers were running. if they are running identical software we might assume that the resuls would be the same (because this is the desig that we as humans woukd strive to implement). however, even running identical software on identical hardware, it is very imorobable that these machines will simultaneously be in the exact same state when the event occurs. this is even true if the event itself occurs simultaneously to both at the same time ... the state of each machine will depend on every previous event, as well as every previous state that occurred before.

im not gonna claim to be an expert on neurology, but i am inclined to believe that it is [the brain] a deterministic system. perhaps there are some elements at the very lowest levels of abstraction that are probabilistic rather than deterministic, such as the quantum mechanics underneath the chemistry. im no electrical engineer either but iirc the transistors that make up integrated circuit owe their behavior to effects that happen on the quantum scale as well ... which are abstracted into transistors then logic gates, CPU subsystems all the way up to the computer system that can be directly interacted with. of course the machine is still deterministic from our point of view, the perspective of it that we can directly interact with.

 

What about it seems to be deterministic about it to you?

 

and there might be different outcomes based on the problem...one computer may be hard assed about it...another a softie....another a little of both, etc.....one is just self serving...one is thinking of all.....etc...all of these variables.....that our brains compute on an every day level....and can one computer say...ok, that does not work, I will change my approach now....and on and on? I am asking.....I don't know, either, but it is indeed, fascinating.

 

what is will exactly ... i image myself as a machine. since i am the machine it is my nature to run the program that im running. from the perspective of this that i can observe, my will is in fact to run this very program as it is what i feel i was meant to do (if i didnt feel this way id be doung something else right ) what about when the machine reaches a conditional branch in the program .. it must make a decision based on some internal state (which could have been changed by external events). would the machine feel as if it is making the right choice. i would argue that there was never any choice at all for the machine ... just computation. if i could see externally the state of all variables involved i could predict what the next event would be. of course to truly know this would require being able to know what exactly is going on inside the cpu itself too. software and even hardware always seems to have mysterious bugs leading to mysterious effects ... and these are things that humans designed so think about a system as complex as the human mind, which we didnt design and what kind of mysterious anomalies might arise in such a system. understanding the human brain/mind at a great enough level for the system to then. appear to us to become predictable in nature probably requires a greater level of intelligence than we currently possess. imagine trying to reverse engineer an extremely compicated computing device with no datasheet or idea of its workings ... it would be hard to just look at the electrical signals and be able to see how it worked at every level. its software could be mysteriously updated, and behave in a now different way with no obvious mechanism yet retain the same outward appearance. it would appear mysterious and unpredictable. this is trivial in comparison to understanding the mind.

 

because its made of the same thing everything else is. let me clarify that it isnt obvious that its deterministic, but it must be. i believe if we could know the exact state at every instant of all the components of the human brain that it would yield itself to deterministic causality just like every other system. the more complex a system, the more mysterious it appears because there may be variables involved that arent possible to know the nature of their involvment.

i did mention that there could possibly be probabilistic components at the quantum level .. the system at large is still algorithmic in nature including some variables with unpredictable values ...

 

what is will? Your will or anyone's will to achieve something, to do something or to even just not do something...it all comes from the will or determination or drive or how important something is to any individual.....and that may be different for each person...what is important...what is not.....and how to achieve or not achieve what is important....etc....
Neuorology.....we have so much to learn still about the human mind, and can we ever learn it all?
circuiting...some circuits short circuiting when it was not in favor of what any individual wanted to do....all of these variables....the electricity....the currents and connections in each brain.....how can anyone know all of that and then that it is different for each person in some ways, and yes, similar is some ways, as well.....so many things come into variables...such as food and mood....health of any organism from head to toe.....weather...what is externally going on in each person's life in the background, at times.....etc., etc.....

 

i think your getting it .. the drive to do sonething. of course it depends on the person, their experiences and all the other factors you mention. machines are the same way ... mine might be running a different program than yours, therefore our purpose may be different. i sometimes make the analogy of the mind being the software whivh runs of the hardware of the brain. although i feel this a somewhat useful analogy, im not sure that it actually really applies ... as even in the real of machines this is just a distinction created by humans to provide an artificial seperation between the fields of electrical engineering and software design. it takes both for the system to work.

i dont think anybody knows everything about all of these things at the same time ... the only way we can handle it is to break a large problem into small manageable peices and then try to solve the problems individually ... different people solving different sets of problems of course. being able to understand the intacacies of absolutely everything simultaneously and how these intracacies are involved in the big picture are properties that one might attribute to god.