The Death Penalty

[Iris]

that's why i've always been thinking that someone should invent a 'Neural Behavioral Correction' equipment. you stick it in the guy's head (aka Matrix but not that long a needle, ouch!), click on a switch, and the violent or erratic behavioral part of the brain is subdued. next thing you know the guy is a changed man!

yeah, yeah, i know it's crap, but even then walking on the moon was thought impossible, right? think about it. no need for death penalties, no need even for correctional facilities or jails. of course it has to be regulated else it falls to the wrong hands and abuses the method.

[Coldfire26]

I really doubt ppl will invent this anytime soon. you can't imagine the damage that can be caused by faulty proceadures...

[SystemOverride_uplink]

KILL EM ALL AND LET GOD SORT EM OUT

[Rkiver]

Once again another meaningful post from SystemOverride...........

[SystemOverride_uplink]

lol    i would just kill all the the evil people in the world then there would but no problems only yappy relavtives.......


(Edited by SystemOverride at 4:38 pm on Nov. 22, 2003)

[Jackmn]

There are no such thing as 'bad' people. There are simply opposing, subjective points of view.

[hackerboy]

Jackmn, I disagree.  Bad people are people who do bad things.  If someone lies, he's a liar; if someone kills, he's a murder; if someone commits an evil act, he's evil.

Iris, I have a feeling that 'Neural Behavioral Correction' might tend to end up like Jack Nicholson in "One Flies Over the Cuckoo's Nest"

[Stewsburntmonkey]

"One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"

Jackmn's point was any definition of bad is subjective.  There is no concrete way to say something is bad or not.  All we have is some concensus about what we feel is bad.  It is this moral ambiguity people like W exploit in labels like "axis of evil" and "evildoers".  :)

[hackerboy]

I agree that politicians tend to call people "evildoers" or so on, when it suits their agenda, but to say that there is no such thing as bad people is obviously wrong.  

Thanks for the correction, you are right that it is "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

[Stewsburntmonkey]

I am just saying it is subjective.  Many people claim divine inspiration for commiting what are widely reguarded as horrible acts.  Society calls them evil, but what if God really did work through them meaning they would be truly righteous?  I am of course assuming God to exist and that He is the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong.  Even people on the level of Stalin or Hitler have their supporters who believe they were in the right.  Everything is subjective in this reguard.  :)

[hackerboy]

Just because someone claims divine inspiration does not mean that they have it.  They could believe their inspiration comes from God, when it might be Satan disguised.  The Bible warns of Satan's masquerading as an "angel of light."

However, since there is no way for us to tell, I'd suggest we leave it to God to arbitrate, as you suggested.

[Adriac]

Quote: from Iris on 12:50 am on Nov. 22, 2003[br]that's why i've always been thinking that someone should invent a 'Neural Behavioral Correction' equipment. you stick it in the guy's head (aka Matrix but not that long a needle, ouch!), click on a switch, and the violent or erratic behavioral part of the brain is subdued. next thing you know the guy is a changed man!

Personality, such as we understand it physically, is a problem of chemicals. Mental illnesses are chemical imbalances (which can be fixed by drugs that either stimulate or reduce production of those chemicals). The brain is simply too complicated to understand on a level where we can take it apart; we just don't understand how it comes together.

Broadly, there are systems we can understand and control (say, the dopamine reward system- that's a fun one*), but we can't augment specific personalities simply because they are inexplicable.


*Psychiatric inside joke (pun)- the dopamine reward system controls the experience of pleasure. When you have fun, you're experiencing the dopamine reward system doing its thing.

[Jackmn]

Lying is nothing more than a sequence of neural nets in the brain firing in a certain pattern, causing a sequence of sounds to be emitted from the individual in question.

Nothing more than electrochemical reactions, no more or less evil than any other chemical reaction in the universe.

Killing is nothing more than one set of complex chemical reactions reducing another set of reactions to a simpler level. Again, nothing more than electrochemistry.

Everything can be broken down into the reactions of individual particles. Our very conceptions of 'good' and 'evil' can be shown to be derived from Darwinian evolution (Not killing people of the same race is definitly a sociological survival attribute). The same goes for all of our emotions.

[Adriac]

You raise excellent points, Jackmn... But this is just too good to pass up.

I defy you to explain the "soul"

[Stewsburntmonkey]

It is too easy to just explain away everthing as a series of chemical reactions.  We know so little about the who process that we cannot say much of anything with certainty.  We have choices to make (even if they are just illusions) we have thoughts that change over time etc.  These can be dismissed as chemical processes preset from the time of our birth, but whether they are or not is still up in the air.  Nature is a hugely complex creature, simply dismissing everything as simple interactions is not the most enlightened view.  Until you can we can fully understand these things we cannot dismiss them so easily.  :)