[FRIAM] Few of you ...

[uǝlƃ ☣]

"Automism" is a funky word.  But if it means something like knee-jerk reaction, then I get it.  The important question you ask evaluates negative, though.  No, nothing "is what it is however it comes to be."  This is an instance of the logical abstraction layer I've been mentioning (that has no traction, apparently).  To violently slice a thing out of its context and then assume that thing has some existence, reality, effect, etc. separate from its history, is just plain wrong.  At the very least, the speed with which the "automism" was programmed in, the extent to which it's tethered/bound to things outside it, and the speed with which it could be deprogrammed are all violated by the slicing out.

So, one of our cats died on Wednesday.  She went in for exploratory surgery to investigate a mass that was preventing food from moving from her stomach to her intestines.  It was a pyloric adenoma the surgeon saw no good way to fix.  So we killed her.  The important question is: To what extent did we destroy any happiness, good will, comfort, etc. by putting her through a 2 week process of changing her diet, forcing barium down her throat, poking her for blood draws, etc?  She was a super happy cat for ~5 years.  But her life ended in terror and pain (despite the relatively humane way we did things compared to what it could have been).

If, paraphrasing, she is what she is however she came to be, then she was a terrified and suffering animal and the 5 preceding years were entirely washed away by the 2 week ending.

On 1/16/19 5:06 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> As a good friend, I would like to gently chide you for the implicit assumption that a the assignment of any behavioral automism to a particular physiological cause makes it more plausible as an automism.  It is what it is however it comes to be, isn't it?   Could it not have been imprinted in the few minutes after the puppies first opened their eyes and later transferred from Mom to owner as part of a normal developmental process?  Either way, it now is a behavioral automism, and like all behavior is the result of a physiological machine operating in a physical environment.  

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☣ uǝlƃ