What Happens When Your Brain Says You Don't Exist | Hacker News Reader

What Happens When Your Brain Says You Don't Exist

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Fascinating that amputating a functional leg could be considered ethical in light of a mental disorder. I am interested in what the road to getting that procedure done looks like.

The phrase to google is "elective amputation".

Thanks that was informative.

It must be particularly difficult to relate to those of us that don't have that disorder. When the patient in the article described his leg as foreign, or that his "soul doesn't extend into that part" of his leg, my first thought was that surely amputees would feel similarly about their prosthetics, but by all reports a good prosthetic has a positive effect on those amputees.

Maybe they feel more like the limb is a parasite? If I imagine that I had a large parasite permanently attached to my body, I could begin to understand the desperation to have it removed.

Irony would be if this patient got a prosthetic leg.

That's a question I'd really love to have answered, actually.

I still can't figure it out. I would be overjoyed to have a parasite that feeds off me and acts as an extra (reasonably-placed) limb.

Well, that is what would happen if I ever got gender reassignment surgery...

Except that your gender reassignment request would probably not be thought of as resulting from a mental disorder. Not agreeing or disagreeing with the amputation...just pointing out a difference from this example.

Gender dysphoria or gender identity disorder is an accepted diagnosis in the medical community for individuals expressing discomfort with their gender as assigned at birth, and sex reassignment surgery (after psychotherapy) is considered as one possible treatment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_dysphoria

> Except that your gender reassignment request would probably not be thought of as resulting from a mental disorder.

Gender reassignment procedures are commonly part of the treatment for gender identity disorder, which is why they are considered medically-necessary procedures, to which people for whom the state is responsible for medical care (e.g., prisoners) are entitled.

How is it a treatment?

Sorry, I was making a crass joke about the size of my penis. Presumably I wouldn't get my leg amputated for a gender reassignment surgery, but maybe my third leg...

No this is criminal : the Russians had pretty good results with this kind of mental disorder by making the patients fast, yes you read me well, just fasting.

But it's too simple and there's no money to be made of it. So they're going to cut legs from people that could be saved by fasting.

I'd offer a source but it's a book in French from a journalist that studied fasting and went to Russia since during the Soviet times they made a lot of researches on fasting.

If it was a profit issue, there would be money to be made from treating a patient for the consultation and duration of the fast. Not everything is a Big Industry conspiracy.

> but it's a book in French

Some of us read French.

"Le jeûne, une nouvelle thérapie ?" ISBN-13: 978-2707175571

If you read Russian (since your nick is Pavel I thought you might) I'm sure you could find better sources than that.

England has a national health service.

So that NHS has two options:

1) put someone through a fast. (Cheap - about £1000 per week). Then provide some talking therapy for some time.

2) amputating a leg. (Just the amputation is going to be between £8,000 and £16,000), followed by considerable physiotherapy and prosthetic legs.

Here the NHS wants the cheapest effective option, not the more expensive option.

If starvation works you should probably send the evidence to NICE.

Come on, your NHS is probably as badly run than my Sécurité Sociale, and allergic to consider better alternatives if it's not big pharma approved.

For the record I tried fasting for 2 weeks and it didn't do anything for me (I don't have dimorphism though). However we need scientific studies to either prove or disprove the benefits of fasting so we don't have to debate on just opinions but facts.

Sticking an icepick up someone's nose, into their brain, and swirling it around in there used to be considered ethical as well.

I guess that depends whether you consider the amputation treatment for the disorder or a negative symptom of the disorder.

So these people feel like their leg is prosthetic in a way ? I'd still be tempted to keep that well-functional-free prosthetic. Then again, we are talking mental disorders of course.

BBC Radio Four has a programme "Inside the Ethics Committee". That takes real world cases and talks to people involved, and also a panel of ethicists. It's fascinating.

Recently they covered a case of a woman active in sports who suffered a knee injury, and several failed surgeries to repair the damage. That left her unable to participate in sport. She began to hate the leg and wanted an amputation. (Did she get it? I won't spoil the programme).

That particular episode is here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b061tfmp

The series' page is here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007xbtd

This kind of programming is excellent. It's something the BBC does very well. Other episodes cover equally tough cases, so be a bit careful. There are some episodes that ralk about suicide, for example.

This made me think that believing in a self is evolutionarily advantageous, but perhaps illusory. Those who don't associate their body and life as their "own" in some metaphysical sense will be substantially more prone to dying before reproducing.

How is someone who believes in self observationally distinguishable from one that doesn't? How does not believing in self prohibit certain actions?

How is someone who believes in private cloud, with zero remote management, observationally distinguishable from one that is OK using 100% public cloud? The answer is related to how they establish trust within their organization and themselves based on their use cases.

Some Tibetan Buddhist monks practice a type of mindfulness that consists of imagining bits and pieces of their bodies are being slowly dissolved or devoured, until nothing is left. They trust their 'souls' are actually a part of a higher consciousness that they seek to become aware of through their actions, and death. These monks definitely prohibit certain actions to attain their intent. Drugs, sexual desire, right thinking, right action, right mindfulness, etc. You can totally tell the difference from them and someone who isn't considered (at least by Buddhists) to be enlightened.

Except that someone can purport to disbelieve in self while doing all the things they prohibit :-p

Plus, whatever animals you don't think believe in self.

so many comments are downvoted.Rare thing on hn.

Everything that defines the self such as experiences, thoughts, and even our physical appearance is ephemeral and intangible. There is no particular thing to hold on to. It's all in a state of flux.

That may seem obvious, but to conceptual thinkers like myself, experiencing non-duality (no-self) and "Thusness" (as Alan Watts calls it) is difficult. It's why I designed subliminal posters for meditating: http://zission.com

Here is a specific poster for nonduality http://zission.com/product/words-inside-outside/

The text on the poster is unreadable, at least on my Galaxy S4.

The words are almost transparent for a reason. When the words are hard to read, the conscious mind becomes preoccupied with the image and the message imprints directly to the unconscious. It's a technique known as Critical Factor Bypass.

EDIT: This comment is becoming transparent too. Your conscious mind will ignore them because they are hard to read, but your subconscious mind is about to make a choice... about deepening your meditation... and feeling a growing sense of confidence... about buying my posters...

[citation needed], preferably in a format both my conscious and unconscious mind can parse.

Critical Factor Bypass is a well known technique in hypnotherapy, and I could provide tons of links. That said, it's an experimental project and has been extremely beneficial for me. I thought I'd share.

> I could provide tons of links

Please do!

> That said, it's an experimental project and it's been beneficial for me. I thought I'd share :)

That's cool, but when you make vague claims that sound kind of like pseudo-science, you should go ahead and provide citations and links and stuff, otherwise people think you're a nutter.

Western Journal of Medicine Oct. 2001: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1071579/

Hypnotic trance—A deeply relaxed and focused state with increased suggestibility and suspension of critical faculties.

The same article then goes on to say meditation and visualization techniques are used to induce trance. Zission combines both: http://zission.com

"A ton of links" is not one. Just saying.

This screams pseudoscience all over the place.

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