Science, Technology & Health: October 2008 Archives

Even though the vast majority of Christians are as willing as the general population to make use of every available medical treatment when they have a physical malady, it seems that some Christians are unwilling to accept that mental health problems are as real as physical health problems.

In a study of Christian church members who approached their church for help with a personal or family member's diagnosed mental illness, researchers found that more than 32 percent were told by their pastor that they or their loved one did not really have a mental illness.

The problem was solely spiritual in nature, they were told.

Here's the thing: Other studies have found that clergy, and not psychologists or other mental health experts, are the most common source of help sought in times of psychological distress.

"The results are troubling because it suggests individuals in the local church are either denying or dismissing a somewhat high percentage of mental health diagnosis," said study leader Matthew Stanford, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Baylor University in Texas. "Those whose mental illness is dismissed by clergy are not only being told they don't have a mental illness, they are also being told they need to stop taking their medication. That can be a very dangerous thing."

Being a Christian, I think I can identify the two obstacles that hinder Christians from properly understanding mental illness.

First, it may appear that acknowledging the reality of a mental illness undermines the Christian doctrine of sin. If sin is caused by illness, then how can God hold anyone accountable for anything? Yes, it's a slippery slope from (A) "that person has schizophrenia and is not responsible for his actions" to (B) "that person is a victim of society's injustice and is not responsible for his actions". But the fact that there's a risk of a slippery slope to (B) doesn't negate the truth behind (A).

Just as God will not condemn a person for missing church the day after they're injured in a car wreck or have a baby, God will not condemn a person for sins of omission or commission that are out of their control due to mental illness or disability. God's standard for each of us is that we honor him according to how he has enabled us.

Read the parable of the talents ("talents" are units of gold). The man who invested two talents and earned two more got the same reward as the man who invested five talents and earned five more. The man who had one talent wasn't condemned because he earned too little, but because he failed to use the talent he had at all. God doesn't expect more from us than he enables us to do. In the parable, God gave each man the talents he had, and God wasn't disappointed when the man to whom he gave two talents "only" earned two more.

I hope the connection I'm making is clear between the talents in the parable and the level of physical and mental health that God blesses a person with. The point is that mental illness or disability do not negate a person's responsibility to repent of their sin and accept Christ's payment to the degree they are able to do so, but that degree may be less than what a person in full health is capable of.

Second, while secular humanists are too extreme in their belief that man is purely material and mechanical, Christians have a tendency to view man as purely spiritual. It's true that men have spirits that stand outside the bounds of the natural physical world. For now, though, these spirits are bound to our physical bodies and must suffer the limitations of our mortal lives.

When Jesus was tortured and crucified he didn't dismiss the pain as merely a physical irritation that his spirit could ignore. No, he cried out in agony! And not just physical agony, but mental agony as well.

Matthew 27:46: About the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?"—which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

Has there ever been a deeper pain than that Jesus suffered when God turned his back on him for the sake of our sin? Not even the nails in his hands and feet compared to it. Jesus is God, but when he bound himself to a mortal body he experienced all the pain and suffering that goes along with the human experience -- physical and mental.

Christians who believe that mental illnesses or disabilities are merely matters of the will that can be overcome by the strength of our spirits have a fundamental misunderstanding of our dual nature. Our spirits and our bodies are not independent (as the Buddhists teach) but are intimately linked until they are finally separated at death. Some mental illness is the result of physical problems in physical brains, and can be no more overcome by willpower or therapy than can be diabetes.

When therapy is the best possible treatment for a mental illness, then I've got no doubt that such therapy should be Biblical in nature, but it should also be informed by medical expertise. When drugs are required to treat a physical problem in the brain, then they should not be rejected any more than a diabetic would reject insulin.

It's unnerving to accept that physical changes in our brains can affect our mental processes, but they can. Does this undermine the concept of free will? No, but it qualifies our free will. A man with a broken leg may want to run a marathon, but his failure to do so isn't the result of a lack of willpower. His free will may desire to, but his body simply cannot. A man with schizophrenia, or mania, or depression may want to act normally, but his brain will not cooperate.

Therapy is an important part of treatment for these diseases, but therapy alone will often not mitigate their symptoms enough to allow the normal exercise of free will. A man with diabetes receives therapy and instruction on how to manage his disease, what he should eat, and what sorts of activities he needs to limit, but even with the best therapy and willpower a diabetic may require insulin injections. A man with depression may require drugs to enable his body/brain to act on the instructions he is given in therapy and that his free will wants to carry out.

As with many issues, consideration of mental health issues requires a great deal of discernment on the part of Christians. It's true that many people are simply looking for ways to escape responsibility for their decisions and are quick to claim that some force outside of their control compelled them to act badly. Sometimes that's true and sometimes it's not, but Christians who dismiss all such claims will end up ignoring some of the most hurting people in the world who are in desperate need of God's love.

In Heaven there will be no mental illness just as there is no physical illness. As Christians we live with an expectation for that future, but we haven't reached it yet. Christians need to properly understand the nature of mental illness and mental disability if we hope to share God's love with people who are suffering.

It's fascinating to read Richard Dooling's account of how artificial intelligence destroyed the financial market. It looks like the AI guys on Wall Street succumbed to the same hubris that most academic researchers fall prey to.

The Wall Street geeks, the quantitative analysts (“quants”) and masters of “algo trading” probably felt the same irresistible lure of “illimitable power” when they discovered “evolutionary algorithms” that allowed them to create vast empires of wealth by deriving the dependence structures of portfolio credit derivatives.

What does that mean? You’ll never know.

Actually, I do know! I had a job offer to work on financial AI but decided against it because I didn't want to move to New York. I bet I could have made a lot more money, but hey, I could have just lost it all too! With the connectedness of it all, I might be able to get into this from St. Louis these day.

But anyway, who would have guessed that Skynet would come from Wall Street and not the Pentagon?

More discussion as I learn more.

The debate last night was pretty boring, but Barack Obama had one of his dumbest moments ever. When asked if health care is a right, responsibility, or privilege, Obama answered "it's a right". Let's look at all the ways that's stupid.

First, what level if health care is required by Obama's "right"? Top-of-the-line Western medicine? Such health care is a right for whom? Just Americans? Or everyone in the world? Are we violating the rights of Chinese peasants by not invading China and providing Western style health care? Or would Obama do this if he thought he could?

Second, setting aside what Obama thinks would be nice in an ideal world, where in the Constitution is this right to health care established? He's running for President, not philosopher-in-chief, so I assume when he says "right" he means it within the American Constitutional framework and not any other moral or legal construction. So, where's the health care clause of the Constitution? Obama is supposedly a Constitutional scholar, so maybe he can enlighten me. When did the people and the states write health care into our national compact?

Third, think about what it would mean for health care to be a right. When you consider the ramifications even an inch beneath the surface you run into all sorts of problems.

Every right one person has imposes an obligation on someone else:

• Right: Free speech. Obligation: We have to let you talk, even when you stay stupid or dangerous things.
• Right: Free religion. Obligation: We have to let you go to any church you want, or none at all, even if we think you're corrupting our country.
• Right: Free assembly. Obligation: We have to let you meet with your dumb friends.
• Right: Due process. Obligation: We have to give you a trial, even when it's clear that you're guilty.
• Right: Jury trial. Obligation: We have to take time out of our lives to serve on juries.

You get the point. With the exception of the right to trial-by-jury, I think all the rights specified in the Constitution create negative obligations on the rest of society. Your right obligates me and the government to not do anything to impede it. In contrast, positive obligations require me not just to leave you alone, but to actually do something for your benefit.

So, back to health care. Does Obama mean that we have a right to buy whatever health care we can afford, without interference from the government? Doubtful. What he really means is that people (only Americans? Africans? who?) have a "right" to have other people pay for their health care. Obama's health care right creates a whole host of obligations on the rest of us, not merely to refrain from interference with the right, but to act positively to enable it.

• Taxpayers will be obligated to pay for others' health care under threat of force
• Doctors will be obligated to provide health care at the government's direction
• Insurance companies will be obligated to cover or not cover people or ailments at the government's direction
• Employers will be obligated to pay for health care of whatever kind mandated by the government

The issue of health care really cuts to the core of the difference between leftists and conservatives.

Conservatives believe that "rights" express our fundamental freedoms that cannot be taken away by anyone. The only obligations created by conservative "rights" are negative obligations that require you to stay out of my business.

Leftists believe that "rights" express obligations that the government can impose on us by force. Leftist "rights" create obligations on us to spend our time, money, and effort on other people regardless of our own desires. That's not freedom, that's slavery.

A few years ago I wrote extensively about the ChatNannies hoax, and it looks like journalists are being a bit too credulous again if they're thinking that any software is yet close to passing a Turing test.

In the Turing test a machine seeks to fool judges into believing that it could be human. The test is performed by conducting a text-based conversation on any subject. If the computer's responses are indistinguishable from those of a human, it has passed the Turing test and can be said to be "thinking".

No machine has yet passed the test devised by Turing, who helped to crack German military codes during the Second World War. But at 9am next Sunday, six computer programs - "artificial conversational entities" - will answer questions posed by human volunteers at the University of Reading in a bid to become the first recognised "thinking" machine. If any program succeeds, it is likely to be hailed as the most significant breakthrough in artificial intelligence since the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. It could also raise profound questions about whether a computer has the potential to be "conscious" - and if humans should have the 'right' to switch it off.

But I can guarantee you that none of the programs mentioned in the article will even come close to passing. The two sample conversations are indicative. If you can't tell which is the computer... maybe you aren't human yourself.

Can you tell human from machine?

One of these conversations is between Professor Kevin Warwick (KW) and a human; the other between Warwick and a computer. Can you tell which is which?

Conversation one:

Subject: Hello. My name is Nick and I am a human.

KW: Are you happy being a human?

Subject: Yes, I am. Are you? Good. Then we are both happy.

KW: Yes, I am. Are you happy with your life at present?

Subject: Parts of it. I hate my job, but most people do, right?

KW: I'm OK with mine. What is your job?

Subject: I work as an 'online internet advertising monitor', which is fancy language for electronic filing. What do you do?

KW: I interrogate humans and machines.

Subject: Which ones do you prefer, humans or machines?

KW: Which do you prefer?

Subject: Hmm. Depends on for what purpose you mean.

KW: To go to a restaurant, for example?

Subject: Then I would much prefer going with a human.

Conversation two:

Subject: Hello, my name is Mike and I am a man.

KW: Are you happy being a human?

Subject: Judge, I'm a guy.

KW: Does that worry you?

Subject: Don't worry, we'll work everything through.

KW: Do you have worries then?

Subject: Let's move on from that basis.

KW: Why?

Subject: Why? I like this subject.

KW: What is the subject, do you think?

Subject: What is the subject I wonder if I think? I know that it's good to thonk about. Think deeplt about mysterious subjects.

KW: What mysterious subjects?

Subject: Think deeply about mysterious dubjects.

KW: What's a dubject?

We're a long way from a conversational artificial intelligence, but human-like conversations are probably one of the things that AI is least suited for. The advantages that AI has over human intelligence are:

• much larger working memory
• perfect and immediate recall
• much faster number-crunching
• flawless rule-following (the rules may be flawed, but they'll be followed perfectly)

None of these advantages really contribute to conversation, but they do let AI perform well in many other domains. Asking a computer to carry on a conversation like trying to build a house with a lathe. The problem isn't that you need a better lathe, it's that you're using the wrong tool.