Aswad
Posts: 9374
Joined: 4/4/2007
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quote:
ORIGINAL: CitizenCane
Just because the body learns a response doesn't mean that any more or less conscious aspect of the mind is in the same place.
Of course not. Stimulus-response. You need to build the desired response, not a related one.
If you want a complex mental response, like my example about "our song", you need an appropriate conditioning for that.
quote:
A woman may get wet while being raped, this doesn't mean she's enjoying it.
Entirely true. But that may well be an entirely autonomous response.
AFAIK, there have been instances of people being conditioned to associate positive things with such an assault; if anyone has a good source, that would be an interesting testament to the efficacy of the human brain in doing stimulus-response pairing. Mine aren't suitable for this forum.
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One of the great complications of trauma is that physiological 'pleasure' can become associated with decidedly unpleasurable circumstances.
Correct. There's the surface trauma associated with the coupling of physical touch and arousal with the emotional response to assault, and the deeper trauma associated with the coupling to the negative feedback given by society and the interactions with the dissonant internal responses.
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This can lead to a lot of complicated feelings- various kinds of self-hatred among them- that are anything but sexy.
Quite.
But it doesn't have to.
As I've said in the past, I know people who have been raped, and I know rape victims
And the two groups do not overlap.
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Conditioning people to positive pleasure responses can certainly be done, but some kind of desire to be conditioned ('desire' being a complex term) is pretty important.
Not really.
It's what negative reinforcement is all about at the earliest stages of raising a child, for instance.
And it's what happens all along when we develop a liking for something.
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The human psyche is pretty complex, and expecting simple pavlovian responses is optimistic, except on the same simple level of physiological reactions.
Actually, the complexity of the human psyche is overestimated.
Yes, there is a complex set of interactions, but the fundamental mechanisms are simple.
Anything stimulus-response pairing you could train into an animal is possible in a human.
Any potential pairing that is exclusive to humans is related to our special developments, which are dominated by simpler things like the addition of a 6th layer in the columns of the neocortex. This represents a repeating pattern of a simple algorithm which can yield complicated results.
You just need to find the "key" in order to get the more complex pairings down.
quote:
If the person being conditioned already has significan traumatic associations with any of the elements of the conditioning, don't expect straightforward results.
Traumatic associations should be deconditioned first, which can be complex, as any therapist will tell you. It can also be done, but may require strict control over external feedback sources in some cases, and isn't always possible without "untangling" parts of what identity the person has built on top of this trauma, which can be very difficult to deal with for both parties.
In short, I agree that trust and the desire to be conditioned is very helpful.
(What, we agree on something? That's a first, isn't it?  )
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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subs and Pavlov's dog - 
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