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Originally Posted by Fuzz
But don't the papers that describe manufactured memories from trauma give you some pause in accepting these stories?
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Not at all. Manufactured memories are always a concern, but a trained psychologist will sniff those out quickly. There are plenty of tools and markers that make manufactured memories raise red flags. This is why methods are extremely important to review and observe during the process, and make sure appropriate rigor is maintained in that regard.
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The psychological analysis is always going to be limited to analyzing what the patient can present, and we know the mind is incredibly unreliable.
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Disagree on this. The problem with many of these articles is making the assumption that the people are damaged in some way, and as a result their minds unreliable. Those assumptions are part of the problem. The reality is that many of these people are not damaged, they are high functioning individuals with perfectly functioning brains and intact mental faculties. I would also say that the mind is not incredibly unreliable. If it were, we wouldn't trust it to do anything and we would be slaves to computers... which we program to emulate out thought and decision processes. Unless there is some type of cognitive impairment, which is not evident in many of the publications, you have to accept that this is an event that happened.
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So using any of it as evidence of their claims tend to not be very useful in steering towards fact. Maybe they are interesting as a curiosity, but I have trouble assigning much scientific value to them.
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Everything we do is brain and memory based. If our brains and minds are so faulty then everything we do and propose is faulty. Every concept we propose and mull over would then be faulty. Every single cognitive function would then be brought into question and nothing that science does would have value or meaning. If the study of behavior and brain function has no value, then pretty much everything we do with that bushel of neurons is useless and has no value.