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Originally Posted by Chula Vista
The human mind has evolved to a point beyond mathematical laws IMO. It's capable of passion that can drive a person to do things that are beyond any sense of comprehension or logic.
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How do you evolve beyond math? Evolution is governed by naturalistic laws. To claim that something can "evolve beyond mathematical laws", you have to not only accept the existence of magic (previously defined by me as any governing force that defies natural laws as they exist in reality regardless if those laws contradict our current models), but that it enters the process at some point.
And seemingly irrational acts based on emotion are not illogical. Say you hear a stick crack in the middle of woods which you know full well are free from large predators, and which are not known for harboring criminal activity. It would be logical to assume that it was just a deer, or a hiker, but ancient instinct, from a time before the existance of human-created "safe zones" where they did not have to worry about predators, kicks in and you may very well become startled.
There is almost certainly no danger, but if your ancestors hadn't developed instincts to treat every noise in the woods as a possible threat, then they would likely have been eaten by considerably more bears. Emotions and instincts are not necessarily logical in every specific situation, but their development was still based logic.
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There was a story years back of a woman who roasted her young child to death in her oven because she was convinced he had the devil in him.
Sorry, but stuff like that is never going to be explained by an equation. It's not magic. It's the human brain gone haywire.
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Sounds like an
Argument from Incredulity, which is a logical fallacy basically meaning that since you can't imagine how something could be so, then it must not be so. Human emotions are complex to such an extent that the human mind is clearly incapable of fully understanding them, therefore, your own subjective analysis of them should be treated as suspect when attempting to do so.
People aren't clones. Genes are "randomized" to a certain extent in order to prevent genetic stagnation in a species. Since this process is not overseen by an infallible computer, undesirable deformities, both physical and mental, are bound to occur.
From what you describe, this woman was actually acting according to a parent's basic instinct to protect their child: she saw a threat (i.e. demonic possession) and acted to neutralize that threat. Her dysfunctional premise and response would probably still be mathematically predictable if your equation accounted for her mental aberration, and her mental illness (be it genetic and/or developmental) would also be predictable.