Doctor Madeline Frost

[eschatonic]

This is actually the distinction in my mind. Chaz is a beta because he controls the anomaly. Hafs is (currently) a gamma, because she doesn't. Frost would still be dangerous as a beta. She'd still have to be locked up. She'd be in control, but I very much doubt she would use it in a way other humans would find ethical or acceptable. Or, you know, non-lethal.

Are you arguing that her becoming beta would do anything more than give her more scope than she currently has?

Do you think she needs to be locked up now? Because she seems to be doing a great deal of good.

I don't think she needs to be locked up now. I think she would be dangerous because she is such a ... well, very strange person. A lot of her behavior resembles Aspergers type symptoms, but autism-spectrum issues are not acquired. We don't know much about her past except that it was unpleasant and probably involved some trauma. If one wanted to draw spooky conclusions on minimal evidence, she did walk away from the car crash that killed her abusive/mentally ill parents.

I think she would be dangerous because she doesn't like to be bothered, and she doesn't like stupidity, and she doesn't like things that are out of place or irrational or in other ways feel wrong to her autistic-like sensibilities. And I think she is involved with the ACTF and deals with brain cancers partly because she wants to do something about those things. Gammas and brain cancer both fall into the category of Things That Are Wrong. I think that becoming anomalous would widen her scope of Things That Are Wrong that she can help correct. And I think that although her intentions would not be to cause anyone any pain, other humans would still not appreciate her actions.

[DavidG]

Though the implication that she'd decided that the Gun was too dangerous to live is reading a lot into that all, I think.

Agreed, not at all they way I read it.

[DavidG]

This part could easily be read as "Frost tries to talk Melissa into putting the Gun down," no ulterior motives required. She was willing to use the scalpel (to defend herself/put the killer down) if she had to, but when there was no need, she put it away. Her words had a different effect than she'd intended, because Frost doesn't quite see the world like others do.

I'm not certain the words had a different result than she was aiming for, there are a range of possible results that would be acceptable -- anything that doesn't end with anyone other than Melissa dead. If Melissa isn't dead either then that's a triple word score. Frost found herself in a situation where she needed to stop Melissa, so normal rules don't apply. That's potentially the reason for her relaxation and curiousity, just for once she's fully entitled to push a living human's button and see what happens.

Injuries to the decedent were insufficient to cause instantaneous death. However, they were exacerbated by a bleed into the pleural cavity caused when this physician's attempt to relieve pressure on the cardiopulmonary system lacerated the decedent's subclavian artery. This bleed is the immediate cause of death.

It is probable that a competent medical intervention could have saved the victim's life.

--Madeline Frost, M.D.

I seriously doubt that Frost is capable of lying in relation to her professional life, that's inconsistent with everything we know about her.

[DavidG]

Being a Beta just means she's not forced to behave any particular way.  She's still a very scary person.

Personally I don't find Frost at all scary, being Beta wouldn't change that

I think I was conflating Frost's analysis of Melinda's gammability (idea of a bullet, point and click, need line of sight) with some of the subsequent board discussion over what other things were possible with the power, given a modicum of imagination.  Even the possibility of substituting a gun-shape for a gun (or a Gun) makes dealing with it a lot trickier.  (Me, I'm imagining the typical forefinger-and-thumb "bang bang" gesture.  Melinda's conceptualization of the Gun as separate from her may not let that work, though.)

Ultimately Melinda's mythology is similar to, but less dangerous than Bloody Larry Hakes*, and he's been successfully locked up in Idlewild for years.

*Both line of sight, and Melinda's mechanism is arguably more assuredly lethal, but Melinda needed something to set her off, while Bloody Larry is just bloody minded.

[jimsmyth]

Injuries to the decedent were insufficient to cause instantaneous death. However, they were exacerbated by a bleed into the pleural cavity caused when this physician's attempt to relieve pressure on the cardiopulmonary system lacerated the decedent's subclavian artery. This bleed is the immediate cause of death.

It is probable that a competent medical intervention could have saved the victim's life.

--Madeline Frost, M.D.

I seriously doubt that Frost is capable of lying in relation to her professional life, that's inconsistent with everything we know about her.

Nothing in the report specifies that the results were accidental.

What sort of lying would you see there were the results deliberate?

[Korvar]

Here's another, inspired by that very episode:



It is probable that a competent medical intervention could have saved the victim's life.

--Madeline Frost, M.D.

[tylik]

Personally I don't find Frost at all scary, being Beta wouldn't change that

As a reader, I'm a Frost fan.

In person... well, I really don't know. I don't think she'd freak me out, but I could be totally wrong.

[tylik]

Possibly biased by my own preference if I were in the position of losing myself like that. {...] It makes sense to me that Frost wants to live her life under her own terms and if it came to a situation where she was losing that control, she would want to end her life under her own terms. That's my take on her, anyway.

Same here, but that could be my own bias, which is the same as yours (and PTerry's). If I'm not me any more, I don't want to hang around. (Luckily, there is absolutely no family history of Alzheimers or other dementia, and many of my relatives lived into their 90s, one to 106. Physically, they'd deteriorated fairly badly, but were still mentally sharp.

So what does it mean to not be you anymore?

Let me be up front about this question being influenced by my being rather steeped in Buddhist philosophy at the moment, which spends a fair bit of time on the idea that there isn't an absolute, separate or persistent self. I'm not the person I was thirty years ago. I'm not the person I was yesterday. And I don't think it's just a matter of addition of time or experience - I have changed. Heck, maybe nine year old me wouldn't think much of me now. And maybe it would be her privilege to feel that way! (I try not to tie my future selves up in knots, perhaps past selves deserve similar courtesy?)

There is a cultural expectation that there is some kind of core, eternal "self" - but is that itself anything other than a religious perspective, or general expectation?

When I was most incapacitated with the spine injury, I thought a lot about what would make life not worth living any more. (My thoughts about suicide are fairly involved, but I am generally in favor of one's right to die, if with some caveats. And I'm not at all sure I have the moral authority to be pushing those caveats.) Not a question I entirely resolved, or that, I think, is resolvable for me short of by dying... but for myself, I realized that the reduced cognitive capacity did not render my life bereft of meaning. Even though it was painful and embarrassing. (And then there was the more overt physical pain, but let's not go there.) Generally I was pretty happy to let future me work that one out. And so far, so good.* If I stop "being me", well, then who would be making that decision? Or do I figure that at some point in there, I'm no longer a sentient being? Or perhaps trust my own ability to recognize when I'm on the verge of not being a sentient being? (Which is at least skirting the edge of paradox...)

Again, I'm not questioning that each person should get to make their own choice... I'm just kind of confused by some of the terminology used to describe it.

* Actually, I'm pretty darned pleased with my life at present.

[CJ]

Tylik, that's one of the questions that I always keep coming back to - that question about the self.

In some senses, sure, I'm not the person I was yesterday. But the changes are relatively minor and the progression from my self of yesterday and my self of today is a natural one. So I'll put these kind of changes of self into the label of still being "me" as a working definition.

My grandmother died of Alzheimer's. For the last five years of her life, she recognized no one and remembered nothing. Not her own name, not names of loved ones. Not even if she had eaten five minutes ago. When she died, it was more of a sense of closure, because the Grandma who made wonderful fudge and knitted mittens had been gone for a long time. I'll put the state she was in in those last years as a loss of self, again for the purposes of a working definition.

Then there's the gray areas in between those two points. The cases where illness or injury or trauma change a person dramatically, but the person still has memory and will and self-control, that may cause the person to not be the same "me", but they still have a sense of self. A different "me". What Chaz called (calls? I haven't seen him do this in a while) "the new normal". That's not the same not being "me" as where my grandmother went. Or what happens to a gamma.

I don't know. I'm mentally poking around something here that has no handy definitions.

[MadGastronomer]

So what does it mean to not be you anymore?

I interpret it as a matter of identity -- of the qualities one actively claims as being a part of oneself -- rather than of any essential or persistent personality.

[tylik]

It's interesting that Alzheimer's involves pretty widespread cognitive breakdown, even though the memory related symptoms get the most press. That's some of what I was thinking of when writing about verging on no longer being a sentient being. I don't expect future me to be have more than the most tenuous lineage back to current me, but there is a world of difference between someone different and that kind of loss of personhood.

Identity is an interesting one. I used to put a lot of thought into my identity. And yet, a lot of things that have seemed central have turned out to be a lot less persistent than I'd thought. The cognitive effects during the spine thing were perhaps the most scary, because I valued my own mind and identified myself with it so much. Well, and the memory because it was so much like not living in my own head anymore. I am grateful that situation has improved... but it no longer is exactly a fixed point in my life. I've also had other people be rather attached to aspects of my identity - from the people who were upset as I became less active in the pagan community, to the one who feared I was working up to suicide when I left my husband (and house) gave away most of my possessions, returned to academia, moved to the housebarge, and then eventually to Cleveland. (Really, none of this seems particularly inconsistent to me. Especially for people who've known me for more than twenty years!) Then you have the people who are appalled that my hair is currently not hip length. Or the ones who have trouble with me not being an overpaid software professional. Or that I'm currently celibate, after all my years of cheerful lightskirted polyamory. (I don't pretend that my current state is somehow more real or more permanent, it's just what I'm doing now.)

Eh. I guess you could say that everything there stated are superficialities... but I kind of feel like you could keep peeling away layers, and it's likely that there isn't a core. An explicit part of my practice these days is letting go of my own ideas about who I am - not trying to tie myself up in those ideas, kind of. And yet, not to natter on much about the experience itself in a lot of ways it's not really that different than carrying around the conception of self. (Just less work and worry. Selves are apparently heavy, and high maintenance. At least for me. And it's not like I lack work.)

[eschatonic]

Then there's the gray areas in between those two points. The cases where illness or injury or trauma change a person dramatically, but the person still has memory and will and self-control, that may cause the person to not be the same "me", but they still have a sense of self. A different "me". What Chaz called (calls? I haven't seen him do this in a while) "the new normal". That's not the same not being "me" as where my grandmother went. Or what happens to a gamma.

For a lot of people, including Chaz, recovery from trauma (from a discrete traumatic event, not an ongoing traumatic problem like abuse) involves either integrating the event, and the person's reaction to it, into a coherent personality (usually the one they had before); and/or creating/accepting an understanding of how the person they were before changed or was changed into the person they had to become in order to survive/live with what happened to them.

The fact that people often need years to recover from things like rape or assault suggests how extremely difficult this is. People who can't do it at all tend to wind up with long-term, visible mental problems. See your local crazy homeless Vietnam vet. Many of them came back unable (and unable to get any help) to connect the soldier who had seen and perhaps done terrible violence with the untroubled kid they had been before they were drafted.

[Clarentine]

So what does it mean to not be you anymore?

My definition involves awareness of who you were and who you are now.  So, to me, losing yourself means losing the connection to your past, your history, your memories.  That's what makes things like Alzheimer's so frightening to me--from what I understand of the disorder, a sufferer basically is cut more and more adrift. 

[DavidG]

Injuries to the decedent were insufficient to cause instantaneous death. However, they were exacerbated by a bleed into the pleural cavity caused when this physician's attempt to relieve pressure on the cardiopulmonary system lacerated the decedent's subclavian artery. This bleed is the immediate cause of death.

It is probable that a competent medical intervention could have saved the victim's life.

--Madeline Frost, M.D.

I seriously doubt that Frost is capable of lying in relation to her professional life, that's inconsistent with everything we know about her.

Nothing in the report specifies that the results were accidental.

What sort of lying would you see there were the results deliberate?

Frost is very precise with her words. If the result was deliberate, then a competent medical intervention did not save the patient's life, with 100% probability.

[DavidG]

WRT Alzheimer's and loss of self and looking at the situation in general - the person others knew may be 'gone', the person the patient used to be may be 'gone', but is the situation intolerable for the person the patient now is?

I'm on record as saying I don't want a cure for my full range of disability. The dyspraxia comes too close to who I am, the hypermobility and chronic pain may be too closely linked to that to cure separately, certainly nothing I'd push ahead with without an understanding of the genetics specific to me and my disabilities. I'm also on record as hating the fact pain and painkillers mess with my sense of 'me', I know my thought processes should be more fluent than they are. So all of that says the idea of Alzheimers changing my sense of 'me' should terrify me, and it does, but what I can't say is if a me with Alzheimers would find the situation intolerable, and if I can't say that, then can I make decisions for that person?