QUOTE
"if once down the dark path you go, forever will it dominate your destiny."
Remember Anakin was saved from his Sith alter ego in the end.
Personally, and this comes from my own personal life experience (however short it may be compared to others), to truely develope into a noble person one must decent down a path on the darkside, though not the same darkside as in stars wars. What I mean is a path of self discovery through conflict and resolution. Remember in the Empire Strikes in the cave where Yoda told Luke he'd only see what he brought with him. He took his lightsaber and in the cave he found Vader. They dueled and Luke decapitated Vader and his face mask exploded revealing a reflection of Luke himself, his own inner conflict. Later in Return of the Jedi Luke, as a would be Jedi knight, faced down Palpatine. The resolution to Luke's conflict was when he refused to give into his feelings of anger and strike down his father. He had developed from the whiny little boy in the first (the 70's first movie) to a being with the confidence and ability to over come true evil and remain noble in the face of it.
Ok smarmy Star Wars philosophy aside; sometimes we do things for ourselves and those we love that end up hurting others when meant no harm to be done. We think we are doing right but simply lack the experience to know better (never been guilty of that gosh). Sometimes we do things to intentionally hurt people. Face it, it is within our nature. We may regret it later, maybe not. This is the conflict of life which I think really is a part of growing up altogether. Really if you take away our intellectual ability to negatiate into higher levels of maturity we're nothing but a bunch of childish, mean, spiteful and cruel creatures capable of love only as long as it suites our own ego. Most people take a life time figure this stuff out and the learning never ends. Where we really though is in hine sight of our experiences. Being able to look back and say "ah now I understand" is the key. If you cannot do this or empathize with others, either through their own suffering or the suffering you caused them, then you do have a psychopathic personallity.
QUOTE
It's pure speculation of course. But I mean, I can trigger a fairly strong dopamine spike (nothing narcotic grade, but noticable and instant), however, I'm still at a loss as to how to trigger a serotonin drop. Being able to do something one thing with your brain doesn't imply you're fully developed, and so a need to further classify sublevels of development within that center might have been seen as beneficial when the scheme was thought out in the first place (which was when exactly? Where does this information come from? I've never seen it written down in the old books i've read... not that being new means it's invalid, of course.)
Which is exactly why I stress "the power of the darkside". If one spends their entire life being pius it will be harder for them to relate and to and forgive those who live less than pius lives. As for developing mental powers I think the darkside is that of temptation, lust, greed, hate, anger and despair. Yet even then I think one can develope into a great individual. Not all do this. Indeed most people retain behaviors that are less than civil, but that is also just a part of being human I think.
This post has been edited by Acid09: Jun 20 2007, 05:41 PM