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Fresh account for obvious reasons. I wonder whether I "suffer" from this. It's not really suffering. I am very comfortable being a meatbag who hallucinates tha

Fresh account for obvious reasons. I wonder whether I "suffer" from this. It's not really suffering. I am very comfortable being a meatbag who hallucinates that they are thinking thoughts; I know that none of it is really real in the way that physical artifacts are real. Now I have a new and better explanation for why I have visual hallucinations sometimes, particularly halos and fuzz. For anybody else: Don't worry. You aren't controlled by any one thing. You're a colony of trillions of cells, all working together to produce a mutually-beneficial outcome. Edit: Do I have free will? I don't think that the question makes sense. I have free will in the same way that my subatomic particles have free will [0]. I have the ability to choose and to choose not to choose, but none of that entails free will [1]. I can even say that I have free will, but that does not mean that I have free will [2]. I think that, even if free will is a thing, maybe I am not a thing which can have free will because maybe I am not a thing at all. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem [1] https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec18.html https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec18.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

mfoy_ 8y ago
Interesting, I really appreciate you sharing your perspective. I mean no judgement by this, so I put a certain word in scare-quotes, but would you say that perhaps everyone who doesn't have DP/DR is actually more "delusional"?
- DaiHafVaho 8y ago
  I'm not sure. It's possible that I came to my conclusions purely through philosophical reasoning, and that I am suffering the sort of defect that famously consumed Cantor or Gödel or Pirsig. It's easy to say, "I'm not crazy! You're the one who's crazy!" Or perhaps there is a repressed childhood of abuse somewhere in the memories, but who can tell whether repressed memories are a real thing, or whether memories are trustworthy in general. At the same time, though, people delude themselves all the time. It's a cultural thing; I think that memetics is the right field of study for figuring out how that works. And once one starts to realize how delusional their cultural beliefs are, one cannot help but start examining themselves. Upon learning about p-zombies, for example, I realized that I must be a p-zombie, because I had no evidence to the alternative and no way to refute the argument.
  - trevyn 8y ago
    Yes! IMO, it starts making more sense when you start to see why and how delusional cultural beliefs are actually evolutionarily adaptive for the species, and you can start looking for the neurological structures of belief and consciousness. Never before in history has philosophy of mind been supported by detailed neural imaging technologies and computational neural simulacra. I’ve been digging Ecclesiastes lately, except the “nothing makes sense” refrain transforms to “actually, with understanding of modern neuroscience and AI, everything makes perfect sense.” https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes+1&version=CEV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes+1&... (And, of course, “God” translates to “the machine that is the universe” and/or “the character in this fairytale that humans told each other well before the Enlightenment.”)
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
    "I can't refute it" does not imply "therefore it must be true". Neither does "I have no evidence against it".
    - DaiHafVaho 8y ago
      Of course. A proof is that which convinces; I was convinced, but that doesn't mean that you have to be convinced. I was presented with evidence which I can't share with anybody: my experiences.
- FakeComments 8y ago
  One thing to remember about psychological illnesses is that most are defined by hampering a “normal life”, but are normal behaviors taken to an extreme level. I think there’s a lot of “mentally ill” people who understand some aspect of the world better than the average person, but who are distressed by not sharing a common myth or who lack the shared culture to meaningfully share their experience. Unfortunately, that inability to integrate leads to ongoing damage, isolation, and co-morbid conditions. This is where I put on my speculation hat, but — I think certain disorders are caused by the inability to resolve the tension caused by living a lie to maintain a social myth, inability to integrate socially taboo knowledge into a persona acceptable to others and being unwilling to lie, or being unable to articulate an insight and subsequently being pushed out of social interactions for being incoherent.
  - jabbadabbadooba 8y ago
    >> This is where I put on my speculation hat, but — I think certain disorders are caused by the inability to resolve the tension caused by living a lie to maintain a social myth, inability to integrate socially taboo knowledge into a persona acceptable to others and being unwilling to lie, or being unable to articulate an insight and subsequently being pushed out of social interactions for being incoherent. This hits close to home.
  - Consultant32452 8y ago
    One possible example of this phenomenon is called depressive realism, the hypothesis that depressed people more accurately interpret the world. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism
- IC4RUS 8y ago
  I think that's an interesting thought. I struggled with DP/DR for a couple years, and the alarming part was that I felt like I was just watching myself perform automatic actions without any need for conscious oversight (this is where my experience differed significantly from Bandersnatch - rather than feeling controlled by someone else, I was frightened by how I was just watching myself act. It's interesting to connect this to ideas of confabulation in neuroscience/psychology to that of DP/DR. There's evidence that we may actively confabulate stories to explain what we're doing, even if we don't actually know. This is explained a bit here: https://thesituationist.wordpress.com/2009/04/13/the-situation-of-confabulation/ https://thesituationist.wordpress.com/2009/04/13/the-situati.... Oliver Sack's writings explore the topic a bit too, where those with severe mental injury or impairment would create unrealistic stories to explain their bizarre actions. So, I wondered if part of the DP/DR involved losing the ability to confabulate and create a narrative regarding why I was acting the way that I was. And, part of my recovery was trying to recover that 'delusion.' Furthermore, the article 'Anxiety Changes Depersonalization and Derealization Symptoms in Vestibular Patients' has a couple relevant sections: 'It has been hypothesized that “depersonalization is a hard-wired vestigial response for dealing with extreme anxiety, combining a state of increased alertness with a profound inhibition of the emotional response system.” The proposed mechanism is that the medial prefrontal cortex inhibits the emotional processing of the amygdala and related structures in response to increased anxiety resulting in a dampening of sympathetic output and reduced emotional experiencing that leads to hypervigilance, attentional difficulties, and emptiness of the mind.' This provides evidence that DP/DR involves lessened emotional response. Later, the article states: 'The role of the limbic system and the amygdala in particular is very important, since affective memory connections to past experience could be an important factor in making new perceptions feel familiar and real' So, I wonder if DP/DR is partially caused by a lessened ability to create narrative/reasoning about control over one's actions (with the emotional hyporeactivity exacerbating the feeling of detachment from the environment). And, if you consider these often-faulty narratives to be a bit delusional, then maybe you could make that conclusion!
vanderZwan 8y ago
> hallucinates that they are thinking thoughts That particular phrasing is a bit turtles-all-the-way-down, though..
- vokep 8y ago
  But when you start thinking about how there isn't just something from nothing, but something from nothing that can see stuff...then its hard not to view things like turtles-all-the-way-down
  - vanderZwan 8y ago
    I think you missed my point: hallucinating implies thinking. So saying that we're hallucinating that we think is saying that we are not thinking but meta-thinking hallucinated thoughts.
    - vokep 8y ago
      Right! What I meant is that when you look at perception itself, of thoughts or anything else, you run into turtles all the way down, or up. Who or what actually thinks? I do? except I can't decide what I think entirely, even if I do, how do I know that I'm doing it. The core of it I think is that thoughts are no more "real" than hallucinations. The major difference between thoughts and hallucinations is that thoughts correlate with something real.
oarabbus_ 8y ago
>Now I have a new and better explanation for why I have visual hallucinations sometimes, particularly halos and fuzz. Which is what? These can have a physiological basis i.e. astigmatism i.e. it's actually really real despite your opinion that you're "hallucinating thoughts".
alexanderthe- 8y ago
I like to think of this view as jailbreaking your biological operating system. We are an aggregate of trillions of cells with one fundamental purpose, to propagate our DNA and ensure the survival of our species. Of course we grow into thinking that almost everything we do is under the influence of our own free will, but it is our DNA and the corresponding influence it has over us that dictates the propensity to choose one thing or another in the first place. Yuval Noah Harrari touches on this in his book, 'Sapiens'. In a sense, our DNA is a biological form of a general artificial intelligence, but distributed over billions of lives and over the spans of time. The collective progress of humanity being handed down generation by generation. With each generation, unique mutations in the collective DNA of humanity gives birth unique individuals with their own talents, interests, and potential to move our species forward. As a collective whole, we will either survive and evolve, or perish. Thinking about such things doesn't do much to make it more likely that your unique DNA will propagate... and so maybe by the reproductive success of these traits within humanity we are, as a species, quite comfortable being a meatbag who hallucinates that they are thinking thoughts without delving any deeper.
yummypaint 8y ago
I wonder to what extent holding scientifically accepted beliefs about free-will alters ones experience of this phenomenon. I could understand how it might be terrifying to people with judeo-christian beliefs, but what about someone who is already a secular neuroscientist? I wonder how many people may be experiencing this without being perturbed or feeling the need to seek medical help. Also, it isn't clear to me whether people with this condition are "missing" something, or if they are in some way perceiving their thought processes with greater fidelity than the rest of us. People have plenty of biological features that aren't necessary for survival (male nipples, tailbones, etc), could the illusion of free will be similar?
- foldr 8y ago
  > I wonder to what extent holding scientifically accepted beliefs about free-will There's no such thing. There's no scientific consensus regarding what free will is or whether we have it.

mfoy_ 8y ago

Interesting, I really appreciate you sharing your perspective. I mean no judgement by this, so I put a certain word in scare-quotes, but would you say that perhaps everyone who doesn't have DP/DR is actually more "delusional"?

DaiHafVaho 8y ago
I'm not sure. It's possible that I came to my conclusions purely through philosophical reasoning, and that I am suffering the sort of defect that famously consumed Cantor or Gödel or Pirsig. It's easy to say, "I'm not crazy! You're the one who's crazy!" Or perhaps there is a repressed childhood of abuse somewhere in the memories, but who can tell whether repressed memories are a real thing, or whether memories are trustworthy in general. At the same time, though, people delude themselves all the time. It's a cultural thing; I think that memetics is the right field of study for figuring out how that works. And once one starts to realize how delusional their cultural beliefs are, one cannot help but start examining themselves. Upon learning about p-zombies, for example, I realized that I must be a p-zombie, because I had no evidence to the alternative and no way to refute the argument.
- trevyn 8y ago
  Yes! IMO, it starts making more sense when you start to see why and how delusional cultural beliefs are actually evolutionarily adaptive for the species, and you can start looking for the neurological structures of belief and consciousness. Never before in history has philosophy of mind been supported by detailed neural imaging technologies and computational neural simulacra. I’ve been digging Ecclesiastes lately, except the “nothing makes sense” refrain transforms to “actually, with understanding of modern neuroscience and AI, everything makes perfect sense.” https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes+1&version=CEV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes+1&... (And, of course, “God” translates to “the machine that is the universe” and/or “the character in this fairytale that humans told each other well before the Enlightenment.”)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  "I can't refute it" does not imply "therefore it must be true". Neither does "I have no evidence against it".
  - DaiHafVaho 8y ago
    Of course. A proof is that which convinces; I was convinced, but that doesn't mean that you have to be convinced. I was presented with evidence which I can't share with anybody: my experiences.
FakeComments 8y ago
One thing to remember about psychological illnesses is that most are defined by hampering a “normal life”, but are normal behaviors taken to an extreme level. I think there’s a lot of “mentally ill” people who understand some aspect of the world better than the average person, but who are distressed by not sharing a common myth or who lack the shared culture to meaningfully share their experience. Unfortunately, that inability to integrate leads to ongoing damage, isolation, and co-morbid conditions. This is where I put on my speculation hat, but — I think certain disorders are caused by the inability to resolve the tension caused by living a lie to maintain a social myth, inability to integrate socially taboo knowledge into a persona acceptable to others and being unwilling to lie, or being unable to articulate an insight and subsequently being pushed out of social interactions for being incoherent.
- jabbadabbadooba 8y ago
  >> This is where I put on my speculation hat, but — I think certain disorders are caused by the inability to resolve the tension caused by living a lie to maintain a social myth, inability to integrate socially taboo knowledge into a persona acceptable to others and being unwilling to lie, or being unable to articulate an insight and subsequently being pushed out of social interactions for being incoherent. This hits close to home.
- Consultant32452 8y ago
  One possible example of this phenomenon is called depressive realism, the hypothesis that depressed people more accurately interpret the world. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism
IC4RUS 8y ago
I think that's an interesting thought. I struggled with DP/DR for a couple years, and the alarming part was that I felt like I was just watching myself perform automatic actions without any need for conscious oversight (this is where my experience differed significantly from Bandersnatch - rather than feeling controlled by someone else, I was frightened by how I was just watching myself act. It's interesting to connect this to ideas of confabulation in neuroscience/psychology to that of DP/DR. There's evidence that we may actively confabulate stories to explain what we're doing, even if we don't actually know. This is explained a bit here: https://thesituationist.wordpress.com/2009/04/13/the-situation-of-confabulation/ https://thesituationist.wordpress.com/2009/04/13/the-situati.... Oliver Sack's writings explore the topic a bit too, where those with severe mental injury or impairment would create unrealistic stories to explain their bizarre actions. So, I wondered if part of the DP/DR involved losing the ability to confabulate and create a narrative regarding why I was acting the way that I was. And, part of my recovery was trying to recover that 'delusion.' Furthermore, the article 'Anxiety Changes Depersonalization and Derealization Symptoms in Vestibular Patients' has a couple relevant sections: 'It has been hypothesized that “depersonalization is a hard-wired vestigial response for dealing with extreme anxiety, combining a state of increased alertness with a profound inhibition of the emotional response system.” The proposed mechanism is that the medial prefrontal cortex inhibits the emotional processing of the amygdala and related structures in response to increased anxiety resulting in a dampening of sympathetic output and reduced emotional experiencing that leads to hypervigilance, attentional difficulties, and emptiness of the mind.' This provides evidence that DP/DR involves lessened emotional response. Later, the article states: 'The role of the limbic system and the amygdala in particular is very important, since affective memory connections to past experience could be an important factor in making new perceptions feel familiar and real' So, I wonder if DP/DR is partially caused by a lessened ability to create narrative/reasoning about control over one's actions (with the emotional hyporeactivity exacerbating the feeling of detachment from the environment). And, if you consider these often-faulty narratives to be a bit delusional, then maybe you could make that conclusion!

vanderZwan 8y ago

> hallucinates that they are thinking thoughts That particular phrasing is a bit turtles-all-the-way-down, though..

vokep 8y ago
But when you start thinking about how there isn't just something from nothing, but something from nothing that can see stuff...then its hard not to view things like turtles-all-the-way-down
- vanderZwan 8y ago
  I think you missed my point: hallucinating implies thinking. So saying that we're hallucinating that we think is saying that we are not thinking but meta-thinking hallucinated thoughts.
  - vokep 8y ago
    Right! What I meant is that when you look at perception itself, of thoughts or anything else, you run into turtles all the way down, or up. Who or what actually thinks? I do? except I can't decide what I think entirely, even if I do, how do I know that I'm doing it. The core of it I think is that thoughts are no more "real" than hallucinations. The major difference between thoughts and hallucinations is that thoughts correlate with something real.

oarabbus_ 8y ago

>Now I have a new and better explanation for why I have visual hallucinations sometimes, particularly halos and fuzz. Which is what? These can have a physiological basis i.e. astigmatism i.e. it's actually really real despite your opinion that you're "hallucinating thoughts".

alexanderthe- 8y ago

I like to think of this view as jailbreaking your biological operating system. We are an aggregate of trillions of cells with one fundamental purpose, to propagate our DNA and ensure the survival of our species. Of course we grow into thinking that almost everything we do is under the influence of our own free will, but it is our DNA and the corresponding influence it has over us that dictates the propensity to choose one thing or another in the first place. Yuval Noah Harrari touches on this in his book, 'Sapiens'. In a sense, our DNA is a biological form of a general artificial intelligence, but distributed over billions of lives and over the spans of time. The collective progress of humanity being handed down generation by generation. With each generation, unique mutations in the collective DNA of humanity gives birth unique individuals with their own talents, interests, and potential to move our species forward. As a collective whole, we will either survive and evolve, or perish. Thinking about such things doesn't do much to make it more likely that your unique DNA will propagate... and so maybe by the reproductive success of these traits within humanity we are, as a species, quite comfortable being a meatbag who hallucinates that they are thinking thoughts without delving any deeper.

yummypaint 8y ago

I wonder to what extent holding scientifically accepted beliefs about free-will alters ones experience of this phenomenon. I could understand how it might be terrifying to people with judeo-christian beliefs, but what about someone who is already a secular neuroscientist? I wonder how many people may be experiencing this without being perturbed or feeling the need to seek medical help. Also, it isn't clear to me whether people with this condition are "missing" something, or if they are in some way perceiving their thought processes with greater fidelity than the rest of us. People have plenty of biological features that aren't necessary for survival (male nipples, tailbones, etc), could the illusion of free will be similar?

foldr 8y ago
> I wonder to what extent holding scientifically accepted beliefs about free-will There's no such thing. There's no scientific consensus regarding what free will is or whether we have it.