I was inspired by the later scenes in A Beautiful Mind, where Nash was still hallucinating as he went about his day but he chose to just ignore his visions of people he knew were not real.
That movie was very interesting. The scene that caught my attention the most was when he realized the little girl couldn’t be real because she never aged.
I wonder what would happen if you went to a psych ward and started teaching a schizophrenic patient the scientific method? Not specifically related to their visions, but just about natural phenomena. Would they be able to shake off their delusions?
I think a better test would be to teach people prone to developing schizophrenia and then see if it help with those that did develop schizophrenia. It would be much easier to teach rationality before the onset of schizophrenia to boot.
Absolutely we should run that test, and I suspect it would help. The experiment I proposed, however, was more designed out of the question, “would it be possible to teach rationality to someone who cannot trust their own perceptions, and in fact may not realize yet that their perceptions are untrustworthy?” Is rationality genuinely not possible in that case? Or is it possible to give them enough rational skills to recover from the deepest set delusions humans can have?
I was inspired by the later scenes in A Beautiful Mind, where Nash was still hallucinating as he went about his day but he chose to just ignore his visions of people he knew were not real.
That movie was very interesting. The scene that caught my attention the most was when he realized the little girl couldn’t be real because she never aged.
I wonder what would happen if you went to a psych ward and started teaching a schizophrenic patient the scientific method? Not specifically related to their visions, but just about natural phenomena. Would they be able to shake off their delusions?
I think a better test would be to teach people prone to developing schizophrenia and then see if it help with those that did develop schizophrenia. It would be much easier to teach rationality before the onset of schizophrenia to boot.
Absolutely we should run that test, and I suspect it would help. The experiment I proposed, however, was more designed out of the question, “would it be possible to teach rationality to someone who cannot trust their own perceptions, and in fact may not realize yet that their perceptions are untrustworthy?” Is rationality genuinely not possible in that case? Or is it possible to give them enough rational skills to recover from the deepest set delusions humans can have?
People affected by Charles Bonnet syndrome, according to Wikipedia, are often sane and able to distinguish their hallucinations as hallucinations.