I began to feel that I was trapped in reality, in some sense, and that there were beings outside the universe—previous escapees—who were sending me telepathic messages in an effort to help me escape as well.
This is a familiar mind state. Most often in the middle of the night, suggesting it’s a particular brain state repressed by being conscious, especially after thinking hard about something intellectually eluding.
I associate it with being on the schizophrenic side of the autistic-schizophrenic spectrum, and I consider it within normal range, but not something we’re very aware of yet as a society. Though the movie ‘A Beautiful Mind’ makes it easier to point to.
I think with myself it is connected to assimilating difficult concepts (along the lines of permitting the revolutionary to take over). The flexibility of thought required to learn weird things is also a flexibility in ideas about how the universe might work. In other words, I think that the sense that there are layers of reality and ‘real’ reality is leaking through is a byproduct of this flexibility.
On Less Wrong, the discussion about ‘biases’ is very interesting, but I think that irrationality due to biases is completely eclipsed by errors in rationality due to schizophrenic influences. (Whereas biases are incorrect judgements about external reality, at least they’re about external reality. These biases are at least nodding to the supremacy of the ‘territory’, whereas schizophrenic influences are like getting lost in a maze of layers of maps.)
Further, I hypothesize that if lots of LWers tend to be on the autistic side of the spectrum, they may not be aware of these influences and wonder why people aren’t more concerned with being accurately logical and don’t commit to materialism. However, schizophrenic events seem to teach that “real-life” and logic are a small part of ‘truth’ (though I think this is just a hallucination or a misinterpretation) and that the material world is a small lower-dimensional component of a much vaster, richer reality.
I look forward to understanding such thought patterns, if research progress is made in these areas in my lifetime. I did pick up a book on schizophrenia-the-disorder, and the list of delusions didn’t sound familiar (maybe ‘paranoia’ was closest). So perhaps the association with ‘schizophrenia’ is completely wrong.
the material world is a small lower-dimensional component of a much vaster, richer reality.
I’d have thought that was just iNtuitive in the Myers-Briggs system.
Or would that be that the perceptible world is dwarfed by something larger and/or richer and/or truer and/or above/beneath/beyond itself.
Perhaps there’s a distinction between people with that temperament and who think the way to get at the larger reality by drilling into the perceptible world vs. those who think they can get at the larger reality by getting away from the perceptible world.
Perhaps there’s a distinction between people with that temperament and who think the way to get at the larger reality by drilling into the perceptible world vs. those who think they can get at the larger reality by getting away from the perceptible world.
I don’t have any clear ideas on how beliefs, personality and ‘schizophrenic events’ would influence one another, but I would only comment that the feelings of unreality are something my brain does to me and after the effects, I can interpret the experience through the filter of my personality and beliefs. Perhaps this is because they are rare, and more of an exceptional than normal experience. Perhaps people sitting in a somewhat schizophrenic state* all the time are the intuitive personality type.
* This would be relative to my baseline experience, it might be an entirely healthy mental state for them in which case my labeling is misleading. For my set of experiences, it does not seem like it would be mentally stable/healthy if they were to last for any extended period.
This reminds me of the bicameral mind hypothesis. Certain people (corresponding to your “schizophrenic side of the schizophrenic-autistic spectrum”) may well still receive the results of unconscious processing as “voices in their head” rather than a coherent deliberation on all facets of the truth. (The bicameral mind hypothesis holds that said “voices” are the ancestral condition, which is probably unprovable but intriguing nevertheless.)
″In June 1936 Gödel developed paranoid symptoms and spent several months in a sanitarium for nervous diseases.”
Consider the proposition:″ “Peter believes someone is out to get him”. On one interpretation, ‘someone’ is unspecific and Peter suffers a general paranoia; he believes that it is true that a person is out to get him, but does not necessarily have any beliefs about who this person may be. What Peter believes is that the predicate ‘is out to get Peter’ is satisfied. This is the de dicto interpretation.
On the de re interpretation, ‘someone’ is specific, picking out some particular individual. There is some person Peter has in mind, and Peter believes that person is out to get him.
In the context of thought, the distinction helps us explain how people can hold seemingly self-contradicting beliefs. Say Lois Lane believes Clark Kent is weaker than Superman. Since Clark Kent is Superman, taken de re, Lois’s belief is untenable; the names ‘Clark Kent’ and ‘Superman’ pick out an individual in the world, and a person (or super-person) cannot be stronger than himself. Understood de dicto, however, this may be a perfectly reasonable belief, since Lois is not aware that Clark and Superman are one and the same.”
This is a familiar mind state. Most often in the middle of the night, suggesting it’s a particular brain state repressed by being conscious, especially after thinking hard about something intellectually eluding.
I associate it with being on the schizophrenic side of the autistic-schizophrenic spectrum, and I consider it within normal range, but not something we’re very aware of yet as a society. Though the movie ‘A Beautiful Mind’ makes it easier to point to.
I think with myself it is connected to assimilating difficult concepts (along the lines of permitting the revolutionary to take over). The flexibility of thought required to learn weird things is also a flexibility in ideas about how the universe might work. In other words, I think that the sense that there are layers of reality and ‘real’ reality is leaking through is a byproduct of this flexibility.
On Less Wrong, the discussion about ‘biases’ is very interesting, but I think that irrationality due to biases is completely eclipsed by errors in rationality due to schizophrenic influences. (Whereas biases are incorrect judgements about external reality, at least they’re about external reality. These biases are at least nodding to the supremacy of the ‘territory’, whereas schizophrenic influences are like getting lost in a maze of layers of maps.)
Further, I hypothesize that if lots of LWers tend to be on the autistic side of the spectrum, they may not be aware of these influences and wonder why people aren’t more concerned with being accurately logical and don’t commit to materialism. However, schizophrenic events seem to teach that “real-life” and logic are a small part of ‘truth’ (though I think this is just a hallucination or a misinterpretation) and that the material world is a small lower-dimensional component of a much vaster, richer reality.
I look forward to understanding such thought patterns, if research progress is made in these areas in my lifetime. I did pick up a book on schizophrenia-the-disorder, and the list of delusions didn’t sound familiar (maybe ‘paranoia’ was closest). So perhaps the association with ‘schizophrenia’ is completely wrong.
I’d have thought that was just iNtuitive in the Myers-Briggs system.
Or would that be that the perceptible world is dwarfed by something larger and/or richer and/or truer and/or above/beneath/beyond itself.
Perhaps there’s a distinction between people with that temperament and who think the way to get at the larger reality by drilling into the perceptible world vs. those who think they can get at the larger reality by getting away from the perceptible world.
I don’t know..
I don’t have any clear ideas on how beliefs, personality and ‘schizophrenic events’ would influence one another, but I would only comment that the feelings of unreality are something my brain does to me and after the effects, I can interpret the experience through the filter of my personality and beliefs. Perhaps this is because they are rare, and more of an exceptional than normal experience. Perhaps people sitting in a somewhat schizophrenic state* all the time are the intuitive personality type.
* This would be relative to my baseline experience, it might be an entirely healthy mental state for them in which case my labeling is misleading. For my set of experiences, it does not seem like it would be mentally stable/healthy if they were to last for any extended period.
For me, the feeling isn’t so much that the perceptible world is false, as that there’s something better behind it.
If you want a theory-driven account of how the Myers-Briggs types experience life differently from each other, check out Psychetypes.
This reminds me of the bicameral mind hypothesis. Certain people (corresponding to your “schizophrenic side of the schizophrenic-autistic spectrum”) may well still receive the results of unconscious processing as “voices in their head” rather than a coherent deliberation on all facets of the truth. (The bicameral mind hypothesis holds that said “voices” are the ancestral condition, which is probably unprovable but intriguing nevertheless.)
″In June 1936 Gödel developed paranoid symptoms and spent several months in a sanitarium for nervous diseases.”
Consider the proposition:″ “Peter believes someone is out to get him”. On one interpretation, ‘someone’ is unspecific and Peter suffers a general paranoia; he believes that it is true that a person is out to get him, but does not necessarily have any beliefs about who this person may be. What Peter believes is that the predicate ‘is out to get Peter’ is satisfied. This is the de dicto interpretation.
On the de re interpretation, ‘someone’ is specific, picking out some particular individual. There is some person Peter has in mind, and Peter believes that person is out to get him.
In the context of thought, the distinction helps us explain how people can hold seemingly self-contradicting beliefs. Say Lois Lane believes Clark Kent is weaker than Superman. Since Clark Kent is Superman, taken de re, Lois’s belief is untenable; the names ‘Clark Kent’ and ‘Superman’ pick out an individual in the world, and a person (or super-person) cannot be stronger than himself. Understood de dicto, however, this may be a perfectly reasonable belief, since Lois is not aware that Clark and Superman are one and the same.”
-Wikipedia