I think my hypothesis would more naturally predict that schizophrenics would experience these symptoms constantly, and not just during psychotic episodes. Not sure what to make of that. Hmmmm. Maybe I should hypothesize that different parts of the cortex are “completely unmoored from each other” only during psychotic episodes, and the rest of the time they’re merely “mediocre at communicating”?
I am not sure that constant symptoms would be a necessary prediction of your theory: I could easily imagine that the out-of-sync regions with weak connections mostly learn to treat their connections as “mostly a bit of noise, little to gain here” and mostly ignore them during normal functioning (this also seems energetically efficient). But during exceptionally strong activation, they start using all channels and the neighbouring brain regions now need to make sense of the unusual input.
I cannot tell whether this story is more natural than a prediction of constant symptoms, but it does seem plausible to me.
I think there is a lot of truth to this, but I do not quite agree.
feels a bit off to me. I think I would agree with an alternate version “most long-lasting negative emotions and moods are caused by our social cognition” (I am not perfectly happy with this formulation).
In my mind the difference is that “for signalling purposes” contains an aspect of a voluntary decision (and thus blame-worthiness for the consequences), whereas my model of this dynamic is closer to “humans are kind of hard-wired to seek high-calorie food which can lead to health problems if food is in abundance”. I guess many rationalists are already sufficiently aware that much of human decision-making (necessarily) is barely conscious. But I think that especially when dealing with this topic of social cognition and self-image it is important to emphasize that some very painful failure modes are bundled with being human and that, while we should take agency in avoiding/overcoming them, we do not have the ability to choose our starting point.
On a different note:
This Ezra Klein Show interview with Rachel Aviv has impressive examples of how influential culture/memes can be for mental (and even physical) illnesses and also how difficult it is to culturally deal with this.