A concrete schizophrenic who scratches their legs because of the ants crawling on them (unobservable to everyone else), is still clearly doing something for a reason. In fact, my personal opinion is that it is impossible for a person to do something without a reason.
I’m not understanding how this statement of mine shows evidence that I consider insanity internally rational. Later on, I simply eluded to that irrationality being a corruption of certain sensory data interpreting mechanisms and lack of exposure to forms of experience or education. I would not be caught dead making the claim that insanity is not internally consisant.
Though, I did take the short-cut in explaining; and by that virtue, left quite a bit to the imagination. shrug
With all due respect, I think that’s bull. Rational people believe in unproven things all the time. Just ask any physicist who believes in superstring theory or magnetic monopoles. Or ask any biologist who believes in punctuated equilibrium.
I just typed a long answer which I then lost, due to logging in problems with the new board. Aagh.
I can’t be bothered typing it again. But the gist is that of the theories above, I still can’t see a satisfactory way of dividing those who report personal experience of the supernatural from
those we might judge as insane.
The only test that seems to hold up is that of the group i.e. if you report the supernatural as a group (i.e. such that others have the same frame of reference to use Mangetout’s language) you will not be judged as insane. Certainly not by that group, and probably not by others, if yours is a large and respected group. If you report your experience alone, you may well be judged insane.
The function-in-society and the harmless-to-yourself-and others tests seem to fall down. There are too many harmless and functioning loonies, and harmful and dysfunctional sane people for this test to work.
So that leaves me believing that supernatural religious experiences are not satisfactorily distinguishable from insanity.
“The term ‘psychosis’ is used for conditions in which the patient loses touch with reality; these include manic-depressive illness and schizophrenia. Up to the end of the nineteenth century these were lumped together under a general category of’madness’. It was the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin who separated off the two entities in I8g6, naming them ‘manic-depressive psychosis’ and ‘dementia praecox’. In I911 Eugen Bleuler, a Swiss psychiatrist, coined the term ‘schizophrenia’, which has displaced Kraepelin’s original label. The symptoms that the two psychotic conditions have in common are delusions and hallucinations. Delusions are defined as false beliefs, which are not shared by others from the person’s cultural background, and which cannot be shaken by argument. The proviso about the cultural background is essential but gives rise to many difficulties in interpretation.”
I disagree with the statement that ‘delusions’ cannot be shaken by argument. The only possibilities I can concieve for not being able to shake a ‘false’ belief with argument are:
*The person possessing the belief is faking their belief for a covert advantage
*The person posessing the belief has severely damaged memory capability (short and long-term)
The first is self-explanitory. The second relies on the expertise of the belief ‘converter’ to invert logical forms against the ‘believers’ own logical axioms; forcing them to acknowledge the a change in belief is required. Obviously, if the memory is damaged; the conversation will never stick for long and the memory will ‘restore default’. Some individuals have adapted memory delete mechanisms to conserve the energy required to maintain a belief which helps sustain their primary indentured system (meaning system that determines life choices). The latter has a four choice scenario which will not be addressed here…
Even if the person has been guided out of acute psychosis (assuming elimination scenarios listed above are absent); that does not mean the frequency or intensity of those thoughts will immediately subside. This lingering anxiety disorder can be equated clinically to PSTD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder); which triggers OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder). Intense analysis and time are required to find the root system and get the ‘human subject’ to acknowledge it’s truth in relation to themselves and their surroundings. Knowledge, as mentioned earlier is not enough; actual habit breaking behaviors need to be practiced rigorously (‘take the steps and the feeling will follow’), in many cases social skills will have to be re-taught from the ground up. While the biochemical relations are still a bit hazy; what is clear is the pathology of the condition and it’s direction out from psychosis to social/personal functionality and contentment shows at least an ‘acasual’ pattern. It seems to me that a different term then delusion would need to be applied to: “an idea that cannot be shaken by argument.”.
Just my innitial impression when reading that…
As a side-note some may want to consider whether ‘absolute’ logical consistency is condusive to self-recursive sentience.
I knew I forgot something! It’d be great to edit =)
A person can be non-delusional yet still repetitious in their PSTD; basically they can start out with ‘psycho-somaticism’ and dump the innitial ‘delusionary’ state while retaining the somaticism associated with the innitial disorder.
Pick me up one too while you’re there, please, Mang’ – no sense in both of us going! :rolleyes:
Huh? First, I see you positing the reasons that you think a theist might observe a law he or she believes to be the word of God, and I might observe that a wide variety of people have chosen that course for quite other reasons.
Then I see the following two sentences:
*The reason why a person desires to go to heaven conflicts with the law required to reach heaven.
Those who do not believe in the precept of God or heaven cannot possess the ability to kill another being… this belief in God and heaven within the Bible is in fact a requirement necessary to trigger the lofical validation of killing; which is ironically, counter-intuitive to the law necessary to attain the goal prescribed.*
And these make absolutely no sense to me. In particular, it would appear that you are apparently making the insane claim that no agnostic or atheist (or believer in a faith other than Unitarianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, or Baha’i, those being the only ones I know of which give any credence to the Bible) can commit the killing of another person. Obviously you’re trying some sort of reductio ad absurdam here – but IMHO you got to the absurd before the reductio. Please explain.
Over on the temp. board we had a major dustup on “no proof” – there is evidence galore suggesting the existence of God (if you have none, just phone your local Kingdom Hall or LDS ward and they’ll be glad to drop by and give you some! – and my thesis is that you, Gaudere, and Spiritus Mundi are being completely sane in finding inadequate the evidence which Mangetout, Lib, and I, equally completely sane, find to be adequate. BTW, I’m not sure what you meant to say when you said “tenement” – obviously, the “basic tenement for sanity” is the SRO dwelling in which the “tenants of one’s faith” rent rooms.
However, I would never call either atheism or theism insanity – they are logical conclusions, sometimes arrived at through an emotional impetus and sometimes completely rationally, on the question of the existence of a god based on one’s evaluation and weighting of the evidence available to him/her.
Obviously God at work forestalling you!
Pity.
I am resisting the temptation to take this post to the Pit, because it seems obvious that you’re trying to make a logical conclusion without being offensive. You realize that you have insulted a reasonable minority of this board’s members by indicating that their views “are not satisfactorily distinguishable from insanity”, don’t you?
I would suggest that you start a new thread in which you define how one distinguishes between perception and misperception, define how one determines what psychological states may affect perception, and the level of misperception and credence in it that must be achieved to constitute “insanity” – and get some common consent on those definitions – then let us examine alleged supernatural religious experiences based on your criteria.
The Excolonic Fact Book, where much of the data being provided around here lately seems to be coming from. :mad:
I am athiest. Feel free to judge my post in this light.
I do not have a problem with belief in ideas that are not proven. I think reasonable people can dissagree in this area.
I do have a problem with belief in ideas that have been pretty conclusively ruled out. If someone tells me that the Earth is only 6k years old, that man and dinosaur walked the Earth together, and evolution is at odds with the second law of thermodynamics, I want space between myself and this person.
I run fast if one’s beliefs are sufficiently bizarre. Including a dead/stiff child in all family activities for several weeks waiting for the child to return to living (think about riding around in the back seat of car with your dead sibling for a few weeks…), or denying that micro-organisms can cause disease (and that anti-biotics can easily take care of many life threatening infections) completely scare me.
I think what you are defining here is not ideas which are insane, but ideas which are illogical. Otherwise known as (if you like) silly or bizarre.
True insanity is a dislocation between one’s perception of reality and actual reality (not one’s logically or illogically arrived at belief about reality, and actual reality)
So If I truly believe that God spoke in my ear and told me I’m the incarnation of the Angel Gabriel (and he didn’t), then I’m insane. If I tell someone about it, and they believe me they may or may not be illogical (depending on how much proof I can rustle up) for doing so, but they are not insane.
Example taken from an actual acquaintance, by the way…
I can’t see any way of ever objectively proving 100% that any given person is or isn’t insane, given that we can’t get inside their head with a tape recorder and listen in to the voices (or whatever). It is, however, often possible to make an educated guess.
Doesn’t have to be about religion either. Isn’t the OP basically the plot of K-pax?
I think what you are defining here is not ideas which are insane, but ideas which are illogical. Otherwise known as (if you like) silly or bizarre.
**/quote]
This isn’t what I was trying to do, I will try to clarify.
Really, I was trying extend your definition a bit, but did a poor job. I gave examples, but didn’t connect the dots. The picture I wanted to paint: When people deny facts and logical conclusion drawn from those facts that because they run counter to what they want to believe, it is hardly sane. I am speaking at a level beyond ignorance or being a fool, but actively suppressing information counter to what the person desires to believe in his/her own mind.
One first case, I am right with you… definitely insane. The second case could go either way. In my example, if the second person had all the evidence in the world indicating against the angel story and chose to believe the story anyway, that is more than gullible.
Actually I’m more of a relatively-recent-but-not-quite-new victim of the Great SDMB Postcount Embezzlement.
But thankyou anyway! And I don’t think anyone actually welcomed me as such last time, so I’ll take that as my Official SDMB Hello.
As far as the rest of your post is concerned…
Just exactly where one draws the insanity line seems to vary a lot from person to person (just look at the Andrea Yates thread…)
My major reason for liking to draw the line at actual dysfunctional perception (auditory/visual hallucinations and so on) is that any other place to draw it seems to be susceptible to fine shadings of opinion about what is and is not logical, and what weight to put on various bits of evidence.
Also, in your example you are assuming that the people in question have the evidence. For instance, there are a lot of people who believe in 6k years creationism simply because someone in authority told them it’s true, and they don’t have the education or ability (or desire) to look up the counterarguments.
I wouldn’t call that insane. I think naive probably covers it (or even ‘uninterested’ in the case of people who believe stuff but don’t seem to care enough to verify whether what they believe has solid foundation)
This is obviously a Bad Thing. But not insane, IMO…
I see some of the argument at the end of my post is actually inapplicable, since you explicitly said
“if the second person had all the evidence in the world indicating against the angel story and chose to believe the story anyway”
Ahem. Try again.
Perhaps I should say that I see a difference between seeing and hearing things that are not there and inability (or unwillingness) to draw correct logical conclusions, and that the latter doesn’t seem to warrant the label ‘insanity’.
Except that since I changed one setting on my preferences, I no longer have any trouble posting. So either God is fairly ineffective, or he’s on my side now
I’m glad you appreciate that. In fact I’d go so far as to say that it is worrying that you even thought about taking it to the pit when all I did was reach a conclusion about a particular difficulty in categorisation.
I will change my conclusion when you provide me with a satisfactory method of distinguishing supernatural religious experiences from insanity. I will not back away from my conclusion just because you (and if it comes to that a million others) get huffy about it.
If you believe that there is common consent to be had on those definitions, perhaps you should state what that is, and use such definitions to answer my OP by providing me with a satisfactory method of distinguishing supernatural religious experiences from insanity. If you are unable to find such definitions, or believe they do not exist, then aren’t you simply helping me to my conclusion i.e. that no such satisfactory method is available?
You are free to disagree with this, but it is a generally accepted definition used by Psychiatry worldwide. Any professional using the term delusion means exactly what Leff says (he’s a professor of psychistry).
If ‘delusions’ can be shaken by argument they are not delusions.
If they are true they are not illusions.
If they are a norm within that person’s culture they are not a delusion.
If you are saying that what you call a delusion is shakable by argument, then you will not be using the term in a way that anyone professionally concerned with delusional states understands.
If language is to have meaning, it must be shared by a community and have generally agreed definitions.
Using delusions to mean ‘beliefs that may be shaken by argument’ would make discourse impossible unless it was redefined as delusion*, so that delusion* means a false belief which is culturally inappropriate which may be shaken by argument.
You are free to disagree with this, but it is a generally accepted definition used by Psychiatry worldwide. Any professional using the term delusion means exactly what Leff says (he’s a professor of psychiatry).
If ‘delusions’ can be shaken by argument they are not delusions.
If they are true they are not delusions.
If they are a norm within that person’s culture they are not a delusion.
If you are saying that what you call a delusion is shakable by argument, then you will not be using the term in a way that anyone professionally concerned with delusional states understands.
If language is to have meaning, it must be shared by a community and have generally agreed definitions.
Using delusions to mean beliefs that may be shaken by argument would make discourse impossible unless it was redefined as delusion*, so that delusion * means a false belief which is culturally inappropriate which may be shaken by argument.
There is Wicca (which is not Satanic) and Black witchcraft (which is Satanic).
Leff does not mean anything by this quote, save that if a group of people practice Satanic rituals, and within their cult, this is normal, then such a belief is not a delusion, but (within their sub-culture) it is the norm. This mirrors other religious beliefs exactly- they are both cut the same deal- cultural appropriateness is an excuse from diagnosis of delusions.
As an extremely skeptical agnostic, I find claims made by main-stream religions to be as ‘strange’ as those made by cults. However,as a professional, I would consider neither system of beliefs to be delusional because their beliefs are shared by a community, thus excluding them from the disgnostic label ‘delusions’. This does not stop them from being ‘weird’, ‘undesirable’, ‘socially unacceptable’, ‘dangerous’, etc. etc.; its just that they cannot be used to assign the lable ‘delusional’.
The alternative is to massively over-diagnose mental illness.
The strictures applied by the generally held definition of ‘delusion’ is an attempt to limit the claim to social control that psychiatry might make.
Any method usable to distinguish between religious belief and insanity would have to be usable to distinguish between atheism and insanity.
Unless you can definitively prove the non-existence of God, atheism is a belief arrived at by non-rational means.
Similarly, you don’t know that the person who hears voices from God is really insane, until you can show that the voices don’t really exist.
Which is why we rely on a functional/dysfunctional measure to determine sanity. A person who hears voices, and cannot otherwise operate in society, is insane. A person who hears voices and holds down a responsible job or can maintain a relationship with his or her neighbors is not.
After all, when you read the posts in this thread, don’t they appear to be voices in your head?
Please explain.
– and my thesis is that you, Gaudere, and Spiritus Mundi are being completely sane in finding inadequate the evidence which Mangetout, Lib, and I, equally completely sane, find to be adequate. BTW, I’m not sure what you meant to say when you said “tenement” – obviously, the “basic tenement for sanity” is the SRO dwelling in which the “tenants of one’s faith” rent rooms. 