While hanging out in some messenger group, someone brought up that they believe people can have telepathic dreams after dosing psychedelics and sharing trips with other people. When questioned, their rationalization arose as an argument based on quantum physics and its’ involvement in consciousness. It was a misunderstanding of the double-slit experiment and its’ implications.
This actually fits with my newer models for what “delusion” really is. That is, delusion is not based on right or wrong, necessarily, but instead, certain biases normally emerge in most people simply on the basis of disagreement. Most people conform to popular beliefs and to be contrarian to those beliefs invokes such patterns of polarization that lead a person into denying their opposition. It is essentially like political polarization. It is normal even, rather than “crazy”.
Disagreeing with people is risky. People punish us for contradicting popular beliefs. They can do so with confidence, knowing that the majority of people will take their side, thus they face no fear of being persecuted for speaking out against the heretic. On the other hand, the heretic is basically defined by their persecution and contradiction to the popular belief.
The reaction of this individual shown above is “my understanding isn’t faulty, I’m not crazy”. To agree with the opposition is to accept that one is grossly and embarrassingly misinformed. To reject the opposition is to defend one’s sanity. This tendency to reject “evidence” that disconfirms your position is called the bias against disconfirmatory evidence and it has been associated with schizophrenia.
There are problems with this notion though. For one, in order to really be labeled delusional, isn’t it necessary for one to engage such a bias? It is almost inherent to the definition of delusion from the DSM5, which is as follows:
A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly held despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture (i.e., it is not an article of religious faith). When a false belief involves a value judgment, it is regarded as a delusion only when the judgment is so extreme as to defy credibility. Delusional conviction can sometimes be inferred from an overvalued idea (in which case the individual has an unreasonable belief or idea but does not hold it as firmly as is the case with a delusion).
Particularly, it is the part that says “A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly held despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary.” This is just describing a person who is engaging in the bias against disconfirmatory evidence, which should also include anyone who challenges mainstream thinking and isn’t convinced when believers in the mainstream attempt to convert the person. Perhaps most people hold beliefs on the basis of being afraid of being persecuted for heresy.
Another problem is that motivated reasoning is normal under certain conditions, particularly when there are rewards or punishments that drive a person to hold certain beliefs. In the example from the beginning, the telepathic-dream-believing individual has an incentive to use motivated reasoning. That is, the person is being publicly shamed for being wrong, so now there is a motivation to reason why they are not wrong. Even labeling a belief delusional sounds offensive to most people and is punishing on its’ own.
While most delusions may tend to be wrong, most ideas and conceptualizations of the world tend to be too. Unfortunately, most people simply accept conclusions made by authorities for which they are not informed enough to assess themselves, otherwise, they would be an authority themselves. Should we add the list of common misconceptions in science and technology to the DSM-10?
People are normally crazy but they are crazy in ways that are synchronized via culture. This includes various religious beliefs, scientism, political opinions, and so on. It is desynchronization from the memetic sphere that leaves you vulnerable to being labeled delusional. Since people are synchronized, there is no moment in which any person challenges the status quo, which means this pattern of motivated reasoning and biases do not apply.
Please share/forward this as I am so lonely. I am desynchronizing from society and we need to get more people synchronized on these ideas! But yes, let’s continue on!
The person who was challenged about their misconception on quantum physics and its’ implications for telepathic dreams quickly brought up the authority figures who informed them about quantum physics, who was seemingly their neuroscience professor. Knowledge that is based on authority is not really knowledge much at all. Rather, it is dogma. In reality, we must verify everything for ourselves if we wish to know anything (ignoring the solipsism problem), which is, of course, not feasible for a large amount of possible knowledge. It would be such a grand privilege. The situation that we are in is that almost everyone is grossly misinformed and society is almost purely based on religion and superstition. Consider the case of the popular concept of “delusion”, an area that the authorities seem to have failed us on as outlined in this write-up.
There is a phenomenon known as the illusion of explanatory depth, in which people often believe that they understand the world around them much more than they actually do, that is, until you ask them to explain themselves. It turns out that people will report their understanding of the flush mechanism of toilets highly until they are asked to explain the mechanism, which they often can’t. This likely applies to the belief that the Earth is round. Certainly, most people couldn’t easily make a high-quality argument that would stand up to normal scientific scrutiny if asked. Meanwhile, flat-earthers seem to come up with all these mathematical arguments that seem deeper than what any normal round-earther could pull off. Should we call these delusions?
In actuality, it is highly probable that most of what we believe about psychology is incorrect, such that a replication crisis has become a fancy topic of today’s world. Even the experts seem to have it all wrong. Yet, we are expected to trust them and if we dissent, we would be delusional.
I do not 100% trust scientists or their conclusions at all. I sort of live with faith in their results though. And that’s fine.
I’m not going to invest a ton of time verifying everything. Otherwise, I wouldn’t get very far (an illusion of getting far actually).
I am definitely going to be wrong about many of my own conclusions because of this. Though, if I simply stick to the popular conclusions, I sure as hell won’t be called out for anything. So that is where I’ll be whenever I am outside of my domain of knowledge.
Please fight me in the comments and prepare yourself to engage in the bias against disconfirmatory evidence!
I'd like to bring out the idea that psychosis and delusions might have evolutionary function. If all humans were infinitely logical and quick to change beliefs upon discovering new, stronger evidence, we wouldn't have a lot of peripheral experimentation and goal seeking behavior. We would all just do whatever is the most logical at the moment, thus technological evolution would be significantly faster. We would probably discover the scientific method 100 thousand years ago. The problem is that this would leave absolutely no space for culture to develop, which is horrifying to say the least... It might be a great filter and the antidote at once. Who knows... but there must be a reason for so much delusional behaviors by so many individuals.
It also might serve a simple psychological function in people with weaker intelligence, I find it's very hard to cope with the simple facts of laws of thermodynamics without becoming a nihilistic piece of shit (for a lot of people).
Cheers