Delusion?

[The Grand Nudger]

Think we''ll have to agree to disagree on that one amigo. "I was possessed by demons, he was possessed by demons, demons did it" will always be an indicator of delusion to me. When you can explain exactly how demons and string theory or multiverse theory belong in the same category I'll have to reassess the situation.

(For the record, my ex-wife was a bitch too, and I could crack jokes about her being a she-demon, but that doesn't actually make her a demon, does it? It's flowery langauge. Not exactly equivalent.)

[5thHorseman]

Perhaps you haven't seen some of our posters wax on about the physical reality of demonic armies Apo..lol.

Perhaps you haven't heard physicists who postulate a multi-verse without evidence, or infinite timelines co-existing simultaneously, or string theories which cannot be empirically tested. More to the point, try to imagine the she-demons postulated by multitudes of ex-husbands actually existing and you will see how far off the map you can get if you start in one direction and just.keep.going.

But all these are well within the sphere of a healthy mind functioning in its appropriate role. No special sauce required.

Don't confuse people working on string theory and people with thoughts of demons, one is an attempt at a way to reconcile relativity and quantum mechanics, the other is old superstition that never dies, totally different, one based on facts the other on superstition.

[Anomalocaris]

Perhaps you haven't seen some of our posters wax on about the physical reality of demonic armies Apo..lol.

Perhaps you haven't heard physicists who postulate a multi-verse without evidence, or infinite timelines co-existing simultaneously, or string theories which cannot be empirically tested.

But all these are well within the sphere of a healthy mind functioning in its appropriate role. No special sauce required.

Perhaps you overlooked the power of the word postulate to make your comparison inappropriate?

to the point, try to imagine the she-demons postulated by multitudes of ex-husbands actually existing and you will see how far off the map you can get if you start in one direction and just.keep.going.

I would say the quality of evidence inevitably gathered in the course of becoming "ex" lends respectable weight to the husband's hypothesis of she-demon.

[Angrboda]

(For the record, my ex-wife was a bitch too, and I could crack jokes about her being a she-demon, but that doesn't actually make her a demon, does it? It's flowery langauge. Not exactly equivalent.)

That wasn't my point, though I see how you were misled by my language. I wasn't implying that female demons were being imagined, I was pointing out how massive the errors in reasoning can become as a result of a simple psychological process -- in this case, that of cognitive dissonance -- being iteratively applied towards the same goal (justifying one's feelings and actions in a relationship). It's akin to evolution, wherein distortions in our thinking (mutations) are repeatedly selected for a specific adaptive quality (reinforcing our desired perceptions of ourselves). Just as evolution can create incredibly complex and powerful animals, the psychology of the human animal can evolve monsters. (And that's just at the personal level; I haven't scratched the surface of social processes and the nature of discourse.)

But we don't necessarily have to agree to disagree. You simply have to give me some evidence that religious or theistic thinking is delusional as psychiatrists define delusion, as a systematic distortion of thinking along specific dimensions that does not occur in thinking not related to the delusion.

You have, afaik, provided no evidence that this is the case. Simply declaring it to be a fact, or arguing folk psychologism is insufficient. I may have paid insufficient attention earlier, so if you have given such evidence, please link me to it. I will warn you in advance though, that as a person with schizo-affective disorder, I have suffered delusions for over 40 years, so I have something of an inside track.

[The Grand Nudger]

Believing in demons is fanciful but not delusional, agreed. Actually seeing them, hearing them, or arguing for their physical existence based upon experience with them is a fairly strong indicator of "psychotic disorders including schizophrenia, paraphrenia, manic episodes of bipolar disorder, and psychotic depression." The stories of the faithful who have confronted Satan himself (or any of his demons) aren't difficult to find. It forms a core part of these peoples religious beliefs. As such I would call people with beliefs like these delusional.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delusion

[Angrboda]

Perhaps you haven't seen some of our posters wax on about the physical reality of demonic armies Apo..lol.

Perhaps you haven't heard physicists who postulate a multi-verse without evidence, or infinite timelines co-existing simultaneously, or string theories which cannot be empirically tested.

But all these are well within the sphere of a healthy mind functioning in its appropriate role. No special sauce required.

Perhaps you overlooked the power of the word postulate to make your comparison inappropriate?

Perhaps you overlooked the rules of this forum about misquoting people. I explicitly noted that my comments -- the comments you omitted -- were more to the point -- implying that the arguments you left in were less germane. In doing so, you distorted my words and my meaning. Please don't do it again.

[The Grand Nudger]

Fix your quote tags, or else it would appear that you have done exactly what you're protesting. (apologies if it got garbled by the code, and disregard if this is so)

[Angrboda]

Believing in demons is fanciful but not delusional, agreed. Actually seeing them, hearing them, or arguing for their physical existence based upon experience with them is a fairly strong indicator of "psychotic disorders including schizophrenia, paraphrenia, manic episodes of bipolar disorder, and psychotic depression." The stories of the faithful who have confronted Satan himself (or any of his demons) aren't difficult to find. It forms a core part of these peoples religious beliefs. As such I would call people with beliefs like these delusional.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delusion

So are stories about alien abductions. These, again, are not properly speaking delusions, as they are usually constructed using rather ordinary and mundane properties of the human mind. I think I'm getting a hint of the problem in that people are looking upon the nature of the human mind as some sort of reliable, common sense obeying, rational computer; this is an incredibly naive view of human mentation which the vast research on psychological bias and processes, memory, perception and social psychology will refute.

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Fix your quote tags, or else it would appear that you have done exactly what you're protesting. (apologies if it got garbled by the code, and disregard if this is so)

I think we crossed in the night. In the 30 seconds I took to fix the tag, you must have grabbed my errant first post.

[The Grand Nudger]

No, lol, I assure you, I know better than to trust my own mind. I handled this objection in my previous (meaningful) post. Belief in demons (or alien abductions) is not delusional. A hallucination that trends towards demons (or alien abductions) is not pathological. Unless it is persistent. People who describe being abducted over and over again, people who describe experiences with demons over and over again (they're everywhere after all) would seem to fit the requirements for diagnosis as delusional(though I'm sure you could find cases where other variables were at play). I'm not a mental health specialist, so this is just a lay persons understanding of the requirements obviously. I'm sitting here reading the DSMV as well as the wiki page on delusions (sourced from the DSMV and a whole host of other places) and both indicate that delusions within a religious framework are exceedingly common. Is this incorrect? Is the DSMV or the Wiki page misleading me as to the conditions for diagnosis as delusional?

Believing in demons is fanciful but not delusional, agreed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delusion

[Angrboda]

No, lol, I assure you, I know better than to trust my own mind. I handled this objection in my previous (meaningful) post. Belief in demons (or alien abductions) is not delusional. A hallucination that trends towards demons (or alien abductions) is not pathological. Unless it is persistent. People who describe being abducted over and over again, people who describe experiences with demons over and over again (they're everywhere after all) would seem to fit the requirements for diagnosis as delusional(though I'm sure you could find cases where other variables were at play). I'm not a mental health specialist, so this is just a lay persons understanding of the requirements obviously. I'm sitting here reading the DSMV as well as the wiki page on delusions (sourced from the DSMV and a whole host of other places) and both indicate that delusions within a religious framework are exceedingly common. Is this incorrect? Is the DSMV or the Wiki page misleading me as to the conditions for diagnosis as delusional?

Believing in demons is fanciful but not delusional, agreed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delusion

Hallucinations are in fact a pathology, but hallucinations and delusions don't go together. More, many of these beliefs you are calling delusions didn't require hallucinatory experience to form (see quotes below). In general, hallucinations don't lead to delusions -- delusions operate on the ordinary raw material of plain perception; delusion is what happens to the percept once received. The two, in general, are not related.

More, delusions, as a rule, follow certain well known and recognizable forms: paranoid delusions; messianic delusions; delusions of grandeur (separate from messianic); and so on.

Now, in the context of this discussion, I'm willing to grant it only provisional status, but the diagnostic criteria explicitly state that if a belief is "normal or expected in their culture" then it will not be diagnosed. Many people may believe that a person's senses become more acute in the event of losing one sense, say sight; whether this belief is true or false, it would not count as delusional or pathological as it is accepted as a rational, normal belief in our culture; in that same vein, if you don't define delusion as error resulting from pathologically distorted cognitions, you end up diagnosing everybody as delusional (or more likely, simply those groups of people whose beliefs you don't like). And given that, historically, what we know to be true today differs from what we knew yesterday -- are you willing to diagnose all of past humanity as delusional (that's that flip side of arrogance I mentioned earlier).

Anyway, from :

Just as our current feelings about our parents shape our memories of how they treated us, our current self-concepts affect memories of our own lives. In 1962, Daniel Offer, then a young resident in psychiatry, and his colleagues interviewed 73 fourteen-year-old boys about their home lives, sexuality, religion, parents, parental discipline, and other emotionally charged topics. Offer and his colleague. were able to re-interview almost all these fellows thirty-four years later, when they were forty-eight years old, to ask them what they remembered of their adolescence. "Remarkably," the researcher. concluded, "the men's ability to guess what they had said about themselves in adolescence was no better than chance."

Elizabeth Loftus, a leading scientist in the field of memory, calls this process "imagination inflation," because the more you imagine something, the more likely you are to inflate it into an actual memory, adding details as you go.(Scientists have even tracked imagination inflation into the brain, using functional MRI to show how it works at a neural level.") For example, Giuliana Mazzoni and her colleagues asked their study participants to tell them a dream, and in return gave them a (false) "personalized" dream analysis. They told half the participants the dream meant that they had been harassed by a bully before the age of three, been lost in a public place, or been through a similar upsetting early event. Compared with control subjects who were given no such interpretations, the dream subjects were more likely to come to believe the dream explanation had really occurred, and about half of them eventually produced detailed memories of the experience. In another experiment, people were asked to remember when their school nurse took a skin sample from their little finger to carry out a national health test. (No such test existed.) Simply imagining this unlikely scenario caused the participants to become more confident that it had happened to them. And the more confident they became, the more sensory details they added to their false memories ("the place smelled horrible"). Researchers have created imagination inflation indirectly, too, merely by asking people to explain how an unlikely event might have happened. Cognitive psychologist Maryanne Garry finds that as people tell you how an event might have happened, it starts to feel real to them. Children are especially vulnerable to this suggestion."

I'll try to post more. On your latter point, since I suffer delusions (almost constant) as well as psychotic symptoms (less frequently), I can assure you the two are distinct.

Anyway, if I misread you, I apologize. I'm tired, and haven't had my morning tea.


ETA: I would recommend you look into the McMartin preschool case, false memory syndrome, and folie a deux. Quite relevant. Wikipedia may not be a good source for McMartin, but should suffice for the other two.