Schizophrenia Identity and the Refutation of Solipsism

schizophrenia identity and the refutation of solipsism:

assume you weren't living on Earth, a world in which you see many other people. and you start hearing voices. and what you hear is unpredictable, it doesn't seem you are hearing your own thoughts aloud. you would likely assume you were indeed talking to other people. you just can't see them.

however, on Earth, hearing voices is referred to as hallucination, that is, they are unreal. a diagnosis which has a solipsistic bias to it, that the voices are all me. but what if the voices are real but the people you see and interact with aren't, that they are merely simulated people? also a solipsistic take on reality. this matter of solipsism and its various shades needs to to be dealt with. on the one hand we dismiss what we hear as other people and on the other we dismiss what we see as other people.

so what is me and what is another person? consider in a reality where physical motion is not real and the stuff of reality is fixed in space, we can divide space up into personal zones, what i call personal bubble spaces, each centred around the person's head. what is far away from me is not me therefore and must be other people.

extreme schizophrenia is a condition that breaks the rules of the universe. strange things happen. time lapses. teleportation. hearing voices. objects appearing. objects disappearing. images of text suddenly changing while you view them. what it does is raise scepticism about the world. that's probably a good thing.

CLEARCHARGE

Schizophrenia: Loss of Affect

schizophrenia loss of affect:

what is schizophrenia? how did it become 99th percentile measure? strange thoughts, hearing wild, what? your world unstable, you have, in a sense, disconnected, so well, what's the building like now, where am i?

how self aware are you? how do you, as a person, affect other people? some may never say to your face, they even know what you're thinking and what you're going to do, yet they not let slip...

and what were you like before? actually, you've lost something of yourself, perhaps you are inactive now, loss of affect about you.

qualms about the world, and, not coming up with any answers, after such happened and, it all goes quiet, what disturbs the mind means loss of affect?

CLEARCHARGE

Schizophrenia Type I: An Intro to Life

schizophrenia type i an intro to life:

walking in the mist, pebbles and stones beneath feet, turning, around the bend
a figure crouched by a tree, a meeting, an instance, a precedent
now i see more, much more, the sun is rising, the colours bloom, irradiating my world
in the dusk, when i close my eyes, i still see yet
schizophrenia has begun
a rainbow swirl of colour in my world

CLEARCHARGE

True Crazy and Acting Normal

true crazy and acting normal:

as someone who was forcibly committed or sectioned to mental hospital not just once, but twice, in my twenties, the inescapable conclusion is this: acting not normal is actually really illegal! it is the unspoken law of society on Earth - you will act normal, or you will be imprisoned!

as i see it, you can be as crazy as you wanna be, but for your own sake, act normal around other people! that means no talking to yourself, even if that is almost impossible when you hear voices. the stereotype of the schizophrenic wandering around whispering to himself, oblivious of everyone else around him, is a true one. what needs to be realized is the intense nature of what is going on in this situation. the voices and the people they represent seem more real than the surrounding people you can see and touch. an ironic possibility is that of the somewhat simulated reality, where the people around you, for the most part, are truly not real people, only simulated people and the people you talk to with voices are, yes, completely real, yet you cannot see them! also, another big thing for acting normal is appearance and hygiene, you simply have to maintain this or people will pick up on it. i rather wish i had been taught how to act normal at school, it would have been far more useful than such esoteric studies as some history and religion. it's stuff a grownup really needs to know! many Christians believe the world is about 7,000 years old, indeed the old Russian calendar before Peter the Great adopted the Julian Calendar, was based on this assumption. my own bias is to think the world is much younger, shockingly so, only over 400 years old, but i digress.

i often suspect that there are far more schizophrenic people than accounted for by official statistics. they say 1% but what if everyone is to some degree? and what if most people just can successfully hide it? by acting normal, of course! Earth is somewhat at least, i believe, hallucinatory in basis. now i'm older, i find it hard to believe that everyone i see in the streets is real, and i've seen odd things, people disappearing, and appearing, out of nowhere. they say many people hear voices but are never diagnosed mentally ill. and it doesn't seem possible that "science", or whatever it is, works perfectly all the time. i think everyone has had some experience where they've wondered to themselves, what just happened? maybe they saw something odd that doesn't make sense. when i was very schizophrenic, i had too many strange experiences to ever fully believe again in the received "normal" world and its teachings of what's what.

and meanwhile, people who have been completely normal up till now, who have never questioned existence on Earth, perhaps they believe things that are false, have been easily led by modern science and its teachings, and are actually truly crazy about reality and metaphysics. one thing i have gone on and on about is that physical motion is not real! you do not really move! nothing really moves! it just seems like it! read my previous posts.

but how much can someone function if they are fundamentally crazy about metaphysics and reality? will they not one day hit the wall, so to speak, because they are insane about how reality and the world really work? the reason i am interested in metaphysics is because of my schizophrenia. if it hadn't happened when i was 20 years old, i might still be a dozy, normal person, just accepting the world as it seems. but when you are shaken up mentally, it leads you to question everything.

CLEARCHARGE

Errors in the Matrix

errors in the matrix:

i borrow the term "matrix" from the films but what i mean is that life here on Earth cannot be quite what it seems, that the material world is somewhat illusory. some of these errors in the matrix are obvious, like when you teleport, as happened to me in Durham, England, in 1993 and 1994, or when you suddenly skip a short distance ahead when you're walking, a mini-teleport, if you will. that happened to me, my father and sister in the underground lobby of the Louvre, in Paris, in 1998. these are clear visual mistakes, things that go against the rules of movement in the matrix. the audio mistakes are more subtle, like when you can bend the lyrics of a song to what you are thinking, when your mind takes over what you're hearing.

but there are other things less obvious. if you're careful, and observant, and your memory is good enough, you will notice other errors. first of all, in my experience, text, what you see on a printed page, is not reliably permanent, is actually unstable. there are instances where i'm sure the print has changed. for example, the first time i read a certain novel, there was a certain passage i remember which i couldn't find again on rereading it. it had disappeared. i am talking about the same book, not reading a copy of a later edition. i've found discarded railway and Underground tickets in London dated in the future. railway timetable boards have changed instantly in front of me. recently, looking through old credit card statements yesterday, something else has come to my attention. now in my memory i bought Sony earphones at Bluewater, in Greenhithe, in 2009, but i also remember after that i found the unopened earphones package with the receipt one day and the receipt was printed showing the transaction as being at the Sony store in Orpington, so after that i assumed my memory was wrong and that i had actually bought it there, not at Bluewater. but now the credit card statement confirms that it was bought at Bluewater in May, 2009. now i have not bought so many Sony earphones that i have confused them with another. i can only conclude that the matrix, the Earth system, had the actual source record for the receipt corrupted or mutated to show false details.

now things like this make you think you are losing your mind perhaps, or that your memory is faulty. but if your memory is correct that means the text has changed, and that you can never rely on text to stay the same. it is fortunate that i've seen text change instantly in front of me or i would keep questioning my memory, assuming that the text couldn't change.

and another thing i've noticed and i've read about elsewhere on the web on glitches in the matrix, but am not sure about, is seeing people walk past me twice. now i wasn't paying attention to where they were all the time exactly, but am i seeing repeats?

as someone with the diagnosis of schizophrenia, i am expected to hallucinate and i do know i do hallucinate. you see where this leads, hypothetically? if i hallucinate, am i hallucinating everything? everything and everyone on Earth? am i totally alone in my own world of hallucinations? once the error in the matrix becomes obvious, becomes apparent, you instinctively move mentally to dismiss the entire world as a falsity. this is extreme, but a natural reaction.

CLEARCHARGE

The Reactive Mind

the reactive mind:

"what i'm saying is that people are impressionable. they go by what they see. and that's obvious that materialism is built on a visual impression of the world, what we see is thought of as real. and dreams, because what we see is usually less clear, that's thought of as not real, because it's less than what we see in waking life."

"wait, what's your argument, that dreams are just as real? or they're both not real? because i would go with both not being that real."

"maybe they're equally real or equally not real, if you see what i mean. my point is that we place dreams on a lower status just because we see in waking life much more clearly and it's a more stable world. we prize clarity and stability. you could say the mind is a big snob about the clear light of waking life."

"that philosopher who wondered whether he was a human dreaming of being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming of being human? that you could say both are true?"

"right. the mind reacts upon waking that the dream wasn't real but what if it was?"

"so you could be sharing a dream with real people just as you could be with philosophical zombies in waking life?"

"right. zombies without consciousness, human illusions, simulated people, hallucinations of people, non player characters, whatever. it is interesting that when we consider that a lot of people on earth may not be real, doesn't that mean we're hallucinating? that everyone on earth falls into the schizoid camp of people? that everyone is schizophrenic?"

"but you're equating hallucinations with schizophrenia. but yes, i agree, but not everyone is clinically diagnosed schizophrenic. i have a theory though. all real people may be schizophrenic to some degree, it's just that most people hide it better than those that end up committed to a mental hospital. they have better coping mechanisms. think of it this way, there's a statistic i've read that over 10% hear voices or auditory hallucinations. and if this earth is a simulated world, that means 100% see visual hallucinations of people. why are only 1%, that's the statistic, diagnosed schizophrenic?"

"what you're saying is most people are just better at acting normal so they don't get locked up in a psychiatric ward?"

"exactly. but that's just my theory. it's like acting not normal is illegal and they're well aware of it."

"probably from a very early age, i guess. and i've been trying to remember the first part of my life better. i'm still sure how i ended up here on earth was because i dreamed of earth and then woke up in it. born at the age of three. on the one hand, you've got the theory life on earth is a dream, then you have the theory it's a computer simulation, or that's it's a grand hallucination, but really i guess it has elements of all three."

"it's the frame of reference. like if you think it's a simulation then the question is who created it. the idea of god as the programmer just pops up like that naturally. but i think a lot of people don't ask who created your dreams last night, right?"

"it seems there's no getting away from the concept of god though. everyone on earth feels powerless really. and so everyone can imagine what god is. it's like it's one of the most common concepts that everyone arrives at. what if there is someone with power over it all, even if it's just someone who manages to hack the Matrix, if you like?"

"but is it run on what could be like computer code? are dreams coded too? what if, by inventing the computer and programming languages, we've made it run on computer code in the background?"

"and it wasn't before? so earth was fundamentally different before the advent of the computer age? and now it does run on something like C++? because now the code exists? and this is out there but like maybe before Newton's Laws of Motion, mechanical motion was different? humans somehow made motion work to the laws? who remembers?"

"right. once something new exists, it could change everything in the universe."

"what is the unconscious? is it just the material connecting our senses and the thought in our heads to everything else running in the invisible background? is it a random chaotic swirl happening around us?"

"yes. it's not easy to think about what really goes on, the metaphysics of reality. but all this talk of a simulated reality is the reaction to the Matrix movies, it really popularized the concept. the schizophrenia theory of earth and creation is not as popular."

"it's a loaded word. people fear madness. and chaos, which mentally is what schizophrenia is."

"again, people want stability. full on schizophrenia violently bends reality. it frightens people. it's like taking a sledgehammer to the world that is actually very delicate."

"the question is, if earth is hallucinatory, let's go with this, what makes it so stable?"

"maybe it's the code behind it now. computer science. now everyone knows and imagines the medieval world as a magical, chaotic place and time, it's fully in the culture. the thing is, what if we dismiss those that dismiss that as superstitious nonsense, and consider that's what life really was, nobody made it up later? ancient times really were the world of swords and sorcery?"

"and science banished that away and replaced it with today? science killed the magic? i don't know. i have my doubts sometimes that reality is even older than a few hundred years. i mean i've heard it's the Year 443. that means Year 1 was AD 1572 equivalent. it's like the dream world is constructed in an instant, and so could earth be therefore, i guess."

"that's true, it's just conjecture. but that's the way to think, i think. try to find the truth in everything. consider everything if it were true at first, without prejudice. hopefully eventually what is false will become obvious."

CLEARCHARGE

Understanding Reality with Words

understanding reality with words:

"the thing is, none of us were born knowing a lot, right? how much did we know at the start of time, assuming our consciousness existed even then? but now we know a lot more, we've built up complexes of meanings for words that are related to everyday life. now the search to explain reality inevitably involves using these complexes as metaphors, if you like, to describe how reality works. so the old either or argument is whether reality is mental or material, material in the sense that the things we see and can touch are real. these are the schools of idealism and materialism or physicalism."

"it's easy to see why materialism is popular. we're highly visual."

"right. we're impressed by what we see and touch. idealism is a pulling back from sense perception, doubt comes in. is it all in my own mind kind of question."

"yeah. it's not easy to believe in materialism when you find your mind can influence what you see. really, someone who completely believes in materialism is someone for whom everything completely works, like as in scientifically. i don't think any highly schizophrenic person can be a materialist. imagine seeing what are called "hallucinations" all the time, really bizarre things, hearing many voices you can talk to, just like with other people you can see, and so on. materialism soon seems the theory of a hopelessly naive person living the perfectly "normal" life where nothing weird happens. the idea that the mind is greater than what seems "material" soon occurs. the schizophrenic may be ill, per se, but the instability mentally that occurs during a psychotic episode shows this to be the case. i may be "hallucinating" but what if i can touch the "hallucination", what if i can talk to the "hallucination"?"

"the irony is that most of Earth may be described as a "hallucination". i mean a guy may be "normal", not clinically schizophrenic, but if the world is full of philosophical zombies, illusions of people, is he not hallucinating?"

"that's going on hallucinating meaning not real. i suppose maybe you could argue that everyone on Earth is actually schizophrenic, it's just that most don't know it, they hallucinate people all the time, assuming philosophical zombies are real, and that they all have the potential to blow out to full clinical schizophrenia at some point."

"i think the word that came up after i became schizophrenic was "belief" or "believe". because the onset radically alters your beliefs and you think if only i could "believe" i could make things real."

"do you mean like magical thinking?"

"yeah. like believing if you did something, something would happen, against all scientific reasoning of course. but like things happened. at a railway station, i was looking at a train timetable and then it instantly changed in front of me, the whole board, and the same day, i looked at the railway map, at a map where all the towns of the UK were in different places. it was like i stepped into a parallel universe for a day. if i believed any of it, things might have turned out differently on the day."

"actually that sounds dangerous. maybe you shouldn't travel when you're very schizophrenic."

"that's the frightening truth about schizophrenia and idealism. it is all in your own mind. if you're mind's breaking down, it's actually dangerous. there's no comfort that there's a solid material world out there that's stable."

"but what is beyond mental and material, if there is anything? because now we have computers and that brings in a whole lot of new concepts."

"right. so now we use computer metaphors to describe reality, like it's a "computer simulation", it's a "simulated reality", "bits", "information", "data" and so on. but there's another word that is a factor in all these explanations, it's the word "personal", like is there is a creator who programmed it all in the beginning, a person."

"maybe it's because people want to believe that there is power over it all, that there is a god, if you like. to think that it all is chaotic, non personal, and the situation is highly volatile is kind of frightening. it's like everyone's trapped in a bus going at 120 miles per hour and there's no driver at all!"

"but let's say it is all personal, it's mental, but it's the unconscious in control. what is the unconscious? we all know what consciousness is, we identify ourselves often as our consciousness. i think, therefore i am, but what if i personally am a lot more than what i think, and part of that a lot more is the unconscious?"

"maybe that's what the collective unconscious is, it's like an invisible cloud spread throughout reality that connects everyone. and everyone's head is a pinpoint of consciousness."

"yes. the head is small relative to what surrounds it. the idea of personal zones, assuming everyone is fixed in position in real space, where in that zone everything is more closely linked to and influenced by the head there, where does one person become another person, where's the border?"

"what if, using the computer analogy, it's not all personal, because that's too egocentric, it's all data, or bits? and like even a pixel of light we see is a bit?"

"yes. it's easy to see how new things change the way we think about everything. it's like a new frame of thought appears through which we filter everything old to try to refine what we know and make sense of things."

CLEARCHARGE

Flexible Assumptions about Life

flexible assumptions about life:

"what happened when i was 20 was quite shocking to me. i mean huge upheaval. it's like i was born, i came into this world, i accepted everything i was told, and for a long time, i believed it all. but i suppose as a child, that's typical."

"there's a docile quality to childhood. it's like in a dream. you instantly accept everything you think about the dream world. in a way psychologically that is the most docile state perhaps, in that you're completely led by your thoughts no matter how strange they seem when you wake up."

"and the first thing i remember about this lifetime is a long series of dreams. well then the breakdown happened to me and all the craziness. but what it did was, it called all my assumptions about life, about the world, about earth, into question. it's like it scrambled my brain. i knew some of my thoughts were crazy, were definitely false, but then what if some of the assumptions i had when i was, you know, "normal", also false? how could i be sure?"

"you mean normal assumptions about life and the world?"

"yes, the ones everyone accepts, like the population."

"like seeing is believing."

"exactly. that everything you see and hear in three dimensions is somehow real is the core assumption. but when you have hallucinations, when you're not sure what you're seeing or hearing is real and what is not anymore, that changes everything. and you can never change it back."

"not to lessen what you're saying, but i wonder if, what if everyone experiences hallucinations, maybe just slightly in some cases, you know, not enough to raise the alarm, but it's like, no one admits to it!? maybe it's not a minority? or not hallucinations, in that they're not real at all, but a whisper here and there, you know, they're not sure if someone spoke or not, they certainly can't see anyone, but they're none the wiser? maybe they see something and think, that's odd, but they don't really question it?"

"so, so called normal forever isn't the case for anyone? that wouldn't surprise me. the mind is a delicate thing. it's an upset or something strange that happens first."

"what happened to you was your assumptions were shaken and you became a sceptic."

"no, you're right. that's why you have to have flexible assumptions about life. what happens when you realize you were crazy about something you believed for a very long time is that the shock doesn't wear off for years. you wonder about everything. like are the people i see real, is the world full of philosophical zombies or illusions of people? are the voices i hear, without seeing anybody, real people calling to me, or not?"

"and it's not definitely all or nothing. what if the answer is sometimes?"

"right. it's like changing gears. you wake up and think, what am i going to assume about the world today? you don't want to get stuck into a mindset that collapses when you find out some part of it wasn't true and never was."

CLEARCHARGE

Hallucinations Gone Wild

hallucinations gone wild:

"so that's pretty much how the hallucinations started. i was feeling quite paranoid, very alone. then i started hearing people's voices. it's interesting even though a lot of it was about what i was thinking, so i should have known really, i assumed they were real. you could say i was really naive about the whole thing. i was 20 years old. i didn't know what schizophrenia was at the time. and that all makes sense the normal way. anyway that's how it all began."

"but what triggered it? something must have happened. and what do you mean by makes sense the normal way?"

"in my case i think it was just fear. but to start with it was just auditory. the visual hallucinations came later. what i mean is i worked out that probably most of the voices weren't real at that time, which is more or less what a psychiatrist would say. you know, your brain's not working the right way so you hear your thoughts and so on. what i wanted to tell you is the visual hallucinations became a lot more in an episode i had over two years ago. i really saw things! at night i looked out of the window and saw buildings move and the atmosphere, it was like my house was a starship and i was flying over a huge city. that lasted on and off over a couple of days. it's when you don't sleep, you start thinking a lot, the hallucinations pick right up."

"it doesn't sound safe."

"it's not. you have to be careful when it starts up. but the thought presented itself to me clearly that if in the general equation of everything the mental component of reality were more, that the world even could be generated in a schizophrenic fit in a moment. and even before objects seemed to appear from out of nowhere, i mean that could be touched. i'm not 100% sure but i think i got an extra bottle of Coca-Cola in my fridge, for example. the thing is, i couldn't prove it, because i wasn't sure about the number. also, in the dark, i'd see ghostly images of extra cigarettes in the pack and i was kind of hoping if i could just touch them they would materialize. and then i'd never run out of cigarettes!"

"let me get this straight. so what you are saying is, a real magician is someone having an extreme schizophrenic episode!? magicking objects up from hallucinations?"

"yeah. i guess. but i haven't seen anything out of the ordinary for years."

"but can you make things disappear?"

"well, i have lost a few things over the years."

"if it's a world full of philosophical zombies, maybe you could delete a few people here and there."

"hold on. that's dangerous territory. what if you tried to delete a real person? not good. or just thought about it even? i don't want to go there."

"no you're right. but what if you deleted all the zombies to just leave only the real people on earth?"

"well that might sound fine to start with but what if everyone was left stranded? say 9 out of 10 people disappeared?"

"yeah, you're right again. but what i'm trying to say is, if only you could control it, it wasn't a dangerous out of control thing, you know what i mean?"

"no, i see what you're saying. it did occur to me that maybe all the other real people were in different countries but who knows, right? i had this experience a year after it all started, when i was 21, of sitting in a train to London from Durham and i had this definite feeling that no one else on the train was real, i was completely alone. it's just that the mood changes so drastically sometimes you're forced to go along with it."

"yes. that's true even when you're what they call mentally normal, not schizophrenic. what do you suppose will happen when you die?"

"i expect i'll start dreaming of somewhere else beforehand and then i'll wake up there one day. just how i got here. and that will be that, the end of my time on earth."

CLEARCHARGE

A World View Distorted by Schizophrenia

a world view distorted by schizophrenia:

what is a world view? the fundamental beliefs or assumptions made about the world, the universe even, and reality and life. what drives the philosopher in all of us is the need to know what is real and what is not. to be delusional or crazy is generally agreed to be a bad thing. people are supposed to be locked up in mental hospitals for this very reason. it may be argued that on earth, busy place that it is, such knowledge is not required to be a "success in life" and even that some confusion may not affect ability to "function in society", but this a weak argument, deflected away by the very overriding emotional demand to know the truth.

what does it mean to know? i know there are more complicated theories but two words stand out, "true" and "think", indeed, to think about true things. actually it cannot be further reduced as a concept. academically, if you had little confidence in your judgment on what to be true and what to be false, you would need to think about every theoretical possibility just to cover yourself, in the faint hope that at least you had thought of everything and at some point in time "knew the truth". happily, often the search for truth is a binary proposition, for it is either one or the other, though i am sure sometimes there are multiple theoretical possibilities, and therein lies the "third way" or fourth or fifth.

i don't think i am deceiving myself when i claim to know the conventional beliefs or assumptions on earth. i went to school, after all, i read newspapers and magazines, i've watched television and films, i have attended church before, i've sat through lectures, indeed i have consumed information and media. and i've seen what is technologically possible, telephones, computers, 3D virtual reality games.

let us deal with one of the most fundamental questions. what is motion exactly? it calls into question what you think about time and space, and ultimately decides what you conclude about the so called "external world" that may be highly convincing. can matter, a person, a mind, whatever, actually "move" relative to other matter, persons, or minds? happily, this is a binary proposition. it is either true or false. what are you thinking? i presume you are visualizing an object moving towards or away from another and thinking that might be actuality! in the model of the external world, this is entirely the case put forward.

but the whole question of eyesight, what i see before me, and to the sides, and i really do see objects at a distance in front of me, not in my head, if people were actually moving relative to each other on a round planet, how does the structure of my eyesight not crash into someone else's near me, so to speak?

i began hearing "voices" or "auditory hallucinations" and seeing visual hallucinations when i was 20 years old in my third year at university. after i had been sectioned or committed and released from hospital, i had the rest of the year off and returned to repeat the final year. in that year, i teleported twice. to anyone who has experienced teleportation, the concept of an external world is simply not believable anymore! the first time, i was at an ATM, i had got the cash, i turned away and then i was suddenly at the train station, about a mile away. i even started to worry what would happen if i teleported to New York without my passport on me and couldn't teleport back! if the external world were real, how could i move to another point instantly without feeling anything, even if it was at light speed? or was i a clone somewhere else in space, with my consciousness suddenly activated? no and no. Ockham's Razor would suggest the simplest theory is that, indeed, the external world is not real and that matter does not "move" relative to other matter, space is merely that that is occupied by matter, it is not a "vacuum" or "empty container", quite the opposite.

conventional thinking about schizophrenia is that it is a mental illness of perception, that sufferers are delusional, all voices are hallucinatory and so on. i suspect it is hinged on a belief in the external world, it is posited it is only our perception that has gone awry and reality is just fine, so to speak. if we eliminate belief in the external world, an explanation would be that schizophrenia is an acute instability of the mind, that our hearing and our eyesight are "turned up", which accounts for the "hallucinations", and the system that worked for so long to provide normality, is thrashing around wildly. if the external world is not real, then perception is reality, is it not, don't you think? anything can happen to a schizophrenic!

when i returned to university, i still heard people speaking without seeing them, the "voices". one day i was calmly looking at the door handle, making it move up and down slightly by thought alone. i was staring at the light bulb on the ceiling, adjusting the brightness, dimmer and then brighter, again by thought alone. objects disappeared, i never found where my dissertation went! you see the interesting dichotomy? on the one hand, hallucinating and delusional, on the other, maybe i was telepathic and had budding psychokinesis powers!

CLEARCHARGE

The True Population Puzzle

the true population puzzle:

we can say, yes, the human mind is flexible when thinking about the true population. it can seriously consider it to be anything from one, the self only, during a solipsistic phase, to billions, if not trillions. what do i mean by the true population? now obviously, my mind, or anyone's mind for that matter, bases many considerations or comparisons on the self, we cannot deny we are self-centred to a certain degree, and what we are may be most of what we can know. so, when this question is asked, everyone considers the same category, those that can be defined in the same way, that is, with a mind, a capacity to think, and a human body.

is this a worrying bias? to consider only those the same as yourself to be truly alive, perhaps? we worry very much about physical damage to the human body. it may be we are less concerned about damage to things we do not even consider to be alive, for they are so different, not human. perhaps it matters, perhaps it does not.

to suppose there are billions or trillions of souls out there is pretty much what earth presents. but where do they come from when they are born and where do they go when they die? do they go back to wherever they came from? onward to heaven? and is it possible to create a soul that did not exist? and if it existed, could the death of the soul happen?

now anyone who has ever experienced hallucinations, visual and auditory, can easily consider the possibility seriously that there are far fewer people who are real. once you start hallucinating, to put it simply, you are no longer sure what is real and what is not anymore. to give examples, you see text and moving images on the wall or floor, people suddenly appear and disappear, you hear people in the background and you can talk to these disembodied voices as well, are they truly hallucinations? i personally have seen a train schedule suddenly change completely before me, a train map of the country with the cities in the wrong places, and seen used underground train tickets that seemed dated in the future. i have teleported twice and i suspect several times not obviously as there was no sudden difference to be seen all around me, the explanation being that a distant street was visually smoothly connected to the one i was on. of course eventually, i was diagnosed schizophrenic and i admit i was crazy and delusional, but who wouldn't be confused with all that happening? in acute schizophrenia, the mind is so unstable, that anything can happen, which is why it is truly dangerous.

that i had truly teleported confirmed that the "external world", whatever it is, is not what it seems. most definitely, i cannot really "move" as such in the conventional sense, what i see happening when i walk is the world moving relative to me, not me moving relative to the world. my teleporting was a sudden change in my visual feed for my supposed location on earth. the frightening solipsism hallucinations induce, that you could be the only real person in existence and everyone else is an illusion, and the realization that conventional motion is a falsity, and merely theoretical, is what fuels theories that earth could be a kind of electronic computer simulation and the "external world" does not exist as such.

does it make any difference what the true population is? what if it were only 30? or 4500? everyone has considered billions. i have considered 1 quite seriously! whatever it is, if we ever get the true answer, we would have to adjust our thinking, "change gears" as to what we believe about reality. everyone has assumptions about existence and life, we assume we would function better with the truth, after all.

CLEARCHARGE

And the Storm and Disorder Came

and the storm and disorder came:

then fate served several blows. at twenty years of age, he was surrounded by people he could see and hear, but couldn't escape feeling all alone inside still. a mental disintegration swiftly followed. to describe a schizophrenic episode as a collapse of order in your own personal reality is an apt one. for example, objects were lost forever, spatial structure seemed to randomly shift, there was a strong sense of dislocation. for an unstable mind means an unstable reality.

in positive reflection, it meant and forced him to reconsider much of his life and the world he lived in. it was a fluid time then in young adulthood, because it happened, a permanent change in his state of mind occurred.

and it fed many years of independent thinking about many things, as if it loosened his mind, and would lead him to question much that before he received without further thought.

CLEARCHARGE