Interesting, I really appreciate you sharing your perspective.
I mean no judgement by this, so I put a certain word in scare-quotes, but would you say that perhaps everyone who doesn't have DP/DR is actually more "delusional"?
I mean no judgement by this, so I put a certain word in scare-quotes, but would you say that perhaps everyone who doesn't have DP/DR is actually more "delusional"?
I think there’s a lot of “mentally ill” people who understand some aspect of the world better than the average person, but who are distressed by not sharing a common myth or who lack the shared culture to meaningfully share their experience. Unfortunately, that inability to integrate leads to ongoing damage, isolation, and co-morbid conditions.
This is where I put on my speculation hat, but — I think certain disorders are caused by the inability to resolve the tension caused by living a lie to maintain a social myth, inability to integrate socially taboo knowledge into a persona acceptable to others and being unwilling to lie, or being unable to articulate an insight and subsequently being pushed out of social interactions for being incoherent.
This hits close to home.
It's possible that I came to my conclusions purely through philosophical reasoning, and that I am suffering the sort of defect that famously consumed Cantor or Gödel or Pirsig. It's easy to say, "I'm not crazy! You're the one who's crazy!" Or perhaps there is a repressed childhood of abuse somewhere in the memories, but who can tell whether repressed memories are a real thing, or whether memories are trustworthy in general.
At the same time, though, people delude themselves all the time. It's a cultural thing; I think that memetics is the right field of study for figuring out how that works. And once one starts to realize how delusional their cultural beliefs are, one cannot help but start examining themselves. Upon learning about p-zombies, for example, I realized that I must be a p-zombie, because I had no evidence to the alternative and no way to refute the argument.
I’ve been digging Ecclesiastes lately, except the “nothing makes sense” refrain transforms to “actually, with understanding of modern neuroscience and AI, everything makes perfect sense.” https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes+1&...
(And, of course, “God” translates to “the machine that is the universe” and/or “the character in this fairytale that humans told each other well before the Enlightenment.”)
It's interesting to connect this to ideas of confabulation in neuroscience/psychology to that of DP/DR. There's evidence that we may actively confabulate stories to explain what we're doing, even if we don't actually know. This is explained a bit here: https://thesituationist.wordpress.com/2009/04/13/the-situati.... Oliver Sack's writings explore the topic a bit too, where those with severe mental injury or impairment would create unrealistic stories to explain their bizarre actions.
So, I wondered if part of the DP/DR involved losing the ability to confabulate and create a narrative regarding why I was acting the way that I was. And, part of my recovery was trying to recover that 'delusion.'
Furthermore, the article 'Anxiety Changes Depersonalization and Derealization Symptoms in Vestibular Patients' has a couple relevant sections:
'It has been hypothesized that “depersonalization is a hard-wired vestigial response for dealing with extreme anxiety, combining a state of increased alertness with a profound inhibition of the emotional response system.” The proposed mechanism is that the medial prefrontal cortex inhibits the emotional processing of the amygdala and related structures in response to increased anxiety resulting in a dampening of sympathetic output and reduced emotional experiencing that leads to hypervigilance, attentional difficulties, and emptiness of the mind.'
This provides evidence that DP/DR involves lessened emotional response. Later, the article states:
'The role of the limbic system and the amygdala in particular is very important, since affective memory connections to past experience could be an important factor in making new perceptions feel familiar and real'
So, I wonder if DP/DR is partially caused by a lessened ability to create narrative/reasoning about control over one's actions (with the emotional hyporeactivity exacerbating the feeling of detachment from the environment). And, if you consider these often-faulty narratives to be a bit delusional, then maybe you could make that conclusion!