Comment by kranke155 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kranke155 | Hacker News Reader

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1. At this time I assume all explanations are true.

A. It’s psychosis

B. It’s a spiritual entity that walked into me, just as the song lady said.

C. I should continue taking my medication.

D. I should also take care of myself spiritually and accept there are things I cannot understand completely

I honestly cannot say if it’s just a part of me. At one point I thought so, I thought it was my “intuition” embodied and removed from myself. But the voice played a trick on me and told me to trust someone I shouldn’t have. And then I realised A. I can’t trust it blindly and B. It doesn’t know everything. So C. It’s just saying whatever the hell it wants to say. It has opinions.

However, further proof of its bizarre nature is its continuing ability to predict the future. Granted, it’s much inferior to the original Voice, but it’s still there and it’s still bizarre. For example, it told me I wouldn’t go to a certain city to meet a friend when I had planned to (turns out my friend wasn’t there!) and things of the sort.

As far as driving me insane, I don’t have a great answer. I deal with it day to day. The effect of the voice under my bipolar medication is subdued. I know now that if I raise my medication I can make it even less intense. It’s just part of my condition now, and I fight it when I need to and roll with it if I don’t.

I know it’s perfectly fascinating and odd and even I would have a hard time believing in me 5 years ago.

Would love to see a data visualization of the voice's predictions and their results. Every day, you could keep track of each prediction made, and also go back to old predicitons and write down whether they came true or not. Over a six month span I think you could make a cool chart and those results would be very interesting.

For fun you could also keep track of other related data. How far fetched the prediction is. How confident the voice is. The time frame of the prediction. Just an idea...

Since you appear curious, here is some information.

The voice always speaks in the same tone.

Predictions are usually something I want to do or am planning to do. Plans it usually tells me as soon as they are conceived. Predictions come often when I am making plans, it tells me whether they will work or not.

HOWEVER, to answer your question, such an exercise could be totally futile as in actuality it changes its mind a lot. Sometimes it tells me something I intend to do won't work, without divulging why. I try it anyway and it kinda works, and I figure out why the point of failure. I fix it, and now the voice tells me it will work now, making the initial prediction kind of moot.

Sometimes something happens and something the voice initially thought was a great idea it now says will be an absolute failure. By that time I am often committed so I tell it there's no choice now, we can only keep going, and it kinda agrees and we do the thing anyway. Sometimes the voice is just plain wrong about things.

The predictions aren't so much predictions as they are opinions. Also, studying it with too hard a lens seems to bring out the worse in the condition, so I avoid it.

This seems similar to the type of intrusive thoughts associated with OCD. It's like someone pretending to be God inside your mind, making commentary on all the things you want or try to do, sometimes very cruel. I kind of think of it as the part of your mind that is involved in planning for the future is given a voice, or that your internal anxieties or fears or hopes become kind of like a separate entity alongside the normal conscious mind.

Fascinating. I had no idea.

There is a lot that can be learned about the mind by carefully observing it facing and coping with these situations. Understanding the chemistry and the usage patterns of various parts of the brain as it goes through this form of internal dialogue.

It would, however, require a lot of commitment from the patient and willingness to face the condition and even make the symptoms worse. And, considering how crude our tools are at this stage, wouldn’t likely yield much useful information.

> For example, it told me I wouldn’t go to a certain city to meet a friend when I had planned to (turns out my friend wasn’t there!) and things of the sort.

You aren’t alone friend. This type of thing happens to me regularly enough, and with an unlikely & surprising amount of detail, that it is impossible to write off as coincidence and too specific & detailed to be some kind of subconscious “impression” rising the conscious level.

I don’t hear a voice though, when it happens it just appears in my mind fully realized and I feel a “certainty” in my solar plexus region.

I think this is a very enlightened way to understand things.

We have many models of reality available to us (whether we're talking "statistical mechanics" or "quantum chromodynamics" or "chakra energies"). Categorizing them as "True" or "False" is not very useful (is Newtonian physics "True" or "False"?). Rather, we should be content with judging our models by whether they are _useful_, and that judgement must be made contextually.

Having a mechanistic view of your experiences grounded in neuroscience is useful: It suggests that you should take your medication and that probably helps.

Having a spiritual understanding of your relationship to your experiences caused you to do things that helped you and made your life better. Does that mean that model is "True"? Who cares. It's sort of a meaningless question. It was a useful model, and that's all there is.

Somewhat relatedly, I was quite influenced by this (unfinished) work: https://metarationality.com/

I think if there's something you can't explain, then you should to take all available explanations as likely.

Also, I've seen and experienced too much to just say "it's not a spiritual being". I have compelling evidence that indeed, something was passed between me and the Shaman Song Lady that day, even though it would be impossible to prove.

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