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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

"Onset of acute schizophrenia, or a genuine mystic revelation, or is there a difference?"

That's a great insight.

Could you explain? A genuine mystic revelation would mean, in my opinion, something that cannot be explained by the laws of physics. Acute schizophrenia would mean the exact opposite.

On the other hand if we broaden the meaning of mystic revelation, a "light" mystic revelation, like being in awe in front of nature for example, would have nothing to do with acute schizophrenia.

> A genuine mystic revelation would mean, in my opinion, something that cannot be explained by the laws of physics

Exactly this can happen, whilst also being labelled schizophrenia.

Yes but it would mean that the following two are both right, if there really is no difference between a genuine mystic revelation and schizophrenia:

- There exists something that cannot be explained by the law of physics

- a schizophrenia label is always caused by genuine mystic revelation

I wasn't under the impression that the quote meant that a genuine mystic revelation would be labelled as schizophrenia, if that was what the quote meant, that doesn't seem like a great hindsight or particularly deep observation to me.

Give me an example.

It's not possible, everything can be explained by science sooner or later.

We have plenty examples of this throughout history: lunar eclipse as "omens", plague as "divine wrath", rainbow as a "sign of flood", etc.

“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." - Christopher Hitchens

"It's not possible, everything can be explained by science sooner or later."

I'm not sure there is a good philosophical reason to believe this. I think something like it is certainly true, but its not entirely clear what an explanation even means, for one thing. And then there is the possibility that certain physical outcomes do not actually supervene upon the physical systems which constitute them.

I do not believe in mystical experiences as being informative about the true nature of the universe, and I generally think "science" is a useful set of tools for (at least) predicting the future and designing machines and perhaps even for constructing ontologies, but I don't think "everything" can be explained by science. I can see no powerful reason to think everything has an explanation.

If what we think we know about the brain is true, then what we call reality is contingent on the majority of brains agreeing on it. That is, we'll call reality what my brain and your brain can come to believe independently. But that still means that what we know is just what our brains limit us to knowing, and it doesn't preclude something outside of that. You may argue, it's pointless to discuss something that by it's very definition is unknowable, but the fact that we can describe it by something in system (our language) should make us somewhat curious about it.

sigh Forty years later I still miss the dorm room discussions.

> something that cannot be explained by the laws of physics

that's just ordinary consciousness

Its not new. its been a question for centuries, probably millennia.

William James suggested a criterion to tell these two apart.

So did Philip K. Dick, one enthusiastically embraced by a generation of skeptics: "Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

Which was really hilarious, because for PKD, the point was that he couldn't discount his experiences. He couldn't make them go away even though he understood perfectly well that he might simply be crazy.

A great insight? Where is the insight if there is no way to know?

Objectively speaking, you end up exactly the same way you started.

It is as if I said: oh, the app hangs: infinite loop or crash and frozen? It is one or the other, but never both. Yet you do not know if there is no way for further inspection.

The insight is not into either state but toward the relation of the states.

Exactly, the metadata is the key to encrypted data.

Not everything in real life distills to a programming analogy.

My point was about what you can or cannot know depending on how much you can inspect. It could have been anything else the example.

> Objectively speaking, you end up exactly the same way you started.

Absolutely not.

You end up feeling you're unable to explain x86_64 instruction set you just saw and understood not only to your fellow tribesmen gathered around the campfire and waiting for your trip report in a language which lacks even a remote possibility to explain that, but even to yourself.

Yet, the knowledge of the fact of seeing and understanding persists.

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