h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

PR (take 2) recommended the following:

The Oxford Companion To The Mind (Richard L Gregory, O.L Zanqwill)

"This book contains contributions from all the world's leading experts in the field of phychology.
The entry 'Multiple Personality' casts very serious doubts as the reality of this condition."



I *will* look at the book when I'm back in the first world in a couple of weeks, but I have a question, which I'll go ahead and ask, in ignorance of the arguments of Messrs Gregory and Zanqwill - arguments which will put me right in time, I'm certain.

I've been thinking this for a while, and I *think* it makes sense. I've been wrong before. But hey, what's h2g2 for, if not to be astoundingly wrong in pubilc, right, Clay Boy?

No, this next paragraph is serious, and I'd like any response to consider it as such, please.


Suppose that 'Multiple personalities' is not a "real" condition. There are still people running around who really believe that (and act as if) they have multiple personalities, right? Wouldn't that, in itself, deserve to be called a "condition"? Would that condition be, in any way, distinguishable from Multiple Personality Disorder [sic]?


Does that make sense to anyone? Is the argument against MPD really saying - "you don't have a mental condition, silly - it's all in your mind!"

I'm sure this is addressed on page one of the book in question, and maybe somebody can paraphrase it here, thus disabusing me of my folly.

> "you don't have a mental condition, silly - it's all in your mind!"

The argument against is typically one of the following:
a) You're a lying scumbag
b) You're a self-deluding fool
c) You've been socially conditioned to act in this way
d) Your mind has been altered by social factors so you tend to act in this way

It's a continuum, really, with the condition having various degrees of reality, depending on who you ask.

Lucinda presented:
a) You're a lying scumbag
b) You're a self-deluding fool
c) You've been socially conditioned to act in this way
d) Your mind has been altered by social factors so you tend to act in this way



ok, with option (a), you're a pathological liar, which is already a condition, but you're not a run-of-the-mill liar; you for some reason have to insist that there are many of you. The fact that many people lie this way means that it's a condition worth investigating in its own right, IMHO. Why not call it, "Claims To Have Multiple Personality Disorder Disorder", CTHMPDD, or just MPD, for short.

(b) same thing. Why someone should choose this particular delusion is worthy of study, right? So give it a name. How about... oh, "Multiple Personality Delusion" (MPD for short). Is that better? What's the point?

(c) same thing. How does this work? What kind of "social conditioning" produces a mental condition in which someone acts like they have an actually non-existent condition, erroneously called multiple personalities, but which looks for all the world like multiple personalities? (MPD, short for, CIALIHMPDD, short for "Conditioned Into Acting Like I Have Multiple Personality Disorder Disorder"

(d) same again.

What, do people argue that if something has causes (social, delusional, lies, whatever), then it doesn't exist in its own right, because it's dependent on causes? Very , that. Form is empty and emptiness is form, yo. But that same argument applies to *everything*, so it doesn't really distinguish this particular illusory condition from the illusory condition we call, say, posting at h2g2.



Could someone who "doesn't believe" in MPs please answer this, or even explain what's at stake with this question? Really. If it's shown not to exist, then what do you do with the folks who claim to have it? (Besides being really rude to them, of course. That goes without saying.)

good point. It's rather like saying "religion doesn't exist", in a way - a lot different to saying that God doesn't exist...

Hmm, this one for me is like ghosts. I neither believe, or disbelieve, and probably will not until I come face to face with a ghost, or an MP and see for myself.

How do you know this isn't just in your mind? I don't see any .

Wouldn't the difference in perception of the mp as real or unreal result in people having different attitudes to it? If its not 'real' as defined in GTB's post then (seems to me) there becomes an emphasis on 'curing' it. If it is accepted as 'real' it is treated as way of life and the emphasis is on adapting to it.

Since I had just finished re-reading Penrose a short while ago (it's still by my bed) and since I am as entitled to an opinion as 'Clay_Toy', I can state here that 'Clay_Toy' is wrong when he says that Penrose presents a "definitive refutation" of Hofstader's arguments. That's a bald opinion though, based on my own reading and thinking. "The arguments in this book can be used to refute every single one of the arguments in the book 'Godel, Escher, Bach'." I would be happy to see 'Clay_Toy' establish a one to one relationship between every argument in one book with a refutation in the other. To my way of thinking, both writers have valid things to say but their views are based on contrary postulates rather than contrary facts. That is the beauty of philosophical disputation. The next step would be to search for facts to support or refute such systems of thought. (I just read a story about a computer in Israel that is 'learning' how to speak in the manner of a human child.) Neither author is shouting the other down, though Penrose is clearly responding to Hofstader. In any case, it would be imperative to have read Hofstader as well as Penrose. I suggest you add that book to your list. "This book contains contributions from all the world's leading experts in the field of psychology." I'm rather fond of that word 'all'. That word makes it seem that 'Clay_Toy' believes that even though there is wide disagreement on many points of psychology including the fundamental issue of if there is such a thing as a mind. *All* the experts who matter are in that book and they all agree on everything. 'Clay_Toy', if you want to cite one article from that compendium, please cite it and it's author. Don't try to inflate it's importance by its association with other writers in such a book. I am pleased that you have been doing some research on the mind (not that my opinion really needs to matter to you.) "The book contains a collection of essays which represent a 'withering attack' on the political left." What is the pertinence of your political leanings, right or left, particularly in an international forum such as this where such issues have nothing to do with the discussion here? If you feel that the political right is best, then feel free to vote that way or to campaign for your candidate (as long as you don't do it on h2g2, its against the rules here, I think.) "This book is philosophy put in the form of a novel. " I had always thought that it was a novel overburdened with philosophy. Now I can see that Ms. Rand was simply obscuring her philosophy by attempting to apply it to an artificial world. No, that's merely sarcasm. _Fountainhead_ never worked for me as a novel and consequently the philosophy never worked for me at all. That's *my* mini-review. I had not been aware that Carl Sagan had given up popularizing astronomy and was now an expert on psychology. I'll have to check out his credentials. "a reasonably accurate measure of Intelligence." That phrase is an indication that the measurements *aren't* accurate, they are only 'reasonably' accurate. I don't think that's what you meant to say. A reasonable standard is one that is close enough to satisfy the person measuring but it isn't absolute. If you check out Xyroth's work, here, on intelligence and intelligence testing (after it was abandoned by Playboy Reporter), you will see general IQ testing has been shown to be equivalent to evoked potential. So, there is no longer a need for IQ tests, which are so controversial in any case, particularly at the extreme ends of the measurable scales where they are hard to standardize. To my mind, evoked potential would appear to be measuring the transmission efficiency of the brain. This is fine. And, if that is what evoked potential is measuring then that is what IQ tests are measuring. Faster brains are more intelligent brains. So, that gives a definition of intelligence that seems to correlate strongly with the idea of the brain as a computer. I just thought I's p

Wazungumza,

Or even acquiring it.

Barton

>The huge debates triggered by LekZ touch on so many topics.
>So I've decided to compile a reading list. I am asking every one
>who is seriously interested in the truth to read the works below.

OK. But I want to compile my own reading list. Go and buy (not borrow, because it's very bad manners to taer up other people's books and put them in soup) the following if you'd like to know my version of 'the truth';

Our man in Havana by Graham Greene
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe

Now tear them up, put them in a pot with some tomato (mushroom will do in a pinch, but on NO account use oxtail) soup and stir until your arm aches. Then let the pages float to the top. Read, with your eyes crossed of course, whatever floats up in the order it appears and you'll soon know the 'truth'.

For the record I think Carl Sagan is about as qualified to style himself an expert on everything as my golden retriever. It's just that my dog can't type and we can't afford to hire him a secretary, so his musings go unheard by the nation.

I would be more than happy to act as your dog's secretary. Assuming, of course, that it pays well.

But you'd be working your fingers to the bone....

GTBacchus,

This is the thing that confuses me, GT. Last year, my wife started hearing voices. It's not as fun as portrayed in movies. This was basically the kind of internalized voices of parents, old acquaintances, imagining what strangers might say, etc. I imagine many people daydream about ways their parents would scold them, what your brother would tell you in a certain situation. Only in my wife's case, the voices were always negative, and she couldn't shut them off. She was afraid to watch tv or listen to cd's because the voices told her what lousy taste she had in music. I was eventually able to convince her that the voices were not being projected into her mind by the downstairs neighbors, or by her family, or by radio signal from demons. She checked into the psych ward for a few days, was diagnosed as having Schizo-Affective Disorder, started taking some anti-psychotic medication, and the voices and delusions gradually stopped.

In most cases we assume that people who hear voices are suffering from hallucinations. We give them drugs to silence the voices, and we discourage them from believing that the voices really exist outside of their minds. (By "we" I mean Western medicine, modern psychological concensus on how to treat people who hear voices.)

This standard understanding of auditory hallucinations is difficult to reconcile with the idea that multiple personalities are something to be embraced or developed. It's like saying the voices are not to believed when they are negative, but they should be accepted and believed when they say positive things, or when you think they are other parts inside of you, "metaphorical constructs."

When you understand that they are metaphorical constructs, it seems to show you are still in touch with reality. When you treat them as real, viable entities, it seems difficult to distinguish from other kinds of psychotic delusions.

Before I get broiled alive by flaming responses, let me say that I'm not trying to say people who experience multiple personalities are bad people or anything like that. If "believing" one's multiple personalities doesn't prevent one from getting along in the real world, then there's really no reason to complain about it. I'm just saying it seems hard to distinguish from other behaviors that we would describe as psychotic.

Although I disagree with the "this is an ablosute" wording of the first paragraph un the "Split Personality" section of this entry, I think some of the people involved in this discussion might be interested in reading this entry.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A446393

Deidzoeb,

While DNA probably wouldn't have liked the censorship very much, I think he would have borne it with good grace - if only to keep the Guide running. When he wrote his Welcome, the Guide was still an independent entity, and could do just about anything it wanted.

For some reason, the link to the original message doesn't work anymore. (Page has been removed.) Does h2g2 still have it in the archives?

as it has been mentioned above, I thought that I would supply an analogy to explain evoked potential and iq.

the figure measured by evoked potential is analogous to the clock speed of computers. it measures how fast signals travel down the nervous system.

IQ on the other hand includes this, but also measures lots of other things as well. these include things like knowledge, similarity to the group used to normalise the test, efficiency of various bits of specialised neural circuitry, etc. These extra factors can have an effect on the speed of thinking, but not usually on the quality of thought.

The intelligence project is at http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A584525 and any feedback is greatly appreciated.

I'm amused that the whole crux of the issue for Clay Toy is still the IQ test - notice that he refers to Chris Langan as the 'Smartest Man on Earth.' How do we know this? Why, an IQ test, of course.

I think the smartest man on Earth is currently living on a tropical island, grows coconuts for a living, and has one pair of shoes.

In other words, saying that *this man* is the smartest man on Earth is a sweeping over-generalization, considering the low percentage of the population of Earth that has actually been tested by the current IQ system. And that's only if we assume that the current system of testing intelligence is valid. (My jury's still out on that one.)

And now... on to subjects I know absolutely nothing about! (thanks, Barton, for pointing out that article - a little info is better than none, I suppose!)

The brain is a funny thing... It's capable of receiving and processing quite a lot of data. When it receives information it doesn't know what to do with, it starts making up things to do with it. Anybody that's taken any sort of mild psychedelic can tell you that the brain can create patterns, images, and even moving hallucinations from very little data. (Of course, I know nothing about this phenomenon... Bats! Giant bats! Kill them all! ) Even the dreams and nightmares we have at night are inspired by random thoughts floating through our heads as we sleep, and our brains, bored, assemble weird movies out of them.

So Deidzoeb's wife creating auditory hallucinations from her thoughts is perfectly normal - well, not normal, but something science can explain and quantify. I think we've all had times when we hear things that aren't there - like when you're in the shower and you think the phone keeps ringing. But schizophrenia and its cousins are caused by a chemical imbalance, while MPS/DID is caused by severe trauma. In this case, it's too much data for one brain/one personality to handle. To remain nominally sane, it's necessary to create more personalities that don't remember the event so the individual can function in ordinary life. Since we can't point to a specific chemical that causes this, or unfold the brain for everyone to see the problem, there will be debate for years to come.

Do I believe in DID? If something is round, orange-colored, smells sweet, squirts juice in my eye when I poke a thumb into it, and is filled with squidgy bits, then I might as well call it an orange. I don't think anybody would *choose* to suffer from this condition.

I've already talked plenty, but I really like the idea of evoked potential. It explains something I've always wondered about - how can this doofus over here just say the funniest thing I've ever heard, when he can't find his behind with both hands?

Well... In case you have failed to guess by now ... I am the one the only, the famous, 'Playboy reporter' Darn, I got 'rumbled' quickly - I think Barton suspected in my very first post. It's actually very difficult to hide ones identity - just too many grammatical nauces to give one away. But be watching for me in other possible incarnations!

BTW I'm still not fully sure that the infamous lekz is gone. A classic ploy if you're trying to get away with something is to try it in two different ways - one way which is crude and blatantly obvious ... the trick is to get caught on purpose and this lulls 'the powers' into thinking you've been dealt with.... but they miss the second much more subtle effort...

Any way, Tony, a very brief answer to your question,


Suppose that 'Multiple personalities' is not a "real" condition. There are still people running around
who really believe that (and act as if) they have multiple personalities, right? Wouldn't that, in itself,
deserve to be called a "condition"? Would that condition be, in any way, distinguishable from
Multiple Personality Disorder [sic]?


I do think that there is a difference. Someone may well perceive themselves as a Multiple, but that doesn't mean that every one else should 'buy into' their reality. Because... is 'Multiple Personality' really 'healthy'? That is, can we say that it is no better or worse to perceive oneself as a Multiple than it is to perceive oneself as a single entity?

BTW The psyche book is basically an A-Z : (ie a psyche dictionary) The section under 'Multiple Personality' is actually quite brief.

Barton... well.. sounds like you've read the stuff and given it some thought... not a bad critique. OK, I must admit... I have been perhaps just a tiny bit too 'dismissive' towards some of the people here ... but only a tinny bit . Trouble is, I just haven't had much time on my hands. May come back and talk about the stuff more reasonably lator. Just a note on Langan: I admit the stuff he's posted on his site is pretty obscure and pretentious... but I know more about his theory than he's posted there....I do think that he's on to something.

Back lator...

Nah....I don't think so.

Barton

Ok, I'm beginning to understand. BTW, Playboy, if you call me Tony here (easy tho' it be to spell), there may be some who don't know that you're talking to the person they know as GTBacchus. *waves at all and sundry, grins, and points at both nametags* I guess you could say the same about calling you Playboy Reporter, PR, or whatever, but I don't think anyone's confused about that.

So what you and others are saying is that the question is not, and never was, whether MPD *exists*, which is what I understand by questions of whether something is "real". We all agree that there exists some kind of condition which makes people exhibit multiplicity, but some say that it is a *disorder* which needs to be cured, while others say that it is a condition with which people who have it can and should learn to live. Did I get that right?

That's a very strange use of the word "real". I might even say that it's an intentionally misleading way to put the issue. Yeah... that's misleading.

It's kind of similar to arguments that some people have about homosexuality, and whether it's a choice. Some say that homosexuals can and should be "converted" "back" to heterosexuality, while others say that we should all accept that homosexuality is a natural condition, which doesn't need to be "cured".

I'm not saying that the status of homosexuality is in any way linked to the status of multiplicity, I'm just observing a similarity between the controversies.



As for the question of whether anyone's perception of themselves as multiple should be encouraged, I won't pretend to be well informed enough to address that with any authority. Given the very limited information that I have, I'm inclined to give others the benefit of the doubt when it comes to identifying themselves, but I could certainly be in error. Perhaps further study will teach me to change.

...giving it a few moment's thought, I guess it's a question of which of these two is preferable: 1) Multiples stay multiple, and others either learn to deal, or don't and are rude about it, or 2) Multiples are convinced that they have a disorder, and are turned into, what?, "singulars" by whatever means are effective. (What means are those, anyway?)

For those of us who aren't trained clinical psychiatrists, the question seems to be: what is the compassionate way to deal with a multiple (or a "multiple" )? Is it better for us to adress them as they ask to be addressed, or to correct them about who they are?