Delusion and multiple realities
3 Quarks Daily has an interesting interview looking at a new theory on the nature of delusion. Current theories fall in to “top-down” or “bottom-up” models, where the phenomenon is seen as either a consequence of a disturbance in high level understanding, or of false perceptions. In his article “Delusional Realities”, Shaun Gallagher, a professor of Philosophy at the University of Central Florida, suggests several inadequacies with previous explanations and gives his own;
So, Gallagher proposes an alternative description, which incorporates both top-down and bottom-up components and emphasizes the influence of bodily and social factors. On this view, “in the spirit of embodied, situated and phenomenological views of cognition,” the delusional subject “does not live in the one unified world of meaning that is defined objectively (in a view from nowhere), but in multiple realities, sub-universes or finite provinces of meaning.” He likens the experience of these realities to being “in-the-world” of a book, movie, or video game, but says that “unlike other multiple realities…[delusional ones] may be ‘firmly sustained…’”
Conceiving of delusional states in this way, Gallagher argues, allows us to account for previously unexplained aspects of delusion. For instance, it has been noted that some delusional patients actually find it strange when others express agreement with their delusional claims. This may be because they see themselves as responding to a distinct reality.
The interviewer, Olivia Scheck, asks the question that this begs at the end of the interview; “This is a philosophical approach to answering a psychiatric question, but do you also think it has implications for other areas of philosophy? For instance, does showing that people can experience alternate realities suggest that to some extent aspects of objective reality are just shared beliefs about the world, and does this suggest that our ideas about the world are more constructed than we normally think of them as being?” Imagine a world in which the nature of reality was generally agreed upon. It’s easy to think of vast swathes of the world’s population that are living “in the world” of various books. The interview also links to a great TED talk by Vilayanur Ramachandran entitled “A journey to the center of your mind”, which looks at the brain’s most basic mechanisms and gives an entertaining bottom-up explanation for Capgras Delusion;
