Living a false delusion
"This statement is false." That's a classic logical paradox to consider, but it's much weirder to imagine someone living it. Over at the always-illuminating Mind Hacks, Vaughan excerpts a story about a man who had that very experience, as retold by psychiatrist/philosopher Bill Fulford in the book Philosophical Psychopathology. From the book excerpt:
(The patient) had tried to kill himself because he was afraid he was going to be "locked up". However, this fear was secondary to a paranoid system at the heart of which was the hypochondriacal delusion that he was "mentally ill".Link
He was seen by the duty psychiatrist and by the consultant psychiatrist on call, neither of whom were in any doubt that he was deluded. Indeed, both were ready on the strength of their diagnosis to admit him as an involuntary patient.
Yet had their diagnosis depended on the falsity of the patient's belief, as in the standard definition, they would have been presented with a paradox: if the patient's belief that he was mentally ill was false, then (by the standard definition) he could have been deluded, but this would have made his belief true after all.
Equally, if his belief was true, then he was not deluded (by the standard definition), but this would have made his belief false after all. By the standard definition of delusion, then, his belief, is false, was true and, if true, was false.
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That's some catch, that Catch-22.
I have a headache now.
My brain doesn't not hurt.
Cogito ergo sum. Lock him up!
I tried to figure out that last part and ended smashing my head in the desk.
I would have sentenced the man to an unexpected hanging.
"Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to."
Catch-22
I see everything twice!
we have to stop the terrorists by instilling such fear in everyone that any attempt to use fear as a weapon won't work
This has got to be a joke. Does no one else see that this PARADOX is diagnosed by a PAIR O' DOCS?!? AAAAAAGH!!!
I often fear that I am mentally ill.
I...oh, crap.
I don't know if the article is a joke or not, but anxiety disorders can induce this sort of delusion.
The way to not get caught up in the paradox is to make a distinction between different types of delusions or mental illnesses.
The mental illness the patient has (some form of hypochondria, ocd, panic, or generalized anxiety disorder) isn't the one he fears he has (something more severe and far less treatable).
The "paradox" is a just trick of language (or rather a failure to make certain subtle but significant linguistic/conceptual distinctions).
I'm glad I'm not the only one to have trouble understanding this.
This post rates a unicorn chaser.
"If you work on your mind with your mind, how can you avoid an immense confusion?" Seng-Ts'an
I agree, Treepour. Thanks for expressing it more clearly than I'd have been able to.
You know, I took a course on Epistemology back in college... We spent, like, three weeks proving to our professor that we weren't all figments of his imagination. I understood what he was getting at, but that sort of thinking always felt vaguely dirty... like something you should only do while locked in the bathroom with a copy of "Critique of Pure Reason"
It's just word games. The poor guy was genuinely mentally ill, and we don't even get to hear whether they cured him!
Interesting....does the full article have what actually happened with this guy? This is a brain teaser at its finest.
Aren't all 'paradoxes' just 'trick[s] of language'? Is it true that there are no paradoxes in nature?
A bow to Seng-Ts'an: When we discuss language, we are using what we are discussing to discuss what we're using....
make him fly some more missions and ask him again.
i suspect this is far less interestin than the author has made out.
A delusional fantasy is not particularly dependant on reality. For instance, many people are fearful over the thing written up today regarding the us government and the law, which is evidently a true set of circumstances, but if a fear of that extends to locking oneself in the house or becoming a survivalist or something, it is nonetheless delusional. Now i would not particularly want to be locked up in a mental institution, but trying to off myself because I may be would be, well, wrong. The problem here is that they wanted to lock him up presumably to prevent him from doing the violence to himself that they possibly provoked, which is a philosophical problem only insomuch as it is a methodological problem.
All science is at its best when it is philosophical, but there really is no ontological issue here. That he was delusional is the main thing; that his delusion was of illness is secondary.
All paradoxes are indeed tricks of language. They play on certain common misunderstandings. The belief that "this statement is false" is paradoxical depends on a false belief about statements, truth and falsity, for example.
That said, it's perfectly possible that this guy's mental illness could be fear that he has a mental illness constituted by fearing that he has a mental illness constituted by... I see no reason why indefinite recursion shouldn't be a mental disease, and there's no inconsistency about his position. In fact, his fear would be perfectly justified!
What is at issue is not whether his fear is justified, but whether his response to what he fears is so extreme as to make him dysfunctional. For example, leaving the house does increase our chances of having an accident. On this basis, some level of concern about going outside is justified. But if we respond to that concern by never leaving the house, we are generally considered to be mentally ill (agoraphobic).
Thanks #21, I also found the trick of language here.
He may very well be delusional, but he is undoubtedly delusional about more things than ONLY being mentally ill, so the fact that he's correct in one space, but incorrect that people are trying to get him, is really just part of delusions.
I have a sort of distant relative who believed the church convinced her mother to have her committed because she stopped believing in god. In fact, her mother talked to their priest because the girl was schizophrenic and behaving very strangely. The girl wasn't stupid, she knew her mother asked for help from their priest in getting her daughter treatment. But her brain couldn't process that without paranoia.
Buddy66, it depends. If Treepour's right, the apparent paradox described in the post arises out of the vagueness with which the situation is described. Whereas some paradoxes, like Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, arise in systems where terms are very sharply defined.
Foam at the mouth and fall over backwards. Is he foaming at the mouth to fall over backwards or falling over backwards to foam at the mouth. Tonight 'Spectrum' examines the whole question of frothing and falling, coughing and calling, screaming and bawling, walling and stalling, galling and mauling, palling and hauling, trawling and squalling and zalling. Zalling? Is there a word zalling? If there is what does it mean...if there isn't what does it mean? Perhaps both. Maybe neither. What do I mean by the word mean? What do I mean by the word word, what do I mean by what do I mean, what do I mean by do, and what do I do by mean? What do I do by do by do and what do I do by wasting your time like this? Goodnight.
Ladies and gentlemen, I suggest for your consideration, the Gordian Knot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordian_Knot
I'll also drag in Zeno's paradox, from which we may conclude: if we let someone frame the argument, then we who thrash therein are willing victims.
Which applies to our current political dilemma. Any fine tool can also be used as a weapon by the village idiot.
Ignore this comment.
Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem just identifies a feature of a large class of formal systems. It demonstrates that such systems must either be incomplete or contain formally undecidable propositions. All this tells us is that those formal systems do not describe reality, which came as a great tearing shock only to Platonists, who still haven't quite recovered.
Just as linguistic muddles that look like paradoxes are best resolved by asking questions about language, Gödel sentences (generally of the nature "this theorem cannot be proven within this system") are best understood as a result of incomplete isomorphism between reality and formal language. It's a brilliant proof, but in retrospect, given what a lousy language mathematics is for describing reality, the most surprising thing is that anyone ever considered it might be otherwise.
@26: No!
given what a lousy language mathematics is for describing reality
Hari Seldon says, "Do not want!"
Congratulations, Mr. Hofstadter, on your remarkable insight. [sarcasm]
If you like these mental twisties, and you haven't heard yet of Raymond Smullyan, you're in for a treat. He is the author of books with titles like, What is the name of this book? Here's a link to his page on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Smullyan
@Roger Knights (#30), Smullyan's books sounds interesting! Thanks for the link. I hadn't heard of him.
"Comments
Romeo Vitelli says:
Was the patient's name Yossarian? Just asking."
Hahaha.. Seriously.
The belief that "this statement is false" is paradoxical depends on a false belief about statements, truth and falsity, for example.
Correct. The statement "This statement is false." is really, at heart, a nonsensical statement. It makes no attempt at assigning the value of truthiness of falseness to anything. It would be like saying "All statements are orange." Statements of what? Its not a paradox, or a statement, just a jumble of words. The case in question is even less clever if you think about it because at some point we have to believe that delusion and mental illness are independent of one another, and could not coexist. The whole thing smacks of brain teaser.
The diagnosis didn't depend on the falsity of the belief. Their diagnosis was that this person was exhibiting signs of mental illness. If the guy is obsessing to an irrational degree about thinking he is mentally ill.....then he has a problem and needs help.
Sometimes mentally ill people know they are mentally ill. Sometimes they don't.
A relative of mine is a psychiatric nurse who once had a voluntary patient who exhibited no symptoms whatsoever. Eventually he confided that he wasn't crazy at all, he was just hiding from rogue CIA agents he'd somehow pissed off.
Unlike a normal delusional person, he didn't write 100-page treatises or talk for hours about his "delusion". If pressed about why he was in hiding, he would simply say he wasn't at liberty to discuss it. In other words, he behaved exactly like a man hiding from rogue CIA agents by pretending to be crazy would behave.
My relative, for the first and last time in her long career, came to believe that the guy was probably legit, he really was hiding from somebody. The reality was so improbable that it was automatically assumed to be delusional.
I suggest trying this trick the next time you're being chased by rogue CIA agents.
It is possible to suffer a mental delusion that you are wearing a blue hat.
Putting on a blue hat does not cure this.
If the guy is freaked out enough that he has attempted suicide, he has a mental illness. It may be a short term one, it may well not be the specific illness that these knuckleheads are writing down as his diagnosis, but the poor man has a problem. He's spinning in circles in his head and needs some help to bust out of the loop. Delusion- smusion, it's some nasty kind of anxiety disorder. He needs therapy. He need Xanax. He needs a warm bath and a back rub and a visit with a nice fluffy therapy dog named Wuffles.
The paradoxical niceties are, IMO, a bunch of mental masturbation.
The ninth-to-last word in this post (I believe) should be "if," not "is." If is becomes if, that last sentence, though ugly, becomes more understandable.
@bookyloo, #36:
In med school, one of my psychiatry attendings told us that there is an important distinction between two general subclasses of delusional patients: those who respond to their delusions in a rational, normal way, and those who don't. The ones that do bizarre things are much more common in an inpatient psych unit, and they're obviously likely to have more severe underlying pathology (e.g. delusions as a symptom of schizophrenia). Just because your relative's patient was not exhibiting irrational behavior aside from that belief does not mean that the belief was actually true. They could have had delusional disorder:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delusional_disorder
The thing is, with persecutory delusions, the probability of "rogue CIA agents" being after someone is very, very low. If that person is convinced his wife is cheating on him, which is a common delusion, that's a situation where it's a lot more difficult to know. A common type of persecutory delusion I've seen in the elderly population in NYC is paranoia that the landlord is trying to drive the person out of a rent-stabilized apartment. Again, that's a situation where it's hard to be sure what's true and what's not. One thing I'd say is that if I were being chased by CIA agents, the last place I'd go is an inpatient psych unit. You're locked down and easy to find.
Finally, the classic definition of a delusion is not just a false belief, but a "fixed, false belief." In other words, the belief has to have a character to it that resists evidence to the contrary, or at least the strength of the belief has to be somehow disproportional to the evidence in favor of it.
while we are at it, false delusion is a tautology, surely.
Or is it? Now /I'm/ confused.
yes, should definitely be true delusion. probably... .
OW, BRAIN HURT.