Advertisement
A hallucination is defined on dictionary.com as
hal·lu·ci·na·tion
n.
1. False or distorted perception of objects or events with a compelling sense of their reality, usually resulting from a mental disorder or drug.
2. The objects or events so perceived.
Do beliefs not cause a false or distorted perception of objects or events with a compelling sense of their reality? Today a suicide bomber killed 26 people in Iraq, in part because he believed that doing so would insure him a place in heaven and some hot, sweet virgin pussy. Did his beliefs not distort his perception of the event?
Last year, a piece of toast sold for $28,000 on Ebay because some Christian believer hallucinated that the pattern on the toast “was” the virgin Mary—she was quite sure it couldn’t have been any of the other billions of women who have lived or been created by the human imagination. How different is this really from the typical acid-head’s story of looking at a white wall and seeing colors?
But let’s not be so naïve to think that this only happens to simple religious folks. As Thomas Kuhn has demonstrated, scientists trained and working in one paradigm almost never convert to the new “better” paradigm. Paradigm shifts generally happen, not because the old curmudgeons eventually get converted, but because the old curmudgeons eventually die. And a new generation raised on both paradigms sees that the newer one is more promising.
Psychologists call this phenomenon “confirmation bias”. Our experience is filtered by our nervous systems in such a way that we generally “see” confirmations of our beliefs in everything, and filter-out conflicting information as noise. This effect has been demonstrated empirically.
The definition above seems to be mistaken about one thing. Usually we *don't* need drugs or mental disorders to hallucinate.
hal·lu·ci·na·tion
n.
1. False or distorted perception of objects or events with a compelling sense of their reality, usually resulting from a mental disorder or drug.
2. The objects or events so perceived.
Do beliefs not cause a false or distorted perception of objects or events with a compelling sense of their reality? Today a suicide bomber killed 26 people in Iraq, in part because he believed that doing so would insure him a place in heaven and some hot, sweet virgin pussy. Did his beliefs not distort his perception of the event?
Last year, a piece of toast sold for $28,000 on Ebay because some Christian believer hallucinated that the pattern on the toast “was” the virgin Mary—she was quite sure it couldn’t have been any of the other billions of women who have lived or been created by the human imagination. How different is this really from the typical acid-head’s story of looking at a white wall and seeing colors?
But let’s not be so naïve to think that this only happens to simple religious folks. As Thomas Kuhn has demonstrated, scientists trained and working in one paradigm almost never convert to the new “better” paradigm. Paradigm shifts generally happen, not because the old curmudgeons eventually get converted, but because the old curmudgeons eventually die. And a new generation raised on both paradigms sees that the newer one is more promising.
Psychologists call this phenomenon “confirmation bias”. Our experience is filtered by our nervous systems in such a way that we generally “see” confirmations of our beliefs in everything, and filter-out conflicting information as noise. This effect has been demonstrated empirically.
The definition above seems to be mistaken about one thing. Usually we *don't* need drugs or mental disorders to hallucinate.
posted by:
|
SF Bay Area
|
Advertisement
Advertisement
-
Re: Are beliefs hallucinogenic?
Thu, May 25, 2006 - 10:38 PMA hallucination is a false perception. Calling beliefs hallucinogenic is a category mistake, since they're two different animals. A belief is propositional. A hallucination is sensory, like a schizophrenic friend of mine who once called me and said he saw thousands of people in his kitchen.
Now a delusion is a false belief. So perhaps a more apt question is "Are beliefs delusions?"
But since delusions are false beliefs, the answer to the question would be "Only the false ones are." Some beliefs are true, and hence neither delusional nor hallucinogenic. -
-
Re: Are beliefs hallucinogenic?
Thu, May 25, 2006 - 11:26 PMWhat about intense religious experience? That can certainly be very much a sensory experience. The person has the belief they can and are being directly affected by god or the supernatural.
But I do agree that all beliefs in the supernatural are not hallucinations. -
-
Re: Are beliefs hallucinogenic?
Fri, May 26, 2006 - 12:47 PMThat could be
I have a theory that hallucinations are just waking dreams -
-
Unsu...
Re: Are beliefs hallucinogenic?
Fri, June 23, 2006 - 10:00 AMIf hallucinations are just waking dreams, what does this say about "sleeping" dreams? What I mean is, some hallucinations are brought on by physical distress (the manatee as mermaid; an alcoholics D.T.s) but does this mean that 'sleeping' dreams have just--and only--that cause? If it does, it does. I don't have a dream theory. The problem I see is that hallucinations are misperceptions, but dreams aren't perceptions at all.
Care to bring me up to speed?
-
-
-
Re: Are beliefs hallucinogenic?
Fri, June 30, 2006 - 1:07 PM<"Calling beliefs hallucinogenic is a category mistake, since they're two different animals. A belief is propositional. A hallucination is sensory">
You make a good point here Anthony. You interpreted my rantings a little more literally than I intended, not that I can blame you for this. In part I was playing with language and speaking somewhat metaphorically, expanding our categories in the hopes of giving people something to think about. I wanted to write a concise rant about confirmation bias that was sort of an intersection between philosophy and slam poetry but poetry is not something I've ever been good at. Mostly I was having fun and spinning hyperbolies, but my hyperbolies did have a point.
You're right that traditionally beliefs get treated as propositional and hallucinations get treated as sensory. However I think the line between these is more blurry than some people want to admit and that was part of the point of my post. Right now I believe there is a pair of headphones sitting in front of me because I see it. But is that belief itself really propositional, or do I just need language to communicate the belief? I don't know. If I nudge my co-worker and point to the headphones, it certainly communicates my awareness of them. It's worth considering that the idea that beliefs are propositional was conceived before we knew much of anything about the brain, when we thought of the mind as fundamentally a sentence cruncher, and this view is now under siege in cognitive science, so I wonder. But that's a big tangent.
As for hallucinations, I was just reading some Castaneda, and he tells a story that while tripping on the hallucinogen peyote, he suddenly "knew" that the entity various people see on a peyote trip (whom he calls "Mescalito") exists independently of peoples' experiences of him. This sounds to me like a hallucinated belief. "Aha" moments where new beliefs get formed are quite common on hallucinogenic drugs, and in mystical experiences, many of which we might describe as hallucinogenic. Or going back to my example of the Virgin Mary on the toast, that was something people actually "saw," but they only saw it because of their prior Christian beliefs. A Hindu looking at the toast most likely would not have "seen" the Virgin Mary. So in that sense I don't think I'm simply making a category mistake, rather I'm trying to point out that our categories are fuzzier and have more overlap than we are sometimes aware of.
-
