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Re: 1.3

Posted by alexandra_k on December 23, 2004, at 16:12:23

In reply to Re: 1.3, posted by smokeymadison on December 22, 2004, at 22:38:08

>someone who is so absorbed into what they are feeling at the moment that all else falls away.

Yup, someone who has become focused on giving expression to their anomalous experience.

>as far as necessary and sufficient conditions--you aren't going to be able to define them even for the same person.

Welllllll. What about if we hit upon some suitable level of abstraction and invoke a ceteris parabis (other things being equal) clause? E.g., necessary and sufficient conditions for someone saying 'please pass the salt': They BELIEVE that by asking for the salt they will get it AND they DESIRE salt, ceteris parabis. Ceteris parabis covers saying it in the context of a play, reading from a book, just talking nonsense, saying it in the context I have just said it in etc etc. Maybe it is cheating... maybe we can't cash out the ceteris parabis clause very well, but this seems to be a reasonable attempt.

I am not sure that we can generalise across ALL people who utter things characteristic of those different kinds of delusion. I am in sympathy for your line, but worry that it might ammount to giving up.

How about the necessary and sufficient conditions for uttering something characteristic of the Cotard delusion being: they (1) have an anomalous experience that has the content that they are no longer emotionally connected to anything and they (2) have the desire to express that. Ceteris parabis, of course :-)

>delusional thoughts that are not at the forefront of their minds.

Oh, delusional hypotheses occur to nondelusional subjects all the time. The problem is how come some people adopt the hypothesis as a belief and why they retain it despite 'incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary' (though I do question whether we typically produce evidence that is relevant to what the delusional subject is trying to express. Wellll, maybe the specific form, but not the general)

It used to be the case (well, it still is really) that the problems were the following:

(You can read these as pertaining to the bit of the brain that takes control of the language production areas on your model)

1) Why does the delusional hypothesis occur to some subjects?
2) Why is the hypothesis adopted as a belief?
3) Why is it retained as a belief despite 'incontrovertible and obvious proof and / or evidence to the contrary'?

Maher's version of the empiricist model has it that the delusional hypothesis occurs as an explanation (rationalising strategy) for an anomalous experience.

All sorts of hypotheses occur to subjects when they attempt a rationalising strategy - but there is some evidence that some subjects tend towards an INTERNALISING bias in their explanation whereas others tend towards an EXTERNALISING bias. It was thought for a while that the experience of subjects with the Capgras and Cotard delusions was the same but the Capgras subject has an EXTERNALISING bias and blames the thing in the world for the anomalous experience (in that OTHER PEOPLE have been replaced) whereas the Cotard subject has an INTERNALISING bias and blames themself maintaining that they have changed in that they have died. But then there was the finding of concurrent Cotard and Capgras delusions which put a spanner in the works slightly (surely one cannot exhibit both an internalising and externalising bias at the same time - such a thing would render the distinction meaningless), and now it is typically acknowledged that the anomalous experience in the cases is different - Cotard, global loss of response, Capgras, loss of response to familiar faces.

Then it was found that delusional subjects outperform normal controls on probabilistic reasoning tasks - sorry, that compared to nondelusional controls they have a tendancy to 'jump to conclusions'. It was thought that some kind of bias might mean that some kinds of hypotheses occur to the subject, but not others. Then once the delusional hypothesis has occured delusional subjects are more likely to 'jump to the conclusion' that that hypothesis is correct.

(A worry here is that delusional subjects also tended to quickly 'jump out' of the conclusion that they had jumped into and they showed a tendancy to change their mind which is a problem when it comes to explaining why delusions are held despite evidence to the contrary).

So why is the hypothesis retained?

Thats where Davies et al and Stone and Young come in with the 'observational adequacy over conservativeness' or the inability to inhibit the 'believe what you perceive' response.

Someone asked - why do they believe the delusional hypothesis 'I have died' over 'something has gone wrong with my brain'? They are both internal attributions. (But of course neurological explanation is very different from intentional explanation and offering one when the other is sought simply ammounts to CHANGING THE TOPIC IMO - though cognitive explanation can be a bridge between them)

So why is the hypothesis retained???
IMO the recurrance of the anomalous experience in the face of no alternative ways to reality test.

I guess that is a summary of what I know of what has been proposed of the second factor. All of the above is attempting to cash out what the 'cogntive bias / deficit' amounts to. None of it seems very promising to me. It is all very messy and hard to interpret. The data is a mess, all over the place. What typically sorts out that problem with the data is the phenomenon of theorists (and scientists) fairly much converging on a single theory - but that is a separate issue...

I really want to bypass most of that if possible.

I guess that if there are different mental modules and one believes the delusional hypothesis while another does not - well, then all of the above would apply to the module that does accept and retain the delusional belief.

I am worried about cases where people do act on their delusion. Maybe that can't be covered by the 'expression of experience' model that I propose... Maybe all I have done is said of the class of utterances that are not acted on, that they are not delusions proper...

Aaargh. This is driving me nuts at the moment.

 

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poster:alexandra_k thread:432064
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/write/20041210/msgs/433424.html