I'm not quite so absurdist as Chris in his story above on truth, though I've had plenty of exasperations on it. Koro and kuru might be interesting. The first is a delusory affliction, sometimes in mass hysteria, that genital organs (the penis or female nipples) are disappearing into the body, the second a real disease that emerges from former cannibal practices (it has a long incubation period - the cannibalism is supposed to have stopped in 1960). One of the 'cures' for koro is to get someone else to hang onto the actually non-receding bit. So you see Chris, there is some truth. If you think you have koro, no point in calling me. Kuru is incurable, so the truth there is it ain't good to eat people.
Human susceptibility to delusion seems plain enough. Quite a few students over the years have deluded themselves into thinking my story about koro isn't true. Amazingly, on reference to Wikipedia, they believe it. This, of course, is part of a longer strategy to get them to understand what 'credibility' is - like the credibility of someone teaching from management textbooks as though they are true. Managers, in these books, have responsibility to create reality for others. If this is true, we can at least ask why they choose to inflict such a lousy one. I guess most of us can spot that the guy chopping at his second head, believing it is me, yet putting himself in hospital, is deluded. Gabby might be tempted to applaud, but I'm pretty sure she would try to take the axe away, if she had the chance. This sort of delusion seems easy to spot, even though we don't have direct access to the deluded mind. Yet if we can spot delusions such as this and the action of ophiocordyceps unilateralis, the ant deluding fungus (known as the zombie fungus) - should be not think on our susceptibility to delusions we are not spotting? The deluded ants do not make a pretty picture in death - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis Tony's sculptures (are we there yet on the next batch, I ask as progress chaser on the production line?) have an illusory aspect - but any delusion created does seem facilitatory. This great link he put up the other day gets closer to the kind of delusion that bugs me - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEi9ZQrEjr8 - and I can easily imagine doing something like this on economics as the que sera sera bit. You can imagine a burned-out village in the Congo and dead bodies, with a talk-over by some ghastly PR from Glencore on 'maximising profit opportunities', Greek kids going hungry as Christine Lagarde does standard IMF austerity-speak 5 years after the 'cure' has failed. Groups of teenagers with their neat mobile phones in quasi-orgasmic rituals around them, cut with some poor sod trying to dig his child out of a landslide in the tin resource chain. Various politicians with jawbs-groaf promises against a burning world. The delusion is presumably that we can keep on as we are - but how it has come about and is spreading look intractable. Musak might be a cut up version of Monty Python's 'Bright Side of Life'. Delusions deny evidence (in the Nico Bento case there is a fascinating example of a supposedly 'sane' British court not believing their eyes and instead an 'expert' telling them what they were seeing in CCTV footage was illusory - though much more scary is the real experts were excluded), but this is actually fairly standard human reasoning. We fit evidence in a world-view. CSI is a great example - there are more clues in one episode than I had in a career. The insanesteam economists have finally admitted they don't do science, but still claim they act like objective scientists - frankly a total delusion. Yet they still hold sway. Of course, I still know how to pretend to be a Christian. And there are big questions on whether one's own objectivity is merely another delusion. Evidence seems to be the answer, yet evidence systems turn out to be rhetorical, often with conflicting root metaphors and hidden drives. Remember, most people fail school - so what faith should we have in the general capacity for argument? It's tough - but what is our own delusion as a discussion group? On Monday, February 9, 2015 at 8:24:27 PM UTC, Allan Heretic wrote: > > Ah delusion, norm & money.. Oddly say a science program today. > Money is a commonly agreed upon delusion with agreed upon rules. Alter > the rules the system crashes.. :-P > Left me wondering at what is going happen because of the continued > manipulation of the rules of money .. Greed is a strange delusion. > It was a fasinating. > Then moved on to different realities.. :-D > > تجنب. القتل والاغتصاب واستعباد الآخرين > Évitez; assassiner, le viol et l'esclavage des autres > Avoid; murder, rape and enslavement of others > > -----Original Message----- > From: archytas <[email protected]> > To: [email protected] > Sent: Mon, 09 Feb 2015 8:35 PM > Subject: Re: Mind's Eye Re: Delusions > > Brilliant Chris. 'Truth is an arete', I once read. I looked up 'arete' > in a French dictionary (the first e had a circumflex accent) finding the > useful word 'fish-hook'. I tried Greek and realised it meant 'value'. > Having read 100,000 words to discover this, the idea academics knew > anything about this stuff disappeared. > > There is no crown. Gabby stole the jewels in some campaign to raise Allan > to common dust, apparently. > > On Monday, February 9, 2015 at 6:48:45 PM UTC, Chris Jenkins wrote: >> >> It's times like this I'm quite glad I shook off the ModGod mantle. Heavy >> is the head that wears the crown. >> >> On Sun, Feb 8, 2015 at 7:30 AM, Gabby <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> Oh come on, Allan! I am still waiting for your excuse back in the >>> religion thread! Don't avoid your responsibility there! And you better >>> don't expect any responsibility talking from the ModGods here... >>> >>> -- >>> >>> --- >>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google >>> Groups ""Minds Eye"" group. >>> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send >>> an email to [email protected]. >>> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. >>> >> >> -- > > --- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > ""Minds Eye"" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups ""Minds Eye"" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
