Eccentric, Deluded.

My father requests a post on differentiating normalcy, eccentricity or oddness and delusion and detachment from reality.  So here goes my whole interim yet not original theory of consciousness.  There are four parts:

Experience, Recognition, Analysis (a word for what Consciousness does, but still looking for a better word), and Acts (things you do. Not resting).  You can crudely put them in a diagram.

The ERAA 'loop'

This is a very simple structure:

·         Experience really happens to you, the real you’re in.

·         Perception brings it into mental handling: there are some problems with it, so it gets its own arrow.

·         Recognition is the basic way we relate to the world.  It draws a collection of situations and the practices appropriate to them.  It is continuous, fast, parallel and automatic.

·         That collection of situations and practices is the background – a non-representational totality of familiarity accumulated from experience, which stands under words and thoughts in understanding.

·         Recognition Refers interpreted situations minimally to the conscious understanding.  The very familiar is assumed, and the unchallenged assumption becomes very familiar.

·         The Analytic part of the mind, the consciousness, is a slow-time, one thing at a time zone.  There are a bunch of different faculties and intelligences up here, and the decision making space in which you can revise understandings.

·         Resolve.  The resolving power of consciousness is often referred to as decision making, but I think it manifests a little differently for different personality types.  An insight that enables understanding can be referred to the recognition to reframe a perception and render it familiar.

·         Automaticity of recognition and of action is obvious in walking and balancing, in the way we understand other people immediately by their expressions.

·         Controlled actions are under moment to moment supervision from the analytic consciousness. We use them where there are no automatic resources available.

This structure is modestly well supported in a few fields.  Philosophy (Hume, Hegel?, Heidegger, Searle) furnished the Background.  Heidegger describes most of this, but I believe he would find the separation of a box for analytic understanding troubling.  It is a little like the notion of the pure subject at the heart of all of us, which he would say is just an artefact of things we are familiar with.  Automaticity is a well-supported interpretation of some well-known psych experiments (e.g. Stroup interference - with the off colour words (Green, Brown) words).  The whole thing is not too far from the decision ladder in Cognitive Work Analysis, nor from Recognition Primed Decision Making in Cognitive Task Analysis, although anything with Cognitive in its name is probably in some denial of Heidegger's point that the background is not fully representational - you will find it exhausting to try to enumerate the knowledge embodied there. This point is also supported by Wittgensteins investigations into how things mean. It is also mappable (in military theory) to John Boyd's Observe Orient Decide Act (OODA) 'loop' and to the Act, Sense, Decide, Adapt loop of the Adaptive Army program.

So then, to a question my father asked about eccentricity, oddness and delusion.  These are problems with recognition.  A paranoic has a problem with their brain chemistry and their world is almost literally a nightmare.  Because of the intensity of the psych distress, their recognition reads the world as situations appropriate to that.  People around them are either enemies or allies, and people who they should love but feel nothing about, they may assume are robot replacements. The problems with recognition occur when your background of practices and experiences are not applicable to your world.

Within the communal background, we stake out our little patch, and we tend to do it as if in a campsite – watching our neighbours cautiously, setting up close but not too close. Eccentricity is, I think, about taking a space at a distance from the center of gravity, but maintaining (at least in affection for it) that it is the center of some deeper reality as an important personal commitment, a defining comitment.  The eccentric may choose to move as they move through life.

Delusion afflicts us all when we misrecognize.  Delusion as mental illness is being trapped in misrecognition either because the referring function is ineffective, or because the conscious- analytic parts are not able to find a resolution, or because the resolution is ineffective.  These situations can develop because of brain damage, drugs, or commitment to propositions that are not part of the conventional background. Bad 'propositions' (in which I would include deep ideas, inchoate senses of self etc) can be received from the outside world or manufactured to protect and paper over weaknesses, flaws and incapacities.  

Zizek says the lesson of psychoanalysis is that 'our story', the account we would like to give of ourselves to justify ourselves to others, is a lie we manufacture so we can stand the sight of ourselves.  This, though, may be true of the person crowding into the center as much as the fringe.  

I feel like the question is a good one to set up an Intervention on me for maintaining a delusion as a philosophic blogger...  I may keep you posted.