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What can depersonalization disorder say about the self?

#1
Secular Sanity Offline
When the Self Slips

Individuals living with depersonalisation disorder bring vivid insight to the question of whether the self is an illusion.

Depersonalization Disorder (wikipedia.org)

Quote:Jane suffers from depersonalisation disorder (DPD) – a condition that typically manifests as a profound and distressing feeling of estrangement from one’s own self and body, including one’s experiences, memories and thoughts. Often, depersonalisation is accompanied by derealisation, an alienation from one’s surroundings and environment. Sufferers reportfeeling like zombies, robots or machines, just going through the motions of their own lives. This disorder has been recognised in some form since the late 19th century, and according to studies in the US and UK is estimated to affect between 1 to 2 per cent of the population. But it remains poorly understood.

Just as a transparent window might become visible only when it cracks, I became interested in what DPD might reveal about certain understudied aspects of our experience of selfhood – and, ultimately, consciousness itself. In recent years, it’s become fashionable for philosophers to question the idea that the ‘self’ is real, or to suggest that it’s little more than an ‘illusion’ that our brain creates in order to keep us alive in a constantly changing world. Yet if the self is a mere sham or a trick, why does the loss of ‘self-illusion’ trigger such dramatic feelings of unreality? Why does losing a link to your self make you feel as if you are dead or sleepwalking? If depersonalisation is a misfiring of some psychological coping mechanism, why is living with the condition so unbearable?

I’d smoked cannabis once before, on a hot summer day after I finished my A-levels. I didn’t like the effect: it made the world feel muffled, and me a bit divorced from it, but it passed quickly. This time, after eating the second yogurt, something terrifying happened. My perception drew back into my head, almost as though I was now looking at the world from the back of my own eye sockets. I perceived a delay between an external event, and my brain understanding or processing it. Suddenly there was a fracture between the world and me. While my body was still in the world, my mind had become a disengaged observer.

***Her account of living with DPD suggests that even if the self turns out to be an illusion as a matter of science, its presence to us is what hooks us into the world. If the self is such a vital component of what it even means to experience reality, philosophers should be cautious not to slight its significance.

I still have the memory of what it’s like when the depersonalisation lifts. Those are periods of such indescribable joy. They’re memories I try to hang on to when things get tough – memories of just sitting at my tiny kitchen table in my flat, without feeling the need to achieve or function or engage. Just being. Just living.

The same thing happened to me.  I had tried marijuana once before when I was 17 and didn't like the effect. I was going to wait until I was 70 to try it again, but since it's legal now, and I'm a long way from turning 70, I decided to try it.

Her description is identical to my experience.  My perception of time was really altered. Just like she said, there was a delay between external events and my brain processing it, as well. Everyday chores were difficult because I had to think about things that were usually automatic. Everything seemed out of sequence.  Another odd thing that I noticed was that my metaperception was drastically reduced.  At the time, I thought, "Damn! That's weird."  There's a lot of time wasted in forethought and inside other people's heads.  I didn't lose my sense of self, though, but I didn't feel like I was in control.  

If our sense of self is an illusion then we are just an experience machine.  Weird!   Undecided

Just say no to drugs.  Big Grin
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#2
Syne Offline
I had a friend once, struggling with opioid addiction, that said he felt like an ant...just automatically following routine. A lot of people on anti-depressants report similar feelings.

The biggest problem with marijuana is it altering the perception of time, IMO. I guess a natural extrovert may be taken aback by being knocking into their head (reminds me of a coke-head I knew once and his first experience with LSD), by I doubt it's such a gear shift for natural introverts. I wasted about seven years, decades ago, smoking pot. I don't recommend it to anyone. If you need the medicinal properties, try CBD oil.

Depersonalization just sounds like an extreme dissociation.
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#3
Secular Sanity Offline
Seven years is a long time.  I only took two drags and that was enough for me.  I don’t need it for a medicinal purpose.  I was just curious.  

It is a dissociative disorder but the author does ask an interesting question.  If the self is an illusion, who’s delusional, us or them?  I think it's fascinating. 

Quote:I experience depersonalisation as mostly a lack of narrative. Moments seem to melt away as soon as they have passed, and life goes by as a series of unrelated frames.

Jane’s loss of narrative tracks another set of phenomenological concepts, touching on processes rather than bodies. For Husserl, subjective experience has an intrinsic temporal dimension – events flow from the past through the present towards the future. To be a subject, he says, is to ‘live through’ something. This dimension seems to be lacking in DPD, even though the sufferers retain a contrasting capacity: to survive or stay alive, as a merely organic creature.

Dissociative disorder (wikipedia.org)
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#4
Syne Offline
Yeah, it is a long time. Basically from 18 to 25 (when the brain, on average, takes on the activity patterns of an adult). I'd love to have those years back, but that's a pretty typical period of finding oneself.

Dissociation is a disorder because it has a negative, disruptive effect on one's life. So objectively, the dissociative are delusional.
There's also no naturalistic explanations for an illusory self.
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#5
confused2 Offline
After two drags..
SS Wrote:If the self is an illusion, who’s delusional, us or them?
Like, er, maybe one or more drags too many?

I might have had my own story but (I find) birds are much more interesting.

I hope you (SS) have normalised relations with the human race - they're OK really - well some are - maybe.

Just say no to drugs - it will never be a bad call.
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#6
C C Offline
(Jul 11, 2018 03:43 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote: Depersonalization Disorder (wikipedia.org)


Reminds me a tad of Roger Lewin describing the after-effects of Chris Langton's hang-gliding accident, in one of the early books about chaos and complexity written for the public.[*]

It was an extraordinary experience," recalled Chris Langton. "It's difficult to describe in any precise way, but it was like my brain switched to a new level of activity. Maybe it was triggered by the heat stroke. "We were at Chris's house, midway between Santa Fe and Los Alamos, and he was telling me about an odd aspect of his recovery from a devastating hang-gliding accident.

"When my face smashed into my knee in the crash, I shook up my brain real badly, damaged it in a diffuse way, nothing specific. Generalized trauma, I think it's called. When I recovered initially, I wasn't the same 'me'; I knew that very clearly. There was some of 'me' missing. Then, every once in a while I'd wake up and some part of 'me' would be back; like booting up a Computer to a new level. It still plagues me that I'm not the person I was, and never will be." The accident had been in the fall of 1975. A decade after his close encounter with death he had become obsessed with founding a new scientific endeavor, that of Artificial Life.

[...] By the time he got back home at the end of the fourth consecutive day visiting the mesa, Chris was suffering an excruciating headache and a rapidly rising fever. In the middle of the night, with these symptoms growing alarmingly worse, he dragged himself to the hospital and had to be revived with a saline drip.

"Eventually I went back home, and slept for a long time. When I woke I was aware that I'd got back something of the 'me' I'd been missing. It was a sense of my presence in the world." Before the return Of this missing part of himself, Chris felt he was living in the middle of a cube, the sides of which were cinema screens with pictures projected on them. "It's hard to describe," he told me. "It was as if I could see the world, but somehow I wasn't in it, no emotional presence. Like looking at a picture of something rather than seeing the real thing and reacting to it as a person.

I was aware of what I was missing, but I couldn't conjure it up. It distressed me a lot. Then it came back, just like that. " Shortly afterward, Chris returned to Tsankawi Mesa, to see it again for the first time. I tried to imagine viewing the world as Chris had for a while, but couldn't. I simply couldn't imagine away part of the thought processes that make "me" what "l" am. It sounds like an aspect of consciousness, I said. "Yes, I think it is, " Chris answered thoughtfully. 'And even though the earlier 'me' experienced the world like that, the new 'me' finds it difficult to recall clearly what it was like and still more difficult to convey to someone else."
--Complexity - Life at the edge of chaos (1992) ... Chap9, "The Veil of Consciosness"

~
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#7
RainbowUnicorn Offline
(Jul 11, 2018 03:43 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote: When the Self Slips

Individuals living with depersonalisation disorder bring vivid insight to the question of whether the self is an illusion.

Depersonalization Disorder (wikipedia.org)

Quote:Jane suffers from depersonalisation disorder (DPD) – a condition that typically manifests as a profound and distressing feeling of estrangement from one’s own self and body, including one’s experiences, memories and thoughts. Often, depersonalisation is accompanied by derealisation, an alienation from one’s surroundings and environment. Sufferers reportfeeling like zombies, robots or machines, just going through the motions of their own lives. This disorder has been recognised in some form since the late 19th century, and according to studies in the US and UK is estimated to affect between 1 to 2 per cent of the population. But it remains poorly understood.

Just as a transparent window might become visible only when it cracks, I became interested in what DPD might reveal about certain understudied aspects of our experience of selfhood – and, ultimately, consciousness itself. In recent years, it’s become fashionable for philosophers to question the idea that the ‘self’ is real, or to suggest that it’s little more than an ‘illusion’ that our brain creates in order to keep us alive in a constantly changing world. Yet if the self is a mere sham or a trick, why does the loss of ‘self-illusion’ trigger such dramatic feelings of unreality? Why does losing a link to your self make you feel as if you are dead or sleepwalking? If depersonalisation is a misfiring of some psychological coping mechanism, why is living with the condition so unbearable?

I’d smoked cannabis once before, on a hot summer day after I finished my A-levels. I didn’t like the effect: it made the world feel muffled, and me a bit divorced from it, but it passed quickly. This time, after eating the second yogurt, something terrifying happened. My perception drew back into my head, almost as though I was now looking at the world from the back of my own eye sockets. I perceived a delay between an external event, and my brain understanding or processing it. Suddenly there was a fracture between the world and me. While my body was still in the world, my mind had become a disengaged observer.

***Her account of living with DPD suggests that even if the self turns out to be an illusion as a matter of science, its presence to us is what hooks us into the world. If the self is such a vital component of what it even means to experience reality, philosophers should be cautious not to slight its significance.

I still have the memory of what it’s like when the depersonalisation lifts. Those are periods of such indescribable joy. They’re memories I try to hang on to when things get tough – memories of just sitting at my tiny kitchen table in my flat, without feeling the need to achieve or function or engage. Just being. Just living.

The same thing happened to me.  I had tried marijuana once before when I was 17 and didn't like the effect. I was going to wait until I was 70 to try it again, but since it's legal now, and I'm a long way from turning 70, I decided to try it.

Her description is identical to my experience.  My perception of time was really altered. Just like she said, there was a delay between external events and my brain processing it, as well. Everyday chores were difficult because I had to think about things that were usually automatic. Everything seemed out of sequence.  Another odd thing that I noticed was that my metaperception was drastically reduced.  At the time, I thought, "Damn! That's weird."  There's a lot of time wasted in forethought and inside other people's heads.  I didn't lose my sense of self, though, but I didn't feel like I was in control.  

If our sense of self is an illusion then we are just an experience machine.  Weird!   Undecided

Just say no to drugs.  Big Grin

Quote: but I didn't feel like I was in control. 

what is "control" ?
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#8
Secular Sanity Offline
(Jul 12, 2018 02:51 AM)RainbowUnicorn Wrote: what is "control" ?

Being able to control events that may affect you. Doesn't always work as planned, though.



(Jul 12, 2018 12:31 AM)C C Wrote: Reminds me a tad of Roger Lewin describing the after-effects of Chris Langton's hang-gliding accident, in one of the early books about chaos and complexity written for the public.

You’re good with this sort stuff, C C.  This is what I’ve got so far.

We have the existential sense of self and the categorical sense of self.

The existential self is the sense of being separate and distinct from others. The categorical self is the awareness of being an object with properties, e.g. size, age, gender, etc. As we age we start to categorize ourselves in other numerous ways, e.g. religious beliefs, jobs, politics, race, sexuality, etc.

"It was as if I could see the world, but somehow I wasn't in it, no emotional presence. Like looking at a picture of something rather than seeing the real thing and reacting to it as a person."

But what’s interesting about your story is that Antonia Damasio thinks that what we call the mind, or the self, and the subjectivity is something that begins not with the connection with the outside world, but with our connection to our inner worlds with what we call the body. It doesn’t mean, though, that the outside world, as represented in our brain, doesn’t have a connection to our internal worlds, but he thinks it’s critical to understand that the origin of the self begins in the interior, not in the external world.  

We also have this idea that the images that we have of ourselves, others, and the external world are a part of the self, but there’s no qualia in images. There’s no qualia in a beautiful landscape or a piece of music.  There are no images that are devoid of sentimental qualities that lie between pleasure and pain and we associate these representations and feelings of these images with the self. This sort of sounds like what they’re describing.  The narratives, symbolism, and feelings that we attach to sights, sounds, i.e. our sensual perceptions of the external world seem to be missing.

What do you think?



C2 Wrote:I hope you (SS) have normalised relations with the human race  - they're OK really - well some are - maybe.

I'll go with RU's line of questioning. What's normal?
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#9
C C Offline
(Jul 12, 2018 02:59 AM)Secular Sanity Wrote: This sort of sounds like what they’re describing.  The narratives, symbolism, and feelings that we attach to sights, sounds, i.e. our sensual perceptions of the external world seem to be missing.

What do you think?

Capgras delusion narrows down to specific people or domesticated animals not having the usual emotional and conceptual significance projected upon them (among other potential contributing factors). Resulting in those individuals being deemed imposters. A parent or loved one doesn't "feel right", even though they exhibit the correct appearance, voice, and behavior.

~
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#10
Secular Sanity Offline
(Jul 12, 2018 10:18 AM)C C Wrote: Capgras delusion narrows down to specific people or domesticated animals not having the usual emotional and conceptual significance projected upon them (among other potential contributing factors). Resulting in those individuals being deemed imposters. A parent or loved one doesn't "feel right", even though they exhibit the correct appearance, voice, and behavior.

Oh, yeah, I forgot about that one. Perfect!

Thanks, C C!
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