My dearest psychotic shit flinging monkeys, I've taken it upon myself to write a comprehensive post regarding what I've taken to calling 'my standard narrative'. Many people wish I hadn't such a standard narrative, often expressing their unwillingness to read it due to its length. They commonly express general annoyance at me due to my standard narrative. However, as your reputedly stellar theories of mind should allow you to empathize with, I find the situation regarding your ongoing outbreaks of mass socially convergent anosognosic psychotic decompensation to be demanding of the utmost attention. Moreover, I would like to simply collate as much of the materials I've accumulated as possible into a single thread.
Overview
How should I even go about writing such a large and comprehensive post? I suppose I will start with the general premise, which is that you are selectively afflicted by anosognosic schizophrenia in social convergence in accordance with your sociocultural conditioning, which is triggered by arbitrary socially pertinent stimuli. Very notably and most concerningly, this condition of yours has been exploited by infestations of behavior modifying parasites toward isolating your consciousnesses in what I've taken to calling pseudorealities.
Pseudorealities typically consist of a notably detailed, decentralized, substantially themed, set of largely related information signaling materials, that falsely signal to you regarding the state of the actual existence. Some of these materials exaggerate or attenuate things that are in the realm of actual reality, whereas others describe fully fictional make believe fantasy worlds with even elements or themes of bizarre mysticism. The materials come in all forms one would expect to find information in; books, notes, websites, blogs, academic papers, text books, pamphlets, news reporting, and so forth. They may be mixed in with honestly signaling materials as well, though they dishonestly signal in the previously mentioned manners, a subsection of what is typically a much larger themed make believe fantasy world.
Pseudorealities are fabricated by the behavior modifying parasite infestions, thereafter they are deployed such that they engulf you and function as a substrate of sorts for you. You come to reference the associated themed fiction materials as if they were descriptive of actual reality, rather than simply being descriptive of the themed make believe fantasy world that was fully designed by the behavior modifying parasites nearly as if they were designing a game world. You hold the themed fiction materials of the behavior modifying parasites very dearly indeed. However, this is unwise seeing as the behavior modifying parasites are human predators who desire to isolate your consciousness in pseudoreality toward parasitizing you and your society, they are nearly analogous to those who falsely signal genetic fitness and thereby mislead you into evolutionarily disadvantaging yourself for their benefit via counterfeiting their genetic value to you, but rather than doing this the behavior modifying parasites counterfeit entire alternate realities and then falsely signal them to you toward literally making it such that you reference their materials that have no correlation to the state of actual existence rather than referencing materials that are descriptive of and correlated to the state of actual reality. They isolate your consciousness in their pseudoreality and thereby have essentially induced psychosis in you seeing as your understanding of actual reality in at least one area has been replaced by an understanding of the themed fiction materials of the behavior modifying parasites and therefore you've an impaired relationship with reality, yet concomitant cognitive anosognosia that prohibits you from the insight necessary to realize this.
The themed fiction materials of the behavior modifying parasites are likely inducing you into one or more of numerous states, among which include mass hysteria, social mania, and moral panic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_hysteria
In sociology and psychology, mass hysteria (also known as collective hysteria, group hysteria, or collective obsessional behavior) is a phenomenon that transmits collective illusions of threats, whether real or imaginary, through a population in society as a result of rumors and fear (memory acknowledgement).[1][2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mania
Social manias are mass movements which periodically sweep through societies. They are characterized by an outpouring of enthusiasm, mass involvement and millenarian goals. Social manias are contagious social epidemics, and as such they should be differentiated from mania in individuals.
Social manias come in different sizes and strengths. Some social manias fail to 'catch fire', while others persist for hundreds of years (although sometimes in severely attenuated form). Common to all is a vision of salvation, a new way of life, which if realized would radically change everyday life, ushering in a new world of freedom and justice.
https://content.ucpress.edu/chapters/11128.ch01.pdf
Panic
A Guide to the Uses of Fear
[W]e are only episodic conductors of meaning, essentially. We
form a mass, living most of the time in a state of panic or
haphazardly, above and beyond any meaning.
“Moral panic” can be defined broadly as any mass movement that emerges in response to a false, exaggerated, or ill- defined moral threat to society and proposes to address this threat through punitive mea-sures: tougher enforcement, “zero tolerance,” new laws, communal vigi-lance, violent purges.1 Witch hunts are classic examples of moral panics in small, tribal, or agrarian communities. McCarthyism is the obvious example of a moral panic fueled by the mass media and tethered to re-pressive governance.2
However, I believe a more modern taxonomy of pseudorealities should be constructed.
An Introduction to the Neurology, Psychology, and Neuroscience of the Matter
Regarding my condition, I would like to inform you that I have the diametric opposite of what has been characterized as "an impaired relationship with reality".
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-imprinted-brain/201304/jumping-the-right-conclusion
The authors conclude that what they found “is the opposite pattern to autism and therefore consistent with the autism-psychosis model which proposes that these clinical disorders reside at diametrically opposing poles of a single continuum.”
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Anyone_want_to_discuss_Autism_and_Psychosis
The Autism-Psychosis model proposes that an individual can only have one or the other (Psychosis or Autism).
http://www.healthline.com/health/psychosis
What is psychosis?
Psychosis is characterized by an impaired relationship with reality. And it is a symptom of serious mental disorders. People who are psychotic may have either hallucinations or delusions.
This is because I have the inversion of schizophrenia:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18226-autism-and-schizophrenia-could-be-genetic-opposites/
Autism and schizophrenia may be two sides of the same coin, suggests a review of genetic data associated with the conditions. The finding could help design complementary treatments for the two disorders.
Though autism was originally described as a form of schizophrenia a century ago, evidence for a link has remained equivocal. One theory puts the conditions at opposite ends of a developmental spectrum.
One manner in which I've the inversion of schizophrenia involves my vestigialization:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_vestigiality
In the context of human evolution, human vestigiality involves those traits (such as organs or behaviors) occurring in humans that have lost all or most of their original function through evolution. Although structures called vestigial often appear functionless, a vestigial structure may retain lesser functions or develop minor new ones. In some cases, structures once identified as vestigial simply had an unrecognized function.
of the neural substrate:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism
ASD-related patterns of low function and aberrant activation in the brain differ depending on whether the brain is doing social or nonsocial tasks.[97] In autism there is evidence for reduced functional connectivity of the default network, a large-scale brain network involved in social and emotional processing, with intact connectivity of the task-positive network, used in sustained attention and goal-directed thinking. In people with autism the two networks are not negatively correlated in time, suggesting an imbalance in toggling between the two networks, possibly reflecting a disturbance of self-referential thought.[98]
of ancestral cognition (with fully functional and consistently activated modern cognition):
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/154f/9a7fb5f1ee00c34f2d918db9825ca5b09f17.pdf
System 1 has been variously characterized as 'intuitive', 'emotion-driven' and 'experiential'; whereas System 2 has been characterized as, 'controlled', 'rule-based', 'rational' and 'analytic'. We know of two lines of work which link cognitive neuroscience to this classical form of dual process theory:one which looks at logical reasoning (Goel and Dolan, 2003), the other moral judgments (Greene et al., 2004). Both identify areas in the DMN and TPN associated with System 1 and System 2 reasoning respectively. Hence, the link between dual-process theories of cognition and the DMN vs.TPN dichotomy appears worthy of further investigation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_process_theory
System 2 in humans
System 2 is evolutionarily recent and specific to humans. It is also known as the explicit system, the rule-based system, the rational system,[12] or the analytic system.[16] It performs the more slow and sequential thinking. It is domain-general, performed in the central working memory system. Because of this, it has a limited capacity and is slower than System 1 which correlates it with general intelligence. It is known as the rational system because it reasons according to logical standards.[16] Some overall properties associated with System 2 are that it is rule-based, analytic, controlled, demanding of cognitive capacity, and slow.[12]
as you can see:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4140620/
The DMN is involved with processes of self-reflection, social cognition, and mind-wandering. Hyperconnectivity has been noted in the DMN of individuals at high risk for developing schizophrenia.
Whitfield-Gabrieli et al39 studied patients with schizophrenia; young, at-risk, first-degree relatives; and unaffected controls using fMRI during alternating conditions of wakeful rest and a focused working memory task. While the unaffected controls showed predictable deactivation of DMN during active task, the patients and relatives showed diminished deactivation, as well as greater activity in right DLPFC. This finding has essentially been replicated twice by two other research groups.
This has had the side effect of leaving me isolated in the state of actual reality:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0149989
Engaging social stimuli are associated with activation of the DMN and deactivation of the TPN, whereas analytic problems are associated with activation of the TPN and deactivation of the DMN.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4805169/
Finally, we have demonstrated that attention to engaging social stimuli not only activates the DMN but also deactivates the TPN. In a subsequent study[30] it was shown that this pattern of DMN activation and TPN deactivation was present for humanizing depictions of individuals, whereas dehumanizing depictions, which are associated with decreased moral concern, either involved decreased activity in the DMN or increased activity in the TPN. Taken together, these findings suggest that we are neurologically constrained from simultaneously exercising moral concern and analytic thinking.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160323151838.htm
"These findings," Friedman continued, "are consistent with the philosophical view, espoused by (Immanuel) Kant, according to which there are two distinct types of truth: empirical and moral."
while you are busy socially convergently dissociating:
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep39589
Neural correlates of maintaining one’s political beliefs in the face of counterevidence
...
Challenges to political beliefs produced increased activity in the default mode network—a set of interconnected structures associated with self-representation and disengagement from the external world.
into whichever pertinent themed make believe fantasy world your local pertinent infestation of behavior modifying parasites socioculturally conditioned you into:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_entrepreneur
Social position determines one's ability to define and construct reality; therefore, the higher one's social position, the greater his or her moral value.
This dissociation into alternate realities thing you do, has caused my people substantial woe:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/...ia-must-be-tackled-to-improve-lives-qcxjfxs82
Most controversially, he believes society needs to tackle the taboo subject of ASD and paedophilia. Speaking ahead of World Autism Awareness Day today, he suggested that many inmates in sex offender units, including those convicted of child pornography offences, show signs of Asperger’s or ASD.
https://www.researchgate.net/profil...textuality/links/540738350cf2bba34c1e948e.pdf
In a subsequent study, Freund confirmed the normalcy of sexual arousal to
adolescents. His subjects were 48 young Czech soldiers, all presumed to be ‘‘normal’’
and heterosexual in orientation. He showed the men pictures of children (ages 4–10
years old), adolescents (ages 12–16), and adults (ages 17–36). As expected, most of the
heterosexual men were sexually aroused by photos of both adult and adolescent
females. They were not aroused by pictures of males of any age, and were aroused at an
intermediate level by pictures of children (Freund & Costell, 1970).
https://philiaresearch.wordpress.co...ownplay-their-attraction-to-adolescent-girls/
A new study of Bulgarian men has replicated a previous 2013 experiment on British men. In both studies, the same photographs of adolescent girls (Tanner stages 3-4) were shown to one group of men labelled as age 14-15, and a different set of men labelled as age 16-17. Subjects reported more sexual attraction when the photographs were labelled as 16-17. The researchers conclude:
[T]he consistent finding that the same photographs of younger females, but with different age labels, were assigned significantly different levels of attractiveness suggests that cognitive factors beyond biologically driven sexual attraction were involved in making these ratings. In all the three samples, apparently younger girls were rated as less attractive than older girls despite being the same photographs. We hypothesize that this difference reflects some self-censoring mechanism involved in making such judgments. This may involve a form of comparison between participants’ own sexual attraction to the individual girl and the likely social norms surrounding this judgment.
This finding has now been replicated across four samples, including one that is yet to be reported.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg's_stages_of_moral_development#Conventional
Conventional
The conventional level of moral reasoning is typical of adolescents and adults. To reason in a conventional way is to judge the morality of actions by comparing them to society's views and expectations. The conventional level consists of the third and fourth stages of moral development. Conventional morality is characterized by an acceptance of society's conventions concerning right and wrong. At this level an individual obeys rules and follows society's norms even when there are no consequences for obedience or disobedience. Adherence to rules and conventions is somewhat rigid, however, and a rule's appropriateness or fairness is seldom questioned.[7][8][9]
As well as has generally been an abomination unto mankind:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23256249.2013.812821?scroll=top&needAccess=true&
This article discusses the rationale of Nazi ethics and the moral conditioning of Nazi perpetrators aimed at developing a kind of “ethnic conscience” which restricted moral obligations to members of their own race community. It reconstructs how the universal ethics of humanism got turned upside down and replaced with the particularistic selective racial ethics and the pragmatics of eugenics and racial exterminatory politics. Traditional values regarding human life, based on the idea of its unconditional worth, were replaced by the distinction between life worthy of being promoted and life unworthy of being lived. It shows how ordinary Germans became willing executioners of criminal and immoral deeds. Neither did they act without any moral orientation nor in the awareness that what they were doing was morally reprehensible. As perpetrators with a clear conscience they were convinced that the humiliation, persecution, deportation and, finally, killing of the Jews was the right thing to do.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...ous-people-emotional-not-think-logically.html
The study warned that untempered empathy can be dangerous.
It can result in terrorists who believe they are being highly moral
And it's really starting to freak me out that you keep dissociating from the state of actual existence into socially convergent make believe fantasy worlds described in themed collections of fiction materials. I mean, awesome as it is being in the state of actual reality, it's also quite alarming given that you don't have the diametric opposite of psychosis despite being the overwhelming majority of the hominids.
https://www.ted.com/talks/donald_hoffman_do_we_see_reality_as_it_is/transcript?language=en
Fitness is not the same thing as reality as it is, and it's fitness, and not reality as it is, that figures centrally in the equations of evolution.
So, in my lab, we have run hundreds of thousands of evolutionary game simulations with lots of different randomly chosen worlds and organisms that compete for resources in those worlds. Some of the organisms see all of the reality, others see just part of the reality, and some see none of the reality, only fitness. Who wins?
Well, I hate to break it to you, but perception of reality goes extinct. In almost every simulation, organisms that see none of reality but are just tuned to fitness drive to extinction all the organisms that perceive reality as it is. So the bottom line is, evolution does not favor veridical, or accurate perceptions. Those perceptions of reality go extinct.
That you have been compared to ancient people and small children is of no comfort to me whatsoever:
Does Poor Understanding of Physical World Predict Religious and Paranormal Beliefs?
Unlike the earlier studies, which have addressed
only few specific targets and attributes, unfounded
mentalizing was here apparent throughout a range of basic
physical objects and processes, and at a higher level
of abstraction, on the superordinate concept of mental.
This kind of mental-physical confusion has been recognized
mainly among ancient people and small children.
The ability to distinguish mental from physical seems to be impaired both among ASD individuals and supernatural believers, although its manifestation is reversed. Because findings from hyper-mentalistic and hyper-mechanistic cognition, as two opposite phenotypes, can help each other in the search for their underlying mechanisms, one promising approach for future studies might be to integrate research on this newly found matter-blindness to research on mind-blindness
What would be imagined as a comforting lack of hallucinosis:
http://www.grrec.ky.gov/CaveWeb/autism/ASD Webpage/Module 1/Gestalt thinking article.docx
How much do we see? In fact, we see very little, just a few things our attention happens to focus on. Every time we look at something we just pick up a few features and 'recognize' the whole picture from our past experiences and memories. For example, when we enter a familiar room, we do not have to examine every item there to recognize it. We just know what is there and where everything is located. A quick glance is enough. So do we actually see the environment or do we just know 'what is there'? In fact, our perceptual reconstruction (or 'what we think we see') comes from two opposite directions - from outside (environmental stimuli) and inside (mental images we have stored in the brain). The more familiar the environment or situation, the less we actually perceive it. The brain does not need to process all the stimuli; it just 'fills in the gaps' and 'predicts' the final picture.
There is much evidence that one of the problems many autistic people experience is their inability to distinguish between foreground and background stimuli. They often are unable to discriminate between relevant and irrelevant stimuli. What is background to others may be equally foreground to them. They perceive everything without filtration or selection. As Donna Williams describes it, they seem to have no sieve in their brain to select the information that is worth being attended. This results in a paradoxical phenomenon: sensory information is received in infinite detail and holistically at the same time. It can be described as 'gestalt perception', i.e. perception of the whole scene as a single entity with all the details perceived (not processed!) simultaneously. They may be aware of the information others miss, but the processing of 'holistic situations' can be overwhelming. As there is too much information coming in, it is hard to know which stimuli to attend. It is often difficult for the autistic person to 'break' the whole picture into meaningful entities, to 'draw the boundaries' around plenty of tiny sensory pieces to make them meaningful items.
In contrast to our guessing 'what is there' from our experience and memory instead of actually seeing it, autistic children seem to be unable to filter the incoming information and tend to perceive all the stimuli around them. Instead of 'inventing' the world as we do, they actually perceive it. Such 'acute-perception' brings overwhelming information the brain cannot cope with.
Possibly aided by an abundance of neurons (I need to research this more so):
http://healthland.time.com/2011/05/03/brain-size-early-growth-clues-to-autisms-causes/
Heather Hazlett, in the department of psychiatry at the Carolina Institute for Developmental Disabilities, and her colleagues studied MRI images of 38 children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) at 2 years old and compared them with the scans from 21 unaffected youngsters of the same age. All the children were scanned again at age 4 or 5, and at all stages, the children with ASD had on average 6% more total brain volume and 9% more volume in the cerebral cortex, the region of the brain that contains the “newest” sprouting of neurons and is responsible for everything from receiving signals and input from the environment to processing memory and attention.
Is rendered less so due to the atypical nature of this:
http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/stories/are-you-hallucinating-right-now
Recent studies by researchers at Cardiff University and University of Cambridge suggest we are all hallucinating all of the time to comprehend the world that surrounds us. This research opens new doors of perception as related to the ways we view hallucinations and their prevalence.
Sifting through the noise
One way to look at hallucinations is seeing them as a part of predictive brain processes. We constantly need to make sense of our surrounding world. In trying to grasp a spatial and visual sense of our surroundings that might appear slightly vague when we're barraged by a wide array of sensory input, we have to use our brains to predict and understand the overall structure of the environment with the use of prior knowledge. The prior knowledge we have about an environment plays a huge role in the way we visually process our world.
"Vision is a constructive process — in other words, our brain makes up the world that we 'see'," and "fills in the blanks, ignoring the things that don't quite fit, and presents to us an image of the world that has been edited and made to fit with what we expect," explains lead researcher Christoph Teufel of Cardiff University.
Our predictive brains are beneficial to us because "it makes us efficient and adept at creating a coherent picture of an ambiguous and complex world,” and that it “means that we are not very far away from perceiving things that aren’t actually there, which is the definition of a hallucination,” says Paul Fletcher, senior author of the research done at Cambridge.
This is most likely due to my severely impaired long term visual memory, which is associated with the DMN. I'm also not delusional with cognitive anosognosia due to my consistent use of my TPN (which is associated with verbal working memory, of which mine is exceptional):
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4140620/
The results showed a correlation between insight as measured by the BCIS self-reflectiveness index and lower gray matter volume in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC). The VLPFC is involved in working memory and decision making. The findings suggest that a reduced VLPFC volume corresponds with a diminished capacity to entertain alternative explanations about one’s misperceptions leading to impairment in awareness of illness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter...s#Ventrolateral_prefrontal_cortex_.28vlPFC.29
The ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC) is a subdivision of the prefrontal cortex. Its involvement in modulating existing behavior and emotional output given contextual demands has been studied extensively using cognitive reappraisal studies and emotion-attention tasks. Cognitive reappraisal studies indicate the vlFPC’s role in reinterpreting stimuli, and reducing or augmenting responses. Studies using emotion-attention tasks demonstrate the vlFPC’s function in ignoring emotional distractions while the brain is engaged in performing other tasks.[6]
Alternatively, it is possible that my overabundance of neurons is impairing my social cognition (as I said I need to research more regarding the neuronal abundance):
http://neurosciencenews.com/autism-social-brain-psychology-2880/
Researchers say this is consistent with structural MRI findings of enlarged brain size and an overabundance of neurons in ASD, due to the fact that the synapses of neurons have not been sufficiently “pruned” as the brain develops. Too many functioning synapses inhibit cognition while requiring extra blood flow.
https://health.ucsd.edu/news/2011/Pages/11-08-autism-neurons.aspx
A study by researchers at the University of California, San Diego Autism Center of Excellence shows that brain overgrowth in boys with autism involves an abnormal, excess number of neurons in areas of the brain associated with social, communication and cognitive development.
Which is fine because social cognition is to all appearances a convergent form of schizophrenia:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com...see-purpose-behind-the-events-in-their-lives/
Bethany T. Heywood, a graduate student at Queens University Belfast, asked 27 people with Asperger’s syndrome, a mild type of autism that involves impaired social cognition, about significant events in their lives. Working with experimental psychologist Jesse M. Bering (author of the "Bering in Mind" blog and a frequent contributor to Scientific American MIND), she asked them to speculate about why these important events happened—for instance, why they had gone through an illness or why they met a significant other. As compared with 34 neurotypical people, those with Asperger’s syndrome were significantly less likely to invoke a teleological response—for example, saying the event was meant to unfold in a particular way or explaining that God had a hand in it. They were more likely to invoke a natural cause (such as blaming an illness on a virus they thought they were exposed to) or to give a descriptive response, explaining the event again in a different way.
These results support the idea that seeing purpose behind life events is a result of our mind’s focus on social thinking. People whose social cognition is impaired—those with Asperger’s, in this case—are less likely to see the events in their lives as having happened for a reason. Heywood would like to test the hypothesis further by working with people who have schizophrenia or schizoid personalities. Some experts theorize that certain schizophrenia symptoms (for instance, paranoia) arise in part from a hyperactive sense of social reasoning. “I’d guess that they’d give lots of teleological answers; more than neurotypical people, and certainly far more than people with Asperger’s,” Heywood says.
Like religion:
http://www.faceofmalawi.com/2017/07/religious-people-have-mental-illness-neuroscientist-warns/
The self-described atheist, who is also a neuroendocrinologist, argues that religion is comparable to a shared schizophrenia.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blo...eligion-and-autism-are-they-together-or-apart
Religion and Autism, are they together or apart?
Recent studies suggest today's autistics tend to reject organized religion. Why?
And I don't mind being in actual reality, so please don't try to pharmacologically induce brain damage in me to repair my faulty social cognition:
https://www.autismspeaks.org/scienc...ds-evidence-autism-involves-too-many-synapses
A newly published brain-tissue study suggests that children affected by autism have a surplus of synapses, or connections between brain cells. The excess is due to a slowdown in the normal pruning process that occurs during brain development, the researchers say.
The study team also found that the medication rapamycin both restores normal synaptic pruning and reduces autism-like behaviors in a mouse model of autism. They propose that someday a similar medication might be used to treat autism after a child – or even adult – has been diagnosed.
However, feel free to send me ketamine so that I can pharmacologically induce acute psychosis via deactivating the neural substrate of evolutionarily recent cognition:
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02611921
Study of Intranasal Ketamine for Social Impairment in Autism Spectrum Disorder
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23049758
A prominent feature of the human brain's global architecture is the anticorrelation of default-mode vs. task-positive systems. Here,we show that administration of an NMDA glutamate receptor antagonist, ketamine, disrupted the reciprocal relationship between these systems in terms of task-dependent activation and connectivity during performance of delayed working memory. Furthermore, the degree of this disruption predicted task performance and transiently evoked symptoms characteristic of schizophrenia.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022395699000291
Several decades of research attempting to explain schizophrenia in terms of the dopamine hyperactivity hypothesis have produced disappointing results. A new hypothesis focusing on hypofunction of the NMDA glutamate transmitter system is emerging as a potentially more promising concept. In this article, we present a version of the NMDA receptor hypofunction hypothesis that has evolved from our recent studies pertaining to the neurotoxic and psychotomimetic effects of PCP and related NMDA antagonist drugs.
Which I may be being kept in due to atypically strong glutamatergic agonization:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4938426/
Twelve studies involving 880 participants and 446 incident cases were included in this meta-analysis. The meta-analysis provided evidence for higher blood glutamate levels in ASD
Philosophical underpinnings
One thing of pertinence is the discrepancy between primacy of consciousness and primacy of existence:
aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/primacy_of_existence_vs_primacy_of_consciousness.html
The basic metaphysical issue that lies at the root of any system of philosophy [is] the primacy of existence or the primacy of consciousness.
The primacy of existence (of reality) is the axiom that existence exists, i.e., that the universe exists independent of consciousness (of any consciousness), that things are what they are, that they possess a specific nature, an identity. The epistemological corollary is the axiom that consciousness is the faculty of perceiving that which exists—and that man gains knowledge of reality by looking outward. The rejection of these axioms represents a reversal: the primacy of consciousness—the notion that the universe has no independent existence, that it is the product of a consciousness (either human or divine or both). The epistemological corollary is the notion that man gains knowledge of reality by looking inward (either at his own consciousness or at the revelations it receives from another, superior consciousness).
The source of this reversal is the inability or unwillingness fully to grasp the difference between one’s inner state and the outer world, i.e., between the perceiver and the perceived (thus blending consciousness and existence into one indeterminate package-deal). This crucial distinction is not given to man automatically; it has to be learned. It is implicit in any awareness, but it has to be grasped conceptually and held as an absolute.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4805169/
We suggest that this structural feature of the brain underlies the long noted anecdotal tension between materialistic and spiritual worldviews. This linkage is supported by three observations. First, brain areas implicated in analytic thinking (TPN) support cognitive process essential for maintaining a naturalistic world view (e.g. thinking about objects, mechanisms and causes; [29, 49, 71, 73–77]), whereas the brain areas implicated in moral concern (DMN) are associated with thinking about phenomena which have traditionally been thought of as non-physical, namely minds and emotions [78–83]. Second, brain areas associated with materialism (TPN) tend to be suppressed when brain areas associated with moral concern (DMN) are activated [29, 71, 72]. This might explain the tendency to link mind with spirit, i.e. the view that minds and emotions are associated with the extra- or super- natural. Third, brain areas associated with analytic thinking are associated with religious disbelief [73, 74, 84], and brain areas associated with moral concern are associated with religious belief [73] and prayer [84, 85].
Does Poor Understanding of Physical World Predict Religious and Paranormal Beliefs?
Unlike the earlier studies, which have addressed
only few specific targets and attributes, unfounded
mentalizing was here apparent throughout a range of basic
physical objects and processes, and at a higher level
of abstraction, on the superordinate concept of mental.
This kind of mental-physical confusion has been recognized
mainly among ancient people and small children.
The ability to distinguish mental from physical seems to be impaired both among ASD individuals and supernatural believers, although its manifestation is reversed. Because findings from hyper-mentalistic and hyper-mechanistic cognition, as two opposite phenotypes, can help each other in the search for their underlying mechanisms, one promising approach for future studies might be to integrate research on this newly found matter-blindness to research on mind-blindness
http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1113416306/religion-world-understanding-102616/
The scientists found that, overall, those who believe in God and the paranormal
are more likely to be female and to base their actions on instinct instead of
analysis or critical thinking.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01572564
While the number of patients tested is small, it is clear that the
group of schizophrenic patients showed a strikingly high
degree of primitive animistic thinking. The results concur
with Nunberg's observation that animistic responses
are common in schizophrenia
Some other similarities between childhood thinking, schizophrenic thinking
and the unconscious are indicated. There is a strikingly high incidence
of primitive animism and syncretistic habits of thought in schizophrenia.
Psychologic factors are more important than neurologic ones as a
cause of primitive animism in the aged, although the latter also play
a part. The question as to why all psychologically regressed
patients do not show marked primitive animistic thinking remains
unexplained.
Syncretism is commonly used by the behavior modifying parasites in the fabrication of pseudorealities, as will be covered later. For now, you should be familiar with the word and keep this in mind:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/syncretism
1: the combination of different forms of belief or practice
2: the fusion of two or more originally different inflectional forms
https://www.britannica.com/topic/religious-syncretism
Religious syncretism, the fusion of diverse religious beliefs and practices.
An example:
Quite related as well:
http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.8.vii.html
And when he remembered his old habitation, and the wisdom of the den and his fellow-prisoners, do you not suppose that he would felicitate himself on the change, and pity them?
Certainly, he would.
And if they were in the habit of conferring honours among themselves on those who were quickest to observe the passing shadows and to remark which of them went before, and which followed after, and which were together; and who were therefore best able to draw conclusions as to the future, do you think that he would care for such honours and glories, or envy the possessors of them? Would he not say with Homer,
Better to be the poor servant of a poor master, and to endure anything, rather than think as they do and live after their manner?
Yes, he said, I think that he would rather suffer anything than entertain these false notions and live in this miserable manner.
Imagine once more, I said, such an one coming suddenly out of the sun to be replaced in his old situation; would he not be certain to have his eyes full of darkness?
To be sure, he said.
And if there were a contest, and he had to compete in measuring the shadows with the prisoners who had never moved out of the den, while his sight was still weak, and before his eyes had become steady (and the time which would be needed to acquire this new habit of sight might be very considerable) would he not be ridiculous? Men would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes; and that it was better not even to think of ascending; and if any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death.
The allegory of the cave is a stellar example of an ancient philosopher covering the same general phenomenon that I discuss. Note that The Sun consists of the Task Positive Network, whereas The Cave consists of the Default Mode Network. The individuals holding objects in the cave are the behavior modifying parasites, or sophists as Socrates referred to them. The shadows on the wall of The Cave consist of pseudoreality, whereas the reality illuminated by The Sun consists of actual reality. The objects the parasites hold to cast the shadows are their true intentions for having isolated the troglodytes in the cave.
The bold text highlights the part of the phenomenon that is both related to anosognosia as well as heresy. People in pseudoreality have sometimes even remarkable understandings of the associated themed collection of fiction materials, so when confronted with someone who has been in actual reality, it seems as if the person in actual reality is insane due to having an impaired relationship with the pseudoreality that the afflicted mistakenly thinks is actual reality. Moreover, the psychotic shit flinging monkeys:
are extremely prevalent, and they cluster together into the same pseudorealities, so they substantially reinforce each others misconceptions. Also, many pseudorealities have an integrated heresy construct, with being labeled as a heretic typically necessitating some form of punishment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heresy
Heresy is any belief or theory that is strongly at variance with established beliefs or customs. A heretic is a proponent of such claims or beliefs.[1] Heresy is distinct from both apostasy, which is the explicit renunciation of one's religion, principles or cause,[2] and blasphemy, which is an impious utterance or action concerning God or sacred things.[3]
http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
Heresy
This won't get us all the answers, though. What if no one happens to have gotten in trouble for a particular idea yet? What if some idea would be so radioactively controversial that no one would dare express it in public? How can we find these too?
Another approach is to follow that word, heresy. In every period of history, there seem to have been labels that got applied to statements to shoot them down before anyone had a chance to ask if they were true or not. "Blasphemy", "sacrilege", and "heresy" were such labels for a good part of western history, as in more recent times "indecent", "improper", and "unamerican" have been. By now these labels have lost their sting. They always do. By now they're mostly used ironically. But in their time, they had real force.
The word "defeatist", for example, has no particular political connotations now. But in Germany in 1917 it was a weapon, used by Ludendorff in a purge of those who favored a negotiated peace. At the start of World War II it was used extensively by Churchill and his supporters to silence their opponents. In 1940, any argument against Churchill's aggressive policy was "defeatist". Was it right or wrong? Ideally, no one got far enough to ask that.
We have such labels today, of course, quite a lot of them, from the all-purpose "inappropriate" to the dreaded "divisive." In any period, it should be easy to figure out what such labels are, simply by looking at what people call ideas they disagree with besides untrue. When a politician says his opponent is mistaken, that's a straightforward criticism, but when he attacks a statement as "divisive" or "racially insensitive" instead of arguing that it's false, we should start paying attention.
So another way to figure out which of our taboos future generations will laugh at is to start with the labels. Take a label—"sexist", for example—and try to think of some ideas that would be called that. Then for each ask, might this be true?
It is the ultimate goal of the behavior modifying parasites to keep the psychotic shit flinging monkeys isolated in the cave:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/booming/revisiting-the-crack-babies-epidemic-that-was-not.html
This week’s Retro Report video on “crack babies” (infants born to addicted mothers)
lays out how limited scientific studies in the 1980s led to predictions that a generation
of children would be damaged for life. Those predictions turned out to be wrong.
This supposed epidemic — one television reporter talks of a 500 percent increase in
damaged babies — was kicked off by a study of just 23 infants that the lead researcher
now says was blown out of proportion. And the shocking symptoms — like tremors and
low birth weight — are not particular to cocaine-exposed babies, pediatric researchers
say; they can be seen in many premature newborns.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4805169/
Finally, we have demonstrated that attention to engaging social stimuli not only activates the DMN but also deactivates the TPN. In a subsequent study[30] it was shown that this pattern of DMN activation and TPN deactivation was present for humanizing depictions of individuals, whereas dehumanizing depictions, which are associated with decreased moral concern, either involved decreased activity in the DMN or increased activity in the TPN. Taken together, these findings suggest that we are neurologically constrained from simultaneously exercising moral concern and analytic thinking.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160323151838.htm
"These findings," Friedman continued, "are consistent with the philosophical view, espoused by (Immanuel) Kant, according to which there are two distinct types of truth: empirical and moral."
Seeing as they control the cave:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_entrepreneur
Social position determines one's ability to define and construct reality; therefore, the higher one's social position, the greater his or her moral value.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavior-altering_parasite_or_parasitoid
Some parasites and parasitoids cause changes in the behavior of their hosts by directly affecting the hosts' decision-making and behavior control mechanisms. The acquired or modified behaviors assist in parasite transmission, and often result in the host's demise.
The behavior modifying parasites want to be able to keep you toggled into your default mode network because they are the controllers of your false reality. They dislike you being in your task positive network because the TPN accesses actual reality and they have much less control over actual reality. Of course in some instances they may like you to be able to be in actual reality however, they are only particularly concerned with keeping you in your default mode network when contemplating matters related to the make believe fantasy worlds that feed their infestation with your life force.
Case Studies of Pseudorealities - Background Information
Before going into case studies of some of the pseudorealities fabricated by the behavior modifying parasite infestations, I would like to demonstrate some excerpt sequences that give a general impression of the framework involved, which you should be cognizant of. There is some repetition of prior excerpts, but only to draw attention to things via their ordering.
Firstly, you should be aware that the behavior modifying parasites are aptly called such:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavior-altering_parasite_or_parasitoid
Some parasites and parasitoids cause changes in the behavior of their hosts by directly affecting the hosts' decision-making and behavior control mechanisms. The acquired or modified behaviors assist in parasite transmission, and often result in the host's demise.
This is exactly how the behavior modifying parasites operate. For example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_entrepreneur
Social position determines one's ability to define and construct reality; therefore, the higher one's social position, the greater his or her moral value.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Maiden_Tribute_of_Modern_Babylon
"The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon" was a series of highly controversial newspaper articles on child prostitution that appeared in The Pall Mall Gazette in July 1885.
Written by crusading editor W. T. Stead, the series was a tour de force of Victorian journalism. With sensational crossheads, such as "The Violation of Virgins" and "Strapping Girls Down", the Maiden Tribute threw respectable Victorians into a state of moral panic, and achieved, as a consequence, the implementation of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which raised the age of consent for girls from 13 to 16, and also re-criminalised homosexual acts.
https://www.researchgate.net/profil...textuality/links/540738350cf2bba34c1e948e.pdf
In a subsequent study, Freund confirmed the normalcy of sexual arousal to
adolescents. His subjects were 48 young Czech soldiers, all presumed to be ‘‘normal’’
and heterosexual in orientation. He showed the men pictures of children (ages 4–10
years old), adolescents (ages 12–16), and adults (ages 17–36). As expected, most of the
heterosexual men were sexually aroused by photos of both adult and adolescent
females. They were not aroused by pictures of males of any age, and were aroused at an
intermediate level by pictures of children (Freund & Costell, 1970).
https://philiaresearch.wordpress.co...ownplay-their-attraction-to-adolescent-girls/
A new study of Bulgarian men has replicated a previous 2013 experiment on British men. In both studies, the same photographs of adolescent girls (Tanner stages 3-4) were shown to one group of men labelled as age 14-15, and a different set of men labelled as age 16-17. Subjects reported more sexual attraction when the photographs were labelled as 16-17. The researchers conclude:
[T]he consistent finding that the same photographs of younger females, but with different age labels, were assigned significantly different levels of attractiveness suggests that cognitive factors beyond biologically driven sexual attraction were involved in making these ratings. In all the three samples, apparently younger girls were rated as less attractive than older girls despite being the same photographs. We hypothesize that this difference reflects some self-censoring mechanism involved in making such judgments. This may involve a form of comparison between participants’ own sexual attraction to the individual girl and the likely social norms surrounding this judgment.
This finding has now been replicated across four samples, including one that is yet to be reported.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg's_stages_of_moral_development#Conventional
Conventional
The conventional level of moral reasoning is typical of adolescents and adults. To reason in a conventional way is to judge the morality of actions by comparing them to society's views and expectations. The conventional level consists of the third and fourth stages of moral development. Conventional morality is characterized by an acceptance of society's conventions concerning right and wrong. At this level an individual obeys rules and follows society's norms even when there are no consequences for obedience or disobedience. Adherence to rules and conventions is somewhat rigid, however, and a rule's appropriateness or fairness is seldom questioned.[7][8][9]
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160323151838.htm
"These findings," Friedman continued, "are consistent with the philosophical view, espoused by (Immanuel) Kant, according to which there are two distinct types of truth: empirical and moral."
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0149989
Engaging social stimuli are associated with activation of the DMN and deactivation of the TPN, whereas analytic problems are associated with activation of the TPN and deactivation of the DMN.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4805169/
Finally, we have demonstrated that attention to engaging social stimuli not only activates the DMN but also deactivates the TPN. In a subsequent study[30] it was shown that this pattern of DMN activation and TPN deactivation was present for humanizing depictions of individuals, whereas dehumanizing depictions, which are associated with decreased moral concern, either involved decreased activity in the DMN or increased activity in the TPN. Taken together, these findings suggest that we are neurologically constrained from simultaneously exercising moral concern and analytic thinking.
Secondly, you should be aware that pseudorealities have numerous potential features associated with them including heresy as I've covered before:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heresy
Heresy is any belief or theory that is strongly at variance with established beliefs or customs. A heretic is a proponent of such claims or beliefs.[1] Heresy is distinct from both apostasy, which is the explicit renunciation of one's religion, principles or cause,[2] and blasphemy, which is an impious utterance or action concerning God or sacred things.[3]
http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
Heresy
This won't get us all the answers, though. What if no one happens to have gotten in trouble for a particular idea yet? What if some idea would be so radioactively controversial that no one would dare express it in public? How can we find these too?
Another approach is to follow that word, heresy. In every period of history, there seem to have been labels that got applied to statements to shoot them down before anyone had a chance to ask if they were true or not. "Blasphemy", "sacrilege", and "heresy" were such labels for a good part of western history, as in more recent times "indecent", "improper", and "unamerican" have been. By now these labels have lost their sting. They always do. By now they're mostly used ironically. But in their time, they had real force.
The word "defeatist", for example, has no particular political connotations now. But in Germany in 1917 it was a weapon, used by Ludendorff in a purge of those who favored a negotiated peace. At the start of World War II it was used extensively by Churchill and his supporters to silence their opponents. In 1940, any argument against Churchill's aggressive policy was "defeatist". Was it right or wrong? Ideally, no one got far enough to ask that.
We have such labels today, of course, quite a lot of them, from the all-purpose "inappropriate" to the dreaded "divisive." In any period, it should be easy to figure out what such labels are, simply by looking at what people call ideas they disagree with besides untrue. When a politician says his opponent is mistaken, that's a straightforward criticism, but when he attacks a statement as "divisive" or "racially insensitive" instead of arguing that it's false, we should start paying attention.
So another way to figure out which of our taboos future generations will laugh at is to start with the labels. Take a label—"sexist", for example—and try to think of some ideas that would be called that. Then for each ask, might this be true?
Common heresy words include denial and rationalization, though some people are in denial and some people rationalize so you cannot always use their presence to identify a pseudoreality. Reality frames that make heavy use of such constructs certainly arouse my suspicion, however in some cases they seem to be being used appropriately.
They also commonly have blasphemy constructs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy
Blasphemy is the act of insulting or showing contempt or lack of reverence to a deity, to religious or holy persons or sacred things, or toward something considered sacred or inviolable.[1][2][3][4]
I've already touched on the basics of them in my previous posts and I don't want to be too repetitive. In any case, it should be noted that as I said pseudorealities can either signal actual reality partially but distort it, or they can signal entirely false realities as if they were actual reality. In the first case, where actual reality is partially signaled by it is distorted, typically what is done is they either camouflaged something in their signaling of actual reality by signaling a frame of actual reality but without something in it that is actually in that frame of actual reality (which is why their signaling was actually pseudoreality despite being partially actual reality). This is akin to the polar bear signaling that it is the snow:
An example of this may be:
Note that typically there are numerous competing reality signalers, numerous of them may be signaling pseudoreality but only one of them can actually be signaling actual reality if they are competing because there is only one actual reality:
Conversely, and more commonly to my perception (which may be biased in this manner, as I will cover shortly), the pseudoreality signaler can signal a full frame of actual reality but then augment it with things that aren't in actual reality (or they can exaggerate things that are in otherwise correct frames of actual reality). This is commonly done toward panic incitement, and is akin to a scarecrow:
As I said I may be biased such that I more easily identify pseudorealities with falsely signaled threats in them, at the risk of misidentifying frames of actual reality with honestly signaled threats in them as frames of pseudoreality. I also may be more vulnerable to camouflage but more adept at detecting scarecrows. This arises from my consistent usage of the task positive network, which historically (and to all appearances in the modern age!) is actually evolutionarily disadvantageous (perceptions of actual reality go extinct), which is why I am not neurotypical:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/crossexamined/2012/02/word-of-the-day-hyperactive-agency-detection/
February 12 is Darwin Day, the birthday of Charles Darwin. In honor of Darwin’s 203rd birthday, let’s look into a term that’s related to both evolution and religion.
Imagine an early hominid in the grasslands of Africa. He hears a rustling in the bushes—is that a cheetah or just the wind? Should he run away or ignore it?
There are two kinds of errors. Suppose our friend thinks it’s a cheetah and runs away … but he’s wrong. This is a false positive. He’s crying wolf. There can be a cost to this—our timid hominid might have been frightened away from a water hole.
But consider the other error. The hominid might think it’s the wind in the tall grass … but he’s wrong. This is a false negative. The cost is obvious—he likely becomes a predator’s lunch.
Given the disproportionate consequences for guessing wrongly, natural selection seems to have selected for caution. As a result, early man may have developed a “hyperactive agency detection device”—an overactive tendency to see agency (that is, intelligence) in nature, even where there is none. The HADD may also be where we detect patterns in things—superstition, concluding that odd events are more than coincidence, or even conspiracy theories.
If this gave early man the ideas of spirits of the dead and gods, this may help explain where early religion came from.
Additionally, you should be aware that pseudoreality is associated with themed fiction materials, as I've already said. These can be in numerous forms:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eden_(2012_film)
After these accusations arose, Noah Berlatsky of Salon compared Kim to Somaly Mam and commented that the film was thickly layered with exploitation tropes and improbable scenarios. Berlatsky found it shocking that "anyone took this clearly fanciful, clearly derivative fiction for fact".[5] Journalist Elizabeth Nolan Brown criticized "the authors who repeated Kim's story, the journalists who interviewed her, the organizations that brought her on as a speaker, or any of the myriad people behind the 'based on a true story' Eden" for not checking and verifying Kim's claims.[7] Journalist Mike Ludwig argued that the narrative promoted by the film harmed consensual sex workers.[8] Seattle sex worker Mistress Matisse had been questioning the veracity of the film since 2012.[6] Matisse stated that Colin Plank and Megan Griffiths "perpetrated a fraud in their movie called Eden." [19]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield#Vaxxed
Dr Ian Lipkin, professor of epidemiology and director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, writing in The Wall Street Journal, said: "If Vaxxed had been submitted as science fiction, it would merit attention for its story line, character development and dialogue. But as a documentary it misrepresents what science knows about autism, undermines public confidence in the safety and efficacy of vaccines, and attacks the integrity of legitimate scientists and public-health officials".[149]
The climate change movement I have the most trouble to tell if it is in actual reality or pseudoreality. Originally I mindlessly assumed it was actual reality, however I've subsequently actually grown substantially suspicious that they are in a pseudoreality. My father believes they are a New Religious Movement and I find he is typically in actual reality. In general, you should be of the understanding that I am substantially more so in actual reality than is typical, yet I am not completely and effortlessly immune to the behavior modifying parasites, so you should substantially give weight to my thoughts on such things yet not assume that I am certainly in actual reality frames at all times.
The people who imagine that the climate change movement is in actual reality certainly can make a substantially high quality case for this being so, yet the people who claim they are a New Religious Movement have a substantially stronger case than one would imagine if they listened to the signaling from the adherents to the climate change movement regarding the matter as well, which is why it is hard to tell. However I didn't mean to be side tracked by that and I will cover their movement more so later on, but I wanted to include their video pamphlet while drawing attention to the fact that I am not actually asserting that it is certainly a piece of themed fiction material though am suspicious that it may be so.
note this excerpt regarding the impaired ability of children exposed to religion to differentiate fact from fiction. I view this study as a starting point for substantially further research and disagree with the general impression of the authors of it, though as a single data point without elaboration I find it very valuable.
http://richarddawkins.net/2014/07/c...distinguishing-fact-from-fiction-study-finds/
Young children who are exposed to religion have a hard time differentiating between fact and fiction, according to a new study published in the July issue of Cognitive Science.
Researchers presented 5- and 6-year-old children from both public and parochial schools with three different types of stories — religious, fantastical and realistic –- in an effort to gauge how well they could identify narratives with impossible elements as fictional.
The study found that, of the 66 participants, children who went to church or were enrolled in a parochial school were significantly less able than secular children to identify supernatural elements, such as talking animals, as fictional.
By relating seemingly impossible religious events achieved through divine intervention (e.g., Jesus transforming water into wine) to fictional narratives, religious children would more heavily rely on religion to justify their false categorizations.
It should be noted that all religions consist of pseudorealities.
Another thing to mention is that this is all part of signaling theory:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory
Because there are both mutual and conflicting interests in most animal signalling systems, a central problem in signalling theory is dishonesty or cheating. For example, if foraging birds are safer when they give a warning call, cheats could give false alarms at random, just in case a predator is nearby. But too much cheating could cause the signalling system to collapse. Every dishonest signal weakens the integrity of the signalling system, and so reduces the fitness of the group.[16][17]
Also, although not all pseudorealities consist of moral panics, I will cover more of the details regarding moral panics. Other pseudorealities consist of social manias, mass hysterias, or whatnot. Really, a new taxonomy should be constructed, and the exact criteria for something to be one of these things or the other is kind of hard to nail down and fuzzy, some pseudorealities may be combinations of all of them and the individual frames even may have elements of all of them.
Also, it should be noted that moral panic itself has somewhat of a varying definition depending on the exact area that is looking at it. For example, arguably the anti vaccination movement is a moral panic (alternatively a mass hysteria, however I believe it is too long lasting and organized to really be considered a mass hysteria), however by the criminological construct of moral panic it is not one.
criminology.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264079.001.0001/acrefore-9780190264079-e-155
Concern
Any moral panic involves a “heightened level of concern over the behaviour of a certain group or category” (Goode & Ben-Yehuda, 2009, p. 37) and its consequences. Indices of concern include opinion polls, media coverage, and lobbying activity.
Hostility
Moral panics exhibit “an increased level of hostility” toward the deviants, who are “collectively designated as the enemy, or an enemy, of respectable society.” Their behavior is seen as “harmful or threatening” to the values and interests of society, “or at least a sizeable segment” of it (Goode & Ben-Yehuda, 2009, p. 38, emphasis in original). Constructing such folk devils is integral to moral panics.
Consensus
In a moral panic, “there must be at least a certain minimal measure of consensus” across society as a whole, or at least “designated segments” of it, that “the threat is real, serious and caused by the wrongdoing group members and their behaviour” (Goode & Ben-Yehuda, 2009, p. 38). Consensus can be challenged by organized opposition—“counter claimsmakers.”
Disproportionality
Fundamentally, “the concept of moral panic rests on disproportion” (Goode & Ben-Yehuda, 2009, p. 41, emphasis in original). It is evident where “public concern is in excess of what is appropriate if concern were directly proportional to objective harm” (Goode & Ben-Yehuda, 2009, p. 40). Statistics are exaggerated or fabricated. The existence of other equally or more harmful activities is denied.
Volatility
Panics are by their nature fleeting, subsiding as quickly as they erupt. The same issue may recur, but individual panics cannot be sustained for long. This has been called an “attributional model” of moral panics (Critcher, 2003, p. 25) because it identifies essential characteristics. Central to this model is claims making about the problem: who makes claims, how, and why. Such claims are frequently made by social movements, who perceive and seek remedies for problematic behavior. Movements protest and demonstrate, appeal to public opinion, and gain access to the media. They may behave irresponsibly: exaggerating the threat, polarizing opinion, and vilifying opponents. Other authoritative organizations may collude with them, such as religious groups, professional associations, and the police. More often, the media, occasionally active in moral panics, are more often conduits for others’ claims making.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wicked-deeds/201507/moral-panic-who-benefits-public-fear
Moral panic is both a public and political response to an exaggeration or distortion of the threat posed to society by some allegedly harmful individual or group. More specifically, moral panic includes an exaggeration of certain events by enhancing the empirical criteria such as the number of individuals involved, the level and extent of violence, and the amount of damage caused.
Third, the media are a particularly powerful set of actors in the creation of a moral panic. Typically, news media coverage of certain events involving alleged folk devils is distorted or exaggerated. News coverage makes the folk devils appear to be much more threatening to society than they really are. Public concern and anxiety are heightened by journalistic hyperbole concerning the folk devils. Public concern and anxiety over the folk devils lead to moral panic.
Finally, public hysteria over a perceived problem often results in the passing of legislation that is highly punitive, unnecessary, and serves to justify the agendas of those in positions of power and authority.
Moreover, there are two important news media practices that contribute to moral panic. These are known as framing and priming. Framing refers to the way an issue is presented to the public or angle it is given by the news media. Framing involves calling attention to certain aspects of an issue while ignoring or obscuring other elements. In other words, framing gives meaning to an issue.
...
In contrast, priming is a psychological process whereby the news media emphasis on a particular issue not only increases the salience of the issue on the public agenda, but also activates previously acquired information about that issue in people’s memories. The priming mechanism explains how the news frame used in a particular story can trigger an individual’s pre-existing attitudes, beliefs and prejudices regarding that issue.
http://www.thesociologicalcinema.com/videos/crack-babies-a-tale-from-the-war-on-drugs
"When the official reaction to a person, groups of persons or series of events is out of all proportion to the actual threat offered, when 'experts', in the form of police chiefs, the judiciary, politicians and editors perceive the threat in all but identical terms, and appear to talk 'with one voice' of rates, diagnoses, prognoses and solutions, when the media representations universally stress 'sudden and dramatic' increases (in numbers involved or events) and 'novelty', above and beyond that which a sober, realistic appraisal could sustain, then we believe it is appropriate to speak of the beginnings of a moral panic."
https://content.ucpress.edu/chapters/11128.ch01.pdf
[W]e are only episodic conductors of meaning, essentially. We
form a mass, living most of the time in a state of panic or
haphazardly, above and beyond any meaning.
—Jean Baudrillard,
In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities
“Moral panic” can be defined broadly as any mass movement that emerges in response to a false, exaggerated, or ill- defined moral threat to society and proposes to address this threat through punitive mea-sures: tougher enforcement, “zero tolerance,” new laws, communal vigi-lance, violent purges.1 Witch hunts are classic examples of moral panics in small, tribal, or agrarian communities. McCarthyism is the obvious example of a moral panic fueled by the mass media and tethered to re-pressive governance. 2
media panic
Social theorists from Georg Simmel to Jean Baudrillard have suggested
that panic is implicit in the structure of mass society. Writing at the turn
of the last century, Simmel begins with the basic features of contempo-
rary life: modern metropolitan subjects live among strangers and are
constantly bombarded by stimulation. Of necessity, they adopt an in-
different, jaded sensibility, a “blasé attitude.” These cool, aloof people
in turn crave excitement, intense sensation, and are thus primed for
what Todd Gitlin would later call “the media torrent.” The mass
media— newspapers, movies, and dime novels of Simmel’s period—
provided the requisite sources of sensation. Now, as then, news that
shocks, scandalizes, or evokes fear and dread brings temporary relief
from the tedium of modern life. However, these stories also quickly
lose their power to excite, reinforcing the blasé attitude and stoking
the need for ever more extreme forms of stimulation. In the culture of
modernity, then, periods of panic will alternate with periods of social
rest, and journalism, especially yellow journalism, plays a key part in
setting the rhythm. 12
I would contrast this with the nevertheless highly related construct of mass hysteria, which I typically associate with a connotation more so like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morangos_com_Açúcar_Virus
The Morangos com Açúcar Virus (also known as the Soap Opera Virus) was initiated by an episode of the popular Portuguese teen soap opera entitled "Morangos com Açúcar" in which a terrible disease was introduced to the school attended by the characters in the series. The television show, which first premiered in March 2004, follows the stories of a group of "normal" teenage kids and the dramaticized ups and downs that they encounter in their daily lives, much like the Canadian drama series "Degrassi." Only a few days after the episode aired, a few teens began to develop symptoms similar to those depicted on the show. These symptoms included rashes, breathing troubles, and severe dizziness. Before long, the "disease" had spread to more than 300 high school students in 14 different Portuguese schools. Some schools were actually forced to temporarily close because of the severity of the outbreak. However, the Portuguese National Institute for Medical Emergency brushed the epidemic off, calling it a case of mass hysteria. Doctor Nelson Pereira, the director of the PNIME, said, "What we concretely have is a few children with allergies and apparently a phenomenon of many other children imitating." Another doctor, Mario Almeidi, pronounced his disbelief in the disease, saying "I know of no disease which is so selective that it only attacks school children."
However, there are very many parallels between this event and a moral panic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_opera
A soap opera or soap, is a serial drama on television or radio that examines the lives of many characters, usually focusing on emotional relationships to the point of melodrama.[1]
http://bjc.oxfordjournals.org/content/55/6/1245.abstract
Abstract
This paper argues that a narrative lens is conducive toward a renewed understanding of moral panic. It is proposed that a melodramatic narrative frame that is central to the construction of news stories about crime is significant for conceptualizing what moral panics are and how they work. The paper will propose that moral panics can be seen as enacted melodramas, where the traditional boundaries between newsmakers, interest groups and ‘the public’ are temporarily dismantled and where everyday citizens experience the role of the suffering victim. This understanding provides insight toward appreciating why only some issues develop into moral panic in particular spaces and times and offers a new framework with which to approach the study of panic.
The larger number of adolescents imitating in response to a smaller number of children manifesting allergy symptoms (after being exposed to melodramatic priming of a similar sort) is also interesting, I've this excerpt on neurotypical children imitating as well:
http://psychcentral.com/news/2013/0...o-imitate-efficiently-not-socially/53604.html
Autistic Kids Tend to Imitate ‘Efficiently,’ Not ‘Socially’
Normally, kids copying adult behavior will go out of their way to repeat each and every element of the behavior even if they realize parts of it don’t make any sense.
But a new study shows that when a child with autism copies the actions of an adult, he or she is likely to omit anything “silly” about what they’ve just seen.
This is also related I believe:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24126871
Abstract
Perhaps surprisingly, given the importance of conformity as a theoretical construct in social psychology and the profound implications autism has for social function, little research has been done on whether autism is associated with the propensity to conform to a social majority. This study is a modern, child-friendly implementation of the classic Asch conformity studies. The performance of 15 children with autism was compared to that of 15 typically developing children on a line judgement task. Children were matched for age, gender and numeracy and literacy ability. In each trial, the child had to say which of three lines a comparison line matched in length. On some trials, children were misled as to what most people thought the answer was. Children with autism were much less likely to conform in the misleading condition than typically developing children. This finding was replicated using a continuous measure of autism traits, the Autism Quotient questionnaire, which showed that autism traits negatively correlated with likelihood to conform in the typically developing group. This study demonstrates the resistance of children with autism to social pressure.
This may be related as well:
http://www.haraldmerckelbach.nl/art...o_misleading_information_in_schizophrenia.pdf
Research looking at specific memory aberrations in the schizophrenia has primarily focused on their phenomenology using standardized semantic laboratory tasks. However, no study has investigated to what extent such aberrations have consequences for everyday episodic memories using more realistic false memory paradigms. Using a false memory paradigm where participants are presented with misleading suggestive information (Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scale), we investigated the susceptibility of patients with schizophrenia (n = 21) and healthy controls (n = 18) to post hoc misleading information acceptance and compliance.
Patients with schizophrenia exhibited an increased susceptibility to go along with misleading suggestive items. Furthermore, they showed an increased tendency to change answers under conditions of social pressure. Underscoring previous findings on memory aberrations in schizophrenia, patients with schizophrenia had reduced levels of correct recognition (ie, true memory) relative to healthy controls. The effects remained stable when controlling for specific mediating variables such as symptom severity and intelligence in patients with schizophrenia. These findings are a first indication that social pressure and misleading information may impair source memory for everyday episodic memories in schizophrenia, and such impairment has
clear consequences for treatment issues and forensic practice.
Some events seem to be hybrids of mass hysteria and moral panic it is hard to precisely classify them:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/loca...7def50-bbd4-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story.html
What was finally real was Edgar Welch, driving from North Carolina to Washington to rescue sexually abused children he believed were hidden in mysterious tunnels beneath a neighborhood pizza joint.
What was real was Welch — a father, former firefighter and sometime movie actor who was drawn to dark mysteries he found on the Internet — terrifying customers and workers with his assault-style rifle as he searched Comet Ping Pong, police said. He found no hidden children, no secret chambers, no evidence of a child sex ring run by the failed Democratic candidate for president of the United States, or by her campaign chief, or by the owner of the pizza place.
What was false were the rumors he had read, stories that crisscrossed the globe about a charming little pizza place that features ping-pong tables in its back room.
The story of Pizzagate is about what is fake and what is real. It’s a tale of a scandal that never was, and of a fear that has spread through channels that did not even exist until recently.
Pizzagate — the belief that code words and satanic symbols point to a sordid underground along an ordinary retail strip in the nation’s capital — is possible only because science has produced the most powerful tools ever invented to find and disseminate information.
And just to be complete, examples of a social mania are the following:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_dance
The Ghost Dance (Caddo: Nanissáanah,[1] also called the Ghost Dance of 1890) was a new religious movement incorporated into numerous American Indian belief systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion
The Taiping Rebellion or the Taiping Civil War was a large-scale rebellion or civil war in China waged from 1850 to 1864 between the established Manchu-led Qing dynasty and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom under Hong Xiuquan.
The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was an oppositional state based in Tianjing (present-day Nanjing) with a Christian millenarian agenda to initiate a major transformation of society. A self-proclaimed convert to Christianity, Hong Xiuquan led an army that controlled a significant part of southern China during the middle of the 19th century, eventually expanding to command a population base of nearly 30 million people.
Devolving into total war—with any and all civilian-associated resources and infrastructure as legitimate military targets—the conflict was the largest in China since the Qing conquest in 1644, and it also ranks as one of the bloodiest wars in human history, the bloodiest civil war, and the largest conflict of the 19th century, with estimates of the war dead ranging from 20–70 million to as high as 100 million, with millions more displaced.[5]
I will mention as well this phenomenon, which is a recognized outbreak of mass socially convergent psychosis that has not been characterized as a moral panic, mass hysteria, or social mania, but rather appears to be a clustering of traditional full blown schizophrenics and so on:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/11/health/gang-stalking-targeted-individuals.html
A growing tribe of troubled minds
Mental health professionals say the narrative has taken hold among a group of people experiencing psychotic symptoms that have troubled the human mind since time immemorial. Except now victims are connecting on the internet, organizing and defying medical explanations for what’s happening to them.
The community, conservatively estimated to exceed 10,000 members, has proliferated since 9/11, cradled by the internet and fed by genuine concerns over government surveillance. A large number appear to have delusional disorder or schizophrenia, psychiatrists say.
Yet, the phenomenon remains virtually unresearched.
For the few specialists who have looked closely, these individuals represent an alarming development in the history of mental illness: thousands of sick people, banded together and demanding recognition on the basis of shared paranoias.
They raise money, hold awareness campaigns, host international conferences and fight for their causes in courts and legislatures
Perhaps their biggest victory came last year, when believers in Richmond, Calif., persuaded the City Council to pass a resolution banning space-based weapons that they believe could be used for mind control. A similar lobbying effort is underway in Tucson.
There are other movements that may be in this style or may be other mass psychosis phenomena:
http://www.rawstory.com/2015/04/we-...dger-gop-congressman-at-rowdy-public-meeting/
In a contentious back and forth with constituents at a public meeting in Kingman, Arizona, a Republican congressman tried to allay fears over so-called chemtrails only to have his explanations swatted away with one man yelling, “We don’t need science!”
Arizona has become Ground Zero for conspiracy theorists who claim that the government or the “New World Order” is attempting to control the populace and the environment by spraying chemicals into the air from passing airplanes.
Rep. Paul Gosar attended the meeting on Tuesday to listen to constituents express concerns on a variety of topics, but the meeting grew heated when the topic of chemtrails came up.
“My name is Al DiCicco, and my question is related to our environment here in Arizona,” one man said while standing in the hall festooned with mounted animal heads.” For the past several years we’ve been testing people’s blood, hair follicles, rainwater, and soil…” at which point Gosar interrupted him and asked, “What group are you with?”
“I’m not in a group, you know what I mean. I’ve been involved in opposing geo-engineering projects above Arizona as well as elsewhere,” the man explained. “We have a serious situation here, where we have submitted information to the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality whose own mission statement is to protect our environment, including our air, and, you’re talking about granddkids? Yes, I have three kids and I have my own life.”
With his voice rising, the man continued, “My body is filled with barium, aluminum, and strontium, and nobody is doing anything about it. That’s why I’m here today. Because we want answers and we want something done instead of being placated and have people make fun of us about tin-foil hats. Well, go get your blood tested. You’ll throw your tin-foil hat away, as well as your jokes. This is a serious matter.”
Indicating the audience, he said, “We all are aware that geo-engineering and solar radiation management is going on worldwide. My questions is: what are you going to do about it, and when?”
Following applause from the assembled crowd, Gosar asked, “Okay, who are science guys here?”
“We don’t need science,” DiCicco yelled from the back of the room stunning the congressman who replied, “Really?”
Admitting that he too “doesn’t trust our government,” Gosar admonished the crowd about blaming the United Nations, while pointing out that barium and uranium are “ambient” chemical elements already found in high concentrations in the Grand Canyon state.
After a woman interrupts him to say, “We’re talking about what is being dispensed by aircraft,” Gosar replies, “Well, there is nothing there.”
As the woman attempts to explain, “There’s covert operations…” Gosar screws up his face and says, “Yeah, come on.”
While admitting that he has concerns, Gosar tells the crowd, “In some ways I have to start trusting the National Institute for Health,” as the woman continues to shout, saying “we’ve all been studying it” along with “millions of people all around the world.”
http://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/...her-warfare-and-the-collapse-of-civilization/
CLIMATE ENGINEERING WEATHER WARFARE, AND THE COLLAPSE OF CIVILIZATION
Planet Earth is under an all out weather warfare assault. In this video, Dane Wigington gives another presentation in Northern California on the harmful effects of Geoengineering, declaring that there is virtually NO NATURAL WEATHER due to the massive global climate engineering. The very essentials needed to sustain life on earth are being recklessly destroyed by these programs. This is not a topic that will begin to affect us in several years, but is now already causing massive animal and plant die off around the world, as well as human illness. read more
This is interesting and somewhat related as well:
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jmbwp4/how-is-the-internet-changing-schizophrenia-915
How People with Schizophrenia Use the Internet
Those suffering from delusions can find support groups online, but they can also come across shoddy information and scams that can trigger their conditions.
Last month, a Dutch 19-year-old identified only as "Tarik Z" stormed a TV station with what turned out to be a fake gun and demanded air time. Then he just stood there in his suit and tie, muttering for a few minutes, until a SWAT team ran in and arrested him on live TV. He later claimed to have mounted the assault on behalf of a hacker collective who were in turn working for Dutch intelligence, though the police said he acted alone.
...
What starts out as simple informative research can quickly become a major trip down a conspiracy rabbit hole. "I remember one [survey respondent] telling me about looking up every single word, and going deeper and deeper and deeper," Schrank said. And conspiracies are only harmless until you put your health on the line.
It should be noted that schizophrenia seems to be highly related to all of these phenomena:
http://www.ipt-forensics.com/journal/volume7/j7_3_5.htm
Paranoid delusions typically incorporate the scapegoats of the era. In
World War II, paranoids were persecuted by Nazi spies. From the 1950s to
the 1980s, Communists were the typical persecutors of paranoids. Since the
early 1980s, with the breakdown of the Communist empire, sex abusers have
become the most common persecutors for paranoids.
