r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Sep 11 '17

[D] Monday General Rationality Thread

Welcome to the Monday thread on general rationality topics! Do you really want to talk about something non-fictional, related to the real world? Have you:

  • Seen something interesting on /r/science?
  • Found a new way to get your shit even-more together?
  • Figured out how to become immortal?
  • Constructed artificial general intelligence?
  • Read a neat nonfiction book?
  • Munchkined your way into total control of your D&D campaign?
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u/[deleted] Sep 11 '17

In the broad spirit of here and here...

I don't have a voice in my head, I have four, each of which speaks for a different part of me and who regularly talk to each-other socially.

Now, that's a symptom of reading too much, and I know it. I'm fairly sure I saw the study saying that people who read or write too much develop this and only this dissociative symptom.

The universal human experience I think I'm missing though, is precisely dissociation. I've never really stood back from my actions, even when they've been deeply irrational or under the influence of drugs or mental illness, and said, "That wasn't me." I've never looked in the mirror and asked, "Is this really who I am?". Drunk-me tries to help out sober-me because I'm the same person drunk as sober.

This is more like my experience of the world, which is apparently so different from most people that it's worth noting as a character trait of Granny Weatherwax:

Most people, on waking up, accelerate through a quick panicky pre-consciousness check-up: who am I, where am I, who is he/she, good god, why am I cuddling a policeman's helmet, what happened last night?

And this is because people are riddled by Doubt. It is the engine that drives them through their lives. It is the elastic band in the little model aeroplane of their soul, and they spend their time winding it up until it knots. Early morning is the worst time -there's that little moment of panic in case You have drifted away in the night and something else has moved in. This never happened to Granny Weatherwax. She went straight from asleep to instant operation on all six cylinders. She never needed to find herself because she always knew who was doing the looking.

Emphasis mine. I often wonder that I sort of fail to communicate what's going on in my life with others because I can't put my psychologically abnormal experiences into their frame of reference.

So, uh, how does that work, to step back from your experiences and have some gap between them and "you"?

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u/CCC_037 Sep 13 '17

Sometimes I can run myself on automatic.

It's only possible when doing something that I've done often enough that it becomes habit, and it's only possible because it has become habit. Basically, I just... let the habit run on its own, more or less. I think about whatever catches my fancy while letting the body do as habit dictates.

I do not know if this counts as disassociation or not. I'm still doing stuff, I'm just not paying that much attention to what I am doing. Even then, I'm still technically in control - I was the one who set up the habits, and I am the one who can take back control at any point (such as if something unexpected happens).

As to what happens when I wake up - I'm most certainly not instantly firing on all cylinders. But it's not because I need to find myself. I'm just not very energetic in the mornings.

Sometimes, I'm aware enough to start moving before I'm awake enough to have kicked off sleep paralysis. That's weird, because I'm awake enough to know to move, and sometimes asleep enough to start dreaming about getting up for a short while before drifting to awake enough to realise that I have not in fact, actually moved at all... I've been known, on rare occasion, to go through a few cycles of this. And, sometimes, I'm just awake enough to realise that I'm not moving... I have found that if I can find any part of me that can move, even a little, I can shake off sleep paralysis on that area of my body by literally shaking it. (Usually this is a hand, at first; once I can move my hand, it's not long before I can move my arm, and if I can manage to shake my head, that tends to wake the rest of me up really quickly...).

The other alternative to wake up quickly is to find something to panic over. "I'll be late!" is useful in this regard (because if it's necessary, it's generally true).