Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>
>
> On 2/22/07, *Brent Meeker* <meekerdb.domain.name.hidden
> <mailto:meekerdb.domain.name.hidden>> wrote:
>
> Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>
> > A patient says that his leg is paralysed, behaves as if his leg is
> > paralysed, but the clinical signs and investigations are not
> consistent
> > with a paralysed leg. The diagnosis of hysterical paralysis is
> made. A
> > patient claims to hear voices of people nobody else sees, responds to
> > the voices as if they are there, but the clinical signs and
> response to
> > antipsychotic treatment is not consistent with the auditory
> > hallucinations experienced by peopel with psychotic illness. The
> > diagnosis of hysterical hallucinations is made: that is, they aren't
> > hearing voices that aren't there, they only *think* they're hearing
> > voices that aren't there.
>
> How is this diagnosis made? It sounds like an impossible
> distinction - a scientific resolution of the zombie question.
>
>
> The diagnosis of "pseudohallucinations" is made if they don't have the
> characteristics typical of hallucinations in schizophrenia - that is,
> there are third person observable differences. Without these differences
> it would be impossible to tell and, since psychiatry at least aspires to
> be an empirical science, the possibility is generally ignored. However,
> you can have delusions about anything, so it should be at least
> theoretically possible to have a delusion that you are having a
> perception. Patients frequently report delusional memories of
> perceptions: that is, they insist that they had a conversation or
> experience that they could not even have hallucinated, because they were
> under observation at the time of the alleged incident. Suppose this
> process is happening "live", so that they believe they are hearing a
> voice and responding as if they are hearing a voice even though they are
> not even hallucinating such a thing. We might speculate that the actual
> experience would surely feel different to the mere belief that they are
> having the experience, but if they could notice such a difference they
> would not be deluded.
>
> Stathis Papaioannou
This comports with the idea that consciousness is a process of making up a narrative history of what the brain's various functional modules considered most important at a given time in order to commit it to memory. I first learned of this theory from John McCarthy's discussion of how to make a conscious robot - but I don't know that he originated it. If it is correct then a malfunction of the brain might cause a narrative to be confabulated that had nothing to do with perception - even perceptions that were acted on appropriately.
Brent Meeker
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Received on Thu Feb 22 2007 - 23:59:25 PST