Sanity

We discover the universe by the differences we perceive among things. Planets and stars appear to the naked eye as quite similar, but then we notice that planets move slowly around among the more fixed points of light. That is what planet means—wanderer. We notice the difference between robins and bluejays, their colors are quite different, but then so are their behaviors. Jays are much noisier and scrappier than robins. We notice the differences between siblings, including members of litters. One will be dominant and get most of the food, while others just as large seem to accept getting the lesser share of everything. We notice the behaviors of people who act differently from us, especially those who seem to be tracking the world completely differently.

Sanity is not just a relative situation, although there are people who think so. There are things that can go wrong with consciousness and among them are mental illnesses that we call paranoia and schizophrenia. Paranoia is not just being obsessively afraid of some thing. It is a state in which the person takes wildly unusual and typically ineffective precautions against being overcome by some malevolent force that haunts their waking moments. It is as if some part of the inner social compact has become undone and the person no longer has the ability to trust. All relationships become subject to the suspicion that great harm is intended, that the person's self concept is at stake. Okay, now hold that thought.

The other major mental illness is called schizophrenia because the people who suffer from it seem to have their self split into two or more seemingly independent personalities. Quite often schizophrenics hear the voices of unseen agents in their heads and are unable to associate these voice with thoughts they would claim for their own, like they would when subvocalizing when reading or when thinking about a poem or some auditory memory. Some of the classic cases of schizophrenia have involved multiple personalities which were quite different in behavior from the others. Schizophrenia seems to be a situation where the concept of the "other" has been confused with the concept of self.

By the time we are in our twenties we have heard a great deal about paranoia and schizophrenia from literature and the arts. Among educated people, at least, these mental illnesses are not considered bizarre, just extremely unfortunate and sometimes a little frightening. Eurogene adults between 18 and 33, roughly, are the most at risk for schizophrenia, suggesting that their may be a maturational process involved. I have no idea, but it struck me that recent psychological research has identified "risk" as a component of maturity that becomes mature around age 25, supporting many decades of automobile insurance company data on the recklessness of teen and early-twenties drivers. When you think about it, it is not exactly by accident that young men are quick to volunteer into the military and for reasons that defy explanation are willing to venture into what appears to be certain death (and frequently is ...) at the command of a senior who will remain more secure.

Before the break I suggested that the model of consciousness I want to describe contains a "model" of the self employing mirror neurons and existing as a constantly stimulated and self-stimulating neural construct. That is, the self-model is wired such that inputs from the periphery and from the active senses are sought on a repeating basis and added to the sum of the construct, compared, refined, and certain other circuits being assured that everything is okay (if it is, that is). Think of the process as being replenished on a cycle of, say, ten cycles per second, in other words well within the capacity of neurons to transmit signals throughout the peripheral and central nervous systems, the PNS and CNS. So, if you like, self could be considered something like a buzz of more or less passive information coursing around the brain along routes established genetically and by the experience as a fetus and as an infant.

When I was first learning computers a friend said to me that the central processing unit, CPU, was a device which when provided electricity reiterated the hardwired instructions built into the microchip so that, in effect, the CPU asks this question thousands of times a second: "Has anyone pressed a key on the keyboard?...Has anyone pressed a key on the keyboard?...Has anyone pressed a key on the keyboard?...Has anyone pressed a key on the keyboard?"...and so on. That is the mechanical version of the organic process I wish to place at the center of the self-model.

Of course, this concept really describes best a person sound asleep. An alarm clock would penetrate the sleep and bring arousal and then a multitude of things would happen, most of them routinely, most of them more or less hardwired into self-model because they achieve results that are useful. One of them would be a quick visual inspection of the offending alarm clock and another would be a slightly uncoordinated stab at the snooze button ... unless of course the awakening also tripped a memory loop that contained the information "History Final Exam at 9:00 a.m."

The paranoid person might not be so lucky. The alarm clock might not be remembered correctly and might instead of promoting a snooze-button punching routine from the huge repertoire of familiar motions, might evoke a poignant memory of an automobile careening toward its helpless victim, the paranoid's mother or kid sister, perhaps, evoking a cascade of horrible memories, with the self-model scrambling to gather up these spurious details and refine them down to a kernel of "yes, but ... that was long ago and this noise was really the alarm clock" ... and failing at it.

Recently, (since the covid pandemic) People, younger than 50, say, use the expression "insane!" to express their difficulty, but not an impossibility, of comprehending something. Much of it is hyperbole, of course, but "insane" and "crazy" are terms that have healthy and unhealthy emotional "baggage," repertoires, decency mores and limits, associations with health, as opposed to the preceding set of expressions "incredible" and "unbelievable," both of which are associated and contrasted with normal functioning of the ratiocinative brain, i.e., normal thinking and learning, which both say are not.

Language and the vernaculars of language are full of mostly ephemeral jargon like these four words. The first two suggest that the person is reeling from a sense of personal insanity if whateveritis is true, while the second pair seem to be a somewhat surprising negative judgment that whateveritis is false in some important way. These differences suggest to me that the self-model of people has a component that cycles through a battery of tests, principally of sensory inputs by which to measure its own fitness for dealing with what one must deal with "these days."

Assuming that the terms, all four of them, are used on television news and television dramas hyperbolically, they may be indicators of broad scale social sresses, as well as, the usual sort of rejecting elder vocabularies.

During the covid pandemic lockdowns around the world, lots of people have said they were going "nuts," meaning they were not coping well with the realities of being locked down. Is it reasonable to suggest that when a self-model with its firmly associated repertoires of coping thoughts and behaviors begins to fail, the person is beginning to be insane? If so, coping is sane and not is not sane. It means that an autonomous being has failed to make the necessary adjustments to deal with a major environmental change ... for which most people are prepared and able.

Being an historian (Russia and the US) and a student of politics and ideologies, I like the idea that jihadists and assassins and terrorists and other violent extremists are not sane.