Schizophrenia is probably only called an illness because it’s assumed by most people that the hallucinations and delusions and anhedonia would be frightening or painful, and they usually are at least once in the course of the person’s life. By contrast, being blind, deaf, or autistic, are not directly painful; any suffering caused, while often just as or more severe and in the case of autism, often leading to suicide, is indirect, caused by the consequences of the limitations the condition puts on you, clashing negatively with the demands of your personal circumstances (such as a society that demands you do things you find extremely stressful and difficult every day, in order to get an education or not be homeless, and fails to provide sufficient accommodations or alternatives – this is why suicide is a massive problem among people with autism and no learning disabilty but quite low among people with autism plus learning disability). There is actually one symptom of autism that is directly unpleasant (sensory hypersensitivity), and if everyone with autism had that symptom and everyone knew about it, it would probably be called an illness. But most people don’t think of that symptom first, and most people with autism don’t have it, so we think of autism as causing any suffering only indirectly, like blindness, and thus not an illness.

Correct, “the incorrigibility is the key distinction” (well, a key distinction; also there has to be demonstrable falsehood, not something that has a reasonable chance of being true, and there has to be intensity, not a wishy washy I-dunno feeling about whether it’s true).

But epistemic standards are not culturally relative. Logic is correct. Period. Anyone who says otherwise is as delusional as someone who is certain their cat is an alien explorer from Mars. Again, as I noted, have someone try to navigate a room with fake logic and they will quickly discover for themselves it doesn’t work. Indeed, every fallacy in the book is demonstrated to be true by real-world counter-examples (also known as facts).

So someone raised in an isolated cult, say, who is taught, let’s say, that logic is bullshit, and who then encounters a demonstration to the contrary outside in the real world, they will either go “Oh, holy shit! I’ve been taught bullshit all my life!” and revise their take on logic, or they will remain trapped in the delusion they were abusively imbued with (and engage in standard delusional behaviors like avoiding evidence they are wrong, confabulating rationalizations to escape the consequences of the evidence they are faced with, attack the messengers as evil, etc.).

As for the rest, you are questioning the epistemic foundations of all of science. If these are not problems tearing down the whole of physics (e.g. “Some physicists are nutters who think the earth is flat. Ergo no unified diagnostic community exists in physics. Ergo no standards exist in physics.”), then they don’t have any effect on psychology either. The existence of crazy scientists doesn’t change anything. That’s why having a very large and culturally diverse science community is a major component of what makes the scientific method successful. The probability of a mass delusion of that scale and sweep is simply vanishingly small.

The rest comes down to logic. If using logic X results in constant obvious failure even to navigate a room, then there can be no sane reason to adopt X, when you know about logic Y which does navigate the room. If your epistemology is such as to rule that no evidence ever counts for anything, the lack of logic in it is directly demonstrable to you, so you can only maintain it by rejecting logic. Psychosis, meanwhile, is the other side of the coin, where what you observe is not real, in which case you have to ask which is more likely: if you alone see X, and everyone else you talk to, hundreds and hundreds of people, and indeed by indirect report, billions and billions of people, don’t, what has the higher prior, that you are psychotic, or that all of them are, and not only psychotic but just by coincidence sharing the exact same psychosis down to the last detail? That then gets you back to logic (probability theory).

Hence, Epistemological End Game.

None of that’s true. There are indeed measures of human emotion, which have been predictively successful, and there are increasingly corroborating physical measures as well (brain scan and physiology). Psychology is a young science (it was only turned into a proper science in the early 20th century), but has grown by leaps in bounds with increasing rigor and established data. And solid definitions are routinely developed when needed. And are no more abstract than many crucial terms in geology, botany, zoology…

Religion may be a delusion, but aspects of it, such as promiscuous teleology (Kelemen & Rosset, 2009[1]), are also (normally) a demarcated stage of cognitive development in children that adults can be caught-up in, whether through social conditioning (reinforcement of a promiscuously teleological (creationist) account of the world), or through cognitive load. This is also true of other cognitive developmental stages. Nicholas Epley recounts a similar issue with differences between adults and children in perspective taking (Epley. Morewedge, Keysar, 2004[2]), in his excellent book, ‘Mind-wise’ (Epley, 2014). In this experiment, adults and children sat down in front of a shelving unit, where some of the shelves can be seen from both front and back, but some are blocked with panels so that only the participant can see what’s on the shelf. The experimenter on the far side of the shelving unit asks the participant to move particular objects on the shelves, such that they are familiarized with the objects and their placement. In the experimental manipulation the experimenter asks for the smallest car to be moved. The experimenter can see two cars, but the participant can see three – the smallest car is actually not visible to the experimenter due to a panel blocking their line of sight, a fact that the participant is aware of. An adult would know that the smallest car is not visible to the experimenter, and that, as such, they must be referring to the medium sized car. Children, however, being more egocentric, and a less developed theory of mind, will more often reach for the actually smallest car. What Epley and colleagues found was that adults still looked to the actually smallest car before moving on to the medium-sized car and following the experimenter’s instructions with that (see Epley. Morewedge, Keysar, 2004, Fig 2., p. 764, for differences in response times). These two papers, in combination, seem to imply that adults go through the same steps as kids (but more quickly) before applying additional knowledge in subsequent cognitive recursions (see Michael Corballis, 2011, for a book length discussion on human cognitive recursion). If, however, one is raised in an environment where such additional information has no validity, and thus isn’t learned, then the persistent promiscuous teleology would not count as a mental defect. If anything this is just miseducation, something many atheists (and humanists) already accuse faith schools and religious education of, anyway.

I think you make an excellent point how not all religious belief is delusional (would the above count as delusional, or merely ill-informed… or just immature?), and one of religion’s strengths is the cohesive community (read: in-group) it creates for the believers. So, yes, atheists are self-selecting out of that in-group, and some (many?) believers definitely adopt the ‘if you’re not with us, you’re against us’ stance. Indeed, on Shalom Schwartz’s (2012[3]) analysis, spirituality is a product of this kind of Conformity, along with Tradition (of your in-group) and Benevolence (kindness towards your in-group), all very cultural, and noticeably not about true belief-formation. (My dissertation was in part an extension of Schwartz’s work, but I state that it is religion, not spirituality, in that location – I actually sent you an email with this, Richard, as I was proposing an approach to the Ethicology you called for in ‘Sense and Goodness Without God.’) It is certainly true that atheists don’t have a ‘get out of delusion free’ card, as we well know thanks to Kahneman and Tversky’s biases and heuristics program – though you say these are errors, not delusions – but I think you undersell the impact of these sources of error, they could, through Nyhan and Reifler’s (2010[4]) ‘Backfire Effect’, as well as confirmation bias (a feature of strong in-group orientation) lead to delusions. I would point out, though, that a delusion systematically educated into people, and that does not affect the individual in society (in part because they share it with everyone else), may affect society as a whole. Religiously inspired intransigence on the matter of climate change springs to mind, likewise the undercurrent of religiously inspired misogyny in Western society.

Whilst I should like to have commented on the posting as a whole, I should get to the crux of the matter (as I am supposed to be writing an essay, and this is officially procrastinatory behaviour). The mental illness most often raised as being related to religion is schizophrenia, or at least schizotypal behaviour, and this is where things get interesting in the context of this discussion. Schizophrenia is not well understood. Even 100 years after getting its name, we’re still floundering around trying to properly describe it, diagnose it, find genetic precursors and so on. Schizophrenia’s prevalence is approximately equal in every society (around 1%), just as every society has language, and religion. This is despite Schizophrenia having a negative impact on fecundity (Polimeni & Reiss, 2002[5]). It is genetic, in that children of sufferers are 10 times more likely to suffer from it as the normal population (schizophrenia.com, 2004[6]), but it is also quite common in people who do not have any family history at all. There has been quite a bit of work linking schizophrenia and creative or divergent thinking (e.g. Preti & Miotto, 1997[7], but see Fisher, 2015[8]). The one person in a tribe that exhibits divergent thinking, including delusions and hallucinations is the shaman. Indeed, Julian Silverman (1967[9]) suggested that the only difference between schizophrenia and shamanism was societal acceptance. If there’s something to Robin Dunbar’s number (tribes of humans are, ideally, generally no larger than 150 people), then the 1% prevalence rate would see each tribe with a single shaman, possibly two. As such, Schizophrenia may just be a hyper-specialisation for creativity (Polimeni & Reiss, 2002), just as you suggested that OCD/fastidiousness is, Richard, and just as autism/analyticality might be. Indeed, given that humans are cognitive generalists, a normal distribution should generate specialists as occasional outliers (autism’s prevalence is also around 1%).

Shamanism tends to be associated with animistic religions, wherein they intercede with spirits, but they also engage with ancestor spirits, which is not necessarily an element of animism (Eliade, 1972[10]). In ‘Big Gods’ Ara Norenzayan (2013) draws a clear line from animism and ancestor-worship to polytheism to henotheism to monotheism. It is not such a stretch to suggest that the role of the shaman-schizophrenic also evolved (and with tribes numbering vastly more than 150, it is also reasonable to expect that some of those drawn to religion are more schizophrenic than others, but not, members of the priestly class). In this case, though, we’re not talking about schizophrenia as an illness (though it is, in our medicalized worldview), so much as a particular instantiation of normal human cognitive traits, just as OCD and autism could be. To illustrate how a functioning human being might harbor a delusion (that might be sub-clinically schizophrenic) I’d like to reference your discussion on J. P. Moreland’s idea of Libertarian freewill:

“So even if I want most of all not to raise my hand, according to Moreland, I might raise it anyway, presumably as long as I have any minuscule desire to do it. Of course, this seems counter-intuitive right from the start. If the strongest desire in me is to stay still, how can I be caused to raise my hand by a weaker force?”

This strikes me as a clear description of thought insertion, a primary positive symptom of schizophrenia. More frequent than thought insertion, however, are delusions of persecution and reference (Tandon, Nasrallah & Keshavan, 2009[11]), and one can’t move (in the online atheist community) for complaints about the Christian persecution complex, particularly as instantiated in Fox “News”.

The reduction of the self-other boundary is fundamental to religion, and a primary descriptor of schizophrenia (Wang, Metzak & Woodward, 2011[12]). Schizophrenics are (in the main) better able to cope with the world when they engage with it religiously (Mohr, Brandt, Borras, Gilliéron & Huguelet, 2006[13]):

“For some patients, religion instilled hope, purpose, and meaning in their lives (71%), whereas for others, it induced spiritual despair (14%). Patients also reported that religion lessened (54%) or increased (10%) psychotic and general symptoms. Religion was also reported to increase social integration (28%) or social isolation (3%). It may reduce (33%) or increase (10%) the risk of suicide attempts, reduce (14%) or increase (3%) substance use, and foster adherence to (16%) or be in opposition to (15%) psychiatric treatment.” (p. 1952)

The compatibility between schizophrenia and religion as a worldview is pretty clear.

In conclusion, I want to suggest that theism is not a mental illness (nor indeed is atheism), that religion is just a means to explain the world in light of a particular set of delusions that, in varying strengths, form part of the normal human cognitive milieu, give rise to types of creativity, and led to a certain approach to sociality (in a limited sense, and one that is not coping with modern population sizes). Schizophrenia is a strong instantiation of those predispositions that also find expression in religion, just as autism is a strong instantiation of those predispositions that find expression in STEMM subjects. I was going to say more (and hopefully say the preceding better, but I really do have to get back to my essay).

1: Keleman & Rosset, 2009: http://www.csr-arc.com/files/27/ARC-24-Kelemen&Rosset.pdf

2: Epley. Morewedge, Keysar, 2004: http://www.careymorewedge.com/papers/perspectivetaking.pdf

3: Schwartz, 2012: http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1116&context=orpc

4: Nyhan & Reifler, 2010: http://climate.engin.umich.edu/figures/Rood_Climate_Change_AOSS480_Documents/Nyhan_Belief_Facts_Politics_PoliticalBehavior_2010.pdf

5: Polimeni & Reiss, 2002: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Joseph_Polimeni/publication/11352781_How_shamanism_and_group_selection_may_reveal_the_origins_of_schizophrenia/links/0c9605227e8880d54f000000.pdf

6: http://www.schizophrenia.com/research/hereditygen.htm

7: Preti & Miotto, 1997: http://cogprints.org/2009/1/preti_a&miotto_p.html

8: Fisher, 2015: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4335301/

9: Silverman, 1967: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/store/10.1525/aa.1967.69.1.02a00030/asset/aa.1967.69.1.02a00030.pdf;jsessionid=36668752AA91671613CE926B5597F0F2.f02t03?v=1&t=i8li2g8l&s=ebf65291d728e500404a7b15d34c2b671d915cd6

10: Eliade, M. S. (1974). Shamanism: Archaic techniques of ecstasy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

11: Tandon, Nasrallah & Keshavan, 2009: https://xa.yimg.com/kq/groups/25284703/1387720232/name/Tandon_et_al_2009_SR_Schizophrenia-4.pdf

12: Wang, Metzak & Woodward, 2011: http://www.cnoslab.com/pdfs/Aberrant-connectivity.pdf

13: Mohr, Brandt, Borras, Gilliéron & Huguelet, 2006: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sylvia_Mohr/publication/6721446_Toward_an_integration_of_spirituality_and_religiousness_into_the_psychosocial_dimension_of_schizophrenia/links/02bfe510f730440d52000000.pdf

The main reason I prefer the political analogy is that it avoids any discussion of mental health, with no inferred or explicit insults or mischaracterizations. As mentioned, it broaches the subject of brainwashing and groupthink, of social engineering, yet still allows discussion of mental health if (and only if) it’s shown to be a valid point.

Now, that last point strikes me as circular, or at least potentially so without further clarification. Certainly, someone who is insensitive to standards of evidence you or I might use could be perfectly sensitive to standards of evidence within their community’s system of epistemic norms. And it doesn’t seem intuitively implausible (allowing for how loaded judging anything by “intuitive appeal” is) that a mentally-normal, well-meaning person could be raised up in a system of epistemic norms that foil any attempts by someone with our epistemic norms to prove anything at all to them. In other words, I’m wondering if it’s hasty to appeal to a “diagnostic community as a whole” – does such a unified, coherent entity exist? If we can’t appeal to such a community, is it more reasonable to appeal to a putative set of “natural epistemic norms” that can be “read off” (so to speak) of the facts about the universe, causality, etc., and recovered/reconstructed to facilitate inter-epistemic-norm-system communication? This might run into problems along the lines of Hume’s problem of induction, I fear, but I’m not ready to write the concept off out of hand.

My concern is that it seems that there are obviously people who are normally-functioning and well-meaning who have (from our perspective) deviant epistemic systems – that much you have addressed, of course. But I also worry that such a system could be constructed so that a normally-functioning and well-meaning person might be immune to anything we might consider “evidence.” I’m not sure appeal to “facts all the way down” can resolve the situation, either, as even reasonable people operating within the same epistemic-norm-system can disagree on the explanation of facts, and that when dealing with relatively straightforward issues! In other words, if we want to claim that holding a “demonstrably false” belief incorrigibly is enough to qualify someone as delusional, we need to do considerable unpacking of what makes something “demonstrably false.”

Let me qualify all this by saying that I am not an epistemic relativist, and I think your account is substantially correct, but as I have recently been teaching a class on the science/pseudo-science demarcation problem, I have become a bit gun-shy (or perhaps inclined to over-think, as you like) on issues of epistemic communities. And thank you, by the way, for all your thought-provoking blog posts!

And conversely, political ideologies (like Marxim and Libertarianism) are built on top of elaborate factually false mythologies, and yet held fanatically. They then drive people to try and ruin the lives of other people, believing self-righteously that it’s for the best. Because of the mythology they believe is true. So, yes, parallels there.

Translation: “I’m an ableist fuck and I want to be able to disregard the harm I do to innocent people (and don’t give a shit about being factually accurate either), and how dare you point that out.”

People like you are precisely why I write articles like this. You will never learn. But more and more people will now see you for what you are. And they will stop enabling your bullshit. And the world will become a better place.

Works for me. I don’t see a problem.