Roger McFillin is a very conscientious and principled character who has the honesty and guts to publicly level some very serious and confronting critiques about the psychiatric establishment.
He's also inclined to a sentimental, traditionalist and conservative take on wishful-thinking woo-woo. It's hardly surprising though, in many ways.
Mainstream apologists for psychiatry and allegedly scientific, "evidence-based" psychology may claim to be liberal or left-wing, but in real terms they rarely are. More like high-decile, expedient hustlers merging with the herd.
The power of the mob is so strong critique within ranks is extremely unusual. Those who dissent do so usually because they are buoyed by the solidarity and morale of their oppositional subcultures.
So you won't get a middle-class high school guidance counselor ripping into the evils of antidepressants. But you may well find a Marxist, anarchist, libertarian or Objectivist presenting well-researched evidence about what awful drugs they can be. When you're outside the charmed circle, you are more likely to tell it like it is.
So McFillin, for all his mystical muesli, is simply following the standard pattern of a thinking person whose peculiarities have meant he hasn't been assimilated into the mainstream social and clinical trance. As with all impassioned talking heads in the public square, I extract what is useful, and jettison the idealistic and deluded distortions.
I recently tried to have a conversation with a psychiatrist about the long term hazards of medicating someone, without contemplating and attempting to heal processes of the mind. It wasn't a topic he cared to discuss. He seemed perplexed. Previously when I have asked whether perceived existential threats, trauma or intellectual disability were factors contributing to paranoia, I was poo-pooed and admonished for not having already found a source of psychotropics to "control the situation". - Isn't it telling to consider that health care providers should think in such terms?
On reflection this feels like moral injury for all concerned, including practitioners who have a blinkered vision of their true impact.
The underpinnings of psychiatry, which ignore aspects of the psyche, are never scrutinised or tested by the law. ACAT tribunals are part of the same echo chamber as the system of delivery.
Threats to people's sense of safety and attacks upon their autonomy, I suspect are at the root of most breakdowns. Collapse in the ability to relate, to even retain a sense of one's own identity; (some narratives include ideas such as "I didn't recognise myself"), should be a situation in which others step forward/ provide space rather than recoiling. Investigating the themes expressed so as to understand how they are representative of perceived threats can help everyone concerned to unpack the content of or motivations for what might seem superficially to be odd behaviour. Healing may not even require conscious insight.
Fascinatng take on how the Vienna Circle got misread. The shift from "science can't talk about the mind" to "mind doesn't exist" is a huge conceptual leap that somehow became orthodoxy. I appreciate how the biocognitive model tries to rescue mental phenomena using information theory, though I wonder if treating mind as purely informational state captures everything about subjective experience.
I expand on this in Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder from2021. By some feat of recursive legerdemain, the brain generates what we call subjective experience. Important to note that this doesn't require vast computational ability, which then opens the door to animals having mental lives. However, I have to admit it may be that we will never be able to determine the codes used by the brain to generate subjectivity. In that sense, the mysterians may win.
I went through it several times on an early internet forumm with materialists.
It goes like this, with small variations.
Science studies what is real.
If it is not real, then it is an illusion.
Anyone trained in English-Prime can spot the problems immediately - most physical-scientists are not.
Anyone who has followed a post-structuralist argument can see the problems immediately - once again, guess who are "informed" that post-structuralism should be regarded as hocus pocus.
And if you want a good grade, to get a good job, and pay off those debts, you damned well internalise those POV as well.
And so it goes - until a competing educational system that is less hidebound outcompetes you in what it produces.
Precisely. Science is "objective" (stifles snigger). Scientists are not responsible for what they create, anymore than soldiers are for war-crimes... senior officers, anyway, obviously.
I'm sure you see my attempt at cynical humour there.
I am looking in your bibliography for works of scientists like Rupert Sheldrake and psychiatrists like Dr. Daniel J. Siegel, Dr. Iain McGilchrist, I think they have some ideas to contribute to your work. Mainly because I am familiar with their books and YouTube videos. By relating or including these presently high profiled scholars it is easier for others to enter your discussion. Hope this is helpful, that is my intention. I assume you would like a broader readership.
"No telepathy or telekinesis, no “universal consciousness” (whatever that means), nothing supernatural and no life after death in this system. If you want to believe these things, go ahead but there is no conceivable proof."
Actually, there are vast amounts of proof, but the believers in such proofs have been called "Insane" for their experiences, and tortured extensively until they forswear.
What IF many of those locked up for "Hearing voices" actually were?
The earliest Buddhist manuals brought to the West warned about developing telepathy during meditation training. Many of the 90s generation in the raves experienced it through those mass experiences. If you take an openminded look through the literature on reincarnation, there are equally many bizarre (From the POV of doubters) "coincidences" that take a LOT of "explaining away" very creatively.
Universal Consciousness is one of the more likely solutions to the QM conundrums, take that up with Wheeler. Einstein couldn't disprove it - perhaps you can.
Apart from those niggles - to be expected to one trained in the western paradigms - another excellent historical essay about where the Damned Idjits went badly wrong, and some baby steps out of the quagmire they think is clear blue sky. Quantum fields make a LOT of sense to anyone who has experienced reality with the aid of shrooms, btw. But still, baby steps out are better than digging deeper, lol. :)
Ah yes but... (there's always a but). A sophisticated informational state, and we can agree the mind is sophisticated, can always produce experiences that aren't generated by any outside stimulus, or by an inner stimulus as with pain. Nobody who has these experiences (and people who hear voices are actually hearing them) can prove they aren't the products of a malfunction in the systems generating their total perceptive state. Those who say "My experiences are proof of the supernatural" have to show why they can't be mistaken or misled, why we have to accept their statements as gospel. The mind is complex, there are so many ways it can malfunction even in the presence of a perfectly healthy brain.
There was a fantastic Psychology text book, simply called "Paranoia" in the college library - 30+ years later I have no idea of the author - that shone a very unexpected look into the phenomena. When his patients displayed this trait - eg, the people around were plotting against them etc - instead of assuming they themselves were "crazy", he instead left the cushy office to go investigate. To his evident surprise, in *every case* he discovered these suspicions were justified. Sometimes malevolent, and sometimes intended beneficially (The people were genuinely concerned about the patients, and were indeed talking about them behind their backs to try to help... with almost predictably disastrous results), but always the patients complaints had validity, and were rational. Off memory from a long time ago, I think the figure was in the ball park of about 30 cases.
Right there can be seen that to find "proof", one needs to actually investigate, rather than write-off.
If someone reports experiencing "telepathy" - often sadly in our culture associated with trauma rather than positively - then an in-depth discussion by a professional who is aware that hostility can be subconscious, with the *projector*, could uncover if there is any validity to those claims too. Just like only a small part of direct communication is actually verbal - most communication is via body language, subtle clues in positioning, emotional timbre, all the non language sounds we make - so too is the large majority of 'telepathy' also communicated - but not all. Bearing all this in mind, setting up a test should not be beyond the capabilities of even a semi-decent researcher.
The onus upon a genuine medical professioner should not be to demand proof from the person experiencing them, but manage to prove to the experiencer that the thoughts ARE solely internal - from this can come healing. Is that considerably more work? Of course it is. The genuine psychological healing is nearly always the hardest for all concerned. That's not news to you, I know THAT much about you by now, Niall.
But the first step along that path is not to discount the personal experiences out of hand. If you believe it is "Impossible", then you close all the doors to resolving this issue beyond saying the sufferer is either demented, or needs chemical 'healing' - with all the dangers that brings in its wake which are nearly always more detrimental than the original problem was in the first place.
I have an advantage - I have experienced direct, unarguable telepathy myself, on several occasions. This I cannot prove to you (I'm sure that sounds familiar), yet more because I have no way to find the observers in a few cases, nor to know if I could that they would remember the incident, and nor that they could convince you even if those two hurdles were overcome.
What I know is good enough for me. All I would ask is to keep an open mind, and behave with more compassion to those not fortunate enough to have a framework that enables them to understand what they are experiencing - again, often at times of great trauma to them personally.
HOW it could happen, while of interest, is academic* compared to being sympathetic to the possibility, even if it does seem impossible.
For the large majority of human existence, as far back as we know before the last few hundred years, these abilities were taken as granted.
Unlike the large majority today, I do not think we are particularly wiser as a culture.
Impossible means "given the set of rules of this system, that is not possible. Find another answer." In informational systems, including the mind, any physical defect can be mimicked by a computational defect. As for the nature of the experiences, the sky is the limit but they are all generated by the malfunctioning mind, not by the supernatural. Voices are real, they just don't have a basis in verifiable external reality or in the supernatural. Sorry to be a party-pooper but everything that seems fantastic has a natural explanation
Not at all - you are moving within the materialist paradigm, so you are still limited by its own limits of the possible. As I mentioned a few months back, as a teen I fell in love with Positivism too - it was having direct experiences that simply could not be explained by materialism that lead me to seek further explanations, I had also out of amusement read a bit of Crowley - didn't believe a word of the more preposterous claims.
Until I started experiencing them myself.
And on occasion had them unexpectedly shown to me by people I trusted, when I needed the unexplained being explained.
What you are calling "Supernatural" is to me perfectly natural, which changes the frames completely.
I have had so many of what you think are "supernatural" experiences that they are realler than you are to me - for all I know for sure you could be an AI, or a Mossad/MI5 materialist sting operation to find the doubters in efficacy of Big Pharma magical pills, lmao. (As it happens I don't believe that, but I keep open minds, lol ;) )
Imagine what it would be like for you personally, should you start to experience hearing other people's subvocalised thought, be unable to clearly distinguish them from your own thoughts, and be completely unable to ask for help from anyone around you because they have the same beliefs as you currently do, and more than most would know the dangers inherent in being labelled as "crazy".
That's not a pretty picture, is it?
Previous generations/wiser cultures would send you on a 'retreat' for a few months, isolation and meditation until you learn to separate and reconstruct your ego barrier, surrounded by spiritually educated 'experts' who have experienced what you are going through in such a situation.
They took mental and spiritual health seriously.
We? We look for ways to profit from the suffering individual, and do everything possible to make the suffering worse.
At worse the person ends up in the hands of "christians" who tell them they are filled with "demons" who need exorcising; at best they meet caring secular people who tell them their experiences are "impossible".
Neither path actually helps the person. Although both can "cure" the person in their own way.
Roger McFillin is a very conscientious and principled character who has the honesty and guts to publicly level some very serious and confronting critiques about the psychiatric establishment.
He's also inclined to a sentimental, traditionalist and conservative take on wishful-thinking woo-woo. It's hardly surprising though, in many ways.
Mainstream apologists for psychiatry and allegedly scientific, "evidence-based" psychology may claim to be liberal or left-wing, but in real terms they rarely are. More like high-decile, expedient hustlers merging with the herd.
The power of the mob is so strong critique within ranks is extremely unusual. Those who dissent do so usually because they are buoyed by the solidarity and morale of their oppositional subcultures.
So you won't get a middle-class high school guidance counselor ripping into the evils of antidepressants. But you may well find a Marxist, anarchist, libertarian or Objectivist presenting well-researched evidence about what awful drugs they can be. When you're outside the charmed circle, you are more likely to tell it like it is.
So McFillin, for all his mystical muesli, is simply following the standard pattern of a thinking person whose peculiarities have meant he hasn't been assimilated into the mainstream social and clinical trance. As with all impassioned talking heads in the public square, I extract what is useful, and jettison the idealistic and deluded distortions.
If you come across any idealistic or deluded distortions in my stuff, be sure to let me know.
Ok, done! I tend to usually be on the same page with your takes though.
I recently tried to have a conversation with a psychiatrist about the long term hazards of medicating someone, without contemplating and attempting to heal processes of the mind. It wasn't a topic he cared to discuss. He seemed perplexed. Previously when I have asked whether perceived existential threats, trauma or intellectual disability were factors contributing to paranoia, I was poo-pooed and admonished for not having already found a source of psychotropics to "control the situation". - Isn't it telling to consider that health care providers should think in such terms?
On reflection this feels like moral injury for all concerned, including practitioners who have a blinkered vision of their true impact.
The underpinnings of psychiatry, which ignore aspects of the psyche, are never scrutinised or tested by the law. ACAT tribunals are part of the same echo chamber as the system of delivery.
Threats to people's sense of safety and attacks upon their autonomy, I suspect are at the root of most breakdowns. Collapse in the ability to relate, to even retain a sense of one's own identity; (some narratives include ideas such as "I didn't recognise myself"), should be a situation in which others step forward/ provide space rather than recoiling. Investigating the themes expressed so as to understand how they are representative of perceived threats can help everyone concerned to unpack the content of or motivations for what might seem superficially to be odd behaviour. Healing may not even require conscious insight.
Fascinatng take on how the Vienna Circle got misread. The shift from "science can't talk about the mind" to "mind doesn't exist" is a huge conceptual leap that somehow became orthodoxy. I appreciate how the biocognitive model tries to rescue mental phenomena using information theory, though I wonder if treating mind as purely informational state captures everything about subjective experience.
I expand on this in Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder from2021. By some feat of recursive legerdemain, the brain generates what we call subjective experience. Important to note that this doesn't require vast computational ability, which then opens the door to animals having mental lives. However, I have to admit it may be that we will never be able to determine the codes used by the brain to generate subjectivity. In that sense, the mysterians may win.
I went through it several times on an early internet forumm with materialists.
It goes like this, with small variations.
Science studies what is real.
If it is not real, then it is an illusion.
Anyone trained in English-Prime can spot the problems immediately - most physical-scientists are not.
Anyone who has followed a post-structuralist argument can see the problems immediately - once again, guess who are "informed" that post-structuralism should be regarded as hocus pocus.
And if you want a good grade, to get a good job, and pay off those debts, you damned well internalise those POV as well.
And so it goes - until a competing educational system that is less hidebound outcompetes you in what it produces.
I've not heard of E-Prime but on checking, it's closely aligned with predicate logic.
To continue your syllogism: "If science doesn't study it, it must be an illusion. Science doesn't study morality. Ergo morality is an illusion."
This is what allows scientists to develop nuclear weapons without considering the consequences of their actions.
The main goal of E-Prime can be seen as avoiding the use of "is", as much as possible. As can be seen, I'm no expert, and lax even at that.
"Is" is absolutist (Religious in nature), while science should be conditional.
Agreed. I never liked the copula.
I had to look that up, bit embarrassing for someone who once taught English (At a TEFL level though, and not as primary subject is my excuse).
Bloody Latin. Our 'magical' language should be Welsh.
Precisely. Science is "objective" (stifles snigger). Scientists are not responsible for what they create, anymore than soldiers are for war-crimes... senior officers, anyway, obviously.
I'm sure you see my attempt at cynical humour there.
Sub-atomic humour, what can you say??
I am looking in your bibliography for works of scientists like Rupert Sheldrake and psychiatrists like Dr. Daniel J. Siegel, Dr. Iain McGilchrist, I think they have some ideas to contribute to your work. Mainly because I am familiar with their books and YouTube videos. By relating or including these presently high profiled scholars it is easier for others to enter your discussion. Hope this is helpful, that is my intention. I assume you would like a broader readership.
I'm not familiar with them, will have a look.
"No telepathy or telekinesis, no “universal consciousness” (whatever that means), nothing supernatural and no life after death in this system. If you want to believe these things, go ahead but there is no conceivable proof."
Actually, there are vast amounts of proof, but the believers in such proofs have been called "Insane" for their experiences, and tortured extensively until they forswear.
What IF many of those locked up for "Hearing voices" actually were?
The earliest Buddhist manuals brought to the West warned about developing telepathy during meditation training. Many of the 90s generation in the raves experienced it through those mass experiences. If you take an openminded look through the literature on reincarnation, there are equally many bizarre (From the POV of doubters) "coincidences" that take a LOT of "explaining away" very creatively.
Universal Consciousness is one of the more likely solutions to the QM conundrums, take that up with Wheeler. Einstein couldn't disprove it - perhaps you can.
Apart from those niggles - to be expected to one trained in the western paradigms - another excellent historical essay about where the Damned Idjits went badly wrong, and some baby steps out of the quagmire they think is clear blue sky. Quantum fields make a LOT of sense to anyone who has experienced reality with the aid of shrooms, btw. But still, baby steps out are better than digging deeper, lol. :)
Ah yes but... (there's always a but). A sophisticated informational state, and we can agree the mind is sophisticated, can always produce experiences that aren't generated by any outside stimulus, or by an inner stimulus as with pain. Nobody who has these experiences (and people who hear voices are actually hearing them) can prove they aren't the products of a malfunction in the systems generating their total perceptive state. Those who say "My experiences are proof of the supernatural" have to show why they can't be mistaken or misled, why we have to accept their statements as gospel. The mind is complex, there are so many ways it can malfunction even in the presence of a perfectly healthy brain.
There was a fantastic Psychology text book, simply called "Paranoia" in the college library - 30+ years later I have no idea of the author - that shone a very unexpected look into the phenomena. When his patients displayed this trait - eg, the people around were plotting against them etc - instead of assuming they themselves were "crazy", he instead left the cushy office to go investigate. To his evident surprise, in *every case* he discovered these suspicions were justified. Sometimes malevolent, and sometimes intended beneficially (The people were genuinely concerned about the patients, and were indeed talking about them behind their backs to try to help... with almost predictably disastrous results), but always the patients complaints had validity, and were rational. Off memory from a long time ago, I think the figure was in the ball park of about 30 cases.
Right there can be seen that to find "proof", one needs to actually investigate, rather than write-off.
If someone reports experiencing "telepathy" - often sadly in our culture associated with trauma rather than positively - then an in-depth discussion by a professional who is aware that hostility can be subconscious, with the *projector*, could uncover if there is any validity to those claims too. Just like only a small part of direct communication is actually verbal - most communication is via body language, subtle clues in positioning, emotional timbre, all the non language sounds we make - so too is the large majority of 'telepathy' also communicated - but not all. Bearing all this in mind, setting up a test should not be beyond the capabilities of even a semi-decent researcher.
The onus upon a genuine medical professioner should not be to demand proof from the person experiencing them, but manage to prove to the experiencer that the thoughts ARE solely internal - from this can come healing. Is that considerably more work? Of course it is. The genuine psychological healing is nearly always the hardest for all concerned. That's not news to you, I know THAT much about you by now, Niall.
But the first step along that path is not to discount the personal experiences out of hand. If you believe it is "Impossible", then you close all the doors to resolving this issue beyond saying the sufferer is either demented, or needs chemical 'healing' - with all the dangers that brings in its wake which are nearly always more detrimental than the original problem was in the first place.
I have an advantage - I have experienced direct, unarguable telepathy myself, on several occasions. This I cannot prove to you (I'm sure that sounds familiar), yet more because I have no way to find the observers in a few cases, nor to know if I could that they would remember the incident, and nor that they could convince you even if those two hurdles were overcome.
What I know is good enough for me. All I would ask is to keep an open mind, and behave with more compassion to those not fortunate enough to have a framework that enables them to understand what they are experiencing - again, often at times of great trauma to them personally.
HOW it could happen, while of interest, is academic* compared to being sympathetic to the possibility, even if it does seem impossible.
For the large majority of human existence, as far back as we know before the last few hundred years, these abilities were taken as granted.
Unlike the large majority today, I do not think we are particularly wiser as a culture.
*pun intended.
Peace. xx
Impossible means "given the set of rules of this system, that is not possible. Find another answer." In informational systems, including the mind, any physical defect can be mimicked by a computational defect. As for the nature of the experiences, the sky is the limit but they are all generated by the malfunctioning mind, not by the supernatural. Voices are real, they just don't have a basis in verifiable external reality or in the supernatural. Sorry to be a party-pooper but everything that seems fantastic has a natural explanation
Not at all - you are moving within the materialist paradigm, so you are still limited by its own limits of the possible. As I mentioned a few months back, as a teen I fell in love with Positivism too - it was having direct experiences that simply could not be explained by materialism that lead me to seek further explanations, I had also out of amusement read a bit of Crowley - didn't believe a word of the more preposterous claims.
Until I started experiencing them myself.
And on occasion had them unexpectedly shown to me by people I trusted, when I needed the unexplained being explained.
What you are calling "Supernatural" is to me perfectly natural, which changes the frames completely.
I have had so many of what you think are "supernatural" experiences that they are realler than you are to me - for all I know for sure you could be an AI, or a Mossad/MI5 materialist sting operation to find the doubters in efficacy of Big Pharma magical pills, lmao. (As it happens I don't believe that, but I keep open minds, lol ;) )
Imagine what it would be like for you personally, should you start to experience hearing other people's subvocalised thought, be unable to clearly distinguish them from your own thoughts, and be completely unable to ask for help from anyone around you because they have the same beliefs as you currently do, and more than most would know the dangers inherent in being labelled as "crazy".
That's not a pretty picture, is it?
Previous generations/wiser cultures would send you on a 'retreat' for a few months, isolation and meditation until you learn to separate and reconstruct your ego barrier, surrounded by spiritually educated 'experts' who have experienced what you are going through in such a situation.
They took mental and spiritual health seriously.
We? We look for ways to profit from the suffering individual, and do everything possible to make the suffering worse.
At worse the person ends up in the hands of "christians" who tell them they are filled with "demons" who need exorcising; at best they meet caring secular people who tell them their experiences are "impossible".
Neither path actually helps the person. Although both can "cure" the person in their own way.
Liked the 'sense of humour ' angle ! Whereabouts in the brain is it to be found !