Hi all

As part of psychology we study mental "illnesess" (quotes because who says they are illnesses not just differences?) and one we study is schizophrenia, im sure many of you know roughy what it entails such as hearing voices, hallucinations, disorganized speach and being generally detatched from the world as if in a dream world.

Well basically i think that schizophrenia shows us that reality is actually just an illusion created in the mind. If these people see things then that is their reality and it is real to them. one psychologist describes schizophrenia as "a sane way to deal with an insane world" which i think is partly true. For one how do we know that people who think aliens are trying to abduct them arent right? it could be that aliens really are trying to abduct them and we dont belive them, or maybe we are the insane ones and they are sane? We could be in denial of the fact that aliens are abducting pepople.

You can see that everyone has their own reality and there is no such thing as REALITY as reality is defined on the net as:


Well who deciedes what the world really is? is it some old white-heaired guy in a lab saying "ahh this is real, this is not..." or is society as a whole? Or is it the individual? In my opinion it is the individual, I decide wether life is good or not, wether someone is a good person, and technically my mind has created the world around me. I belive it was the matrix film that suggested "reality is just electrical impulses interpreted by the brain" this is too true. If my brain decides the weather is sunny, then the weather is sunny as far as im concerned! And that is the reality to me.

Anyone have any ideas on this? All in all, there is no reality which suggests we are all living in an illusion created by out minds and brains.

Humm my tutor would be proud of that methinks Lets hope someone else has veiws on this subject!

It seems like you're proposing your philosophy... Well... I kinda think that life is what you make it. You can always go through life as if it were a dream. If you noticed, dreams break the boundaries of time. Sometimes you dream about the past, present and future. When you dream about the future (and sometimes forget about your dream) and the dream comes true, you get deja vu. Who knows... we may all be living in a dream. Why is it that dreams have such power? Maybe that's reality...

Pretty interesting thoughts there. Maybe those schizophrenic persons are actually experiencing reality. We may never know unless we become like them (though I'm not sure if we'll still be able to testify)

Mhmm, ive thought that too! How do we know we arent actually schizophrenics who when we sleep we have more "real" dreams and when we wake "reality" seems like a dream. So when we really are dreaming we think we're awake and when we really are awake we are actually dreaming? (if that makes sense!)

That would mean that when we "dream" (IE when we are actually awake but think we are dreaming) the people we see who seem weird would be people in the waking world and everythng that happens would be interpreted by our schizophrenic brain and twisted so it seems like a dream!

Its a very good point! You made me think in detail now, which is never good!

That’s very philosophical of you, shadowx… I guess whatever your brain tells you could be considered reality – after all, what you see is reality to you. For example, maybe what you see as red is actually blue to others… But then again, I guess reality is just not in one’s own mind but in their dealings/relationships with others… I mean, if you’re schizophrenic you really don’t see others as what they are. If you hallucinate or something that people are aliens, then is that true? No, not really, because, even if we do all look like aliens in reality (which there is nothing to compare us to, so I guess that’s true) we see each other as human beings… our intentional actions are in reality… If you hallucinate that someone is trying to kill you when in reality this entity is trying to diagnose you, it’s pretty obvious what reality is.

i have a view on this. i think that if people are in reality, other people think they are insane. Maybe schizophrenics are in reality and we are the ones calling them insane.
We call them insane, but they never call us insane. Maybe that's beacuse the are in reality.

The problem, though, is that they are not able to comprehend reality, and that's what drives them "insane". The just don't understand reality.

They see it, but don't get it, and we just don't see it at all.

Thanx, they offered a philosphy course at college, maybe i shouldve taken it!



This could work the other way around, we see them as diagnosing but in actual fact they might be tryin to kill the person. does that make sense? basically anything that we think is a hallucination they are having could infact be a hullicination we are having and they are seeing the truth.



Exactly!! i was worried people might think im crazy! but maybe not!

And great example with the red and blue thing cangor, it shows what we all mean so easilly!

This could go into a whole bit on sense-data as well. Something may not exist in a material sense but something is indeed there and that something is sense-data. There are ideas that we do not directly percieve the materail world and only percieve this sense-data. Now with schizophrenia, it may very well be "tuned" into something. I really haven't read much on how or why schizophrenia works and I'm a psych major. Nobody seems to be able to provide any agreeable answers to my knowledge. If anybody knows anything, I would love to find out more.

By sense data do you mean data from the senses? Meaning that the world is infact "made up" of data in the senses, which is similar to what i mean about reality beinng an illusion in the mind.