An increasing number of people I’ve been around recently have had mental breakdowns of one sort or another. This leads me to wonder if I’ll be the next. It’s not impossible. But this leads to another question: how would I even know? And what might be the cause?
Like any good scientist, I’m going to put forward a hypothesis before I even go looking for data. But because I’m a member of the underground intellectual elite, I’ll posture a little and call it a theory.
The idea is this: if you’re trying to get at the most fundamental questions, then you’re at risk of cutting your mind on the edges of consensus reality. You don’t have to be a genius in order to get a psychotic break. And maybe such breaks are possible for anyone who pushes their mind too hard in a particular direction.
If you lift a heavy weight, you might hurt your back. If you play basketball, you might sprain your ankle. And at least anecdotally, this idea seems to hold up. Many of the paragons of intellectual achievement have had mental breakdowns. Consider John Nash, Nietzsche, and Howard Hughes. After searching some more, I’m also learning that Gottlob Frege, John Stuart Mill, David Hume, Adam Smith, etc. also suffered from mental illness. These are big names. You might even be envious of their accomplishments, but would you want to pay the price?
With sports, you can often see the injury, and often even see the exact moment when it happened. Mental breakdowns can be far more private. An outsider may not be able to know what someone was thinking about and why thinking about it might have led to the breakdown.
Telling them to stay away from the thing that causes a breakdown would be like asking a basketball player to stop playing ball. You could medicate. If you take John Nash, for example, you give him anti-psychotic drugs that dull his mind. You’ve fixed the problem, but you’ve also blunted his sharp mind. The schizophrenics are correct in thinking that the drugs are a form of mind control. Imagine if we treated sports injuries with sedatives. You’ve solved the root cause of the sports injuries, but you’ve also turned him into a puddle.
And yes, psychologists understand that drugs like Lithium are blunt instruments, and they’d be elated to have more refined tools at their disposal. But I want to propose a few other ways of thinking about mental illness.
I have 4 broad proposals:
Up the complexity of their environment by engaging them philosophically
Teaching good intellectual form
Extract the value of their divergent thinking
Engagement
Philosophy
A decent number of the people I’ve met who’ve had psychotic breaks were generally intelligent. Problems occur when they can’t get a foothold or meet anyone who sees eye-to-eye with them, or meet them where they’re at. And this results in alienation. It’s important to be able to not let your mind run on an idea in isolation for too long. At some point, you want some kind of feedback. You want engagement without them necessarily agreeing with you. Enabling is bad, and so is dismissal.
In myself, I’ve noticed that my mind would get stuck on problems. For example, for a while I was unsure at what point I should defend myself against my ex, and what the ramifications might be, or on what axiomatic basis I should make my decisions. Another question I couldn’t resolve is why I felt so bad about dating again when most people I talked to felt that it was totally fine to date someone new. In addition to not being able to make sense of my ex, politics increasingly didn’t make sense to me. I wasn’t able to get along at work either. So almost nothing made sense to me and I needed some way of determining if I was the one who was wrong or if something else was going on.
What helped me make sense of the world was discovering the rationalists, making some rationalist friends, getting into philosophy, and getting into religion. Psychology made little impact on me, ultimately.
I used to be concerned that I viewed things too robotically and that I might be a little autistic. And now I’m thinking I lean just a tad in the schizophrenic direction. Sure, I get it I probably shouldn’t self-diagnose. It’s also somewhat acceptable to be on the autistic spectrum, but calling yourself schizo is only more recently becoming a thing.
I don’t think I’d lean toward being schizo if I wasn’t contemplating the religious. The figures in the Bible hear the voice of God all the time—a consistent narrative trope. I think the schizo direction makes a lot more sense if it’s viewed as a response to something rather than as a symptom to be treated.
People can have schizophrenic breaks, and schizophrenia itself is fairly heritable. One way I might interpret this is to say that the schizo brain has some element that aims at the “outside”, or something like the divine or religious. Maybe the schizo gene and the God gene is the same gene. I don’t want to put too much weight on this specific proposal. I mostly want to direct your thinking towards a set of ideas that might prove useful.
The schizophrenic mind will sometimes see things and believe that the TV might be sending special messages to them, or get paranoid about thought broadcasting. They might even think that they’re Jesus and they’re here to save the world. But there are clearly very mild versions of all of these problems that a normal person might experience.
There are a few ways to see the world that make certain types of delusions more epistemically justifiable. If you believe in a Creator, then you might believe that such a being has a special calling for you. And many Christians do believe something like this. And you can justify the supernatural mathematically via Kurt Godel. He proved that the Hilbert program to axiomatize and create a provably internally consistent mathematical system was a dead end. You need to go outside of the system if you want to do this, but then you run into the same problem with your outer system.
Then we have Descartes, Boltzmann brains, Game Theory, and the simulation hypothesis. Descartes says you can’t know anything for sure other than that you exist. If your world stops making sense, and if you’re increasingly paranoid about the dangers in your environment, then it would make sense to retreat into your own mind. The Boltzmann brain thought experiment is another justification. The more we understand about how big the world is, the more likely it is that there’s only one brain: yours. If you create a big enough universe, at some point, it looks more probably that a bunch of atoms randomly came together to form your mind. The simulation argument states that if technology continues to make any progress at all, then we’ll be able to simulate the universe we actually experience. So again, we have reason to believe that we are the center. Finally, even if you believe other agents exist, game theory makes a strong case for acting in the world as if it’s just you. There are many philosophical roads to solipsism.
Intellectual form
I suspect good intellectual form can help us avoid falling head-first into schizophrenia if our minds can detect what’s happening. One of the most important ideas to keep in mind (imo) is that there’s (almost) no god. In other words, you need to be really pushed into an intellectual corner before you decide to introduce a new entity or decide on a supernatural explanation for a phenomena. If you follow the advice of Occam’s razor, you wouldn’t “multiply entities beyond necessity”. But of course we know that psychotic breaks sometimes co-occur with stress and trauma. In short, these people are pushed into their own intellectual corner. They need a new mental framework to reconcile everything they’re experiencing.
Now if you’re pushed against your intellectual limits by a traumatic event, and you’re at a point where you can justifiably introduce a new entity, then you’re in a super interesting place. You may not be on the edge of human knowledge, but you may be on the edge of what you know. It can be hard to tell the difference. I’ve experienced this when I stopped believing in God. The only Christianity I was aware of was of an unsophisticated variety, and so when I rejected it, I felt that I really did reach the bounds of the latest Christian thought. But it later turned out that I was wrong.
Extraction
Another approach is to get the upside of schizophrenic thinking while limiting the downside. We effectively want a brownian ratchet, and the venture capital world can help us understand how it might work for us.
VCs will fund many companies with the expectation that most of them will fail either outright fail, or peter out. The purpose of VC capital is to take asymmetric bets where being right helps you more than being wrong hurts you. If we approach psychotic breaks the way VCs approach entrepreneurs, we’d take a mental breakdown as “experience” in sense-making. Someone coming back to sanity might be reason enough to fund a future endeavor.
This relates to schizophrenia because one way to look at the disorder is to see it as a kind of over-active pattern matching. The paranoia tries to pattern-match for threats. The voices could be small sounds or white noise being picked up and microscopic variations in the sounds getting amplified and coded with meaning until they turn into voices. With better mental tools, you can learn to spot contradictions and things that don’t make sense and perhaps suppress or ignore such spurious information.
Now, if someone’s suffering from over-active pattern-matching, then maybe we can somehow put this to use? It’s important to not just take anyone’s pattern matching. Suppose you get someone who isn’t able to comprehend existing technology, what it’s capable of, etc. So you might imagine the government is tracking you in ways that are technically beyond its capabilities. But just a little pattern matching might actually be useful. Most people are mimetic and do what everyone else does. A lot of people think step-by-step rather than pattern matching. Musk claims most people reason my analogy rather than thinking from first principles.
Engagement
I have a couple friends who will talk at me rather than to me, and I’m not immune to this pattern myself. I fill my mind with thoughts and ideas and then I just dump. The most common approach people take with people like me and my friends is to isolate us.
If we are guilty of “aggravated verbal assault”, then the cure must be social prison. The idea is that if we were to be left alone to think about what we’ve done, we’ll return to society cured of our verbal diarrhea. We’ll learn our lesson, and we can be re-integrated.
The problem with this approach is if the problem is overthinking, solving it by creating more opportunity for overthinking can’t be the answer. The person will likely return to society less sane than they started. They will be more disconnected from reality and will be more accustomed to withdrawing into their own minds.
But the alternative can’t be to entertain their insanity. Do we pretend that the insane person is actually sane? Do we instead flip the entire world on its head so that it makes sense to the bumbling insane person on the corner of the street? It seems my proposal is even more extreme than to suggest that the insane person runs the insane asylum. It sounds like I’m suggesting that the world bends to the insane person’s will. In any case, I wrote a story inspired by this line of reasoning:
Summary
I didn’t expect this post to get so long. I don’t claim to know what happens, but I hope this helps someone. There have been many times where merely seeing a problem from a new angle was enough to get me unstuck.
WhenI was young, I ‘over thought’. Later I decided to trust my feelings, and stop questioning them. My goal became succeeding on conventional terms, keep reading, and hope for the best. There really is a danger in over-thinking, as you point out. I’d say more philosophers went crazy [at times] than stayed sane. Perhaps you should collect your essays and write a book, something like “Notes from the Underground’”. Dostoyevski is a kindred spirit, I think.