Re: psychoceramics: re: Trials of a mind-control campaigner

[Cosma Shalizi <shalizi @ phys-next1.physics.wisc.edu>]

[Mitch Porter]
>[acb]
>> [Mitchell Porter]
>>> I'm showing my cards here, of course; I suspect that the vast majority 

>>> of people who believe themselves victims of government mind control 

>>> are experiencing phenomena such as "voices in the head", and interpreting 

>>> them as the product of a technology, rather than of a biological process.
>> Or rather than the product of demonic possession or supernatural forces.
>Yes, good point. One wonders how many other interpretations of the
>same psychological phenomenon there have been, throughout history
>(and what the actual basis of the phenomenon is).

I've just finished a fascinating very closely related to this subject, the
late Nicholas Spanos's _Multiple Identities and False Memories: A
Sociocognitive Perspective_ (Washington, D.C.: American
Psychological Association, 1996; review coming soon to my web pages). 

Spanos doesn't talk about people who think they're being mind-controlled
(I suspect he didn't know about them), but he does present what I think is a
compelling case that demoniacs, spirit mediums, shamans,
glossolaliacs, hysterics, alien abductees, people recalling past (or
future!) lives, the hypnotized, and multiple personality disorder
patients are all variations on the same theme.  This does not,
surprisingly, involve some altered state of consciousness or brain
function (which was more or less what I suspected before reading the book),
but something more akin to acting, though obviously not the same as
self-conscious acting.  (Some of the experiments which support this are
exceedingly clever.)  All of these people have to be trained to act in the
appropriate Really Strange ways (the training itself may not be
deliberate, but is always present), and the proper interpretations have
to be learnt too, e.g., if a supposed demoniac denies she's possessed,
that's the demon speaking, and she needs another long exorcism and some
more time on bread and water in the penitential cell.  (Cf. Lichtenberg:
``Certain rash people have asserted that, just as there are no mice where
there are no cats, so no one is possessed where there are no exorcists.'') 

Spanos does not, unfortunately, consider how these purely social
processes might connect with biological disorders, but does provide
plenty of evidence that it's relatively easy to get people without any sort
of organic problem to ``enact multiple identities.''  (Alas, he writes
like what he was, an academic psychologist.)  He also doesn't give much
consideration to the subjective experiences of these people, but I
suspect that's a pretty complicated problem best tackled by someone like
Daniel Dennett or David Chalmers.    


Cosma Shalizi
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