Sanity, consistency, and ideals

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Sane-itizing topic

I have consistently considered the word 'sane' to be a legal definition, and used in court to determine mental soundness of a person uttering an oath.

Well, right, but the issue is with such a perspective, whether there is a real difference between a person with schizophrenia who think that ghosts are trying to control his minds using radiowaves, and other people.

I'm uneasy about treating myself to a wildcard/intuitive concept of consistency. Within the framework of formalising natural language into a formal language, and then formally demonstrating inconsistency (in the sense of that particular system), and finally flipping back to the position that what was formalised in one sense ought to be considered naturally inconsistent...

Time and again I experience tension between various things I more or less believe, but to my light what really matters is the success rate of the expectations I build, and my awareness of records of similar attempts in the past to build expecations on similar matters...

I like the idea that expectations work out BECAUSE they are based on true beliefs, and vice versa, but when I try to think about a belief, subtracting the kind of expectations it will encourage me to form, there's too little left for my thinking to come to grips.


j

I think it's possible. What I actually think is that there is no correlation between consistency and sanity. You can be consistent and sane. You can be consistent and insane (schizophrenic delusions can have very strong internal consistency). You can be inconsistent and insane, you can be inconsistent and sane-- and I think many, many people are inconsistent and sane. Being inconsistent merely means you are flexible and can adjust to a different situation. In a very different situation, it would acyually be insane (or rather, irrational) to be too consistent. It would pin yopu to "solutions" to your problems that didn't work and that you stuck to merely out of consistency.

Hmm.... the issue I was getting at is whether what is in some sense expected for people to think inconsistent in itself. The thread I was inspired by was a thread about whether it is moral to entertain oneself when the same resources could so easily help somebody else out so much. Now, the issue is that to say that any entertainment is worth having a person die seems obviously absurd. At the same time though, it would similarly seem absurd to refrain from so many normal and every day activities to donate so much to the poor. The question is whether this is a real conundrum and whether other similar conundrums exist.

Yes, I remember that thread. My contribution to it was that you could be reasonably consistent by spending some of your allocated entertainment $$ on destitute entertainers; street musicians and artists. I suppose what you are getting at is where is the line between "reasonably consistent" and "total weasel hypocrite". Why would "reasonable" need to be there as a qualifier on "consistent" unless you are a hypocrite? For me, I think being too consistent is just nuts (irrational, insane). Too much dedication to consistency forces you to create needless dilemmas like the one posed in that thread. But then again, I'm NT. So inconsistency is not distressing to me.

edited to add; I practice what I preach. A chunk of my entertainment $$ does in fact go to street performers and local theater (which is always destitute). This isn't out of some ideal that it's immoral to entertain myself while others are destitute and how can I resolve this dilemma. It's because I give money to reward the really good perfortmers so they'll keep on entertaining me and to give the bad performers incentive to keep practicing.

Oh.... well.... I guess the fact that you are an NT allows that inconsistency to make sense....

I can't really make sense of your "reasonably consistent" notion vs "dedication to consistency" without actually reading it as basically just a statement of the issue I am getting at. I am not concerned with that line simply because the analysis I make ignores it. There is consistent, and then there is inconsistent. Now, it is true that there is likely also extremely inconsistent, but I think that is also considered "insane". The issue is that if sane and complete consistency are opposed, then one cannot be sane and really be consistent.

That being said, you might say that total consistency is insane, the problem is that without it, there are contradictions in beliefs, and these contradictions in beliefs mean that to a certain extent a person is absurd/nonsensical. I mean, you might saying that being insane is just weird, but the problem is that if we have contradictions, then there are issues with "what is the essential person and what do they stand for"? It seems to me that persistent contradictions undermine our ability to find an essential person and thus undermines notions of personal identity. After all, if persons are not a set of consistent beliefs, or even necessarily clear core beliefs, then how do we measure identity?

Have you tried a big 5? It works pretty well. So does a Myers-Briggs test. I guess what I'm trying to say is that personality is great for measuring identity, especially when a large number of people can't even verbalize their core beliefs.

To answer your original question, flexibility is an important feature for sanity (or whatever word you like,) which doesn't merge well with consistency. Although this is easily fixed by being consistently flexible. So yes, it's possible, but not likely. Actually kinda rare.

Umm...... a lot of people have similar personality characteristics. Even further though, a lot of people have personalities, they don't necessarily invest any meaning into these personalities.


Umm.... that doesn't actually really answer it at all. Consistency is not incompatible with flexibility, as all one has to do is just adapt each belief in relationship to other beliefs. Even further though, "consistently flexible" says nothing about a particular belief at a particular moment.

Sanity is being in touch with the world as it is. Insanity is the insistence that things are what they are not.

ruveyn

Not just that though. Your characterization only works on issues of delusion, but not things such as psychopathy or anything else of that sort.