The Philosopher, Ch. 3

Human's have an amazing ability to make shit up.   Not only to make shit up, but after they have made it up, they have an amazing ability to believe it, suppressing the knowledge that it was made up in the first place.

When society considers that your ability to make shit up to be out of the ordinary (or pathological) it considers it to be confabulation.   For example, in Contard's delusion, the person believes what they have made up about themselves in the extreme--believing that they are dead.  There is a documented case where a patient suffering from Contard's delusion believed he was dead so strongly that he actually starved.  

But what I'm getting at is the tendency toward a reverse form of Contard's delusion that we all share:  the belief not that we are dead, but that we are living.   This is a very practical and convenient idea.   Hard to do much of anything without it:-).   There are a mulitude of different perspectives on what constitutes life.   The biologists might say that we really are mostly a vast colony of bacteria in a host organism.   See "Things that Don't go Together,"  Supra at Ch. 7.   Though the belief that we are living has tremendous practical advantages,  it is still a belief-- perhaps no different than a belief that we are dead.

Like Cotard's, the belief that we are alive may be just as delusional or compulsive.  For in our belief that we are alive,  isn't there an internal narrative which we cling, a story we construct minute-by-minute to assure ourselves that we understand what is happening?  Sufferers of conditions like Cotard’s delusion may invent weird, nonsensical explanations for their reality because they are experiencing weird, nonsensical input. The only difference between these patients’ explanations and our own explanations is the degree to which they are obviously, verifiably false. Whatever explanations we manufacture at any given moment to explain our state of mind and body could be similarly muddled.   Whether or not your brain is damaged, your mind is always trying to explain itself to itself, and the degree of accuracy varies moment to moment.

Don't believe everything you think.  Even that you are just a big container of mostly bacteria:-)

Over on Yonder Montain, the dude with the Split lip bathes in the River sipping some very hot, by now, buttered rum.   Did you hear that it was 108 yesterday?