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This is: The benefits of madness: A positive account of arationality , published by Skatche on the AI Alignment Forum.
This post originated in a comment I posted about a strange and unpleasant experience I had when pushing myself too hard mentally. People seemed interested in hearing about it, so I sat down to write. In the process, however, it became something rather different (and a great deal longer) than what I originally intended. The incident referred to in the above comment was a case of manic focus gone wrong; but the truth is, often in my life it's gone incredibly right. I've gotten myself into some pretty strange headspaces, but through discipline and quick thinking I have often been able to turn them to my advantage and put them to good use.
Part 1, then, lays out a sort of cognitive history, focusing on the more extreme states I've been in. Part 2 continues the narrative; this is where I began to learn to ride them out and make them work for me. Part 3 is the incident in question: where I overstepped myself and suffered the consequences.
Some of you, however, may want to skip ahead to part 4 (unless you find my autobiographical writings interesting as a case study). There, I've written a proposal for a series of posts about how to effectively use the full spectrum of somatic and cognitive states to one's advantage. I have vacillated for a long time about this, for reasons that will be discussed below, but I decided that if I was already laying this much on the line, I might as well take it a step further. Read if you will; and if you're interested, please say so.
Part 1: My cognitive background
Let's start with full disclosure: there is madness in my family. My father was an alcoholic; it was clear to all of us that he also had some other psychological issues, but I never fully learned the details. My sister has been variously diagnosed with depression, bipolar, borderline personality disorder, etc, and has a breakdown about three or four times a year. My brother is also bipolar. He's had two manic episodes so far; he became psychotic during the first one, and both times he's been hospitalized. And then there's me: the sane, dependable one.
That's what I thought, anyway, until my brother had his first episode and I started to look back on my own history. I'd always regarded myself as rather unusual, certainly, but basically stable. But seeing full-blown psychosis for the first time, and within my own family at that, gave new definition and clarity to some of the experiences I had had. My first episode happened when I was in my senior year of high school. I had been getting into New Age for about six months, reading rather credulously the work of one Dr. Joshua David Stone, author of the Ascension Manual and a number of other books inspired primarily by theosophy. I had not thought much about spirituality since renouncing God at the age of twelve, yet a vague unease had led me to begin seeking. Once I got started, I just ate it up; yet the vague unease persisted. I did my best to believe and to perform the meditative exercises, and for the most part I did, but it just wasn't sitting quite right.
During winter break of that year, I began reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig. Now, here was something new: Pirsig rejected the analytic method as the sole arbiter of truth, yet he was also clearly uncomfortable with holism and spirituality. In fact, he seemed uncomfortable with all his ideas: they had come to him during a period of degenerating mental illness, culminating in a nervous breakdown and subsequent electroshock therapy. Yet rather than dismiss these ideas, he seemed determined to confront them and grapple with them, to sift for genuine insights among the delusions. Even more interesting was his rhetorical style: rather than simply...
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