One, is God disappeared to you when you were insane. That is quite interesting to me because my son also cycles in and out of belief in God. When he’s otherwise sane he believes in God, and when he’s insane he is positive that God doesn’t exist. Which is odd because my feeling of powerful belief in God is the thing that most resembles in me the powerful beliefs he professes of these paranoid delusions or psychoses. In other words, he just knows them without being able to clearly say how it is he knows them. He can’t give evidence, he’s just positive. I guess my experience of complete faith in God causes me to give more credence to his complete faith in these bizarre truths he propounds, and to just accept them as things he knows without knowing how he knows them. I mean *I* don’t believe them, but I don’t try to talk him out of them or refute them to him. I just take them as his articles of faith and accept them as such, as I would accept another’s religious faith that contradicted mine.

Two is that I can totally understand and tentatively accept the possible existence of a shadow organization along the lines of the SWO. I mean, everyone knows WalMart is satanic! That’s a no-brainer. And as powerful as WalMart is in the world, if you hypothesize that they might team up with Satan, then I can certainly understand why such an organization might be even more powerful, able to conceal itself, and visible only to the otherwise mad. There’s a whole folklore to build on the topic of holy fools and wise madmen, of course. For instance, in Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrell it was George VI who could see the gentleman with the thistledown hair long before Strange was able to espy him.

It only stands to reason that evil stand-ins have to be cloned and trained to perpetrate so much evil as we see in the world today, since otherwise nice people like our children wouldn’t do such horrible things as we sometimes observe in them. In short, it’s not all that much of a stretch to find a framework in which your whole SWO scenario makes perfect sense as well. My son and I tonight were discussing, for instance, that he thought I was possessed the night he went mad and shoved me to the ground and escaped into the night barefooted to knock urgently on neighbors’ doors begging a ride to the airport. He was reacting rationally, he said, to the fact that I was possessed. I hypothesized that it was my father who was possessing me (his parenting style, anyway) and countered that my son seemed possessed by HIS father that same night. So we agreed to schedule a double-exorcism with whatever ecclesiastical leaders would agree to the same, (we’re thinking of asking the African Catholic priest who practices nearby) and then hugged and made up.

Thirdly, I’m dismayed to read at the end of your account that you’re still not sure what it means about truth and the nature of madness and sanity, for I was hoping, sir, that you could give me some real answers. When I read your account the first time, it was with great interest in what it showed us about the fabric of our reality that our brains are just as much constructing as revealing, about how creative our brains are in weaving this texture of waking life around us from the raw sensory impressions it receives. But until my son’s recent madness I didn’t feel it to be so very vital to know for sure what is really real as opposed to only seemingly real. And I still feel myself to be very much at sea on that point.

I’ve always wanted to be the first human ambassador to the aliens, when we contact other intelligent species in the galaxy. I have this teeming bubbling xenophilia that consumes me and delights me when bumping up against any strangeness of foreignness. I feel such joy at letting my mind dance among the bizarre possibilities that are likely to be commonplace in extraterrestrial thought. The aliens in science fiction who are the most alien of aliens, such as the star-intelligences in Frank Herbert’s Whipping Star, or other really bizarre inconceivable otherminds, are the ones that I feel are most realistic. I think that not only are aliens stranger than we imagine but they’re most likely stranger than we CAN imagine. So perhaps human madness is a close analog to that, a first approximation to the true oddness that will be the other ways of being, other ways of thinking, that other intelligent species will display.

I wonder, in fact, if my son’s madness, and your former madness, aren’t just as valid in some sense as this shared madness that we in our culture call sanity?

It matters not at all what hardware a spirit is implemented on, so long as the implementation is true to the original. This is indeed why we can’t judge each other but only God can judge us. Nobody knows what predispositions were there for reasons beyond the person’s control. So we’re all tempted in totally different ways. So only God can say how well we did given what we had to work with.

So yes, do baptize those androids! Their spirits are just as real as ours. What is a regular human body but a vast biochemical machine upon which our spirits are implemented, anyway? The spirit is all contained in the information.

There’s no need to worry about what happens at the resurrection, since the resurrection consists of just this! Our descendants ages and ages hence, or, say, not before next Wednesday at the earliest, will learn how to build immortal bodies, and then with The Lord’s help will learn how to restore their ancestors into those perfect bodies. The Lord has the “tapes” that contain all the information in our brains at the time of death, or actually at any point in our lives. The information is not being destroyed. It’s saved. I’m not sure why temple work is required, but maybe it’s just the huge database of people and their relationships that we will need to be able to reconstruct who is whom. I’m sure there’s a good reason for it, anyway. A real reason, I mean, not just a made up reason.

Incidentally, my son is dealing with mental illness now and he’s completely convinced that many bad things that are happening and have happened all over in the world are due to him. The lady professor who shot some people in Huntsville, AL the other day he feels did it because of him, which he knows because she wore a pink shirt. To him this clearly refers to some former villainy or bad thoughts he committed while also wearing a pink shirt. That’s how he’s sure it’s actually his fault. When I talk to him I just accept these things. I don’t try to contradict him or talk him out of them, because that doesn’t work and just makes him distrust me, that I’m trying to put one over on him. So I just go along. I ask him to explain his reasoning to me and then I accept that he knows these things.

So I want to ask SteveP, how do you know that the things you know now are realer somehow than the things you knew then when you had the brain bacteria? (My son has Lyme disease of the central nervous system, so his problems are possibly entirely due to bacteria as well.)

When I bear testimony to my son, and I describe how I just know that God exists because I can feel it when I pray, I know He answers me, I directly perceive someone there, etc. That knowledge, that testimony, sounds to me exactly like my son’s knowledge of all the meaning that he’s recently learned how to read into everything around him that tells him all these things that he believes now, all his various psychoses. How do you know after that experience of being so sure of the truth of all the crazy things you believed then, that the things you believe now, that we all agree with each other in believing, aren’t just as illusory or insane? I really have no answer to that question except the answer by Darwinian fitness, that I am happier and more successful and my life works so much better for me now than it did before I knew God.

The truth is something that is very slippery. I’m sure different species see our same world in very different ways, depending on their particular brain wiring, and sensory inputs. Who is to say a dog’s reality is less real than a human’s? Even different human cultures hold very different views of the world from each other. Which reality is realer? I’m not sure there’s any answer to that question other than the answer produced by natural selection. Whatever views survive and propagate are somehow best, even though survival is very contingent on the random happenstance of history, as the fossils of the Burgess Shale teach us, right?

Maybe the whole world is intimately connected, I’m postulating, and my son’s current view is more correct than our “standard model” that we call sanity in our culture. I really don’t know for sure how to judge that. How do you judge between worldviews of different cultures? How do you know for sure that your worldview now is actually truer than the view you held when you were technically insane? Do you have a solid test that would let you know for sure? I’m sure you must have thought about it. Please let me know, if it’s not too much of a threadjack. If it is then please email me and let me know. Is it just a majority rule sort of thing? I need to know so I don’t go totally off the rails and follow my son into his paranoia and various psychoses, okay?

The thing is, because of what I know of science, of the magical realism of Jorge Luis Borges which is true to quantum mechanics, of all the science fiction I’ve read in my life, and the fantasy and speculative fiction, I find I can quite easily slip into the mode of seeing the world through his point of view. I just have to hypothesize previously unknown laws of physics that extend the “spooky action at a distance” that we know is true because of non-locality. We’ve got all the 11 dimensions of string theory (counting time, of course) to play with. There’s dark matter and dark energy, inflation, and the interaction of stuff going on in all those other curled up dimensions. There’s the cosmological constant and all that. It’s really quite easy to imagine some vastly advanced version of physics that could explain all these things, including the pink shirts, and probably your aliens as well. I mean it’s barely even a stretch for me to imagine.

So how do you decide what’s real and what’s mental illness? I’m beginning to wonder if we actually can know. Thinking about it is sort of running me off the rails into other dimensions myself. =) So my question is really quite urgent. Please tell me if you have come up with an answer to that, will you?

Sorry, Dr. P, no answers, just more questions.

You may find the following video by V.S. Ramachandran of UCSD interesting. He spends a few minutes on a three different patients with various kinds of brain damage which in turn illuminates some unique aspects of brain function.

Schizophrenia presents a whole host of problems for the faithful since it strikes at the very heart of our notions concerning free agency and the usual platitudes about someone being given trials for the own benefit absolutely fail. My heart goes out to your family member.

Assuming we can indefinitely replace failing body parts so that a person can live forever, does a person with a healthy artificial body still need to be resurrected? If so, what happens if the artificial body is still functioning at the time of the resurrection? Does it somehow lose its spirit to the resurrected body? Or does the “person” now have two bodies and two spirits?

I don’t think we should/would deny such a person baptism. We certainly don’t for people with artificial legs, hands, eyes, etc. So even if the being gets to the point that the whole body is “man-made”, if the being has faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and desires to repent andis asking for baptism (the first principles), I can think of no reason why we would deny them the ordinances.

As for R. Gary’s question on whether we would still need a resurrection – it seems to me that the wise thing would be to do everything in our power to sustain and improve life. Ours is a religion to prepare for life, not for death. Even in if we find ourselves in this “imaginary super biotech world” (which may turn out to be not too imaginary), replacing our minds and bodies and living for eons, I’ll still take any resurrection God offers.

To think otherwise seems to me to be looking modern medicine two hundred years ago and asking “and in this imaginary future of hip replacements, laser eye surgery, heart transplants, etc., etc., will there still be a need for God’s healing power?” While I’m still both deeply greatful for, and a believer in, God’s healing powers, I’ll still go to the doctor when I’m sick.

If in our future, doctors can make the lame to walk, the deaf to hear, and blind to see – as they are already doing and will do better in the future – I will praise the Lord for his mercies upon us his children. And if we “raise the dead” into labratory raised or silicon-crafted bodies, I’ll pray in thanks while still worshipping my Father and my Lord and, to use Paul’s words, continue to hope for “a better resurrection”.

Maybe we never will see a world like Steve describes.

But if we do, should we not be greatful?

And if we do, is there any reason we should lose our faith in God, Christ, or eternal salvation?