If schizophrenics have a warped view of reality, does that mean the rest of us see reality accurately?

[Anonymous]

[OneViewpoint]

"Reality" is a question humans have never answered and may not be capable of understanding with our limited sensory perceptions and our meat brains.

Simple example, we perceive radiation in a limited band of visible (to our eyes) light. But we know thermal radiation, UV light, microwave energy, infrared, gamma radiation, X-rays, and radio waves exist. Looks like gravitational waves exist too. We can't see any of it. 200 years ago it wasn't part of human reality.

Another example. Thanks to Newtonian physics we can accurately predict planetary motion and understand the macro universe well enough to get by in it. But is that "reality"? Because things get a lot weirder at the quantum level. We've only kinda sorta understood that for about 100 years.

But so far a fundamental understanding of the nature of gravity and the theory that unifies the quantum and macro world eludes us. The nature of reality remains a debate between science and philosophy. It may remain that way forever.

Or maybe our tools like the Large Hadron Collider someday get us to the objective truth of reality some day. I'm pretty sure it's gonna happen this week though. I'm also sure that 95% of humanity will not be able to understand objective reality if we ever reach that level of knowledge. They will keep wallowing in the mud with their "Gods".

[ArrowheadSW]

I have some friends who have schizophrenia in their family. And I also used to work with some psychiatric patients (years ago). I've seen in what ways their sense of the world around them might be warped. As for those who DON'T have the illness, their sense of the world around them may or may not be aligned with reality. But most have enough grasp of the world around them to be functional enough to live day to day.

[CupcakeTheDestroyer]

So interesting fun fact about schizophrenia: while this condition does indeed create auditory and sometimes visual hallucinations, it’s only in the United States that these hallucinations are violent in nature. In the US, schizophrenics hallucinate ghosts, monsters, people that want to cause harm to the individual. In every other nation, the hallucinations are quite gentle in nature, usually in the form of lost loved ones who happily support them.

[ArrowheadSW]

@cupcakethedestroyer I was talking to my friend's brother, and he suffers from schizophrenia. He was saying that there were voices following him around in his apartment saying violent and threatening things. He said that he wanted to move, but he was getting such a good deal on the rent! As if it was the apartment that was the issue... LOL

[jahaims]

Nope