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What exactly are “sanity” and “insanity” ?

Wiki says –

Sanity considered as a legal term denotes that an individual is of sound mind and therefore can bear legal responsibility for his or her actions. It is generally defined in terms of the absence of insanity. It is not a medical term, although the opinions of medical experts are often important in making a legal decision as to whether someone is sane or insane. It is also not the same concept as mental illness. One can be acting under profound mental illness and yet be sane, and one can also be ruled insane without an underlying mental illness.

Sanity outside of legal definitions has been little explored by science and medicine, as the concentration has been on illness. Dr. P.S. Graven suggested the term "un-sane" to describe a condition that is not exactly insane, but not quite sane either

I thought I was becoming sane. But now, its all really vague since no one really knows what exactly the word sane means. There are no clear cut definitions anywhere. An absence of insanity, they say, is sanity. So what is insanity. I think that is something that has also been subjected to much research by persons vastly more able than I currently am.

What I had considered to be sane was to have ‘normal’ trains of thought. Go utterly with the flow, ie. I even studied for exams, something that which I never do for internal evaluation exams. Lol! Anyway, the bottomline is that I don’t think I like that kind of ‘sanity’. I am more comfortable acting out the role of the pseudo thinker. Coming to think of it, these pseudo thoughts are something that I crave for now. I appear to have lost that questioning mindset that I used to have, in the past few months.

So this is an exercise which may be entirely futile! Still I guess I can write any amount of utter bull shit in my blog. *angelic*

Destiny is a thing which always arouses my curiosity. Are things pre destined?

A group of people think that everything is ‘written’ or has been pre destined. Another set believes that nothing beats free will and free will is the alfa and omega of everything. A lot of others, frankly don’t give a shit about the concepts at all. Just live. Why grow confused over questions whose answers we might never happen to find out. Heh! I guess its fun just to keep pondering. Who knows, maybe someone will find out the secret to everything one day.

There are a lot of astrologers, seers and people with crystal balls and tarot cards, around the globe. There have also been prophets. Some point out that that the Bible is a huge prophecy, most of whose predictions have occurred correctly. And then there are the Indian astrologers who write the Jaathakam or future of little children based on their times of birth. Most of these concepts are dismissed as quacks and coincidences by logical minds.

But the fact is that there are a lot of predictions which do come true. The people who made those prophecies must have some kind of future sensing powers, at the moment of writing the prophecies, at least. They can also be treated this way – that they are just general projections of the future and would probably occur. It’s a game of poker then. And the accurate prophecy is an intelligent bluff. There is also the approach, where once a person has been shown his/her Jaathakam, he/she might actually try to act out the drama subconsciously, tending to adhere to the predictions. Oh well..Anything can happen.

Coming back to the point, what strikes me is that if some people have been able to predict the future accurately, there lies a possibility of all things being written. We don’t have a say in our lives then. What we consider to be our free choices were actually decided in advance by some intricate system. Everything suddenly becomes a huge system which has specific responses to definite excitations. Nothing’s unpredictable with the system. Free will becomes an illusion then.

I got this point of view from watching the movie ‘Waking Life’. A professor tells the protagonist that –

It starts to look like all our decisions are really just a charade.

Think about how it happens. There's some electrical activity in your brain. Your neurons fire. They send a signal down into your nervous system. It passes along down into your muscle fibers. They twitch. You might, say, reach out your arm. It looks like it's a free action on your part, but every one of those – every part of that process is actually governed by physical law, chemical laws, electrical laws, and so on.

So now it just looks like the big bang set up the initial conditions, and the whole rest of human history, and even before, is really just the playing out of subatomic particles according to these basic fundamental physical laws. We think we're special. We think we have some kind of special dignity, but that now comes under threat. I mean, that's really challenged by this picture.

So you might be saying, “Well, wait a minute. What about quantum mechanics? I know enough contemporary physical theory to know it's not really like that. It's really a probabilistic theory. There's room. It's loose. It's not deterministic.” And that's going to enable us to understand free will. But if you look at the details, it's not really going to help because what happens is you have some very small quantum particles, and their behavior is apparently a bit random. They swerve. Their behavior is absurd in the sense that its unpredictable and we can't understand it based on anything that came before. It just does something out of the blue, according to a probabilistic framework. But is that going to help with freedom? I mean, should our freedom be just a matter of probabilities, just some random swerving in a chaotic system? That starts to seem like it's worse. I'd rather be a gear in a big deterministic physical machine than just some random swerving.

(This might be copyrighted stuff…I got this from a screenplay of the movie ‘Waking Life’.. acknowledgements to whomsoever concerned)

Yea yea..whatever!