First Foray: Introduction/definitions to get started...

To Be or Not to Not-Be: The Mythos of a Bipolar Brain

I remember the day of my first euphoric seizure / manic episode vividly. In fact, unless I was to develop amnesia or dementia or some other pathological state related to memory, I don't see how it would be possible to forget. I was visiting Toronto and was offered a house to stay in which was almost empty but being held jointly by a friend and some of her cohorts as equity. There was almost no furniture, but there were signs that this venue had been used for entertaining guests now and again. In order to be comfortable, I had to purchase a couple of small throw blankets and a thin mat to make sleeping on the floor a little more comfortable. I had a few friends in Toronto that I was hoping to see (including the individual that had allowed me the house in the first place), and was looking forward to catching up.

But something in my mind was not quite right. It was going into visual constructions that did not seem to linearly connect with any previous thought processes. I felt like I was juggling ideas like balls, while systematically swapping them out for more general ideas until I got to a point where I could not simplify any further. I ended up at a cross with quantum entanglement along a spectrum at the top opposite absurdism at the bottom, and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle on the left with the Kantian thing-in-itself on the right. When taken all together, an idea came to me, as if the phrase formed out of nowhere but was instantly describable: “metaphysical schizophrenia”. I thought to myself “no one has ever got this far in theorizing, or I would have come across it by now.” What did all of these symbols and synthetic formations mean?

At the time, metaphysical schizophrenia appeared to me as a sort of Platonic cave. At the time, metaphysical schizophrenia appeared to me as a sort of Platonic cave; the idea that all humans were somehow deeply flawed in an overarching manner that prevented the birth of some sort of means of intelligibility of reality that would allow them to transcend their own conditions. It seemed as if all of humanity was swimming against a strong current or running to stand still. The more that I delved deeper into this line of reasoning, the more my paranoia grew that I was onto something big that no one in history had ever considered, but would be hugely influential in toppling the social status quo somehow. I mistrusted my phone as being tapped. I worried about going out and who might be waiting for me. The fight-or-flight instincts in me told me that this strong current was moving me into some dangerous waters. Of course nothing of the paranoiac thoughts came to pass, but I was at a point where I didn't know where to go from here, so I focused on trying to make more sense of how these concepts could possibly fit together. I will return to the significance of the symbolism within my series of manic episodes later (the above describes the first of several).

A question immediately arises: why should any reader be interested in the details of my mind? I am completely unknown to the public and have no lengthy curriculum vitae of publications that would suggest that this undertaking is any more than an egoistic and / or fantastical conception of my own importance to the world. However, with the increasing power of computers via machine learning and neural networks, a natural hypothesis emerges, could “neurotypical” simply mean a mind-brain that cannot process information faster than through direct connections and linear thinking, while a “neurodivergent” mind suggests the penchant for non-linear leaps made that can only be understood in hindsight? In other words, is neurodivergence simply the manifestation of a mind that overstresses the linear dendrite-cell body-axon physical neuronal network, causing the arcing of neuronal potentials to across space to areas of the brain that are adjacent spatially but not connectively? Given that my first episode was preceded by the rapid reconstruction of reality to weigh the merits of two fundaments of epistemic causality, namely God versus randomization and pattern matching, which was followed immediately by a massive electrical surge in the centre of my brain as if stabbed by a knife, I believe that I can lay a foundation stone for an understanding of neurodivergence that is both physical (brain) and ethereal (mind) that is at least testable for consistency and correspondence. The neurodivergent need some skin in the game as well, especially considering that the extreme pressures that the internet and screen addiction is putting on our brains makes it possible that neurodivergence (however that may be defined) may become the rule rather than the exception. It is unlikely that the brain was designed for such a paradigmatic leap from television to internet as the primary means of social communication over such a short timeframe.

For now, I will define a foundation by which to attack questions of the how and the why these neurodivergent flights of speculation occur. To begin, I will take the same approach as I did (semiconsciously) during the episode above. I start with four foundational building blocks of what we call “life”. These are mind, brain, subjective reality, and objective reality. To these I add a fifth term—mythos—that allows for the synthesis of complexity through action via interactions between these four somewhat disparate concepts. The mind I define as a container of thoughts. I use the term “container” loosely. I am not necessarily saying that the mind is a bucket waiting to be filled as Karl Popper criticized, but rather a staging area for all thoughts, memories, and predictions that we employ every day to go about our lives with some degree of sanity and predictability based on past experiences and some degree of unpredictability and instability of what is to come. The brain I define as the physical, chemical, and electrical backdrop for the functioning mind, i.e. the phsyico-electrochemical formation of neurons and matter that give rise to thoughts and memories through a process that is gradually becoming more understood through the advent of advances in imaging (e.g. fMRIs) and charting electrical and chemical potentials (e.g. EEGs) to establish correspondence between the non-physical world of thought and the physical world of brain processing—putting a more recognizable face to a name, as it were. In order to (literally) provide food for thought to this mind-brain nexus, it is necessary to add some form of external reality. This can divided into the subjective (reality as constructed by the mind-brain nexus and privately understood) and the objective (reality as existing-in-the-world and publicly understood).

The fifth term, which allows one to synthesize the subjective in relation to the objective through processing by the mind-brain nexus is mythos [some stuff about Jung here?]. This is defined as a system of beliefs (myths) that allow one to subjectively explain objectively reality within an episteme and, consequently to deduce a set of actions or techne through which internal values can be translated into meaning, both epistemically (knowledge) and ontologically (output). The difference between mythos and mythology herein is that a mythology will be used to describe an objectively heldhermeneutical system of explanation via the supernatural whereas a mythos refers to a subjectively-held system of justified true beliefs that allows for a real-world. My usage of hermeneutic is not necessarily to refer to interpretations of the Bible, but rather to consider knowledge within a given historical paradigm and what was possible to synthesize at a certain interval of history based on the knowledge available at the time. A good example is how much our current understanding of cosmology and astronomy has been expanded via the James Webb array. Before James Webb, terrestrial telescopes and observatories limited our means of observation because all such observations were affected by the intervening atmosphere. It is not that we did not know, but rather that we could not know within the historical confines (hermeneutical constraints) of the pre-James Webb reality.

In terms of a mythology, one can start with a basic example from Greek polytheism of the god Apollo and his daily act of bringing the sun in his chariot across the sky, thereby providing a means to explain the how and the why of the observed regularity of the sun. Nowadays, this is referred to as a “myth” because hermeneutically we have replaced the unscientific explanation of the intervention by a god (mythology) with scientific observations and synthesis of a testable and durable theory (mythos) of astronomy and cosmology. Indeed, although the Greeks created a robust polytheistic episteme to make sense of the physical world and its observed processes and regularity, thinkers like Aristotle were hard at work establishing the first vestiges of the natural sciences to appeal directly to physical law rather than having to resort to mythology.

This book, then is a presentation of my mythos as a neurodivergent conception of the internal and external facets of life and reality. The use of mythos is strategic since our notion of 'truth' is inherently bound up with some degree of democratic opinion manifesting as a socially compatible episteme. Such an episteme will therefore reflect a neurotypical agreement on being-in-the-world. Indeed, a neurotypical paradigm is so dominant that we are loathe to consider thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche or Carl Jung as neurodivergent except when disparaging them. We take their works at face-value without considering the human being behind the ideas. One of the components of this idea of metaphysical schizophrenia is that we can learn something new about philosophy, for example, simply by stepping back from philosophy as competing theories for objective truth and thinking of it rather as a collection of similar brains (anatomically, physiologically, and genetically) trying to conceive of a mythos to explain a shared reality, and asking the question “how and why does the human brain find it necessary to resort to such efforts?”