Based on this article, there is absolutely no way to distinguish "Hypersanity" from just plain old insanity.
Rationality is systematized winning. Unless your actions are benefitting yourself in some significant way, you cannot be considered rational.
However, you cannot determine a person's inner drivers from the outside. Therefore, you cannot tell, based purely on their actions, whether they are winning (where winning is defined purely based on the individual's value system). Therefore, it is impossible to tell if an individual is "hypersane" or insane.
The whole concept is meaningless and sounds like something people would think is "very deep" while stoned.
> Based on this article, there is absolutely no way to distinguish "Hypersanity" from just plain old insanity.
I don't see it this way at all. Plain old insanity can manifest as typical (or atypical) behavior combined with absurd, easily disprovable beliefs. Hypersanity as described leads to atypical behavior and worldview via a reasoned dismissal of widely accepted values, but nothing wrong on it's face or disprovable. For example, insanity is believing you are covered with spiders when you are not, hypersanity would be not feeling the need to disturb a harmless spider that is sitting on your nose.
> Rationality is systematized winning. Unless your actions are benefitting yourself in some significant way, you cannot be considered rational.
Now I see why you can't distinguish between insanity and hypersanity, you are conflating epistemology and ethics, and they just aren't the same thing. A 'true belief' is one which enables you to achieve some goal, but whether that goal is 'good' or desirable can only be determined when evaluated via some kind of ethical framework. For example, if I decide that the most important thing is to make sure the Canadian flag never touches the ground I will have a very different concept of what 'winning' is compared to someone who's goal is to make as much money as possible, and both of us will have a different concept of winning compared to someone who thinks the most important thing is to teach others that their widely held assumptions are not true or important, such as Diogenes.
The article mentions "conversing with beings which cannot be perceived by anyone but the person themselves" as a canonical example of hypersanity.
I find that pretty comparable to "believing you are covered with spiders when you are not".
>you are conflating epistemology and ethics
The interpretation that the idea of hypersanity refers only to ethics is due to you and you alone, as the article states nothing to that end, so please do not make claims about my thought process that amount to "you are wrong because you did not arrive at the same conclusion as me". It is not only disingenuous, but also arrogant and short-sighted.
I'm not saying it refers only to ethics, I'm saying that you are conflating ethics and epistemology when you say that sanity==beneficial. Sanity refers to a combination of rationality and accurate enough perceptions of the factual state of the world. Rationality means able to make logical inferences, and when you talk about perceptions of the factual state of the world that is epistemology.
A soldier who jumps on a grenade to save his friend isn't automatically insane, but it's certainly not beneficial to the soldier. You would probably counter by pointing out that 'beneficial' depends on what the soldier thinks is best, but that is ethics!
So to say sanity (which is an epistemological concept) is the same as benefit (which can only be defined with reference to an ethical framework) are the same thing, you are directly conflating two very distinct things.
Sanity does not mean necessarily "holding only true beliefs". I believe the issue here is we do not define sanity in the same way.
Given your example of the soldier jumping on a grenade - clearly they value the life of their friend more than their own. Therefore, it is beneficial to them.
The question is 'what does it mean for something to be true', since Hume and Kant largely demolished any possibility that we can access 'objective truth'.
http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/panova1.html "On these grounds, David Hume posits two systems of reality: the first—the reality of perceptions and memory, and the second—the reality of the mind. The mind is able, on the basis of its judgments, to compose a picture of the Universe in spite of the fact that it never perceives all its parts. But as the "first" and also the "second" system of reality exist only in our sense experience, they do not say anything certain about the nature of the external world, the existence of which even remains problematic."
Regarding "true beliefs", you would probably agree with William James who held that "truth be defined in terms of utility", in other words, a belief is 'true' in so far as it is useful in accomplishing things, and another belief would be more true if it is more useful to accomplish that thing.
As for the soldier, you are missing the point. Different people can disagree on what 'beneficial' means without either being wrong. What is 'beneficial for a person' basically means the same thing as 'good for a person', and there is no objective way to decide what is 'good'. Any time you say something is 'good' or something is 'better' than something else, you are assuming some kind of ethical framework.
I never said that 'good' was an objective measure. Quite the opposite, in fact. I quite explicitly said that rationality is about acting toward achieving what is 'good' for oneself.
I wonder whether you are reading my comments with an open mind, or just trying to find something you can disagree with. I'm not saying you are wrong, I'm trying to give you a framework to understand your own opinion.
When you say sanity=success, you are expressing something that is purely an opinion, and can never be anything more than an opinion, based on what you think success is, and your belief that in order to succeed according to your personal definition people have to be sane, or that sanity is just the same thing as being able to achieve your goals.
- What if I feel very guilty and I think I deserve to suffer? I'm sure you're already getting ready to type "if suffering is your goal that just means you are succeeding at suffering!" Fine.
- What if you feel like you can't go on, so you kill yourself? Are you sane because you are succeeding at killing yourself? Maybe so.
- What if my goal is to go temporarily insane to see what that is like? Then you are claiming that I'm only sane if I'm insane... It gets worse though, because what if I fail to go insane, even though it's what I put all my effort into every day? No matter what I just can't make myself insane. Well actually, then I'm not succeeding, so it turns out that by failing to go insane I've succeeded at going insane... which makes me sane.
>I'm not saying you are wrong, I'm trying to give you a framework to understand your own opinion.
The fact that you don't seem to comprehend how absurd and arrogant it is that you think you need to help me understand my own opinion (which you continue to misrepresent) is the reason why I am not inclined to do a charitable reading of what you're saying. You seem to think very highly of yourself, to the point where you seem completely unable to conceive that you might have misapprehended the words of others, and assume immediately that anything that seems illogical to you must be the result of others being confused.
While I'm sure you think you're helping me by showering me with your amazing knowledge and clarity of mind, or something along those lines, you're actually just being annoying. Which is why I'm not inclined to read your comments "with an open mind", thank you very much.
>you are expressing something that is purely an opinion, and can never be anything more than an opinion
Yes. Indeed. You are 100% correct about that. You seem to think I believe "sanity=success" to be an objective fact. I do not.
What I believe is "rationality = acting in a manner one believes they will further their own success, however they define their own success", and that rationality requires sanity. When I state this, I am not stating it to be objective fact. I am making it clear where I stand. If you disagree with me on these premises, well, that's that. We disagree, and that's OK. The rest of my argument stands on the premises that rationality = taking decisions that one believes will further one's own success, and that rationality -> sanity (and therefore insanity implies irrationality, but one can be sane and irrational).
Your example about temporary insanity is actually interesting, because it reveals exactly what you have misapprehended.
>What if my goal is to go temporarily insane to see what that is like? Then you are claiming that I'm only sane if I'm insane...
You seem to think I am saying that you are only rational while you are succeeding, but that's not it. I am claiming you are rational if you act in a way you believe will lead to you succeeding. Or, in other terms, if you strive to act in ways that you believe will maximize your own "success" metric - or "utility", if you will.
So if your ultimate goal is to go insane (and going insane will not interfere with any other goals which are more important than going insane), if you are doing things you believe will make yourself insane, you are rational.
However, once you make yourself insane, you will, by virtue of the fact that insanity implies irrationality, not be rational anymore.
Failing to go insane does not mean you are irrational, just as someone whose greatest goal is to become rich does not become irrational simply by failing to become rich, as long as they keep trying to become rich while becoming rich is their goal (or "increases their utility").
If I believed what you seem to think I believe, I'd have to believe that every single person who makes a resolution to achieve some goal is insane as long as the goal has not been achieved.
> I am claiming you are rational if you act in a way you believe will lead to you succeeding
This is worse than what you were saying before. Even irrational people believe they are acting in a way that will lead to success, why would someone ever act in a way they believe will fail to work? There has to be some kind of external test of whether it is 'reasonable' for the person to believe that the way they are acting will work, right?
I mean lots of people do things like making hats out of aluminum foil to prevent the CIA from reading their thoughts, and they believe it works, but I don't think you can say they are acting rationally by any definition.
Rationality is systematized winning. Unless your actions are benefitting yourself in some significant way, you cannot be considered rational.
However, you cannot determine a person's inner drivers from the outside. Therefore, you cannot tell, based purely on their actions, whether they are winning (where winning is defined purely based on the individual's value system). Therefore, it is impossible to tell if an individual is "hypersane" or insane.
The whole concept is meaningless and sounds like something people would think is "very deep" while stoned.