Today's post is by Dan Williams, a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Philosophy, at the University of Cambridge. If you had to bet on it, what’s the probability that your loved ones have been replaced by visually indistinguishable imposters? That your body is overrun with tiny parasites? That you’re dead? As strange as these possibilities are, each of them captures the content of well-known delusional beliefs: Capgras delusion, delusional parasitosis, and Cotard delusion respectively. Delusional beliefs come in a wide variety of forms and arise from a comparably diverse range of underlying causes. One of the deepest challenges in the contemporary mind sciences is to explain them. Why do people form such delusions? And why on earth do they retain them in the face of seemingly overwhelming evidence against them? My new paper “ Hierarchical Bayesian Models of Delusion ” presents a review and critique of a fascinating body of research in computational psychiatry that at...
A blog at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and mental health