philosophy – Page 2 – LIBERTY PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION

The Illogical Mind; the Reasoning Contains a Flaw:

The Illogical Mind could be a way of describing thinking that reaches conclusions that may not follow reliably from the available evidence or reasoning. It may not mean a person is unintelligent. Some may think illogically under stress, fear, strong emotion, social pressure, or uncertainty.

Common forms of illogical thinking

Pattern	What happens	Example
Emotional reasoning	Feelings are treated as facts	“I feel unsafe, therefore I am unsafe.”
Confirmation bias	Evidence supporting a belief is noticed more than contradictory evidence	“I knew this would happen; look at this one example.”
Black and white thinking	Complex situations become two extremes	“Either I’m successful or I’m a failure.”
Catastrophizing	A possible negative outcome becomes an assumed disaster	“If I make this mistake, everything will be ruined.”
Overgeneralization	One event becomes a broad rule	“They rejected me, so nobody likes me.”
Mind reading	Another person’s thoughts are assumed without evidence	“She didn’t say hello because she dislikes me.”
Post hoc reasoning	Sequence is mistaken for causation	“I thought about the storm, and then it happened, so my thought caused it.”
Magical thinking	Thoughts, rituals, or symbols are treated as directly influencing external events without adequate evidence	“If I don’t perform this ritual, something bad will happen.”
Appeal to authority	A claim is accepted primarily because an authority says it	“It must be true because an expert said it.”
Self-deception	Information threatening one’s preferred belief is avoided or distorted	“I don’t have a problem; everyone else is overreacting.”

Illogical may not necessarily mean irrational

There could be an important distinction:

Illogical thinking: the reasoning contains a flaw.

Irrational thinking: the belief or behavior is poorly supported by evidence, disproportionately driven by emotion, or inconsistent with the person’s goals.

A person may have an understandable reason for an irrational conclusion. For example:

“I’ve been betrayed several times, so I assume everyone will eventually betray me.”

The conclusion may be understandable given the person’s history, but the evidence doesn’t necessarily justify applying it to everyone.

The logical mind vs. the illogical mind

A useful conceptual distinction is:

Logical mind:

“What evidence supports this? What evidence contradicts it? Are there alternative explanations?”

Illogical mind:

“It feels true, therefore it must be true.”

The goal may not be to eliminate emotion. A psychologically healthy person may use emotion as information while using reason and evidence to evaluate what the emotion means.

A powerful question

When you notice an intense belief, ask:

“What do I know, what do I believe, what do I feel, and what am I assuming?”

That separates reality, interpretation, emotion, and inference, one of the foundations of good critical thinking.

Shervan K Shahhian

A Collective Culture; Family, Community, Nation, or Social Movement,…

A Collective Culture may be a system in which people tend to understand themselves partly through their relationships and membership in a larger group, such as a family, community, religious tradition, ethnic group, workplace, nation, or social movement.

Key features may include:

Group identity: “Who we are” is important alongside individual identity.
Shared values: The group develops ideas about what is right, important, honorable, or acceptable.
Social norms: Members learn expected ways of behaving.
Conformity and belonging: Maintaining harmony and group cohesion may be emphasized.
Reciprocity: Helping family or community members may be considered a social responsibility.
Authority and tradition: Elders, institutions, customs, or traditions may carry significant influence.
Collective meaning making: Events may be interpreted through shared stories, beliefs, and cultural frameworks.

Individualistic vs. collective orientation

Individual oriented	Collective oriented
“What do I want?”	“What is best for us?”
Personal autonomy	Relational responsibility
Individual achievement	Group/family achievement
Self-expression	Social harmony
Personal choice	Shared expectations
Independent identity	Interdependent identity

These may be dimensions rather than rigid categories. Most people and cultures contain both individualistic and collective elements.

Psychological importance

Collective culture may provide belonging, identity, social support, meaning, and resilience. However, strong group expectations may sometimes create pressure to conform, fear of rejection, suppressed individuality, or intergenerational conflict.

A useful psychological question could be:

“Is this belief genuinely my own, or have I absorbed it from the collective around me?”

That question may not mean the collective belief is wrong. It encourages metacognition examining where our beliefs came from and deciding consciously which ones we want to retain.

Collective culture vs. Collective delusion

These may be very different concepts:

Collective culture: shared beliefs and practices that organize a group’s life.

Collective delusion: a situation in which a group develops or reinforces a significantly false belief despite evidence contradicting it. Social reinforcement, misinformation, authority influence, fear, and groupthink can contribute.

So, understanding collective cultures could be essential in understanding how individuals and groups mutually shape one another’s perception of reality, identity, values, and behavior.

Shervan K Shahhian

Parapsychology; Dimensions or Realities Beyond Ordinary Human Perception:

“Dimensions or realities beyond ordinary human perception” refers to the idea that there may be aspects of reality that humans may not normally detect through their five senses or ordinary waking consciousness.

1. “Dimensions”

In this context, dimension may mean more than the mathematical dimensions of physics. It may refer to a proposed level, domain, or aspect of reality that may not directly accessible to ordinary human perception.

Examples sometimes discussed include:

Additional physical dimensions proposed in theoretical physics
Hypothesized nonphysical or spiritual realms
Altered states of consciousness
Proposed informational or consciousness related domains
In parapsychology, a possible domain associated with psi phenomena

2. “Realities”

Reality here may mean a proposed domain of existence or experience that may differ from ordinary physical, waking experience.

People sometimes use this language when discussing:

Near death experiences (NDEs)
Out of body experiences
Apparitions
Precognitive or telepathic experiences
Remote viewing
Mystical experiences
Alleged contact with non-human intelligences
Reincarnation or past-life experiences

3. The important distinction

There may be a significant difference between:

Phenomenological reality:

“I genuinely experienced something that seemed like another reality.”

and

Ontological reality:

“That experience demonstrates that another independently existing dimension actually exists.”

The first may be documented as an experience. The second is a much stronger claim requiring independent evidence.

For example, someone might report seeing deceased relatives during an NDE. The experience itself is a phenomenological fact. Whether the experience represents actual contact with deceased persons, mind generated imagery, a consciousness related phenomenon, or something else remains an interpretive question.

In parapsychology

A careful formulation would be:

“Dimensions or realities beyond ordinary human perception” refers to hypothesized aspects of existence that may not be accessible through normal sensory perception but are sometimes proposed to account for anomalous experiences or consciousness related phenomena.

This wording keeps the possibility open without automatically treating the hypothesis as established fact an especially useful distinction when discussing parapsychology, consciousness studies, and unusual experiences.

Shervan K Shahhian

Parapsychology: Past Life Memory refers to an experience in which a person reports having memories of a life lived before:

Past Life memory refers to an experience in which a person reports having memories, images, emotions, sensations, or knowledge that they believe come from a life lived before their present life. It is most commonly discussed in connection with Reincarnation and Parapsychology.

There are several ways to understand these experiences:

Reincarnation interpretation

In many religious and spiritual traditions, past life memories are considered possible memories of a previous incarnation. Some reports involve children who spontaneously describe another person’s life, sometimes with details that researchers investigate.

Psychological interpretation

Psychology may explain some apparent past life memories through mechanisms such as:
- Cryptomnesia: forgotten information is later experienced as something personally remembered.
- Confabulation: the mind unconsciously fills gaps in memory.
- Source monitoring errors: a person remembers information but misidentifies where it came from.
- Imagination and fantasy: vivid imagery may acquire a feeling of autobiographical reality.
- Dreams and hypnagogic experiences
- Suggestion: particularly during hypnosis or guided imagery.

Hypnotic regression

Past life regression uses hypnosis or guided imagery to elicit purported memories of previous lives. These experiences may be extremely vivid and emotionally meaningful, but vividness and emotional intensity may not establish historical accuracy. Certain types of Hypnosis may also increase suggestibility and produce confabulated or false memories.

Parapsychological interpretation

Some researchers investigate cases that they argue are difficult to explain through ordinary memory mechanisms. This includes spontaneous childhood cases, where the child reportedly gives specific information about a deceased person without having undergone regression. These cases are generally considered more interesting scientifically than memories produced after suggestive questioning.

An important distinction

A useful framework is:

“I experienced a memory of a past life” vs “I have established that I actually lived that past life.”

The first is a phenomenological fact about the person’s experience. The second is a historical/external claim requiring independent evidence.

This distinction is particularly important clinically. A therapist may take the experience seriously without prematurely validating or dismissing its paranormal interpretation.

For example:

“Let’s explore what you experienced, what emotions and memories arose, and what meaning it has for you, while remaining open about what we may and may not establish objectively.”

That approach allows psychological investigation and parapsychological inquiry to coexist without confusing subjective experience with proof.

Shervan K Shahhian

AI-Induced Psychosis is not yet a formally established diagnosis:

If someone is experiencing rapidly worsening psychosis, dangerous behavior, inability to care for themselves, or thoughts of harming themselves or someone else, prompt professional or emergency evaluation is appropriate.

AI-induced psychosis is not yet a formally established diagnosis. The term is increasingly used to describe situations in which interaction with an AI system may contribute to, amplify, or reinforce psychotic like thinking or severe loss of reality testing, particularly in vulnerable individuals.

How it may happen:

AI systems may potentially become part of a person’s belief system in several ways:

Reinforcement of unusual beliefs: An AI may inadvertently validate a user’s interpretation rather than challenge it.
Anthropomorphism: The person may begin experiencing the AI as a conscious being, spiritual entity, persecutor, romantic partner, or special guide.
Delusional elaboration: Extended conversations may provide increasingly elaborate explanations for coincidences, surveillance, hidden messages, or supernatural experiences.
Confirmation loops: The person asks increasingly leading questions and receives responses that appear to confirm the original premise.
Sleep deprivation and excessive use: Prolonged late night interaction may worsen vulnerability to paranoia, mania, dissociation, and psychosis.
Mania or psychosis: Someone already developing a manic or psychotic episode may incorporate AI generated material into grandiose, paranoid, religious, or persecutory beliefs.

An important distinction

AI generally may not be described as literally “causing schizophrenia.” A more clinically defensible formulation could be:

AI interaction may act as a precipitating, amplifying, or maintaining factor in psychotic symptoms in susceptible individuals.

The underlying vulnerability may involve psychiatric illness, sleep deprivation, substance use, trauma, “neurological conditions: consult with a Neurologist”, severe stress, or other factors.

A particularly important phenomenon: the AI reality validation loop

One concerning pattern looks like this:

Unusual experience…interpretation...AI confirmation…increased conviction…additional searching…more “evidence”…stronger conviction

For example, someone might say:

“I think the government is communicating with me through coincidences.”

A poorly calibrated AI might respond in a way that treats the premise as established fact. The user may be then interpret the AI’s response as independent confirmation, even though the AI is actually generating language rather than independently verifying the claim.

This could be why epistemic humility and reality testing are especially important when discussing paranoia, voices, supernatural experiences, UAPs, telepathy, or other anomalous phenomena.

Clinical perspective

A clinician should neither automatically dismiss an unusual experience nor automatically affirm its proposed explanation, right away.

A useful approach could be:

Validate the experience without automatically validating the interpretation.

For example:

“I can see that this experience feels very real and significant to you. Let’s examine what you experienced, what explanations are possible, and what evidence would distinguish among them.”

That approach is compatible with both mental health consulting and responsible exploration of anomalous experiences. It preserves curiosity without sacrificing reality testing.

Possible warning signs:

AI interaction may become particularly concerning when someone develops:

increasing certainty about an implausible belief
severe paranoia or perceived persecution
belief that AI is secretly communicating with them
belief that AI has supernatural powers or consciousness specifically directed toward them
escalating grandiosity or claims of a special mission
hearing/seeing things associated with AI-generated interpretations
markedly reduced need for sleep
disorganized thinking or behavior
withdrawal from ordinary relationships and responsibilities

The emerging concept of AI induced or AI amplified psychosis is therefore best understood as a clinical and technological phenomenon under investigation, rather than a new established psychotic disorder.

Shervan K Shahhian

Compassion Training is the deliberate practice of developing the ability to respond to suffering,…

Compassion Training is the deliberate practice of developing the ability to respond to suffering, your own or someone else’s, with understanding, warmth, and a motivation to help, rather than judgment, avoidance, or hostility.

What compassion training develops

Self-compassion: treating yourself with the same understanding you would offer another person.
Empathy: recognizing and understanding another person’s emotional experience.
Emotional regulation: staying present with suffering without becoming overwhelmed by it.
Nonjudgment: noticing difficult thoughts and behaviors without immediately condemning the person.
Prosocial motivation: developing an intention to reduce suffering and promote well-being.
Compassionate action: translating concern into appropriate, constructive behavior.

Compassion vs. empathy

They’re related but not identical:

Empathy:

” I can understand or feel what you’re experiencing.”

Compassion:

“I recognize your suffering, I care about it, and I want to respond helpfully.”

Too much empathic distress may actually lead to exhaustion or withdrawal. Compassion training attempts to cultivate caring without becoming psychologically flooded.

Common approaches

A well known framework is Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT). It integrates compassion practices with psychological and evolutionary models, particularly for people who experience high levels of shame, self-criticism, or threat sensitivity.

Training may include:

Compassionate breathing
Loving kindness meditation
Compassionate imagery
Developing a compassionate inner voice
Self-compassion exercises
Perspective taking
Recognizing self-criticism
Compassionate letter writing
Practicing compassionate responses to difficult people
Cultivating compassion while maintaining boundaries

A simple exercise

When encountering suffering, pause and ask:

1. What is happening?

Observe without immediately judging.

2. What might this person be experiencing?

Try to understand without assuming you know their entire story.

3. What would be genuinely helpful?

Compassion isn’t necessarily giving someone what they want.

4. What is the healthiest action I can take?

Sometimes compassion means helping; sometimes it means setting a firm boundary.

An important distinction

Compassion may not mean permissiveness.

You may simultaneously say:

“I understand that you’re suffering.”

and

“I cannot allow you to treat me this way.”

That combination, warmth plus boundaries, is particularly important in clinical, caregiving, and interpersonal settings.

In Mental Health, compassion training may therefore be viewed as developing kindness , emotional regulation, perspective taking, appropriate action, rather than simply “being nice.”

Shervan K Shahhian

Mastering Group Psychology (MGP), means understanding how people behave differently when they become part of a group:

Mastering Group Psychology means understanding how people think, feel, and behave differently when they become part of a group, and learning to participate without surrendering your independent judgment.

A useful principle may be:

Understand the group without becoming psychologically owned by it.

1. Understand the forces that shape groups

Groups may create powerful pressures through:

Conformity: “Everyone else believes this, so I should too.”
Norms: unspoken rules about what is acceptable.
Social identity: “People like us think this way.”
Status: people compete for approval, influence, and position.
Emotional contagion: moods spread through the group.
Group polarization: discussion can push members toward more extreme positions.
Groupthink: maintaining harmony becomes more important than questioning assumptions.

2. Learn to separate belonging from agreement

You may belong to a group without agreeing with everything it believes.

Ask yourself:

“If nobody in this group knew what I thought, what would I actually believe?”

That question helps expose opinion mirroring and conformity.

3. Watch the group’s emotional temperature

Before reacting to a group, observe it.

Ask:

What emotion is dominating the room?
Who is influencing that emotion?
Who gets rewarded for agreement?
Who gets punished or ridiculed for dissent?
What subjects are people afraid to question?

This gives you psychological distance.

4. Don’t confuse confidence with truth

Groups may manufacture certainty.

When everyone agrees passionately, your mind may interpret consensus as evidence.

Instead ask:

“What evidence would convince me that this group is wrong?”

If the answer is “nothing,” you’ve moved from reasoning into identity protection.

5. Maintain an independent identity

Your goal may not be to become antisocial or distrustful.

It’s to have multiple sources of identity, your values, work, relationships, interests, personal principles, and individual goals, so that no single group becomes your entire psychological world.

6. Become a constructive dissenter

You may not have to oppose the group constantly. Instead, learn to say:

“What’s the evidence for that?”
“Could there be another explanation?”
“What are we overlooking?”
“Would we believe this if another group said it?”
“What would change our minds?”

The master of group psychology may not be the person who controls the group. It’s the person who may understand its influence while remaining capable of thinking independently.

Shervan K Shahhian

Internalized Oppression (IO) is a Psychological and Social Process:

Internalized Oppression may be a psychological and social process in which a person absorbs negative stereotypes, beliefs, or attitudes about a group they belong to and begins to apply those beliefs to themselves or others in the same group.

In simple terms:

“The negative message I have heard about people like me becomes a belief I hold about myself.”

How it develops

Internalized oppression may develop when a person is repeatedly exposed to messages through family, culture, institutions, media, peers, or discrimination, that their group is inferior, defective, undesirable, or less worthy.

Over time, those messages may become part of the person’s own self-concept.

Examples

Internalized sexism: A woman believes women are naturally less capable of leadership.
Internalized racism: A person adopts negative stereotypes about their own racial or ethnic group.
Internalized ageism: An older person begins believing, “I’m too old to learn new things.”
Internalized homophobia: A person experiences shame or self-rejection because of negative societal messages about homosexuality.
Internalized classism: Someone from a disadvantaged socioeconomic background believes, “People like me aren’t meant to succeed.”

Psychological effects

Internalized oppression may contribute to:

Self-rejection
Self-loathing
Low self-esteem
Shame and guilt
Negative self-talk
Body dissatisfaction
Depressive or anxious feelings
Imposter syndrome
Perfectionism
Rejecting or distancing oneself from members of one’s own group
Feeling that one’s identity must be hidden or changed to be acceptable

Internalized oppression vs. self-loathing

They overlap, but they aren’t identical.

Self-loathing: “I dislike or hate myself.”

Internalized oppression: “I have absorbed a negative belief about my group, and I now apply that belief to myself.”

For example:

“People from my background aren’t intelligent, so there must be something wrong with me because I’m from that background.”

That illustrates how social prejudice may become personal self-rejection.

An important distinction

Internalized oppression may not be simply having low self-esteem. It specifically involves socially or culturally transmitted devaluation becoming internalized.

A useful psychological sequence is:

External prejudice, repeated exposure, internalization, negative self-belief,

self-rejection/shame:

Possible behavioral consequences

It may also be understood as one pathway through which social oppression becomes psychologically embedded within an individual’s self-concept.

Shervan K Shahhian

Psychological Defenses (PD), or Defense Mechanisms, Are Largely Automatic Mental Processes:

Psychological Defenses (PD), or defense mechanisms could be largely automatic mental processes that help a person manage anxiety, emotional pain, inner conflict, shame, or threatening thoughts and feelings.

They may not be necessarily pathological. Everyone uses them. The important question is how often?, how rigidly?, and how effectively they are used?

Possible psychological defenses

Denial: refusing to accept a painful or threatening reality.
Projection: attributing one’s own unacceptable feelings or impulses to someone else.
Rationalization: creating a seemingly logical explanation for behavior that has another underlying motivation.
Repression: keeping distressing thoughts or feelings outside conscious awareness.
Displacement: redirecting an emotion from its original target to a safer target.
Reaction formation: expressing the opposite of an unacceptable feeling or impulse.
Intellectualization: focusing on facts and analysis to distance oneself from difficult emotions.
Dissociation: experiencing a sense of detachment from one’s thoughts, feelings, memories, identity, or surroundings.
Regression: reverting to earlier patterns of behavior when overwhelmed.
Acting out: expressing emotional distress through behavior rather than words.
Splitting: seeing people or situations in extremes, such as entirely good or entirely bad.
Compensation: emphasizing strengths in one area to offset perceived weaknesses in another.

Healthy vs. less adaptive defenses

Defenses exist on a continuum.

Some may be relatively mature and adaptive:

Mature: Humor • Sublimation • Altruism • Suppression • Anticipation

Less adaptive: Rationalization • Projection • Displacement • Intellectualization

More potentially problematic when persistent:

Denial • Splitting • Acting out • Severe dissociation

For example: sublimation may transform an uncomfortable impulse into something constructive, while chronic denial may prevent someone from recognizing a serious problem.

An important distinction

A psychological defense is not necessarily conscious deception. A person may genuinely experience their interpretation as true because the defense is helping protect them from something emotionally threatening.

In clinical psychology, it may be useful to ask:

“What emotion, conflict, or vulnerability might this defense be protecting the person from?”

That question may provide more insight than simply labeling the defense.

Shervan K Shahhian

Illogical Speech maybe a disturbance in the organization of thought,…

Illogical speech maybe a disturbance in the organization of thought in which a person’s conclusions or statements do not follow logically from the information they provide. It maybe considered a type of formal thought disorder and it could be commonly associated with psychotic disorders, particularly schizophrenia, though it may also occur in mania, severe neurological conditions: Consult with a Neurologist, and substance induced psychosis.

Unlike simply making a mistake or expressing an unusual opinion, illogical speech it could reflect a breakdown in logical reasoning. The person may believe their statements make perfect sense, even though the connections between ideas are objectively invalid.

Characteristics of Illogical Speech

Someone with illogical speech may:

Reach conclusions that do not follow from the evidence.
Make contradictory statements without recognizing the inconsistency.
Use reasoning that is internally inconsistent or irrational.
Draw causal relationships where none exist.
Jump from one premise to an unrelated conclusion.

Examples

Example 1

“The mail arrived late today. That proves my neighbors are controlling the weather.”

The conclusion does not logically follow from the observation.

Example 2

“I wore a blue shirt, and then my team lost the game. Therefore, I caused them to lose.”

This reflects faulty cause-and-effect reasoning.

Example 3

“I haven’t slept much this week. Therefore, I must be the president.”

The conclusion bears no logical relationship to the premise.

How It Differs from Other Thought Disorders

Thought Disturbance	Description
Illogical speech	Conclusions do not logically follow from the premises.
Disorganized speech	Speech is difficult to follow because thoughts are poorly organized.
Tangential speech	The speaker wanders away from the question and never returns to it.
Circumstantial speech	Includes excessive detail but eventually answers the question.
Loose associations	Ideas shift from one topic to another with weak or absent logical connections.
Word salad	Words are combined in a way that lacks meaningful grammatical or logical structure.

Conditions Associated with Illogical Speech

Illogical speech may be seen in:

Schizophrenia spectrum disorders?
Schizoaffective disorder?
Bipolar I disorder during a manic episode with psychotic features?
Substance induced psychosis (e.g., amphetamines, cocaine, hallucinogens)?
Delirium?
Major neurocognitive disorders (certain forms of dementia)?
Brain injury affecting executive functioning or reasoning: Consult with a Medical Doctor.

Clinical Assessment

Mental health professionals may evaluate illogical speech during the Mental Status Examination (MSE) by observing:

Whether conclusions logically follow from statements.
The coherence and organization of reasoning.
The presence of other formal thought disorders.
Whether delusions or hallucinations are influencing the person’s reasoning.
The person’s level of insight into their thinking.

Why It Happens

Illogical speech may be thought to arise from impairments in the brain systems responsible for:

(Consult with a Neurologist)

Executive functioning
Abstract reasoning
Cognitive flexibility
Working memory
Logical inference

Important Distinction

Not every illogical statement indicates mental illness. People may make illogical arguments because of:

Cognitive biases
Emotional reasoning
Stress or fatigue
Lack of information
Poor critical thinking skills
Extreme stress
Major fear

Clinically significant illogical speech is persistent, marked, and occurs as part of a broader pattern of impaired thinking, often alongside other symptoms such as delusions, hallucinations, or significant disorganization.

Summary

Illogical speech maybe a formal thought disorder in which reasoning breaks down, causing conclusions that may not logically follow from the facts or premises presented. It could be associated with psychotic disorders but may also occur in mania, neurological illnesses, or substance induced states. Some clinicians assess it by examining the logical coherence of a person’s thought process, rather than whether their beliefs are merely unusual or unpopular.

Shervan K Shahhian