Bibliographic record
Abstract
[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. Our greatest blessings, [says Socrates,] come to us by way of madness, provided madness is given us by divine gift. Plato, Phaedrus 244A. (E. R. Dodds, 1951, p. 64) I understand psychiatry to be that branch of medicine that deals with mental disturbance and its treatment by drugs and psychotherapy. (I further understand that clinical parapsychology is that aspect of psychical research that deals with psychiatric issues inasmuch as they are related to belief in, and alleged experience of, paranormal.) Though I have no formal training in psychiatry, my qualifications to speak about it are several: I have taken counseling and psychotherapy as part of my Honours degree in psychology; I have some background in psychoanalysis and abnormal psychology; and, in addition to my professional qualifications, I have severe bipolar disorder, experience of which I believe affords me a number of insights into discussion of this particular mental condition. I would suggest that this background has equipped me well to do research specifically in area of bipolar disorder, and I have four publications on this topic, one in British Journal of Clinical Psychology and two in coauthorship with my then-psychiatrist, Darryl Bassett (Lange, Thalbourne, Houran, & Lester, 2002; Thalbourne & Bassett, 1998; Thalbourne, Delin, & Bassett, 1994; Thalbourne & Houran, 2005). I have a number of publications in which experience of mania, depression, schizotypy, and dissociation were measured by questionnaire (1) and related to each other and to other variables (e.g., Thalbourne & Delin, 1994). It is on two of these other variables that I would like to concentrate in this paper, namely, mystical experience and belief in, and alleged experience of, paranormal. I have carefully defined these two concepts and will give those definitions. THE MYSTICAL First, mystical experience is: An experience which ... consists of a majority of following features: it tends to be sudden in onset, joyful, and difficult to verbalize; it involves a sense of perceiving purpose of existence; an insight into the harmony of things; (2) a perception of an ultimate unity--of oneness; transcendence of ego; an utter conviction of immortality; and it tends to be temporary, authoritative and to be attributed supreme value. Some people interpret mystical experience as an experience of unity with God. (Thalbourne, 2003, pp. 74-75) Perhaps most famous account of mystical experience was given by Canadian psychiatrist--or alienist as he was called then--Richard Maurice Bucke. The following quote is from Bucke's book Cosmic Consciousness (Bucke, 1901/1969). Note that author speaks of himself in third person: It was in early spring, at beginning of his thirty-sixth year. He and two friends had spent evening reading Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Browning, and especially Whitman. They parted at midnight, and he had a long drive in a hansom (it was in an English city). His mind, deeply under influence of ideas, images and emotions called up by reading and talk of evening, was calm and peaceful. He was in a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment. All at once, without warning of any kind, he found himself wrapped around as it were by a flame-colored cloud. For an instant he thought of fire, some sudden conflagration in great city; next, he knew that light was within himself. Directly afterwards came upon him a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination quite impossible to describe. Into his brain streamed one momentary lightening-flash of Brahmic Splendor which has ever since lightened his life; upon his heart fell one drop of Brahmic Bliss, leaving thenceforward for always an aftertaste of heaven. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".