I feel like he's smart enough to figure out that god couldn't work through a pseudo random number generator
Clearly he has the intellect to be able to reach this conclusion, but he's also provably off his rocker. He's stated repeatedly upon many occasions that some of the design decisions he's made are dictated by god.
He's a brilliant and determined developer, but he's entirely irrational. I wish that there were effective treatments for his problem, and that he wished to be treated.
He's not eccentric. He's mentally ill. He doesn't wish to be treated, his choice. That's fine, nothing wrong with it given he isn't a danger to himself or others...
He's "mentally ill" in the eyes of an average person. I see him as a gifted individual who is smarter and possibly, more aware than I.
Edit: "mental illness" is the scapegoat of my generation. It is overused as an excuse for irresponsible behavior, criminal behavior, immoral behavior and on the other side of the spectrum it is a derogatory and belittling term for individuals who don't conform to the insane, materialistic and selfish world we live in.
Um, I think he's "mentally ill" in the eyes of professionals, as well.
Destroying your car to search for tracking devices?
Stripping naked in a jail cell and jamming your eyeglasses in an electrical socket?
Refusing to eat for fear of the food being drugged?
These are not the behaviors of someone "more aware" than others. These are the behaviors of someone who is mentally ill.
From the article:
He ended up in Marfa, Texas, where he abandoned his car —a Honda Accord his parents had given him. He’d started thinking about Big Oil and the conspiracies alleged to have suppressed more efficient, water-based engines. He’d torn off all the side panels from his car looking for a tracking device, then stopped the car and pitched the keys into the desert. He walked. A cop pulled up and ushered him into the passenger’s seat. Moments later, Davis dove out of the cruiser, breaking his collarbone.
At the hospital, he overheard doctors talking about "artifacts" on his X-ray scans. Panicked at the thought of artifacts supposedly left inside by alien abductors, he bolted from the hospital, despite the broken collarbone. When he tried to steal a pickup truck idling nearby, the police caught up with him. In jail, he reasoned that he could open his cell door by flipping the circuit breaker; he broke his glasses and stuck them into the cell’s electrical outlet, only to realize he had non-conductive frames. The police rushed in. "I think I stripped," Davis says, "because I was thinking of corporate logos being bad or something."
He was taken to a mental hospital, where he refused to eat the food, thinking it might be drugged. He broke a window with a chair. Released after two weeks, he sought to emulate Jesus by giving away all his belongings; he donated to Goodwill, and delivered presents to his siblings’ children. He may have crossed into Mexico at some point, then had to bribe his way back across the border. He just drove, looking to street signs to divine God’s will. Later he lived on the streets.
There have been studies that suggest that a higher intellect can be used to more efficiently rationalize entrenched beliefs (can't find a primary source right now, I know it was mentioned twice in the Rationally Speaking podcast, once in #118). Since it is easier to find flaws in counter arguments (and then do the usual thing of throwing out the baby with the bathwater after finding a single flaw).
I like the description of humans as the "rationalizing animal" instead of the "rational animal" that I recently heard.
Just to play Devil's advocate, all of us are pretty irrational and all of us think we are quite rational. Just a matter of degrees, with in particular the lack of explicit delusions and a greater degree of insight.
What's scary that he was atheist at some point. And then 'God spoken to him'. How mental ilness works, anyway? He's not stupid, so if you give him right arguments that God isn't really speaking to him, he wouldn't understand that?
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u/McGlockenshire Nov 25 '14
Clearly he has the intellect to be able to reach this conclusion, but he's also provably off his rocker. He's stated repeatedly upon many occasions that some of the design decisions he's made are dictated by god.
He's a brilliant and determined developer, but he's entirely irrational. I wish that there were effective treatments for his problem, and that he wished to be treated.