Role-Playing Games, Schizophrenia, and Skepticism

What is it that role-playing games, schizophrenia, and skepticism have in common?

Besides being demonized by Christians, they all involve the reality-testing circuitry in the brain.

Role-playing games, and I refer here primarily to the pen-and-paper variety, require a group of people to all take on the mindsets of fictional characters inhabiting the same imaginary landscape while keeping the fictional separate from the real. This is not difficult for very many people when it comes to dealing with their own character and eir environment, but it suffers occasional (if notorious) difficulties when it comes to separating the personality of another player from the personality of the corresponding character. In other words, sometimes in-game conflicts get accidentally translated into real life.
Experience playing RPGs develops the skill of compartmentalization while at the same time bringing it into the consciousness of the player. Almost everyone has at least some capability to compartmentalize, but one of the primary causes of inconsistent thought and behaviour in a person is when a person doesn't realize that two compartments of their thought are contradictory. Becoming more aware of compartmentalization enables people to better avoid these sorts of situations.

Schizophrenia can be characterized in part as a critical failure of the brain's reality-testing circuitry - its major symptoms include delusions and hallucinations - in particular this is true of the paranoid variety.
Everyone has thoughts (usually fleeting) considering the possibility that others are acting maliciously towards them, and everyone occasionally imagines what it might be like if certain pieces of their life were acting to directly oppose them, but someone with paranoid schizophrenia simply doesn't treat these thoughts as imagination. A schizophrenic can't simply dismiss these thoughts, sometimes just imagining the possibility of betrayal is enough for em to believe that it is true.

There is some speculation among neuropsychologists that even normal people actually believe whatever they imagine, but they are able to subsequently disbelieve with even a moment's consideration. If this is the case, it seems all the more relevant for skepticism and the scientific method to be included in any educational curriculum.

Skepticism is the consistent application of strict evidentiary criteria to any proposition. In addition to being a fundamental part of the scientific method, skepticism is practiced by almost everyone in a large variety of situations (if you think you are never skeptical, I've got some property in Alpha Centauri I'd like to sell you).
The primary realization of skeptical thinking is that the human brain's reality-testing circuitry is not very accurate in most situations. Once you have had this realization, it is simply a matter of questioning how your innate reality-testing can be supplemented enough to meet the demands of modern life.

Really, the only negative consequence of applying too much skeptical thinking to a question is that it can waste time and energy. For example, is the table in front of you real or imagined? Your innate reality-testing software says that if you can see it and touch it, it's real. Of course our senses can be fooled pretty easily, so we can go to great skeptical lengths to determine whether or not that table is real. We can go through months of scientific testing, double-blind trials (of some kind) and painful statistical analysis to answer the question, but all this analysis is even more likely to give us the correct answer than the simple and obvious test, wasting a whole lot of time and energy in the process. The difficulty in thinking skeptically in practice is developing guidelines for determining which situations are worth leaving to your brain along and which are worth investigating in detail.

There is an additional point of contact between skepticism and role-playing games, specifically fantasy-based RPGs. In a role-playing game you can imagine what a world which involved magic might actually be like. The more experience you have imagining what life in a magical world might be like, the easier it is to recognize the faults of magical thinking in the real world.

Finally!

My video response to the blasphemy challenge with actually legible text went up here almost two weeks ago. While nobody has commented on the new version, the only real question that seems to need answering, judging by the comments on the blurry-text version, is what do I mean when I say "I deny the existence of reality"?

Before I state my actual position, I would like to demonstrate the necessity of involving semantics in the matter by presenting something which appears problematic but is not key to my belief.

Let us take the common sense notion of reality, somewhat formalized, that reality is defined to be everything that exists. Obviously, we should then ask what is meant by existence, but we will ignore this question for now.
It seems natural to me, a mathematician, to formalize this definition further by defining the term "reality" to refer to the set consisting of all things which have the property of existence. Now, let us ask the question: does reality exist?
Strictly speaking, our definitions tell us that this is, in essence, asking whether "reality" is an element of the set "reality".
Supposing that "reality" is an element of itself, we may construct a version of Russell's paradox, rendering this supposition untenable.

An obvious change to our interpretation of the question appears to resolve this issue, but raises another: "is reality a subset of itself?"
In this case the answer is clearly yes, but in order to interpret the question "does reality exist?" in this fashion we must assume that the property of "existence" applies not only to all elements of reality but also to all subsets. By our definition of reality, this means that all subsets of reality must also be elements of reality and so reality must contain its own power set, bringing us back to the previous problem.

The above argument does not in itself prove the nonexistence of reality, rather it points out that we must develop a good understanding of our concepts and questions before it can be meaningful to ask questions about our concepts.
Unfortunately, I do not believe such a thing is possible in our current conceptual framework.

I would like to jump back to an earlier point and say that the intuitive notions of reality and existence suffer from a major flaw in that they are circularly defined.
"What is reality?" "Reality is everything that exists."
"What does it mean for something to exist?" "Something exists if it is real."
Obviously, these concepts will not suffice in conforming to whatever may actually be.

Concepts of "reality" range between the very vague and the very precise. The very vague notions are useful for everyday living and thought and probably include some measure of correspondence with the universe but they are too fuzzy for ontological questions, in my opinion. I have never heard of or concieved of a concept of reality with even moderate precision that I believe is internally consistent, let alone corresponds to the universe (except the nihilistic concept, which seems like a cop-out). I cannot even develop vague notions of characteristics that such a moderately precise concept of reality might have. As such, I believe that my current understanding (and, unless I hear otherwise, that of others) is insufficient to form a coherent question which could take the place of the meaningless "does reality exist?" and therefore I must conclude that neither "reality exists" nor "reality does not exist" are true (whatever true may mean), given our current concepts behind those words.

It was pointed out to me earlier today, that perhaps "I deny the existence of reality, but I don't quite mean it that way" was not the best way to concisely get across my beliefs. This may be the case, but it's something I can't change now.