Still No Sleep

by Berg

Image Text: I'm not listening to you. I mean, what does a SQUIRREL know about mental health?

As I begin writing this post, it's 1:30 in Los Angeles. By the time I finish writing it, it'll be at least 2:00. When I finally stop poring through Google reader it'll be 2:30, and when I've read enough of A Clash Of Kings to fall asleep it'll be well past 3:00. Insomnia and I are bosom buddies, and so I feel that I have a special connection to today's xkcd.

The comic starts simply enough- Cueball lets us know that a) he is going mad from sleep deprivation, and b) it's getting worse. Sleep is an important physiological function that gives your body and mind time to recharge (and yes, I'm well aware that you probably already knew that). Going for too long without sleep can be fatal, and even going for short periods without sleep (or even without enough sleep) can have deleterious effects on your cognitive ability. Even putting aside the negative effects on attention, mood, and general ability to think clearly that even minor amounts of sleep deprivation can bring about, the body will try to counteract prolonged sleep deprivation with microsleeps, periods of about 10-60 seconds where the brain essentially blacks out. If you're microsleeping, you might not even realize it, but your consciousness will be broken into tiny chunks nonetheless. When your sleep-deprived brain tries to fill in the gaps (much in the same way lasers "fill in" the scratches on CDs), your narrative of what's going on in the world around you can be adversely affected, as it is for Cueball.

Cueball's particular brand of sleep deprivation psychosis manifests itself as an uncertainty as to which state of consciousness his brain is currently in. REM sleep (dreaming) and normal consciousness are very close to one another (as opposed to normal consciousness and delta wave sleep). If you'd care to get a sense of what it might be like to confuse your waking state and your dreaming state, go see Inception. If somehow you read xkcd, explain xkcd, and you haven't seen Inception, congratulations- you're the most specific intellectual on the planet.

Back to business- Cueball's grasp on reality is weakening, due to his chronic lack of sleep. When he encounters a tree, therefore, he cannot be certain whether or not the tree exists in the real world, or if it's some hallucination, an artifact of his mind "filling in" the gaps in his consciousness caused by microsleep. Cueball then slides further down the rabbit hole, wondering if perhaps his hallucination is itself a hallucination, making the tree real, and Cueball sane. Of course, if this is the case, he's still hallucinating, which opens up the possibility that his hallucination of a hallucination is itself a hallucination, making the tree not real, and Cueball insane. Clearly, Cueball is having a hard time parsing his subjective perception of reality apart from any objective reality around him, and he needs a second opinion in order to sort things out. Luckily, a talking squirrel is here to save the day!

Wait- a talking squirrel?

Squirrels can't talk. Helpfully, the squirrel tells Cueball not to worry about the tree. Now, we the only semi-sleep deprived reader know that if this squirrel is talking to Cueball, and squirrels can't talk, then the squirrel must only be talking in Cueball's mind, confirming the fact that he's hallucinating. The squirrel's advice is still solid, though- it's not worth worrying about whether the hallucination is a hallucination or not, since clearly hallucinations abound. Cueball might as well just sit back and enjoy the ride.

In the image text, Cueball recognizes that something is amiss with the squirrel, but he's juuuust a touch off the mark: Cueball discounts the squirrel's advice not because squirrels can't talk, but because even a talking squirrel can't possibly be an authority on mental health. Cueball's got a point there- in a fairly influential paper on the philosophy of mind published in 1974 called "What is it like to be a bat?" Thomas Nagel advances the argument (and forgive me if I'm butchering this) the mental state of being a bat and the mental state of being a human are so thoroughly defined by the differing sensory apparatus through which humans and bats interact with the world that a human can not in any meaningful way truly imagine what it is like to be a bat, and vice versa. In this view, a squirrel could not possibly have any meaningful insight into Cueball's mental state, in that Cueball's baseline mental state is so far removed from a squirrel's baseline mental state that at best the squirrel can only experience the mental state of a squirrel imagining what it is to be a human. Pile on top of that a mental state that Cueball himself is having a hard time understanding, and squirrel's advice becomes resoundingly hollow, in that it comes from a mental state several degrees of removal away from what Cueball is currently experiencing.

The lesson? Get some sleep, otherwise you'll wind up digging through every Philosophy of Language and Cog Sci course folder you have on your hard drive in an effort to derive meaning from the misadventures of an insomniac stick figure.