Jack by the hedge said:
( How come no one points out Alderbanks delusions?)
With all that's going on, I rather overlooked this.
I meant to ask:
What delusions?
No response, I notice. I'd rather like to know, as well.
I'll take a guess that scrappy's reasoning runs that he's being told the voices he hears are delusions, Alderbank heard something on some files when he visited (I think this is right, can't be bothered to check), therefore he also has delusions which no one's pointing out.
If so, the answer is that Alderbank isn't claiming to have heard complete sentences spoken by spirits. That you can hear
something isn't in dispute. The problem is not hearing something, nor even thinking that it's intelligible speech (which is quite normal), but then compounding that by building an entire evidence-free theory of spirits, special messages, laptops, webcams, magical changing files and all the rest of this palaver.
We'll all admit that sometimes we can hear/see something that fits a known pattern and is then all but impossible to shake. We're familiar with the man in the moon, for instance. Strictly, that could be described as delusional. But to pursue the analogy, scrappy and flaccon have constructed an elaborate theory that the man really exists, but he hides when people land on the moon, or as he was still visible from Earth maybe he can't be seen properly through spacesuit visors. Maybe he even has some special power to change what people see when they get too close. That's well past the point where everyday pareidolia becomes a problem, and it's why all the attention is on scrappy and flaccon when pareidolia is a common and unremarkable delusion that everyone experiences from time to time.