In Search of AI Psychosis

It's sort of a symptom of our poor mechanisms to create signalling and movement. We evolved to operate at the level of troops of baboons and, without utilizing the more potent capabilities of the trained mined, those mechanisms fail at the internet scale.

People often "believe" things as a means of signalling others. Deeply held "beliefs" tell us where the troop will go. Using these extremely compact signals helps the group focus through the chaos and arrive at a fast consensus on new decisions. When a question comes up, a few people shout their beliefs. We take the temperature of the room, some voices are more common than others, and a direction becomes apparent. It's like Monte Carlo sampling the centroid and applying some reduction.

This means of consensus is wildly illogical, but slower, logical discussion takes time that baboons on the move don't have. It's a simple information and communication efficiency problem. We can't contextualize everything, and contextualizing is often itself a means of intense dishonesty through choosing the framing, which leads to intense debate and more time.

Efficiency and the prominently visible preservation of each one's interests in the means of consensus are vital. I don't think we have reached anything near optimum and certainly not anything designed for internet scale. As a result, the mind of the internet is not really near its potential.

I've recently learned about Tuchman's law after I bought her A Distant Mirror at a booksale

>Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening—on a lucky day—without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena. This has led me to formulate Tuchman's Law, as follows: "The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold" (or any figure the reader would care to supply).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_W._Tuchman#cite_note-M...

That may be, but the LLM certainly isn’t helping.

> 'biological' mental illness is tightly coupled to qualitative mental state, and bidirectionally at that. Not only do your chemicals influence your thoughts, your thoughts influence your chemicals, and it's possible for a vulnerable person to be pushed over the edge by either kind of input. We like to think that 'as long as nothing is chemically wrong' we're a-ok, but the truth is that it's possible for simple normal trains of thought to latch your brain into a very undesirable state.

It's interesting to see you mention this. After reading this post yesterday I wound up with some curious questions along these lines. I guess my question goes something like this:

This article seems to assert that 'mental illness' must always have some underlying representation in the brain - that is, mental illness is caused by chemical imbalances or malformation in brain structure. But is it possible for a brain to become 'disordered' in a purely mental way? i.e. that to any way we know of "inspecting" the brain, it would look like a the hardware was healthy - but the "mind inside the brain" could somehow be stuck in a "thought trap"? Your post above seems to assert this could be the case.

I think I've pretty much internalized a notion of consciousness that was purely bottom-up and materialistic. Thoughts are the product of brain state, brain state is the product of physics, which at "brain component scale" is deterministic. So it seems very spooky on its face that somehow thoughts themselves could have a bidirectional relationship with chemistry.

I spent a bunch of time reading articles and (what else) chatting with Claude back and forth about this topic, and it's really interesting - it seems there are at least some arguments out there that information (or maybe even consciousness) can have causal effects on "stuff" (matter). There's the "Integrated Information Theory" of consciousness (which seems to be, if not exactly "fringe", at least widely disputed) and there's also this interesting notion of "downward causation" (basically the idea that higher-level systems can have causal effects on lower levels - I'm not clear on whether "thought having causal effects on chemistry" fits into this model).

I've got 5 or 6 books coming my way from the local library system - it's a pretty fascinating topic, though I haven't dug deep enough to decide where I stand.

Sorry for the ramble, but this article has at least inspired some interesting rabbit-hole diving for me.

I'm curious - when you assert "Not only do your chemicals influence your thoughts, your thoughts influence your chemicals" - do you have evidence that backs that notion up? I'm not asking to cast doubt, but rather, I guess, because it sounds like maybe you've got some sources I might find interesting as I keep reading.

I mean, on one hand you have a professional psychiatrist who has treated many people for the disorder we're talking about, and on the other, we have a rando on HN who hasn't presented any credentials.

Not saying the latter person is automatically wrong, but I think if you're going to argue against something said by someone who is a subject matter expert, the bar is a bit higher.