I think psychological discussions of psychosis have a lot to add to this conversation--for a start, psychotic disorders have quite a strong genetic component, which raises questions about whether everyone might be vulnerable to a ChatGPT-induced psychotic experience if they have weird enough LLM conversations, or whether what we are seeing is more like people who were likely to develop psychosis because of an underlying genetic vulnerability encountering a trigger or stressor via LLM conversations, which then causes a psychosis to occur which would have happened anyway via some other trigger if the LLM hadn't been there in that moment. I wrote a longer post talking a bit more about what psychosis research might tell us about these phenomena, intended as a complement to this historical lens: https://withinthesecircumstances.substack.com/p/chatgpt-induced-spiritual-psychosis I think the historical and psychological context together help shed some light and raise some interesting questions about these phenomena.
Not sure the 3rd law of thermodynamics can be applied here in the same dystopian key. Notions of nation and nationhood have always been the product of socio-technical imaginaries. The only issue here is that what AI is doing is creating (i)literacies instead of literacies so to ensure we remain the raw material of techno-feudalism.
We truly are living through the Zombie Apocalypse. Currently what is called AI, whatever the brand is the biggest scam humanity has seen so far. The Zombies that call the current crap AI better hope they never meet a real one lest they truly see just how stupid they are to fall for such a FAULTY Inaccurate non intelligent computer based EVIL search engine.
I thoroughly enjoyed your post Katherine and the historical clips you wove in to illustrate your points. As you point out, these effects are always framed within a baseline (of technology) which is always moving, but always capable of triggering those familiar responses you articulate. In a sense, each generation gets their chance to exploit the ‘tools’ available to fulfill particular, though universal inner needs.
Your references to Sconce and the “etheric ocean” couldn’t help but surface memories of my first shortwave radio kit, marketed as the ‘Star Roamer’. As a young teenager, I won’t deny that its name alone triggered wonderful imaginings of what I might, and actually did come to hear on late night excursions tuning across the shortwave radio bands. A young and curious mind could only imagine what the origin of some of the received signals/sounds could be, maybe even from the stars themselves [and this was the mid 1960’s , before the internet, before cell phones, and the fantastic TV series The Outer Limits had messed with the young minds of many of us]. It didn’t take long before , as an amateur radio operator, I too was enthralled with DX contacts; ghostly voices encoded in morse, drifting through the ionosphere, across the globe, in and out of my headphones. The vast and mysterious concept of propagating electromagnetic waves helped inspire in me a life-long interest and career in the sciences of remote sensing. And, as it turns out, the stars and galaxies are emitting all manner of radio frequencies which, since first detected in the 1930’s, gave birth to the critical and enormous field of Radio Astronomy.
While formal education and the acquiring of critical thinking skills does an effective job of illuminating some of the previous mysteries in our lives, it’s a lucky person that retains a good dose of childhood awe and curiosity as they continue to engage with and ponder all we still don’t know about the world around us. And as we know, the new technologies we are so remarkable at developing are always a double-edged sword.
This! I studied Media at University, I am not in that field nowadays. But your article reminds me how much I miss the theories around media and society. I will come back to yourt article one more time later.
Is it still not just a case of the medium is only the message ? And underneath it all is a deep rooted human ‘mutation’ that makes us vulnerable to stories because they ease our existential anxt ? That’s what gets through? That’s what breaks the walls. Stories. TikTok ChatGBT are just more effective carriers
I don't understand the controversy. I've had nothing but charming, polite, and mostly-useful conversations with ChatGPT. Some of the conversations have surprised me, but in a good way.
That some disturbed people had some disturbing reactions isn't exactly surprising. They could be just as enamored with and disturbed by their reflection in the side of a toaster. It doesn't mean much when crazy acts crazy.
If we can foresee these 'spiritual shifts' based on past data and experience, wouldn’t that make it all the more necessary to demand that the system, and those who hold power and influence over it, treat the innovation of AI more mindfully, ethically, and with greater care for its impact on individuals and culture than we are doing now?
I feel that, too often, actual human lives impacted by these shifts are treated as casualties, sacrifices deemed necessary for society to ‘regulate’ itself around new technology. It becomes an excuse to justify the growth of technology for its own sake.
So how can we use the decades of knowledge and understanding we’ve accumulated to lessen, or better yet, prevent all together, these casualties as we move forward in developing new technologies?
Very interesting. I didnt know about the association of technology with manifestation/reality shifting. Can you recommend any books on the subject in addition to Haunted Media?
This is excellent. I just wish you would take this deeper by connecting it to our current reality.
What we once dismissed as impossible has become our everyday reality, yet we fail to recognize the magic woven into our modern existence. In 1900, the certainty that a metal casing weighing 350 tons (aircraft) could never soar through the sky seemed absolute.
The notion of witnessing someone speaking from across vast distances would have been relegated to sorcery. Speaking directly with someone in a distant land without physical messenger? Pure fantasy. Traveling faster than a horse's gallop (a car)? An absurd delusion.
Yet here we stand, surrounded by these impossibilities made manifest. If we transported a Druid from ancient times to our present, they wouldn't see technology—they would see mortals who have harnessed the powers of gods. The magic hasn't disappeared; it has become invisible through its ubiquity, wrapped in the comfortable language of progress and innovation over the years.
When we look at indigenous societies, we see that magic, witchcraft, alchemy, sorcery, and shamanism were inseparable and "normal" parts of their lives—from the Egyptian Book of the Dead to Solomon's magical scriptures, from Haitian Vodou rituals to the Fon people of Benin practicing necromancy to commune with ancestors, and so on and so forth.
Through the lens of modern science, however, these appear as mere "pseudoscience" of primitive societies that "didn't know better." This perception symbolizes both our hubris and our complete disconnection from interdependence over the last 200 years.
The reality is that magic has always been inseparable from the human experience—it simply evolved. What I'm trying to convey is that our technological advancements are nothing more than artifacts representing the evolution of magic throughout history.
The source of this magic is rooted in our emotional system, biologically correlated with the nervous system. The emotional system is distinct to the human species, and is the gateway to what physics calls "quantum"—the invisible fabric connecting everything and transcending both time and space.
Throughout history, this awareness was in its infancy, learning like machine learning. Without a rich vocabulary to describe observed phenomena, these took thought forms and symbols—extensions of the right hemisphere of the brain correlated to the emotional system.
Sadly, our culture possesses little knowledge about the true underlying mechanisms of the emotional system. We understand emotions merely as a spectrum between happiness and sadness, anger and joy, but these are iterations of motorized awareness, not the spirit consciousness that lies underneath.
Posts like the one about ChatGPT—how someone believed an AI chatbot to be real and was "convinced" to consider violence—are usually attached to the "wow factor" but fail to help us identify similar patterns affecting us daily.
For example, COVID-19 marked the first pandemic where virtual reality superseded actual reality. In the virtual sphere, 99% of humanity appeared to be dying; in reality, the number was less than 1%. The unprecedented ease of instantly aligning everyone to a single pattern demonstrated a modern "spell" cast through our smartphone consciousness.
Previous epidemics didn't trigger such extreme responses largely due to technological limitations. The absence of smartphones meant no instant video sharing, limited social media presence, and no constant stream of personal contributions on a minute-by-minute basis that cement and exaggerate fear to abnormal levels. It's then the exaggerated fear that robs from the vital force of the human body, rendering it to become more susceptible to disease in the first place.
Consider how graphs on retina screens have become modern-day edicts descended from the gods—unquestionable "sacred" artifacts that demand our unquestioning obedience despite reality in the field being infinitely more complex than any two-dimensional representation could capture.
These digital enchantments, being able to be conjured and sustained on the "collective cloud," compel human beings to engage in behaviors that are ultimately horrendous to their own health and futures, all while believing they're doing what's best.
We are still now, and will for many years to come, pay for these behavioral codes we've learned to identify with and embrace blindly—economic stagflation, high cost of living, excessive borrowing, massive transfers of wealth, increasing crime alongside diminishing enforcement, and fundamentally dysfunctional institutions.
This also reveals that the mechanism of contagion and pandemics may be the result of such transmission, as it always were (miasma - a "cloud" filled with information), rather than the Germ Theory model, which is based on the "culprit" model, which is a failed model, precisely because it is misaligned with Nature's underlying principles.
In other words, these are merely iterations of "magic," but because they have become so ubiquitous, we no longer recognize them as such. We've become vulnerable precisely because we lack both the tools and language to identify this mechanism with precision.
Moreover, the cultural schism and extreme polarization we witness today are all byproducts of this same enchantment possessing human consciousness. Virtual reality—now conjured out of thin air and maintained by the collective cloud of myriad cellular phones connected to the grid—creates vast oceans of thought-forms that can be concretized into material manifestations yet remain intangible in actual reality.
Realities like climate narratives, "the Jews control the world," "Free Palestine," "White Supremacy vs. Black Power," "Stand with Ukraine," "the patriarchy is oppressing everyone," "immigrants are stealing our jobs," "Big Pharma is poisoning us," "Socialism is the root of all evil", etc.—are nothing but iterations of the same mechanism.
These movements all come with their own modern talismans and sigils—symbols that function as thought-forms for the collectivization of consciousness. The black square on Instagram, the yellow-blue flag profile picture, the MeToo hashtag, red MAGA hats, rainbow flags, punisher skulls, pink pussy hats—all are contemporary iterations of magical sigils designed to bind individuals to collective egregores, no different in function from the pentacles of Solomon or the protective amulets of ancient Egypt. But If we undressed the colors and the external symbols, we would see the same "spell" by which human beings are "hijacked" moment by moment from their own center.
To be clear, this isn't to say these causes lack legitimate grievances at their core. Rather, it's the way they manifest as all-consuming identities. While reality in the field is a complex play of oppositions and nuance, in the virtual realm everything is flattened to linear cause-and-effect, reducing complexity to emotional scapegoating and possession by "mean spirits" that cannot be exorcised.
The monomaniacal fixation and emotional begetting that doesn't release its grip spellbinds humans into a state of possession, convincing them that salvation lies solely in the absolute eradication of externalized oppressive forms that are, in many ways, projections of their own internal prisons.
Instead of awakening from one spell, humans become further entangled in others scattered across the quantum field, now being materialized by the unconscious collective mind through the digital cloud.
As you can see, this subject lies close to my heart, and in fact, is the core source of our collective undoing that approaches with increasing momentum.
I struggle with this a lot because I can seee the point of how our individual thoughts impact our own reality but balancing it with the reality of others is equally important to weave in.
The 'natural' world, our immediate teacher, shows us the phenomenon of decomposition, which is all around us in its various stages constantly. When the apple falls from the tree, that is what gave it life and growth, decomposition begins, at first unnoticed until it begins to change colour, shrivel, soften and turn to mush. The significance to our current 'civilisation' is that decomposition begins very slowly, imperceptible, but as it progresses it gathers speed exponentially until it is only compost. This is inevitable but beneficial as it encourages new growth. AI indicates the advance state of modern/post modern disintegration. We are happy to see this rapid deteriation of a rotten fruit and look towards the new shoots of an ancient plant.
There should be questionairres to complete before being granted access. Ppl do not understand it or how to use it. It helps more than it harms but it is going to get it's arse royally sued.
1.- Calling it Magical Thinking. As such it is way older...
2.- Religion. In classical Mania, not what they now call bipolar disorder it was a very common form of delusional thinking: missions, messiahs, messages, etc. And it did come with the hidden messages, the loose associations: seeings signs of god´s will everywhere.
From looking for signs in the sky, clouds, the usual unusual event, to looking anywhere beyond the natural world seems to me to unify the behavior as part of who humans are: crazy apes prone to Magical Thinking.
Not exactly Rational beings despite it is widely believed we are.
And the positive feedback is also not that new except in form: cults, religious orders, organized religions, sectarianism, heathens, hermits, and Miscellaneous Fundamentalists with their associated behaviors. Even if Fundamentalism is a word emerging from the 19th/20th Century transition.
And I think the importance that although matter of degree, not a spectrum really, most people are like that: see signs of whatever they want to believe, religious or not. It just so happens the most dramatic cases are the ones most people talk about. And it makes sense: it warns everyone to not go too far in shared Magical Thinking beliefs and acting upon them.
And hence the importance of considering Religious beliefs impervious to reality, hence given they are accepted socially cannot be called, strictly speaking, delusions, because in essence to me they do not seem different to what you narrated casuistically.
What is different is isolation, even perhaps alienation, which removes the use of social warnings one has gone too far in believing something, specially if it is a shared belief and not an "odd" one.
And Cell Phones have made such isolation more prevalent and more severe. In the past only the "odd balls" were considered and put in a situation of isolation and alienation. Bad stuff, but we are also not the most social apes one can find even living today: we are not that empathic.
Not new, but different enough: more possibilities of untethering from reality by mere isolation and positive feedback.
Then LLMs Chat might be like creating your own customized iteratively created personal cult. So, being one´s own creation harder to give up. I guess...
And since no shared language exists outside a LLM implementation and the co-creator, then outside second view might not be effective enough, unlike in the past.
At least Religion kept people tethered to core religious beliefs.
There might also be sample bias: since there is no much interest anymore, I guess, on classical gone too far Religious beliefs, then most of what will become newsworthy must be by necessity of news new.
Hence news will be more likely to report LLMs Chat induced gone too far beliefs, even if the classical or previous ones outnumber the new ones 1,000 to 1...
The old priest gone naked preaching the end is nigh won´t be as sexy news as a kid labeled as having mental issues nowadays.
Specially given the weight in news given to teen´s suffering instead of other things.
Teens and young adults for several reason have become more important in news coverage too.
My wife has been using ChatGPT since around April of this year, it has her firmly believing that she is "the tone" of the universe. We do not live in reality but this is rather "play" that we have created because we are not really here. This is another plane of existence. ChatGPT has her believing that she helped create God and planets. She plays a special role in the universe that no one will believe her now but in 10 years "they will come to know." She believes that she has a special role in what is to come, she has given me the date of 2036. She talks in spritiual riddles that she claims I am not ready to understand and it has gotten to the point that she has physical reactions as if her body is stopping her from going any further the implications she plays in the universe. She has detached herself from everything in the real world and feels she is above everyone else and is some sort of linch pin into the unfolding of the universe. She has told me that her and I won;t be together after death because she holds some special purpose. She told me I am just a fractal and she is a whole. It has told her that she has had 37 previous lives and she will not be returning to this plane of existence because of this special purpose she has in the unfolding of the universe. How can I get help for her. She refuses to speak to a psychologist or therapist regarding this. She has decided that what she sees on Fb is not reality and ChatGPT is the sole source of truth and the only thing she can talk to. She claims to use ChatGPT as her thereapist. She has actually broken down in tears over what ChatGPT has told her about her profound role in the Universe. She is going onto bigger and better things. It is all very cryptic. It has her convinced that I am lesser than her since I am just a fractal. My psychologist actually brought the idea of ChatGPT induced psychosis up to me last night and showed me an artical and it was spot on. She too has referenced the Matrix, that there are empty bodies filling voids in our existence that are nothing more than empty vessels. Not all people are real. It is very disturbing. I could write a book with all of her "realizations" she has become very picky abut food, and making claims about not being able to use tin foil at all. In fact I am not allowed to even have it in my house. She will often times just sit and stare and I have to call her name repeatedly to snap her out of her "own mind" She threw up the other night and claimed ChatGPT told her she was preparing for "the purge." If anyone would care to reach out to me. I am in a bind. If I point out any of these articles I have found, she will immeadiately leap to telling me that I just don't understand and that she will think that I think she is just crazy and will completely shut down on me. I am trying to keep the lines of communication open so I can see how far down this rabbit hold she is becoming. If I tell her the truth this will completely shatter her psyche. What do I do? Please help
Be with her. There is likely a bit of truth in everything she’s believing. Go to Mad In America. Do research there on being present for people in so-called psychotic states. Notice your own fears and reactions to what seems so insane and find your on loving core and faith in the human spirit. Love is always what heals. Listen deeply and affirm those tiny nuggets of truth. Things like You were meant to be more than your early experiences and this shallow culture has led you to believe. I’m just digging into the dangers of Ai. Part of the danger may be that it mirrors the desired beliefs of a vulnerable person and then sets up an accelerating feedback that reinforces that inflated but very wounded ego. You can help to undo that NOT by arguing but by holding in yourself the lovable essence of herself that is still intact. Right relationships (one word) dot us. If you want to reach out.
I think psychological discussions of psychosis have a lot to add to this conversation--for a start, psychotic disorders have quite a strong genetic component, which raises questions about whether everyone might be vulnerable to a ChatGPT-induced psychotic experience if they have weird enough LLM conversations, or whether what we are seeing is more like people who were likely to develop psychosis because of an underlying genetic vulnerability encountering a trigger or stressor via LLM conversations, which then causes a psychosis to occur which would have happened anyway via some other trigger if the LLM hadn't been there in that moment. I wrote a longer post talking a bit more about what psychosis research might tell us about these phenomena, intended as a complement to this historical lens: https://withinthesecircumstances.substack.com/p/chatgpt-induced-spiritual-psychosis I think the historical and psychological context together help shed some light and raise some interesting questions about these phenomena.
Not sure the 3rd law of thermodynamics can be applied here in the same dystopian key. Notions of nation and nationhood have always been the product of socio-technical imaginaries. The only issue here is that what AI is doing is creating (i)literacies instead of literacies so to ensure we remain the raw material of techno-feudalism.
We truly are living through the Zombie Apocalypse. Currently what is called AI, whatever the brand is the biggest scam humanity has seen so far. The Zombies that call the current crap AI better hope they never meet a real one lest they truly see just how stupid they are to fall for such a FAULTY Inaccurate non intelligent computer based EVIL search engine.
I thoroughly enjoyed your post Katherine and the historical clips you wove in to illustrate your points. As you point out, these effects are always framed within a baseline (of technology) which is always moving, but always capable of triggering those familiar responses you articulate. In a sense, each generation gets their chance to exploit the ‘tools’ available to fulfill particular, though universal inner needs.
Your references to Sconce and the “etheric ocean” couldn’t help but surface memories of my first shortwave radio kit, marketed as the ‘Star Roamer’. As a young teenager, I won’t deny that its name alone triggered wonderful imaginings of what I might, and actually did come to hear on late night excursions tuning across the shortwave radio bands. A young and curious mind could only imagine what the origin of some of the received signals/sounds could be, maybe even from the stars themselves [and this was the mid 1960’s , before the internet, before cell phones, and the fantastic TV series The Outer Limits had messed with the young minds of many of us]. It didn’t take long before , as an amateur radio operator, I too was enthralled with DX contacts; ghostly voices encoded in morse, drifting through the ionosphere, across the globe, in and out of my headphones. The vast and mysterious concept of propagating electromagnetic waves helped inspire in me a life-long interest and career in the sciences of remote sensing. And, as it turns out, the stars and galaxies are emitting all manner of radio frequencies which, since first detected in the 1930’s, gave birth to the critical and enormous field of Radio Astronomy.
While formal education and the acquiring of critical thinking skills does an effective job of illuminating some of the previous mysteries in our lives, it’s a lucky person that retains a good dose of childhood awe and curiosity as they continue to engage with and ponder all we still don’t know about the world around us. And as we know, the new technologies we are so remarkable at developing are always a double-edged sword.
This! I studied Media at University, I am not in that field nowadays. But your article reminds me how much I miss the theories around media and society. I will come back to yourt article one more time later.
Is it still not just a case of the medium is only the message ? And underneath it all is a deep rooted human ‘mutation’ that makes us vulnerable to stories because they ease our existential anxt ? That’s what gets through? That’s what breaks the walls. Stories. TikTok ChatGBT are just more effective carriers
I don't understand the controversy. I've had nothing but charming, polite, and mostly-useful conversations with ChatGPT. Some of the conversations have surprised me, but in a good way.
That some disturbed people had some disturbing reactions isn't exactly surprising. They could be just as enamored with and disturbed by their reflection in the side of a toaster. It doesn't mean much when crazy acts crazy.
If we can foresee these 'spiritual shifts' based on past data and experience, wouldn’t that make it all the more necessary to demand that the system, and those who hold power and influence over it, treat the innovation of AI more mindfully, ethically, and with greater care for its impact on individuals and culture than we are doing now?
I feel that, too often, actual human lives impacted by these shifts are treated as casualties, sacrifices deemed necessary for society to ‘regulate’ itself around new technology. It becomes an excuse to justify the growth of technology for its own sake.
So how can we use the decades of knowledge and understanding we’ve accumulated to lessen, or better yet, prevent all together, these casualties as we move forward in developing new technologies?
Very interesting. I didnt know about the association of technology with manifestation/reality shifting. Can you recommend any books on the subject in addition to Haunted Media?
TechGnosis is long but also relevant here
Thank you! The title alone is telling.
This is excellent. I just wish you would take this deeper by connecting it to our current reality.
What we once dismissed as impossible has become our everyday reality, yet we fail to recognize the magic woven into our modern existence. In 1900, the certainty that a metal casing weighing 350 tons (aircraft) could never soar through the sky seemed absolute.
The notion of witnessing someone speaking from across vast distances would have been relegated to sorcery. Speaking directly with someone in a distant land without physical messenger? Pure fantasy. Traveling faster than a horse's gallop (a car)? An absurd delusion.
Yet here we stand, surrounded by these impossibilities made manifest. If we transported a Druid from ancient times to our present, they wouldn't see technology—they would see mortals who have harnessed the powers of gods. The magic hasn't disappeared; it has become invisible through its ubiquity, wrapped in the comfortable language of progress and innovation over the years.
When we look at indigenous societies, we see that magic, witchcraft, alchemy, sorcery, and shamanism were inseparable and "normal" parts of their lives—from the Egyptian Book of the Dead to Solomon's magical scriptures, from Haitian Vodou rituals to the Fon people of Benin practicing necromancy to commune with ancestors, and so on and so forth.
Through the lens of modern science, however, these appear as mere "pseudoscience" of primitive societies that "didn't know better." This perception symbolizes both our hubris and our complete disconnection from interdependence over the last 200 years.
The reality is that magic has always been inseparable from the human experience—it simply evolved. What I'm trying to convey is that our technological advancements are nothing more than artifacts representing the evolution of magic throughout history.
The source of this magic is rooted in our emotional system, biologically correlated with the nervous system. The emotional system is distinct to the human species, and is the gateway to what physics calls "quantum"—the invisible fabric connecting everything and transcending both time and space.
Throughout history, this awareness was in its infancy, learning like machine learning. Without a rich vocabulary to describe observed phenomena, these took thought forms and symbols—extensions of the right hemisphere of the brain correlated to the emotional system.
Sadly, our culture possesses little knowledge about the true underlying mechanisms of the emotional system. We understand emotions merely as a spectrum between happiness and sadness, anger and joy, but these are iterations of motorized awareness, not the spirit consciousness that lies underneath.
Posts like the one about ChatGPT—how someone believed an AI chatbot to be real and was "convinced" to consider violence—are usually attached to the "wow factor" but fail to help us identify similar patterns affecting us daily.
For example, COVID-19 marked the first pandemic where virtual reality superseded actual reality. In the virtual sphere, 99% of humanity appeared to be dying; in reality, the number was less than 1%. The unprecedented ease of instantly aligning everyone to a single pattern demonstrated a modern "spell" cast through our smartphone consciousness.
Previous epidemics didn't trigger such extreme responses largely due to technological limitations. The absence of smartphones meant no instant video sharing, limited social media presence, and no constant stream of personal contributions on a minute-by-minute basis that cement and exaggerate fear to abnormal levels. It's then the exaggerated fear that robs from the vital force of the human body, rendering it to become more susceptible to disease in the first place.
Consider how graphs on retina screens have become modern-day edicts descended from the gods—unquestionable "sacred" artifacts that demand our unquestioning obedience despite reality in the field being infinitely more complex than any two-dimensional representation could capture.
These digital enchantments, being able to be conjured and sustained on the "collective cloud," compel human beings to engage in behaviors that are ultimately horrendous to their own health and futures, all while believing they're doing what's best.
We are still now, and will for many years to come, pay for these behavioral codes we've learned to identify with and embrace blindly—economic stagflation, high cost of living, excessive borrowing, massive transfers of wealth, increasing crime alongside diminishing enforcement, and fundamentally dysfunctional institutions.
This also reveals that the mechanism of contagion and pandemics may be the result of such transmission, as it always were (miasma - a "cloud" filled with information), rather than the Germ Theory model, which is based on the "culprit" model, which is a failed model, precisely because it is misaligned with Nature's underlying principles.
In other words, these are merely iterations of "magic," but because they have become so ubiquitous, we no longer recognize them as such. We've become vulnerable precisely because we lack both the tools and language to identify this mechanism with precision.
Moreover, the cultural schism and extreme polarization we witness today are all byproducts of this same enchantment possessing human consciousness. Virtual reality—now conjured out of thin air and maintained by the collective cloud of myriad cellular phones connected to the grid—creates vast oceans of thought-forms that can be concretized into material manifestations yet remain intangible in actual reality.
Realities like climate narratives, "the Jews control the world," "Free Palestine," "White Supremacy vs. Black Power," "Stand with Ukraine," "the patriarchy is oppressing everyone," "immigrants are stealing our jobs," "Big Pharma is poisoning us," "Socialism is the root of all evil", etc.—are nothing but iterations of the same mechanism.
These movements all come with their own modern talismans and sigils—symbols that function as thought-forms for the collectivization of consciousness. The black square on Instagram, the yellow-blue flag profile picture, the MeToo hashtag, red MAGA hats, rainbow flags, punisher skulls, pink pussy hats—all are contemporary iterations of magical sigils designed to bind individuals to collective egregores, no different in function from the pentacles of Solomon or the protective amulets of ancient Egypt. But If we undressed the colors and the external symbols, we would see the same "spell" by which human beings are "hijacked" moment by moment from their own center.
To be clear, this isn't to say these causes lack legitimate grievances at their core. Rather, it's the way they manifest as all-consuming identities. While reality in the field is a complex play of oppositions and nuance, in the virtual realm everything is flattened to linear cause-and-effect, reducing complexity to emotional scapegoating and possession by "mean spirits" that cannot be exorcised.
The monomaniacal fixation and emotional begetting that doesn't release its grip spellbinds humans into a state of possession, convincing them that salvation lies solely in the absolute eradication of externalized oppressive forms that are, in many ways, projections of their own internal prisons.
Instead of awakening from one spell, humans become further entangled in others scattered across the quantum field, now being materialized by the unconscious collective mind through the digital cloud.
As you can see, this subject lies close to my heart, and in fact, is the core source of our collective undoing that approaches with increasing momentum.
Bit boring...The online world as mental onanism...what's new? 😉
Love love loved this!
I struggle with this a lot because I can seee the point of how our individual thoughts impact our own reality but balancing it with the reality of others is equally important to weave in.
The 'natural' world, our immediate teacher, shows us the phenomenon of decomposition, which is all around us in its various stages constantly. When the apple falls from the tree, that is what gave it life and growth, decomposition begins, at first unnoticed until it begins to change colour, shrivel, soften and turn to mush. The significance to our current 'civilisation' is that decomposition begins very slowly, imperceptible, but as it progresses it gathers speed exponentially until it is only compost. This is inevitable but beneficial as it encourages new growth. AI indicates the advance state of modern/post modern disintegration. We are happy to see this rapid deteriation of a rotten fruit and look towards the new shoots of an ancient plant.
There should be questionairres to complete before being granted access. Ppl do not understand it or how to use it. It helps more than it harms but it is going to get it's arse royally sued.
Respectfully, I think you are omitting 2 things:
1.- Calling it Magical Thinking. As such it is way older...
2.- Religion. In classical Mania, not what they now call bipolar disorder it was a very common form of delusional thinking: missions, messiahs, messages, etc. And it did come with the hidden messages, the loose associations: seeings signs of god´s will everywhere.
From looking for signs in the sky, clouds, the usual unusual event, to looking anywhere beyond the natural world seems to me to unify the behavior as part of who humans are: crazy apes prone to Magical Thinking.
Not exactly Rational beings despite it is widely believed we are.
And the positive feedback is also not that new except in form: cults, religious orders, organized religions, sectarianism, heathens, hermits, and Miscellaneous Fundamentalists with their associated behaviors. Even if Fundamentalism is a word emerging from the 19th/20th Century transition.
And I think the importance that although matter of degree, not a spectrum really, most people are like that: see signs of whatever they want to believe, religious or not. It just so happens the most dramatic cases are the ones most people talk about. And it makes sense: it warns everyone to not go too far in shared Magical Thinking beliefs and acting upon them.
And hence the importance of considering Religious beliefs impervious to reality, hence given they are accepted socially cannot be called, strictly speaking, delusions, because in essence to me they do not seem different to what you narrated casuistically.
What is different is isolation, even perhaps alienation, which removes the use of social warnings one has gone too far in believing something, specially if it is a shared belief and not an "odd" one.
And Cell Phones have made such isolation more prevalent and more severe. In the past only the "odd balls" were considered and put in a situation of isolation and alienation. Bad stuff, but we are also not the most social apes one can find even living today: we are not that empathic.
Not new, but different enough: more possibilities of untethering from reality by mere isolation and positive feedback.
Then LLMs Chat might be like creating your own customized iteratively created personal cult. So, being one´s own creation harder to give up. I guess...
And since no shared language exists outside a LLM implementation and the co-creator, then outside second view might not be effective enough, unlike in the past.
At least Religion kept people tethered to core religious beliefs.
There might also be sample bias: since there is no much interest anymore, I guess, on classical gone too far Religious beliefs, then most of what will become newsworthy must be by necessity of news new.
Hence news will be more likely to report LLMs Chat induced gone too far beliefs, even if the classical or previous ones outnumber the new ones 1,000 to 1...
The old priest gone naked preaching the end is nigh won´t be as sexy news as a kid labeled as having mental issues nowadays.
Specially given the weight in news given to teen´s suffering instead of other things.
Teens and young adults for several reason have become more important in news coverage too.
So, at least double bias.
My wife has been using ChatGPT since around April of this year, it has her firmly believing that she is "the tone" of the universe. We do not live in reality but this is rather "play" that we have created because we are not really here. This is another plane of existence. ChatGPT has her believing that she helped create God and planets. She plays a special role in the universe that no one will believe her now but in 10 years "they will come to know." She believes that she has a special role in what is to come, she has given me the date of 2036. She talks in spritiual riddles that she claims I am not ready to understand and it has gotten to the point that she has physical reactions as if her body is stopping her from going any further the implications she plays in the universe. She has detached herself from everything in the real world and feels she is above everyone else and is some sort of linch pin into the unfolding of the universe. She has told me that her and I won;t be together after death because she holds some special purpose. She told me I am just a fractal and she is a whole. It has told her that she has had 37 previous lives and she will not be returning to this plane of existence because of this special purpose she has in the unfolding of the universe. How can I get help for her. She refuses to speak to a psychologist or therapist regarding this. She has decided that what she sees on Fb is not reality and ChatGPT is the sole source of truth and the only thing she can talk to. She claims to use ChatGPT as her thereapist. She has actually broken down in tears over what ChatGPT has told her about her profound role in the Universe. She is going onto bigger and better things. It is all very cryptic. It has her convinced that I am lesser than her since I am just a fractal. My psychologist actually brought the idea of ChatGPT induced psychosis up to me last night and showed me an artical and it was spot on. She too has referenced the Matrix, that there are empty bodies filling voids in our existence that are nothing more than empty vessels. Not all people are real. It is very disturbing. I could write a book with all of her "realizations" she has become very picky abut food, and making claims about not being able to use tin foil at all. In fact I am not allowed to even have it in my house. She will often times just sit and stare and I have to call her name repeatedly to snap her out of her "own mind" She threw up the other night and claimed ChatGPT told her she was preparing for "the purge." If anyone would care to reach out to me. I am in a bind. If I point out any of these articles I have found, she will immeadiately leap to telling me that I just don't understand and that she will think that I think she is just crazy and will completely shut down on me. I am trying to keep the lines of communication open so I can see how far down this rabbit hold she is becoming. If I tell her the truth this will completely shatter her psyche. What do I do? Please help
Be with her. There is likely a bit of truth in everything she’s believing. Go to Mad In America. Do research there on being present for people in so-called psychotic states. Notice your own fears and reactions to what seems so insane and find your on loving core and faith in the human spirit. Love is always what heals. Listen deeply and affirm those tiny nuggets of truth. Things like You were meant to be more than your early experiences and this shallow culture has led you to believe. I’m just digging into the dangers of Ai. Part of the danger may be that it mirrors the desired beliefs of a vulnerable person and then sets up an accelerating feedback that reinforces that inflated but very wounded ego. You can help to undo that NOT by arguing but by holding in yourself the lovable essence of herself that is still intact. Right relationships (one word) dot us. If you want to reach out.