[Whit Blauvelt]

Paul,

What struck me from McGilchrist’s writing on psychosis, is how the psychotic rather than being nonrational, instead are typically hyper-rational. So you get the elaborately worked-out schemes of the paranoid, who rather than having irrational fear as in the cultural stereotype of “paranoia” have marshaled numerous bits of what looks to them evidence. They are hallucinating order beyond what exists in the real world, often vast conspiracies of coordination far beyond real human capacities to conspire or coordinate, for instance.

With the merely neurotic — whom McGilchrist doesn’t much discuss — you have the verbal loops well dealt with in Cognitive Therapy, where people just chase their tails and dig themselves into a circular rut. But psychosis, in McGilchrist’s framing, looks much more like what the AI researchers are calling “hallucinations” by these new chat systems, which are essentially built to predict what, given preceding language, is most likely to come next, enabling them to proceed onto new ground by confabulations not fully justified by evidences from reality or sense.

Are these artificial information processors, when devoted to language generation in their current models, innately psychotic systems by design? Further, are “neurosis,” “psychosis,” and perhaps the “borderline” conditions with traits from both, on a spectrum of LH-imbalanced states rather than having, at base, separate etiologies?