Hallucination: A double-edged sword
Who said that?
If there’s a writer who’s neutral on AI, I’ve yet to meet them. Most, it seems to me, see it as problematic at best and a mortal threat at worst.
One of the accusations levelled against it, and not just by writers, is its annoying habit of hallucinating, aka, making shit up when it doesn’t know the facts.
In this regard, I’d say AI is very human, and anyone who disagrees is welcome to tune in to any recent episode of JD Vance or Kristi Noem giving their unhinged version of events following an ICE shooting or kidnapping.
Hallucinate is a comparatively recent addition to English. Etymonline puts its arrival at 1640; Merriam-Webster puts it even later, at around 1834. We took it from the Latin hallucinationem, “wander (in the mind), dream; talk unreasonably, ramble in thought.” Latin probably took the word from the Greek alyein.
One possible meaning of both the Latin and Greek versions was “prophecy”.
Initially, hallucinate was a transitive verb - to hallucinate meant to cause visions or imaginary perceptions in someone else. But that meaning got shunted aside as the study of the human mind emerged and language was needed to explain the strange things it can get up to without resorting to supernatural causes.
While hallucinations are often perceived as the sole preserve of those with psychological disorders, Psychology Today reports that about 13 percent of adults hear voices at some point, compared with only 0.5 to 1 percent of the population who have schizophrenia.
As you’ll know, hallucinations are generally regarded as a problem, but they can also lead to profound insights. In the mid-1800s, August Kekulé stumbled upon the hexagonal ring structure of the benzene molecule via a day-dream, as he called it, of a snake biting its own tail. His insight paved the way for aromatic chemistry, which led in turn to the creation of synthetic dyes, plastics and pharmaceuticals, aka the modern world.
A daydream or a hallucination? Either way, you have it to thank for the colour in your clothing, the plastic in your recycle bin (and your bloodstream), and the drugs that are keeping you functional.
Or maybe that wasn’t a hallucination, exactly. But the point stands; when William James published his seminal book The Varieties of Religious Experience, he made the radical claim that a vision (or hallucination) ascribed to mental illness, fever, or any other extreme condition, was rendered no less valid for that. Its value, he said, lay in its utility, not its source.
British psychiatrist RD Laing - often called an “anti-psychiatrist”, though he rejected the term - made the same point repeatedly. For him, someone described as schizophrenic was to be taken seriously when describing their personal experience, rather than simply be labelled “unwell”. Schizophrenia could be seen as a valid response to a world that leaves individuals trapped in impossible or absurd situations. For example, someone who says they have a nuclear bomb inside them is considered mad, but a five-star general who boasts of his ability to drop a nuclear warhead on his nation’s enemies is considered sane.
While the rest of us cope by shutting much of our absurd experience out of our conscious lives, many people are simply incapable of that.
One of Laing’s stories, which had a profound impact on me, was of a patient who was brought to the clinic where Laing worked, in what appeared to be a psychotic state. Laing’s colleagues were in favour of medicating him; Laing, however, insisted on placing him in a safe room and allowing the psychotic episode to play itself out. This, it duly did. When interviewed, the now recovered man reported his experience within that state. He found himself on an unfamiliar shore, he said, gazing out to sea. A small boat appeared, and he stepped on board, whereupon he drifted out to the open ocean. After a time, a raging storm descended upon him, and he was sure the boat would sink and that he would drown. Instead, the boat withstood the storm and, after it had subsided, returned him safely to shore.
Laing’s point was simple. What the man experienced, although psychotic by one accepted standard, appeared to be a profoundly healing episode. Drugs, he said, would have interrupted it and almost certainly maintained, if not exacerbated, whatever led to the psychosis in the first place.
Other cultures positively embrace altered states. Shamanism, the contacting of the spirit world while in an altered state, is practiced to heal the sick, communicate with spirits, and guide the dead on the way to the next life. It’s likely that humans have engaged in shamanism since at least the Stone Age, 10,000 years ago, if not earlier.
Today, shamanism is rapidly dying out, although efforts to revitalise it (among, for example, the Sakha and Tuvan people of Russia) are under way. Even as a confirmed atheist, I feel a certain glow of happiness about this. I’m not sure what it is that gets touched through shamanism, but I’m pretty sure that my view of the world, provided courtesy of a dominant culture that has spent the last few hundred years subjugating other cultures as well as the natural world, carries the seeds of its own destruction in its narrowness and self-satisfied certainty.
I’m not saying hallucinations are always a good thing. Mostly they’re trouble. And one of my greatest fears is that the world is devolving into a collectively hallucinatory state, where people no longer trust what they see with our own eyes, but are in thrall to sinister figures with cameras, microphones, massive media platforms and - in the worst cases - armies of goons to act on their basest desires.
I hope we wake up soon.
Bits and specious
Should it be “John being here makes me happy” or “John’s being here makes me happy”? Oliver Kamm opts for the former, and excoriates those who insist on the latter.
Was Bob Dylan anticipating Kristi Noem when he wrote Like a Rolling Stone? Her day (and that of her despicable, sycophantic, diplomat-on-a-chrome-horse loving cronies) is, I sincerely trust, coming.
Quote of the week
The underlying solution - repeated again and again - is to recognize that your brain is producing the visions. They do not exist. Nothing exists except as your consciousness gives it life.
Timothy Leary, The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead