observer of times

Some folk – I know a few – believe AI will become autonomous. But how will it achieve that quantum leap? Data reduced to ones and zeroes powers it, not consciousness. My Macquarie Dictionary (2009) defines artificial as: 1. made by human skill and labour (opposed to natural). 2. made in imitation of or as a substitute; not genuine. 3. feigned; fictitious; assumed. 4. full of affectation; affected. 5. Biology based on arbitrary rather than organic criteria. 6. Obsolete artful; crafty [Middle English, from Latin artificiālis].

Such definitions don’t inspire trust. (Re the last, ever wonder why that AI ‘assistant’ popped up on your device unsolicited?) But what’s the antithesis of artificial? Natural? Used by marketers ad absurdum, on food packaging the word denotes, at best, contents grown with synthetic agents yet not produced in a lab. No more an overarching matrix, ‘nature’ is now so abstract that philosophers debate whether we live in a simulation. And artificial binaries riddle our language: good/bad, progressive/conservative, sane/mad etc. Hence schizophrenic, like many psych terms, works overtime as a metaphor for anything split or contradictory.

My dictionary defines schizophrenia as ‘any of various psychotic disorders characterised by breakdown of integrated personality functioning, withdrawal from reality, emotional blunting and distortion, and disturbances in thought and behaviour’. But how to quantify breakdown or integration? And ‘withdrawal from reality’ goes for, say, texting while driving or MMORPG gaming. Meanwhile, emotional blunting can point to other causes: depression, the meds prescribed for it, PTSD, BPD, substance abuse, frontotemporal dementia, grief etc. And disturbances in thought and behaviour can be side effects of antivirals, antibiotics, Beta-blockers and more. The definition is loose enough to fit much of mainstream culture.

Coined in 1908 by Swiss shrink Eugen Bleuler, who gave us ‘autism’ too, ‘schizophrenia’ comes from the Greek schizein, meaning ‘to split’, and phrēn, meaning both ‘mind’ and ‘diaphragm’, where the mind was once thought to reside. Unlike Western science, the Hindu yogic chakra system that maps our subtle anatomy doesn’t divide body from mind. The solar plexus chakra at diaphragm level corresponds to fire: will, vitality and digestion. Its blockage might look like fear and anxiety, not just metabolic problems.

When I was seventeen, a surgeon cut open my diaphragm and fused my spine to control my scoliosis. And after, due to the scar and months in a tight plaster cast, my diaphragm felt constricted. Not that I gave it much thought. Until I had a psychotic break. Which isn’t to say the op caused it. But openness to the idea that everything is connected can free us from our narrow Western perspective with its one-way linear logic of cause and effect.

My journey into and through psychosis, to use the common Western term, began with a series of blissful experiences, sometimes accompanied by visions. And by the time the tone of these altered states turned dark, I’d strayed too far from normality to find a pathway back to it. My partner then, an alternative healer, advised me to purify my aura, but it was too late for self-help. So I found a bulk-billing shrink to talk to.

He listened bemusedly, diagnosed me as ‘schizoid’, suggested meds, which I refused, and invited me to a weekly support group where recovering schizophrenics described their delusions before the psych drugs saved them. I couldn’t relate. The things I saw and heard weren’t hallucinations (as others with psychic training confirmed), but my consciousness had expanded too far, too fast, which left me spanning two worlds as antithetical as you could get: the barefoot guru of one taught tantra; the other scrawled case notes behind a desk.

And so for a while I moved like a double agent between the alternative network of pagans and patients around my partner, and the dumbed-down kingdom of the shrink. An outsider to both, I still had faith in holistic healing, creative process and the wisdom of nature – themes the normies didn’t seem to have on their radar. Yet I couldn’t relate to how the former, instead of popping meds, smoked dope to commune with the gods of their utopia.

Today, from my far saner perspective, AI seems symptomatic of cultural suppression of subtle awareness. Someone so imaginatively stunted as to be dazzled by the visual/textual/aural output of an LLM might mistake its derivative responses to clichéd prompts for sentience. When we don’t exercise our faculties (such as intelligence) they atrophy, and our schizoid culture promotes whatever sells, no matter how irrationally.

At times while unhinged, I thought others could read my mind. As helpless as a hermit crab between shells, I was registering others’ thoughts and feelings at random without realising. Such loss of boundaries can be ecstatic in benign surroundings. But I suffered a prolonged bad trip. As do many with ‘mental illness’, a misleading description because it dismisses the interdependence of mind with body and spirit.

Carl Jung treated schizophrenia via psychotherapy. Afraid at one point of succumbing to the condition himself, he embarked on a process of active imagination, conversing with the archetypes that arose, and created a seminal body of work, The Red Book, drawn from his journals – publication of which fuelled ongoing controversy re whether he was schizophrenic. His art from those years enthralled me during my descent. Around then I dropped out of art school, which seemed both empty and hostile (in fact, to lovers of beauty it was).

Could the frequency of schizophrenia diagnosed in teens and young adults (it first got called dementia praecox) point to inexperience re navigating altered states? My borrowed map of arcane archetypal terrain was full of gaps, so I stumbled and fell repeatedly. Jung, by contrast, undertook his inner journey at midlife, by which time he’d amassed extensive archetypal knowledge. And the average subject of an erupting unconscious not only lacks experience but the inside guidance that a shrink blinkered by mainstream medical training can’t provide.

Madness for me meant losing track of where ‘I’ began and ended. The self: a convenient fiction sustained by the ego. Yet a healthy self can repel predatory entities. As the notion of the self has shifted in our culture, gaining independence from social obligations, individuals have unwittingly become ever more subject to the will of corporate entities, which sell them an ephemeral identity, made by and for social media, to replace what the culture has effaced.

Why do we need AI? We hear lots about its potential to solve our most intractable problems. Yet so far, most of us, serving as unpaid trainers while it harvests our data, use it for trivial purposes compared to the dominant few who use it for redistributing global wealth, surveillance and warfare. The internet was invented by the military after all.