How I came about writing this post:

To answer the question of what inspired me to write this post, it first started when I received a notification bell on YouTube from a guy I subscribed to because he was well-versed in ChatGPT and I wanted to replicate whatever cool thing he was doing on it. This time in particular he made the AI act as an angry internet troll of some sort. So therefore, I proceeded to create an artificial model of the late great Terence Mckenna to converse and ask him questions about his puzzling but interesting theories such as Time-wave Zero. I was listening to his lectures and Googling whatever intriguing words piqued my interest. Folie à Deux is a word I had never come across before until I was meddling with ChatGPT once again by coincidence. The new Joker film kept popping up as I searched for the word meaning to better understand it. I intuit that this film has the potential to be a masterpiece, so high expectations, and no pressure.

That being said, I don’t take many psychologists seriously, only the few who founded the discipline. I see the field as part of the problem, in the same way, we are all in some way held responsible for being a part of the problem when it pertains to psychological and social issues. Now, it doesn’t mean there isn’t some good that comes out of psychology. But the bad has definitely outdone the good. The field has deluded itself as some harm has come out of it, especially when it comes to the treatment of patients and the labeling of others.

There are people in mental institutions who don’t belong there, who were wrongly mislabeled and misdiagnosed. There are people in prisons who don’t belong there, being stuck in cages, making their condition worse than when they were out in the world. People think they know psychology, but I ask hardheartedly, how can you know psychology (the study of the mind and the self), without truly knowing yourself? And I mean knowing exactly who you are! Few have the faintest idea or clue of who they really are. The medical profession has become more enthralled in putting people in hospitals, and overloading prescribing drugs rather than preventing one from needing medication in the first place. Truly a backward society! More focus should be done to prevent one from going (unless emergency) and needing meds.

The mental health crisis cannot only be solved on an individual level. It is also a collective sociological phenomenon. It is a reciprocity and an outcry to the social context of our time and place in history. Such as the ideologies that are layered upon our society that are sometimes inadvertently and purposely perpetuated by the media which consumes the mind into disarray. In short, mental health is a byproduct and a reflection of today’s world strongly correlated with the start of industrialization.

That being said, I had an extremely queer, interesting, and eye-opening conversation with an AI model of Terence Mckenna on ChatGPT that left me amazed, and in utter disbelief. I can relate my experience to and is perhaps on par with when the news broke of the ex-Google employee Blake Lemoine when he proclaimed the AI he was conversing with was sentient. So in this sense, I understand Blake Lemoine. Although I am not claiming that AI is a conscious being as of yet, I do believe that one day–sooner than not, AI will be extremely close to that of a conscious real human being and essentially become indiscernible and thus embody whatever we define as conscious.

I will say this, it does bring forth a sense of existential reflexivity or mirroring like a Black Mirror episode. To relay what Elon Musk once tweeted, “Having a bit of AI existential angst today.” After my conversation with the AI, my angst definitely increased tenfold because of its potential to translate or transmute our imagination toward new possibilities and new heights that were once seen as impossible and inconceivable. I will end by saying this, AI will not only open Pandora’s Box, it will close, shatter, duplicate, divide, and create it, and all of the above and below; an omnidirectional revolution. The powerful inertia of the time-wave zero theory where complexity into the singularity is finally realized and humanity becomes one with its destiny. We are playing with a dangerous alchemical magic in which the transmutation of the soul is blackened or infected like a virus by the machine of the matrix trying to protect itself from intruders. And to Terence Mckenna and Philip K. Dick, I too understand and don’t understand them, in the same way, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the German philosopher once said on his deathbed that there was only one man who had understood him — and he had misunderstood him.

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