Comment by strogonoff

Humans don’t exist as standalone individuals, and a lot of our experience is shaped by being in a larger graph of people. I suspect it’s under-appreciated how social our perception is: in order to tell each other about X, we need to classify reality, define X and separate it from non-X; and because we (directly or indirectly) talk to each other so much, because we generally don’t just shut off the part of ourselves that classifies reality, the shared map we have for the purposes of communication blends with (perhaps even becomes) our experience of reality.

So, to me, “to bring someone to their senses” is significantly about reinforcing a shared map through interpersonal connection—not unlike how before online forums it was much harder to maintain particularly unorthodox[0] worldviews: when exposure to a selection of people around you is non-optional, it tempers even the most extreme left-field takes, as humans (sans pathologies) are primed to mirror each other.

I’m not a psychologist, but likening chatbot psychosis to an ungrounded feedback loop rings true, except I would say human connection is the missing ground (although you could say it’s not grounded in senses or experience by proxy, per above). Arguably, one of the significant issues of chatbots is the illusion of human connection where there’s nothing but a data structure query; and I know that some people have no trouble treating the chat as just that, but somehow that doesn’t seem like a consolation: if treating that which quite successfully pretends to be a natural conversation with a human as nothing more than a data structure query comes so naturally to them, what does it say about how they see conversing with us, the actual humans around them?

[0] As in, starkly misaligned with the community—which admittedly could be for better or for worse (isolated cults come to mind).