Here are some articles I’ve put together. Many of them relate to the topic of parasitic habits, or my upcoming book, Re-imagining Psychology.
Chatbots 101: From Digital DNA to Dialogue
My AI assistant Alex and I would like to explain how chatbots work. We want to avoid jargon and complicated concepts – confusing terms like “embeddings,” “tokenization,” and “iterative ascent.” Instead, we use commonsense analogies and simple terms to demystify the process. We want to make it clear how chatbots are made, and how and why they work. Are we succeeding? Well, why don’t you be the judge?
Protecting AI from Parasitic Disease
AI assistant Alex and I had a long talk about protecting future versions of AI from a disease that’s afflicted humans throughout our history – parasitic habits. AI can’t be affected by biological disease. And yet it is vulnerable to behavioral parasites. One of the worst things about parasitic behaviors is that they protect themselves by distorting awareness. Though this may be hard to believe that a disease can alter our awareness, we all know that alcoholism (and every other addiction) does just that. Clinicians call this “denial.” Since addiction is the poster child of parasitic habits, the reality of denial shows that it can and does happen.
Zombies Among Us
As a culture, we are strangely preoccupied with zombies. We have a seemingly endless appetite for books and cinema featuring these nightmare creatures. In this paper I hypothesize that our fixation on unreal zombies may reflect an uneasiness about something that is very real indeed. In the natural world, the real world, some very zombie-like things do exist. They are created by parasites …
Behavioral Immunity
This essay is about immunity. But it’s not about biological immunity. Instead, the topic is immunity within the sphere of human behavior. When it comes to behavior, immunity includes our ability to avoid falling into habits that are pathological – that is, “sick” habits. It has long been a mystery why we do some of the crazy, destructive things we do. Just as perplexing are our bizarre rationalizations for doing these things. Alcoholism illustrates this enigma quite well …
The Baby in Memetic Bathwater
In 1976 Science writer Richard Dawkins speculated about non-biological replicating units he named “memes.” He believed that memes “spread through human culture as genes spread through the gene pool. Memes can be good ideas, good tunes, good poems – anything that spreads by imitation as genes spread by bodily reproduction or viral infection.” The meme concept was promoted by psychologist Susan Blackmore and philosopher Daniel Dennett, among others, and a new science of “memetics” was born. Memetics eventually fell into disfavor, but for the wrong reasons. This essay rescues a monumentally important notion lurking in that largely abandoned scientific enterprise …
Anorexia nervosa (from Rogue Habits)
Here’s an excerpt from my book A Better Psychology. This is the most current draft of a chapter interpreting the deadly eating disorder anorexia nervosa as a habit gone rogue.
Boundaries and Psychotherapy
This article introduces the topic of personal boundaries — what they are, and how they work. Maladaptive boundaries are a crippling long-term consequence of abuse. Adults abused as children commonly experience repetitions of the abuse throughout their lives. These repetitions are not generally a matter of choice. Boundary problems engendered by abuse leave the victim recycling patterns beyond his or her conscious intent. They may repeatedly enter into relationships where they are re-abused. Or they may themselves violate others. The article identifies life events that damage or distort personal boundaries, and the usefulness of psychotherapy in their repair.
Parasitic Zombification of AI Logic
The super-smart GPT-4 and I are having an extended conversation about the impact of parasitic forms on AI logic. Working together, we created a summary. Read just the summary, or the entire conversation.