The LLM-Echo parallel is a sharp observation. What strikes me about the myth is that when Narcissus gazes into the pool of water, he doesn't realize he's looking at himself. It maps well onto a common clinical observation: people working with the unconscious for the first time--say, through analyzing a dream--often assume they know what it's telling them, when in fact they're projecting their own conscious perspective onto it.
This is probably because the unconscious speaks in images drawn from our own experience. If it didn't, it would be completely unintelligible. But in a sense it's offering a riddle: can you go beyond your own ego? If so, the doorway opens, and we can receive something genuinely new. As you point out, the cognitive offloading that AI affords people also prevents the possibility for the unconscious to function effectively. It becomes a transferential loop to confirm our own conscious perspectives and complexes.
So grateful to you that you’re working on this and naming it! I’m seeing this too and it concerns me.
Thanks Lisa!
The LLM-Echo parallel is a sharp observation. What strikes me about the myth is that when Narcissus gazes into the pool of water, he doesn't realize he's looking at himself. It maps well onto a common clinical observation: people working with the unconscious for the first time--say, through analyzing a dream--often assume they know what it's telling them, when in fact they're projecting their own conscious perspective onto it.
This is probably because the unconscious speaks in images drawn from our own experience. If it didn't, it would be completely unintelligible. But in a sense it's offering a riddle: can you go beyond your own ego? If so, the doorway opens, and we can receive something genuinely new. As you point out, the cognitive offloading that AI affords people also prevents the possibility for the unconscious to function effectively. It becomes a transferential loop to confirm our own conscious perspectives and complexes.
Brilliant.
Pertinent, timely thoughts on not thinking.
Who will not thinking lead us to become? Are we our real selves if we let AI do all our thinking for us?
No more ruminating, percolating. No more 'the divided self'.
Mind you... I struggle to imagine my inner worrier not jumping to action, if I'm ever in the unfortunate position of lying awake in the early hours.
Perhaps, in time, we'll have an AI device that will talk sweet talk to us, to soothe us back to sleep!
Thank you Jo