A post consisting primarily of a conversation with a chatbot isn't controversial for the reason you'd imagine it's controversial. It's just artistically void of merit and practically lazy. There is no substance here; you didn't do enough of your own thinking to even offer the audience your own words.
Or, to cycle back to the gwern response you got last time you posted:
Or, to put it less flatteringly, "I harangue the most sycophantic and new-agey LLMs I can find until they finally agree with me, in the absence of any objective feedback or empirical evidence, about something I'm already certain of, and I think this is intellectually valid work which deserves the name of 'findings' and is an 'investigation' far superior to whatever it is 'most people' do, rather than deserving the name 'intellectual masturbation'."
If you genuinely have been spinning the wheels on this idea for over a decade, consider the idea that you're not actually going anywhere. You couldn't even adequately argue for your beliefs to the chatbot; why would you expect it to convince other humans? Regardless of the validity or lack thereof of what you're writing, your current strategy to convince the world (and you seem to genuinely want to convince it) is deeply flawed.
Oh, I wonder if this is just performance art or an attempt to get as many downvotes as possible. It does seem well-tailored to get actual engagement (including from me) without effort or coherence.
The main problem is that instead of trying to understand both what belief and what psychosis is, you treat them as things you don't need to define. If you want to argue that belief is psychosis you should start by define what you mean with belief and psychosis before claiming that there's a relationship between them.
Then either the reader can disagree with your definitions or with the link you are making between them. As it stands your post is a vague attempt at playing with words and the associations you have with them instead of rationalist engagement.
Sorry, this is the kind of content we would have obviously rejected from a new user, it's just that your account was old enough to bypass our filters. Please don't make posts like this (or the kind of comments that you left).
Straight from Google definitions "A belief is a mental attitude that something is true or real, often held without absolute proof."
That sounds like core machinery for a mind, the ability to accept a premise as true. That dosnt sound like somthing that is inherently self negating or inducing of psychosis.
This is not even a serious attempt at a less wrong article. Even if you had a point, you've made it badly.
At last, something with a little substance, although it doesn't even come close to exploring or finding fault with the idea. That's ok, it's something.
Just a little retrospection should make crystal clear that most of your life experience has nothing to do with beliefs. Sure, you can couch it in that language if you want, but do you actually make beliefs out of everything you want and do? If you're in a real-time activity, you can't afford those extra cycles of consciousness -- especially not when doing something like sports, driving, or making love. Are you saying that you actually experience life as a stream of beliefs?
That's where everyone gets stuck. Everyone assumes that I have some particular, possibly off-the-wall definition I'm hoping to promote and argue for. Nope.
I've been studying the nature of belief, and later cultic belief, since the 70s. I have long experience and research into what people are talking about when they use the word "belief" or say "I believe that..."
But I didn't stop there. I looked into what they were doing and what they experienced that "belief" referred to.
The assumption that you can reduce all that to a "definition" is unrealistic.
What's more, the fact that this post was met with deflection and denial by people who definitely do not want to explore the idea proves that they have their own "definitions" of belief that are strongly incompatible with the possibility (and implications) that they developed from an underlying psychosis. I'd far more like to hear about theirs than pretend to promote or argue about some pet version of my own.
You provided a definition that we could start from, if you like. Is that your definition of belief, or was it just convenient -- in the same way it was convenient for me to post an AI chat -- to refer to someone else's definition?
Actually, I'm not engaging on this "At last, something with a little substance, although it doesn't even come close to exploring or finding fault with the idea. That's ok, it's something."
This is so condescending. You've already decided you are right. This attitude doesn't belong on lesswrong.
See
about ninth top comment under first answer:
My sense is that neither of us have been very persuaded by those conversations, and I claim that's not very surprising, in a way that's epistemically defensible for both of us. I've spent literal years working through the topic myself in great detail, so it would be very surprising if my view was easily swayed by a short comment chain—and similarly I expect that the same thing is true of you, where you've spent much more time thinking about this and have much more detailed thoughts than are easy to represent in a simple comment chain.
I've thought about this claim more over the last year. I now disagree. I think that this explanation makes us feel good but ultimately isn't true.
I can point to several times where I have quickly changed my mind on issues that I have spent months or years considering:
I think I've probably changed my mind on a range of smaller issues (closer to the size of the deceptive alignment case) but have forgotten about them. The presence of example (1) above particularly suggests to me the presence of similar google-doc-mediated insights which happened fast; where I remember one example, probably I have forgotten several more.
To conclude, I think people in comment sections do in fact spend lots of effort to avoid looking dumb, wrong, or falsified, and forget that they're supposed to be seeking truth.
It seems to me that often people rehearse fancy and cool-sounding reasons for believing roughly the same things they always believed, and comment threads don't often change important beliefs. Feels more like people defensively explaining why they aren't idiots, or why they don't have to change their mind. I mean, if so—I get it, sometimes I feel that way too. But it sucks and I think it happens a lot.
In part, I think, because the site makes truth-seeking harder by spotlighting monkey-brain social-agreement elements. "
Also:
https://www.lesswrong.com/w/updated-beliefs-examples-thereof?sortedBy=new
and the implications of Less Wrong having such a tag
This entire argument is just unfalsifiable from the outside. If you argue that merely recognizing an idea is a proof of it being a serious, verifiable claim, then you could really make that argument for almost anything you ask Claude to examine and take seriously. The thing separating rational belief from psychotic ideas is that they stabilize and get validated after contact with an internally coherent belief system.
So, yes, if you take the very idea or notion of "belief" to mean it's most dysfunctional and pathological limit, you can rationally conclude that belief under that notion is pathological. This is akin to saying: Arsenic, when you look at its most harmful elemental form, is a dangerous, highly toxic, poisonous chemical. Yes, that's true, but it doesn't make organic arsenic (which is harmless and present in most seafood) dangerous or poisonous.
This is controversial, of course. All the good ones are.
I've been working on this little gem informally for decades, concertedly since 2008. So, please bring more to the discussion than 5 minutes of thought.
Approach it like a scientist would: as a hypothesis, not an authoritative declaration, not even as a claim.
What if belief, in the final analysis, turned out to be the result of psychosis?
What if a healthy human being not laboring under the PTSD of familial, organizational, societal, and cultural abuse has no need or interest in belief?
What if belief is the self-defensive shield we concoct out of nothing to protect us from the dread of the fundamental uncertainty involved in confronting reality as it is?
When one of the smartest AIs can't find a problem with your thinking, it's not everything, but it's definitely not nothing.
Go ahead, make my day... (it actually would!)
Read the chat with Claude, think about it, and find the fault in recognizing that belief as a symptom of psychosis.
https://claude.ai/share/31df73c3-8db6-4c6e-b742-6f02e52c7f88