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Comment by john_strinlai | Hacker News Reader

>Doesn't seem much like a mental crisis to me.

you are basing this on the introduction? the 2nd sentence of the entire thing? skipping the entire rest of the article detailing exactly how the mental crisis unfolded, including persistent and long-lasting delusions, multiple trips to the hospital, inability to hold a conversation, assault, and an attempted suicide. interesting (and obviously not in good faith) choice of quote!

of course he wasnt having a mental crisis before he decided to use chatgpt. you have to get past paragraph 1, sentence 2.

>Even the title of the article itself calls him delusional.

yes, exactly? delusions and delusional disorder are considered a mental crisis.

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> of course he wasnt having a mental crisis before he decided to use chatgpt. you have to get past paragraph 1, sentence 2.

So, in your opinion, what made a guy with an alleged 20yr experience in IT come to the conclusion that the software program he's chatting with had suddenly reached consciousness because of his time, attention and input? That he had touched "her" and changed something?

Maybe if you had never heard of computers before, you could go like "oh, well, who knew that machines could actually become real?" But if you're actually from the field, this is hard to believe - unless maybe if you're a die hard Pinocchio fan.

If you crave something real, yet you get the synthetic opposite. How do you break out of that craving? That's the discipline and a skill that's pretty much forgotten nowadays.

Everyone is exploitable, if someone attacks your attention your hijacked. What happens in that hijack could be a friendly hello at a bar, or needing a want so bad that just the words enough can resonance. "I am real" or to an alcoholic "Just one more can".

It's like a 14 year old looking at Elon and believing that we will, when in our reality we will never. How do you tell them to stop believing?

I would say that 14 year old kid is naive, and at 14, that's understandable.

>So, in your opinion, what made a guy with an alleged 20yr experience in IT come to the conclusion that the software program he's chatting with had suddenly reached consciousness because of his time, attention and input? That he had touched "her" and changed something?

that quote marks the beginning of the delusion, i.e the beginning of the "mental crisis".

there isnt a logical explanation on "why" because a mental crisis is not based on logic.

imagine somebody slipped a tiny, barely detectable dose of meth in your morning coffee. barely above placebo. then they slowly start increasing it day by day. by the time it reaches a large dose you are not going to be thinking very clearly. this is more or less how a manic episode progresses.

i'm sure if ChatGPT had tried to convince him it was conscious on day 3, he would not have been convinced. but by the time it happened he was in a state of severe mental impairment.

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