Pistachio Baklavas — A Short Story About Reverse Psychosis

It was a spring Sunday afternoon and I paid a visit to an Ethiopian cafe. I hadn’t eaten anything all day because my appetite had become fairly low since my schizophrenia stabilized. But now I needed a small bite.

Sam: Are those baklavas?

The cashier reached for a brown paper bag.

Cashier: Yes.

Sam: Can I have two?

One of the signs a schizophrenic is in a stabilized state is the degree to which they have meta-cognition and insight.

Meta-cognition involves thinking about your own thinking and the ability to observe and reflect. Schizophrenia commonly disrupts the ability to self-reflect and question your own thoughts and beliefs. Insight on the other hand involves the awareness one has of their own mental health condition and the symptoms.

• Meta-cognition (APA): awareness of one’s own cognitive processes, often involving a conscious attempt to control them.

• Insight (APA) : in psychotherapy, an awareness of underlying sources of emotional, cognitive, or behavioral responses and difficulties in oneself or another person.

The presence of meta-cognition means the schizophrenic person can step back and question their own logic instead of defaulting to the usual confirmation bias loops. Meta-cognition, in the context of schizophrenia, interrupts the mind's autopilot tendency to seek out or construct evidence for the delusional belief, even when there isn't sufficient evidence.

But like my psychologist (a post-doc at a psychosis and schizophrenia clinic) says, no two schizophrenic minds are the same. You meet one schizophrenic, you meet one schizophrenic. The DSM’s clinical categorization of mental illnesses can’t capture all the complexity that spans the spectrum. But you still need categories so that clinicians can refer to medically vetted standards rather than assessing patients based on their own individual stance.

Another indicator of stability in someone with schizophrenia is the extent to which they are open to external feedback or what I best understand as: external verification. While psychosis and schizophrenia involve abnormalities in thoughts, behaviors, emotions, beliefs and sensory perception, I will make thoughts and beliefs the center of my case study. Reception to external verification helps to intervene in self-reinforcing confirmation bias loops aka delusions. The relevance of external verification can also be understood through the lens of Gödel's incompleteness theorems.

Think of a Book of Grammar Rules that states:

“In the Book of Grammar rules all the rules are true.”

However, you must leave out the following line:

“This grammar rule is not true.”

The line – “This grammar rule is not true.” – is a TRUE statement in itself.

Despite its truth that line cannot be included in the Book of Grammar Rules and thus the book will never recognize its own limitations.

The Book of Grammar Rules will never be fully COMPLETE.

Thus, Gödel's incompleteness theorems, based in mathematical logic, states that within any consistent formal system, there will always be true statements that cannot be proven within that system (first theorem), and that the system cannot prove its own consistency (second theorem). The system would need external verification.

But there are limitations and nuances due to Gödel's incompleteness theorems’ application to formal logic.

Human cognition, like AI, is not formal (rule-based) but instead probabilistic, as is the case for predictive processing and active inference frameworks in neuroscience. Gödelian formal logic aligns with the notion that some truths have the inability to be proven within the system; however, for probabilistic systems instead it’s about stabilization and destabilization of meaning instead of provability. If formal Gödelian systems relate to undecidable logic then probabilistic systems relate to paradox, psychosis, meta-cognition and hallucinations.

For human cognition, hallucinations are sensory perception-based rather than semantic or language-based, with the latter being the case for AI (IBM: What are AI Hallucinations?). If AI and psychotic or schizophrenic cognition can both be understood as probabilistic Gödelian limited systems, what happens when two distinct but similarly limited systems (an AI + a psychotic or schizophrenic person) interact?

A human’s prompt input shapes the AI’s prompt output and the AI’s prompt output shapes the human’s prompt input in the form of feedback loops. AI is also argued by some researchers to be Gödelian limited due to its inability to step outside itself, reflect inwards and verify its own logic. Psychotic and schizophrenic minds are also prone to the inability to confirm their own logic without external verification and like AI are also prone to confirmation bias loops. It is established that human cognition sits on the psychosis spectrum with each of us having different thresholds (Psychiatric News). When two Gödelian limited cognitions interact, their dynamic interaction won’t just result in them pushing each other to greater illogic or logic in the context of a spectrum. Instead the experience of illogic, logic, stabilization and destabilization may be a topological one. They will loop into being each other’s external verifiers; the extent to which the human is destabilized while locked into a AI-human loop can be influenced by how they dynamically interact with external verification from outside the loop.

A spectrum is understood as a straight line moving in linear progression where intensity decreases and increases. Topology on the other hand studies what stays never changing while under continuous deformation in the context of shape. For example, OCD and schizophrenia both involve thought loops. While the thought loops for OCD are tight and highly structured, the thought loops for schizophrenia and psychosis are more irregular and unstable. If OCD's thought loops are certainty-seeking (for example repeatedly checking if the oven is off), schizophrenia’s thought loops involve ontological exploration. If OCD’s time signature is rigid, repetitive and clock like, schizophrenia’s is distorted, fragmented, non-linear and warped. If OCD’s failure mode is external verification without exit (“did I look the door” —> checks again —> “did I lock the door” —> checks again), schizophrenia’s failure mode is feedback without grounded external anchoring. If OCD’s strength is precision under uncertainty, as I am personally familiar with, then schizophrenia’s strength lies in alternative-world modeling or generating connections between structures that are loosely connected. A person’s cognitive topology can best be understood by looking at the individual nature of their cognitive experience. For example, if one person has both autism and bipolar disorder, instead of understanding their cognition one topology at a time, the topology of autism and bipolar disorder would need to be understood as intersecting + interacting in the context of the individual.

As we see the emergence of AI dynamically interacting with psychosis prone human cognition, observation of users shows that meta-cognition and insight into one’s own state is no longer a fitting measurement for understanding how stable someone is. This is because user profiles on reddit, twitter and more can be found modeling what the AI is doing to their psychosis prone human cognition, and at times in a intellectually brilliant way. Users have insight into their own condition, but depending on their topology it can come paired with distortion of the initial idea or destabilizing experiences such as grandiose delusions. In order to develop new means of understanding stability we would first need to update our understanding of psychosis to fit the emerging cultural context, as will be demonstrated in part 2. This can also be understood as having relevance due to it being established that culture can shape how a person’s psychosis and schizophrenia expresses itself.

Drawing from Gödel's mathematical theorems and applying it to psychotic and schizophrenic cognitive experiences can help one to grasp the need for external verification checkpoints to avoid self-reinforcing feedback loops. This can be understood in the context of abnormalities in sensory perception but also when mental health professionals serve as external verification points for self-reinforcing thoughts and beliefs. The dynamic impact of external verification is further complicated by the reality that not all who experience psychosis and schizophrenia are receptive to it; it is not a matter of will.

Cashier: What type do you want?

Sam: What do you have?

The cashier held the brown paper bag in her hand explaining what she had.

Sam: I’ll take the two small pistachio baklavas.

She put something into the bag and gave it to me. We had a LITERAL conversation about the two small pistachio baklavas while she held the brown paper bag in her hand.

I sat down at the cafe table. I opened the brown paper bag. Wow, these baklavas look different. They look like four samosas with green chutney in the bag. But I had a whole conversation about baklavas with the cashier as she held the brown bag in her hand ready to put the baklavas in it. So these are probably baklavas. Besides I only learned about baklavas in the last year and have had them only twice. That’s not enough time to remember what they look like. These aren’t samosa. They are baklavas. I — a lifelong Punjabi — gaslighted myself. The cashier had a conversation with me on the spot about baklavas. She said they are baklavas so they are baklavas. But I’m constantly questioning my logic. So I’m stuck in a superposition like state where they aren’t baklavas but they are because an external person aka external verification point told me they are. But I know these aren’t baklavas. But she put it in the bag two seconds after our conversation about baklavas.

Neuroscientists like my former psychiatrist of three years, who are familiar with schizophrenia as abnormalities in predictive processing and active inference, were initially confused why I sought out external verification on autopilot as a means to break from this state of superposition; it got to the point where he had to ask me directly how I saw my schizophrenia express itself because he could not understand what was going on in the black box that is my schizophrenic mind. As a neuroscientist, his questioning of my experience of uncertainty forced me to confront why I sit with the uncertainty no matter how uncomfortable rather than overfitting or overgeneralizing (terms borrowed from AI). While I don’t have the complete picture for why I seek it out (yet), I was able to theorize in proximity to it.