Pistachio Baklavas — A Short Story About Reverse Psychosis
Part 1
AI Disclaimer: This piece was fully written by a human.
When I developed an intellectual interest in psychosis + schizophrenia, I told myself I wouldn’t talk about my personal experience of psychosis + schizophrenia. I slowly learned it’s a balancing act with that balancing act being in the form of three layers.
Layer 1: Staying purely academic/intellectual with no reference to subjective experience.
Layer 2: Pulling from subjective experience to the extent/threshold that it has relevance to academic/intellectual work (example: abstracting underlying mechanisms).
Layer 3: Going deeply into the subjective experience. This layer is relevant to private spaces such as therapy.
This piece will exist between layer 1 and layer 2.
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 one is a stabilized schizophrenic is if they have meta-cognition and insight into their own condition.
This means the schizophrenic person questions their own logic instead of defaulting to the usual confirmation bias loops. The schizophrenic’s meta-cognition minimizes their mind's autopilot tendency to seek evidence of the delusional belief even where there isn't evidence.
But like my psychologist (a post-doc at a psychosis and schizophrenia clinic) says, no two schizophrenic minds are the same. You met one schizophrenic, you met 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 sign of how stable someone with schizophrenia is… 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 an external verifier.
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 in neuroscience). Gödelian formal logic aligns with the notion that some truths have the inability to be proven within the system; but 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, with the latter being the case for AI (IBM: What are AI Hallucinations?). If AI and psychotic/schizophrenic cognition can both be understood as probabilistic Gödelian systems, what happens when an AI + a psychotic/schizophrenic person, two Gödelian limited cognitions, 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. 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.
As we see the emergence of AI dynamically interacting with psychosis prone human cognition, observations 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 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 full answer for why I seek it out, I was able to theorize in proximity to it.
Only when I read “Quantum-like logics and schizophrenia” and it’s isomorphic relationship to John Wheeler’s work did I understand why I felt I was both fully illogical and logical at the same time until a external verification point confirmed which was reality.
There’s a lot of things online about schizophrenia’s relationship to quantum mechanics and it’s often too speculative for my taste. But “Quantum-like logics and schizophrenia” did two things: when first reading it in March 2024, I noted how while it was theoretical paper, it cited external experiments, and secondly, it applied quantum mechanics and quantum-like logics metaphorically (and maybe even isomorphically) rather than literally.
Some relevant concepts in quantum mechanics and its metaphorical logic involves:
Quantum Superposition: Prior to measurement, particles exist in multiple potential states simultaneously.
Wave - Particle Duality: Depending on the observational setup, particles exhibit wave-like (interference patterns) or particle-like (distinct paths) behavior.
Observer Effect: The act of measurement collapses the superposition into a definite state.
The system exists in various possibilities aka potentialities prior to observation. The act of measurement, the act of observation collapses the wave aka field of potentialities into a particle. The act of measurement stabilizes the system. While quantum wave-particles deal with material reality for physicists, we are talking about metaphorical quantum-logic (and perhaps even isomorphic); in this metaphorical relationship, reality can be interpreted as a hallucination (field of potentialities) that stabilizes upon the act of measurement.
One does wonder what Einstein would have thought of his son’s schizophrenia, what Oppenheimer would have thought of his own schizophrenia as well, upon knowing that quantum-like logics can be applied to the cognitive experience. One does wonder how practically far this metaphorical relationship goes considering people with psychosis and schizophrenia can experience time non-linearly and warped.
I go up to the counter. There’s another woman this time. I hold up a piece of what’s in the brown bag and ask her if this is a samosa or a baklava. She tells me it’s a samosa. I tell her I asked for baklavas. She asks what kind. I tell her two small pistachio baklavas. I smile at her and ask if she (her coworker) looked at my Indian face and just went autopilot on the samosa. It got one chuckle out of her — exactly one. I ask her what she wants me to do with the samosas. She says keep them. I go back to the table. The cashier who did my order originally comes to my table and asks if she really gave me samosas. I told her that she did. She takes the bag from my table and walks off so fast that she doesn’t even hear me saying that she left the green chutney behind.
Just like it can be the case for some schizophrenics, my cognitive experience doesn’t fit neatly into the DSM. Instead I experienced reverse psychosis during my one and only cognitive break. Instead I experience reverse schizophrenia.
When I had my psychotic break I wanted my internal logic to be wrong. Instead of doing what I should have been doing, (which was reinforcing my internal logic as a psychotic) I sought out evidence to invalid it. I wanted reality to tell me my internal logic was wrong. I wanted external verification to tell me I was wrong. Instead the thing I was “delusional” about turned out to be true. My internal logic aligned with external reality at the peak of psychosis. I waited for external verification to prove I was wrong but it never arrived.
So now this mush in my head, instead of doing what schizophrenics are more prone to do, which is reinforcing their internal logic regardless of what reality is… it instead seeks out on autopilot constant evidence to invalidate my internal logic. I want to be proven wrong. But every single time, whether it’s what’s going on in reality around me or my psychologist or psychiatrist, I’m proven to not be illogical. Instead of trying to make me realize I’m being illogical due to delusions, they have to convince me I’m logical.
Prior to deviating to exploring cognition, culture, and computation via an artistic lens, I was hell bent on pursuing the double major in CS + physics along with the systems neuroscience major. I quickly learned traditional education does not always fit people like me which validated the very schizophrenia education stats I was also hell bent on not becoming. During this phase I told a professor I always find myself questioning my ideas. He said that would work to my advantage because testing the logic of my ideas is good for research. …
Maybe if I tried proving myself wrong in a neurotypical way aka restricted it to the intellectual work I do. But it happens all the time on autopilot. I’m constantly seeking out evidence to invalidate my logic while being convinced I’m illogical and logical at the same time; and when reality or people externally, whose epistemic integrity my system classifies as reliable, proceed to verify I’m actually not illogical but in fact logical, I have to sit with myself and process that because my brain truly believes she is illogical and logical at the same time — in a superposition state.
The Indian in me questioned if a samosa is a samosa. Because my brain decided to play tricks on me — I — a Punjabi — couldn’t recognize a samosa. And that’s the moral of the story. If you have schizophrenia that decides — without consulting you — to take a path that flips the illness on its head — you end up not being able to recognize a samosa. I will NOT tolerate being held prisoner to my brain. I am COMMITTED to making sure I NEVER misrecognize a samosa EVER again.
Snapshots from Sam Mann’s November 2023 film The Paradox of Sanity/Creativity:
