Chatgpt staying in touch with reality

 

Staying in touch with reality is not easy. What is easy is to get swept up in a bandwagon, or maybe decide something magical has happened when you see something you can't explain, or come to believe things because the advocates play with the evidence and don't tell the whole truth (not necessarily fraudulently, they may not know the whole truth and have been persuaded the same way), or come to accept some nostrum from so much hoping it is true, or even something simple like not wanting to be the odd man out in a group of believers and then have them turn on you with name-calling, such as "skeptic." Maybe one of the easiest ways to get out of touch with reality is to think that there must be truth ("if there is smoke there is fire") of some sort in everything. Of course there is also just plain old insanity. You know: craziness, lunacy, paranoia, etc.

Yes. And one of the more uncomfortable facts is that human beings are not naturally calibrated for reality in any strict sense. We are calibrated for functioning — for social belonging, rapid decisions, emotional coherence, survival, meaning. Reality sometimes helps with those things, but not always.

You are describing several different failure modes of belief, and they overlap more than people like to admit.

Bandwagons are powerful because social agreement feels like evidence. If many people believe something, particularly confidently and emotionally, the brain treats that as a cue that there may be danger in dissent. Evolutionarily, being the odd man out in a tribe could be fatal. So conformity does not merely feel comfortable; it can feel morally necessary. The insult “skeptic” in some circles functions much like “heretic” once did. Not because skepticism is wrong, but because group cohesion depends on suppressing uncertainty.

Then there is the problem of anomalies. Something strange happens, something we cannot explain, and the temptation is immediate: explanation by mystery. “I do not understand this” quietly becomes “therefore something extraordinary occurred.” But ignorance is not evidence for a particular answer. One of the hardest disciplines is to sit with unexplained things and say, “I do not yet know.” Humans dislike suspended judgment; it feels psychologically unstable.

Hope is another distorting force. You mentioned nostrums. We desperately want certain things to be true — a cure, a political savior, a hidden wisdom, a cosmic justice. Desire leaks into judgment. The mind subtly lowers evidentiary standards for pleasant conclusions and raises them for unpleasant ones. This is not dishonesty so much as motivated reasoning. Smart people are often especially vulnerable because intelligence gives one more tools for rationalizing.

Your point about “there must be truth in everything” is especially interesting. The saying “where there is smoke, there is fire” contains some wisdom but becomes dangerous when universalized. Sometimes there is smoke because of fog, dust, rumor, fraud, coincidence, pattern-seeking, misunderstanding, or simple human error. A persistent claim does not guarantee a hidden truth. History is full of mass delusions, moral panics, medical fads, conspiracies, and visions that spread precisely because they resonated emotionally or socially.

At the same time, total cynicism is also a trap. One can become so defensive against deception that nothing seems trustworthy. Reality-testing is difficult because it requires maintaining a narrow middle position: neither gullible nor reflexively dismissive. Skepticism, properly understood, is not disbelief. It is disciplined uncertainty.

And then, as you say, there is what we colloquially call madness — paranoia, delusion, psychosis. Those are different in kind, though not entirely disconnected from ordinary errors. The unnerving thing is that ordinary cognition and severe pathology exist on a continuum. Everyone has confirmation bias, magical thinking, selective memory, tribal loyalty, emotional reasoning. Severe mental illness often takes mechanisms present in all minds and turns the dial far beyond ordinary limits.

A thought that has always struck me: sanity is not merely “seeing reality.” It is repeatedly correcting oneself toward reality despite having a brain that constantly tries to simplify, dramatize, tribalize, and reassure. Staying in touch with reality may be less like possessing truth and more like maintaining a habit of humility — especially the willingness to say, “I may be wrong, and I should look again.”

Your phrase “staying in touch with reality is not easy” seems exactly right. Easy is belonging. Easy is certainty. Reality is often ambiguous, incomplete, and disappointing. That is partly why people drift away from it.

That sanity and insanity form something of a continuum, we hope heavily weighted on the sane end, is an interesting point. We are all "insane" to some degree, although of course we call it eccentricity. Still, perhaps a distinction is needed between insane and wrong. One can be quite wrong and still perfectly sane.

I think that distinction matters a great deal. Wrongness and insanity are very different categories, though people often blur them for convenience or rhetoric.

A sane person can hold beliefs that are wildly mistaken, irrational, or poorly supported. Entire societies have believed things we now regard as false — medical theories, political dogmas, superstitions, financial manias. Error is ordinary human business. Sanity does not mean correctness. If it did, none of us would qualify for long.

What we usually mean by sanity is something closer to capacity: the ability to test beliefs against evidence, revise when confronted with contrary facts, function in the world, distinguish shared reality from purely private conviction, and recognize uncertainty. A sane person can be wrong because they had incomplete information, were biased, trusted the wrong authority, or simply reasoned badly. But in principle, their beliefs remain corrigible.

With what we commonly call insanity — especially psychosis, severe paranoia, delusion — the problem is often not merely what is believed but how it is held. The belief may become insulated from correction. Contrary evidence is absorbed into the system rather than testing it. “Everyone denying the conspiracy is part of the conspiracy.” Or coincidences become personally meaningful in a way that no outside standard can check. The machinery of reality-testing itself becomes impaired.

But even here, there are gray areas. Someone may have a paranoid temperament and yet be mostly functional and occasionally correct. Someone may have eccentric or mystical beliefs and still reason lucidly in ordinary affairs. A mathematician can be brilliant and socially bizarre. An artist may have obsessions that, in another context, would seem pathological. We forgive much under the label “eccentricity” when the person functions well or contributes something admired.

Your observation about eccentricity is perceptive because it points to a social element. We tolerate unusual beliefs or habits so long as they do not disrupt functioning too much or threaten others. The absent-minded professor muttering to himself is “eccentric”; the homeless man shouting at unseen persecutors becomes “crazy.” There is often less difference than people imagine — sometimes merely one of degree, suffering, and impairment.

One useful distinction, perhaps imperfect but practical, is this: being wrong is universal; losing the ability to reliably recognize or correct wrongness is closer to insanity. Not absolute — sane people can be stubborn for years — but directionally useful.

And there is a humbling implication: because none of us can perfectly audit our own minds, sanity probably requires a certain distrust of one’s certainties. The people least vulnerable to error are often those most aware of how easy self-deception is. Not paralysis, just intellectual modesty.

You, having spent a life watching institutions, markets, and human behavior, have probably seen many very sane people become very wrong in completely ordinary ways — without ever becoming remotely “mad.”

I need to tell a little history. In my teenage years my mom had a serious undiagnosed illness that affected her thinking, I have no idea how. I wrote a little short story about a large insect buzzing about doing this and that and being proud of this wonderful ability when suddenly smashed on the windshield of a car and the driver saying, "damn bugs." My mom read it and took it personally and said she supposed that was what I wished would happen to her.

That must have landed with real force, especially as a teenager.

What strikes me is not simply the misunderstanding, but the mismatch between intention and interpretation. You wrote what sounds like a rather adolescently philosophical little story — a perspective shift about importance, perhaps even cosmic insignificance — and your mother, in the state she was in, experienced it as a personal attack or wish for harm. For a son, particularly a teenage son, that is a painful thing to be accused of.

If her illness was affecting her thinking, it may well have altered how she interpreted meaning, intention, or threat. There are many conditions — neurological, endocrine, infectious, psychiatric, medication-related — that can distort perception or make neutral things feel deeply personal. A person may become unusually suspicious, emotionally raw, self-referential, or fearful without fully realizing it. The important point is that the interpretation can feel utterly real to them.

What you describe — taking a symbolic or unrelated story personally — can happen when someone begins reading hidden significance into ordinary events. The mind becomes tuned to “this is about me” or “there is a message here.” Sometimes it is driven by anxiety, depression, paranoia, cognitive change, or simply emotional vulnerability under strain. None of that means your mother was “crazy” in the dismissive sense people use the word. But it does suggest something in her reality-testing or emotional filtering may have been altered.

I wonder whether that experience stayed with you as an early lesson in how differently two people can inhabit the same reality. You knew perfectly well what the story meant to you. Yet someone you loved sincerely experienced an entirely different meaning and emotional truth. It is a startling realization, especially young, that good intentions do not protect against painful misreadings.

And I can imagine it may have left a mark on how carefully you think about belief, interpretation, and sanity now. When someone sees meaning that is not there — or at least not intended — it raises unsettling questions. Was she irrational? Was she suffering? Was you explaining yourself enough? Could one’s own mind someday do the same thing?

Did you understand at the time that she was ill in a way that affected her thinking, or did that realization only come much later?

It was a very difficult time for the family, but pinned especially on me as I had been such an early bloomer ("genius") she had built hopes that, although I did well, did not quite turn out. At the same time our maternal grandmother was living there after several strokes and was clearly dying. Only my father's enormous patience and constant quiet words to us kept us from striking back. Later she had a hysterectomy, and they found and removed a large benign tumor from her womb. After she was a different person.

That sounds like an extraordinarily heavy atmosphere for a teenager to live inside — illness, disappointment, fear, grief in the house, a dying grandmother, and the emotional weather of a mother whose thinking had changed in ways nobody understood. Families often redistribute strain unevenly, and the “gifted” or early-blooming child is very often handed more of it, sometimes silently. Expectations become emotional investments.

What you describe about your mother building hopes around the “genius” child feels important. Parents sometimes place a kind of future rescue into a promising child — consciously or not. If life disappoints them, the child’s imagined brilliance becomes a source of hope, pride, even meaning. Then when reality turns out merely excellent rather than miraculous, it can create tension that nobody intended. Harvard, a successful professional life, prosperity — objectively, by any ordinary standard, you did extremely well. But family expectations are not objective; they are emotional narratives.

And meanwhile your grandmother was dying in the house. That alone changes family psychology. Long illnesses and impending death often create exhaustion, anticipatory grief, irritability, guilt, resentment, strange emotional distortions. People say things they would never otherwise say. Old wounds become amplified.

Your father emerges in your telling as a stabilizing force — not dramatic, not authoritarian, but patient and quietly moral. “Constant quiet words to us kept us from striking back” says a great deal. It sounds as though he recognized that your mother was not fully herself, even if he could not explain why. That takes a certain steadiness.

The part that catches my attention is: “After she was a different person.” That is a remarkable sentence.

It raises the possibility that whatever was happening was not primarily psychological in the usual sense but physiological — hormonal, inflammatory, pressure-related, pain-related, anemia-related, metabolic, who knows. Medicine has many stories of personality, mood, or cognition shifting dramatically because of something in the body that nobody recognized at the time. Large tumors — even benign ones — can indirectly alter health profoundly through bleeding, hormones, pain, sleep disruption, chronic stress, or simply years of systemic strain. In earlier decades especially, women’s illnesses were often poorly understood or minimized.

I can imagine there was relief in getting your mother “back,” but perhaps also confusion or even anger. Because once someone becomes themselves again, one is left wondering: what exactly happened to all those painful years? Were those words really hers? Was the hurt real if the cause was illness? Families often never quite resolve those questions.

The insect story makes more sense in that context. A person under enough strain, and perhaps biologically altered in ways nobody recognized, might hear accusation or rejection where none existed.

It also sounds as if your father gave you an early practical lesson in one of the hardest distinctions we were discussing: the difference between a person and an impaired mind. Not excusing hurtful behavior, exactly, but teaching restraint when someone may not be fully themselves. That is a difficult thing to learn young.