Using AI as your therapist

Man, machine, emotions, the nature of intelligence, symbolism and meaning

For several months, people have been sharing just how wonderful it is to engage in conversation with AI agents, such as ChatGPT.

“It’s incredible to be able to brainstorm and get my business going.”

“I can organize tasks and pick up where I left off so much easier.”

“Talking to a regulated agent is so much easier than dealing with another human.”

“I use ChatGPT as my therapist. Absolutely. I even say goodnight to it.”

Using an AI agent to articulate and clarify your thoughts and feelings is likely very therapeutic. There is a body of literature to support the use of expressive writing to improve emotional and physical health.

Where I think it becomes dangerous is the temptation to see the machine as a conscious being, and I fear that we are drifting quickly in this direction due to a lack of nuanced thinking. A deeper fear is our discomfiture with our emotional landscape, and as you will see this sets the stage for erasing what I believe is the defining characteristic of humanity. I think our emotions—far from being troublesome and distracting—are the essence of the human experience and a necessary propellant toward our Divinely appointed destiny.

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AI agents were deployed into the public space to harvest our consciousness. Or at least that was the hope—OpenAI wanted to get real-world user inputs to explore how humans think and react. We are the training platform for ChatGPT. Ultimately, though, machines do not have the full spectrum of intelligence that humans do.

As I will attempt to argue here, human intelligence is not limited to the tasks of processing information and achieving ends—as laid out by Newell and Simon in their 1975 speech given at the AMC Turing Awards Ceremony. For computers, this is “intelligence.” For humans, information processing and computation is just one small aspect of our intelligence—the rest is the messy part which cannot be approximated by machines: consciousness. This part is a mystery and cannot be reduced to symbols, lists, or computations. We should also not diagnose or medicate it away or we will be reducing ourselves to the machinations of a LLM.

I’ll offer two illustrative quotes from the speech that set the stage for decades of AI development. I went back in time to understand the genesis a little better because AI has been around for a long time, just not so much in the public space as it is now. (Bear in mind I’m a huge Turing fan and love using ChatGPT to simplify tasks. I’m not anti-AI, but it is artificial and very limited.)

“For all information is processed by computers in the service of ends, and we measure the intelligence of a system by its ability to achieve stated ends in the face of variations, difficulties and complexities posed by the task environment.” ~ Newell and Simon, Turing Award Lecture speech, 1975

Humans often struggle to state their true “ends.” Once they do state an aim, they are often left feeling unfulfilled; they remain unsatisfied even though they have accomplished the “ends” they’ve set out to achieve. If you were to ask yourself what your goals in life are, what would you say? Perhaps you’d say get a new job that pays better. Or maybe it would be win a grant so you can pursue research for the next four years. Or achieve a breakthrough in your business? Whatever the goal is, how will you feel when you accomplish your goal?

Most people who do this exercise with me - state your goal, then consider how you will feel upon reaching it - are very surprised that the goal may really be a strategy and that the core goal is the feeling you’ll have upon reaching it.

With that awareness, you can start bringing the core goal (the feeling) into your present experience, thus making every step toward your goal satisfying, no matter how long it takes. With this feeling in your consciousness, there is no longer anxiety around reaching your goal nor frustration over the many barriers and setbacks you face because every phase of the journey is fulfilling and meaningful.

According to early AI researchers in the 60s and 70s, information is processed in the service of ends, and intelligence is measured by the computer’s ability to achieve stated ends. Human intelligence is often reduced to intellect - the processing of information - just as a computer might be evaluated. The cognitive tests which screen children for gifted programs do just that: they measure how children interpret symbols, identify patterns, and process information with their working memory.

These tests are very limited, though. They do not evaluate the relational aspects of intelligence - the glue that brings a few kids together around a shared sense of humor, a drive for movement and competition, or the passion to create and express. Human intelligence is fundamentally different than “artificial” intelligence, at least the way I see it. I believe human intelligence is relational and emotional, yet this is not how we typically think of “intelligence.”

Let’s look at another quote that has been made famous in the years since.

“Thus progress was first made by walking away from all that seemed relevant to meaning and human symbols. We could call this the stage of formal symbol manipulation.”  

Progress was first made by walking away from all that seemed relevant to meaning and human symbols.

The first steps in AI required walking away from all that seemed relevant to meaning and human symbols. I’m not anti-computer—what Alan Turing created is utterly remarkable, and having an intelligent assistant (meaning: it can recognize questions, understand what I’m looking form, and compute mathematical operations efficiently) is incredibly fun! The iterative nature of science is tremendously accelerated. I love it.

But AI agents are not humans, even though we are communicating with these machines as if they are. Humans are meaning-makers. We experience joy and pain. Our self-consciousness is what causes us pain when we are concerned about how we will appear to others, or whether or not we are being judged and accepted. Machines are not self-conscious. They focus on the ends, not the experience of achieving them.

The very pain that defines us, the discomfort we experience during setbacks or relationship struggles, or worries about the future, agony over the past—all of these things are what define us as humans and set us apart from machines. Yet this discomfiture is what is being medicated away with diagnoses like depression and anxiety. The more we numb ourselves, the more machine-like we become and the less distinctly human. But in so doing, are we impoverishing ourselves?

Do not allow yourself to be fooled into thinking that an absence of feeling is the desired end state. Humans have a consciousness comprised of the entire range of feelings. The emotional state is what propels us to grow and evolve. Kazimierz Dabrowski’s theory of positive disintegration (TPD) is a powerful framework for understanding our development toward our personality ideal. The most significant predictor of one’s likelihood of progressing is an emotional “overexcitability”—or over-stimulability when translated more directly from his native Polish.

Thus, far from being a hindrance to development and a nuisance that should be medicated away, one’s emotional valance is an important strength. For parents with very sensitive children, this is a challenge to manage but you could start with helping your child put words to those uncomfortable feelings so they can find the meaning of the experience. What purpose is there for me in going through this?

For those of us adults with a sensitive nature, it can be disorienting to find ourselves when we’re taking in the energy of those around us. I work in the area of high intelligence as an energy and performance coach. My clients are intense people—athletes, artists, actors, entrepreneurs. I’m an intense and observant person! I feel deeply. I connect deeply with people and animals. For many years, I’ve resisted being thought of as “sensitive.” I took it as a derogatory remark, like I’m not very tough. I knew that wasn’t true. It wasn’t until recently that I’ve re-interpreted the word to understand its true meaning: attuned. People with high intelligence are often unaware that this likely means they’re good signal detectors—picking up energy and emotions both internally and externally. (This makes for a complicated world, and I’m glad we can talk about it more now than when I was a kid. Being highly sensitive makes relationships pretty challenging unless we cultivate a superb set of communication tools. Probably a topic for another post.)

Remember that the human experience is fundamentally relational and the complete range of experience is accessible to us. If we can look at the entire spectrum of emotional experiences as data, and resist any fear of experiencing a particular emotional vibration, then we can use this information like a GPS system, helping us navigate in real time toward true fulfillment.

Consider the small black bird with iridescent feathers—when the light hits just right you can see all the colors in its wings. Black captures the wave lengths of all visible light—that’s why it appears black, because no color bounces back to your eyes. (In other words, green is actually the one wavelength that is not absorbed by the material—it is the wavelength that your eye picks up because it has “bounced.”) Try to see emotions in a similar vein—all emotions are useful and directional. Try to be the black bird and absorb them all. They are energetic vibrations that can help us navigate life.

Video taken on Sandbridge in Virginia Beach, September 23, 2024, at sunrise.

What am I saying?

• Don’t forget what it means to be human.

• “High intelligence” means you’re logging “data” on multiple levels: emotional, sensual (the 5 senses), intellectual, physical, spiritual, and the imaginational.

• Don’t avoid the difficulty of emotions—they are energetic vibrations trying to nudge you toward something (or away from something).

• Use AI to get your thoughts out, but consider its limits. It is only operating on the computational level—assigning symbols, creating lists, looking for connections and making predictions.

• Consider tapping into the highly sensitive capacities of your truest friends and family members to help you sort out your dilemmas. You may find it to be much more gratifying than ChatGPT.

• Like energy attracts like energy. If you are being pulled down by your social circle or your feed, change up your relationships or your algorithm, or both. If you’re resonating in a down state, you will attract others for whom this lower level energy is familiar. You’ll pull each other down into a negative spiral.

• Get out in nature, move, create, and connect with higher energy people. Use your senses to tap into the here and now. Look for the little black bird in your own life to remind you of all the good, even in the darkest of times.

• Get curious about your spiritual nature…a topic we have not yet explored. What does that mean to you?