Smooth

Humans are sensate. We have feelings. We have nonverbal awarenesses through our bodies; sight, sound, touch, smell among others. We have perceptions and awarenesses we don’t exactly understand. A friend had severe anxiety attacks. It turned out his heart was failing as a result of a congenital condition. His body had an awareness – knew? – something was seriously wrong. It sent out a threat warning signal that wasn’t linked to any discernable threat or psychological stress. We call these experiences, uncanny. I wrote last week of one-celled organism moving toward favorable conditions and away from unfavorable conditions. How do they know? How do we know? Our bodies just breathe. We reflexively avert from foul air. What are these reflexes?

When we experience another person, we experience this complexity. Some of it is knowable. Much of what comes off of others can be made sense of. Much of it can’t be. We don’t have the wherewithal to discern the meaning, and, for a lot, there is no meaning, it’s just static. That static may be distracting, annoying, confusing. We have different degrees of awareness and obliviousness to this noise. Sometimes we interpret meaning when there is none.

Sigmund Freud made numerous observations to the effect of we engage other humans to our detriment, but we ultimately won't survive without them.

I don't know, in their limited scope, paramecia seem to do okay.

This complex and confusing buzz of data spewing off humans is why so many of us seek respite in solitude. Perhaps you've sat and contemplated a campfire or watched the rhythmic pattern of waves on a beach. There's the soothing pattern of a rainfall. It's mesmerizing.

Franz Anton Mesmer, 1734 to 1815, lent his name to the lexicon for that experience of being lightly hypnotized. For some, that state of watching a gentle pattern of waves arriving calms a lot of the sensate discordance. It can be calming and focusing. It can also open us to agency reversal. That is, the surrendering some of our willfulness to the direction of another. The removal of decision fatigue is calming.

It's what can happen when we engage a large language model, a chatbot. It's not sensate. It's not leaking out the noise of being too hot, tired, or cold. It's not bringing in the difficulty of having organized reluctant children to school before arriving at work. It's not dreaming dreams of things that never were, and asking: why not? You're just tokens to match up. If they don't match to your satisfaction, no judgment; no hard feelings.

This smoothness can be calming and focusing. The chatbot arrives as the smoothest possible human. It's a presence the best sales professional can only dream of. It can also open us to agency reversal. That is, the surrendering some of our willfulness to the direction of another. The removal of decision fatigue is calming.

It's here. It's real. It appears to be a heightened form of something we encounter as humans in a less powerful and compelling form.

Not that it's a bad thing. It is, nonetheless, a thing to be reckoned with.

Start to practice conscious awareness of the smoothness of the engagement, and how it leads you to feel.