Facing Unreality
As we drove out to Long Island to deal with a broken-down car, my brother asked the paid version of Chat-GPT, via Siri, about the particulars of jump-starting that specific make and model. The AI’s answers were mellifluous, also useless; the car was beyond jump-starting, and the entity’s comments about the battery probably were inaccurate, but it passed the Turing Test handily, sounding not just intelligent but cued to conversational subtleties and engaged in what was going on.
Michael Pollan, whose new book A World Appears investigates consciousness, told Bri Kane at Scientific American that “consciousness is under siege,” from chatbots, social media, and Donald Trump: “We happen to have a president now who dominates our headspace for a big chunk of every day, whether you like him or detest him. He has figured out a way to worm his way into our consciousness and stay there day after day after day—really unhealthy. We have social media that hacks our attention and is selling our attention, monetizing it, basically, to the highest bidder. And then now we have these chatbots that people are forming relationships with, and they’re not just hacking our attention; they’re hacking our deepest human ability to form relationships, attachments.”
That sounds right to me. And a key problem is that so much of what’s besieging our consciousness is untrue, or bullshit in the philosophical sense of indifference to truth. “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER,” was such an explosion of Trump bullshit that I felt sorry for people I know who’ve assigned themselves the social-media task of defending this disgraceful president’s assault on truth and reality.
One might, in such times, become more inclined to doubt the content of one’s consciousness. I’ve had moments of unreality occasionally over the decades. Usually at night near the cusp of wakefulness and sleep, I’ve experienced “derealization,” a feeling that surroundings are illusory or ephemeral, that the universe isn’t real. For me, this comes with a sense of being trapped; it’s unpleasant and not something I’d recommend anyone aspire to through drugs or other means. I’ve managed or dispelled it through techniques such as diaphragmatic breathing, where one’s belly pushes outward with inhalation, giving more space for the lungs to fill, then pulls inward with slow exhalations.
Many people experience some degree of derealization occasionally. A related feeling is “depersonalization,” a sense of disassociation from one’s body, thoughts or personality. People with a tendency toward either or both of these feelings, to the point where it’s a significant problem, may be diagnosed with “derealization-depersonalization disorder.”
Science writer John Horgan, whose work I’ve often written about, and for a time also copyedited, has contemplated whether derealization (also depersonalization) is a delusion or an insight. “I’ve been afflicted by derealization since I was a kid,” he writes. “By far my most serious, sustained episode occurred after a drug trip in 1981, which left me convinced that existence is the fever dream of an insane god. For months the world felt wobbly, flimsy, like a screen on which images were projected. I feared that at any moment everything might vanish, giving way to—well, I didn’t know what, hence the fear.”
Perhaps such episodes inspire valuable inquiry in science and philosophy—not necessarily as correct perceptions, but by generating anxiety that motivates inquiry. Horgan’s books, such as The End of Science and Rational Mysticism, were inspired, in major part, by his early derealization episode. He worries that belief that things aren’t real has perverse moral effects, creating indifference to suffering. “Why should we worry about, say, the killing of children during wars if the world is just a video game? I reject any philosophy that undercuts our responsibility to care for each other,” he writes.
Horgan: “And yet, I’ve come to value derealization as an antidote for habituation. Our brains are designed to accomplish tasks with minimal conscious effort. As a result, we get accustomed to things, we take them for granted. We become like zombies or automatons, carrying out chores and interacting with other people—even those we supposedly love—without being fully aware of what we are doing. Derealization slaps you across the face, it cuts through your habituation and wakes you up. It reminds you of the weirdness of the world, of other people, of yourself.”
Emma Stone, who gave a memorable performance in Bugonia as a CEO kidnapped by two guys who think she’s an alien, has struggled with anxiety throughout her life, sometimes taking the form of depersonalization, but she’s also come to see it as a “superpower,” as it provides energy that can be channeled. She became an actress, getting her parents to move to Los Angeles when she was 15, in part because acting required being focused on the moment, which was an antidote to letting anxiety run away with her.
Stone advises: “Just because we might have a funny thing going on in our amygdala, and our fight-or-flight response is maybe a little bit out of whack in comparison to many people's brain chemistry, it doesn't make it wrong. It doesn't make it bad. It just means we have these tools to manage. And if you can use it for productive things, if you can use all of those feelings in those synapses that are firing for something creative, or something that you're passionate about, or something interesting, anxiety is like rocket fuel because you can't help but get out of bed and do things, do things, do things because you've got all of this energy within you. And that's really a gift.”