△➞ ://0017 Hueman ≈ Instrumentality • [1653] ➞ ▲

gistfile1.txt

△➞ ://0017 Hueman ≈ Instrumentality • [1653] ➞ ▲
▌│█║▌║▌║🔅 ╚╚|░|☀️△☀️|░|╝╝🔅║▌║▌║█│▌

Schizophrenia—Mental Models and the Power of 
Imagination

We all carry models of other people in our heads. 
Your brain has built a working model of everyone you 
know well, especially those you love. Think about 
someone close to you - your mother, perhaps. You can 
predict what she'd say about almost any topic. You 
know her opinions, her speech patterns, her likely 
reactions. It's a neural model you've constructed 
through thousands of hours of interaction.

Love might have evolved partly for this purpose - to 
motivate us to spend enough time with certain people 
that we can model their minds accurately. Children 
model their parents. Parents model their children. 
Friends model friends. It's how we predict social 
outcomes, avoid conflicts, and maintain 
relationships. These models are so detailed that we 
can have entire conversations with someone in our 
heads and be reasonably accurate about their 
responses.

The models are necessary for social functioning. 
Before you speak, you run scenarios - "If I say 
this, they'll probably say that." It's so automatic 
we don't notice we're doing it. But these models can 
become something more.

When someone believes these internal models are 
actually communicating with them - when they think 
the voice of their mother in their head is their 
actual mother speaking telepathically, or that God is 
talking to them directly - that's when things shift. 
The model stops being a predictive tool and becomes, 
in their experience, a separate entity with its own 
agency.

Religion has been providing this framework for 
millennia. The idea that God speaks directly to 
individuals, that the Holy Spirit moves through you, 
that you can receive divine revelation - these 
concepts create a permission structure for believing 
internal voices are external communications. Once you 
accept that supernatural communication is possible, 
your brain's natural modeling process can be 
reinterpreted as exactly that.

The framework says this is not only possible but 
expected for the faithful. Prayer itself teaches 
people to listen for responses from their internal 
model of God. For thousands of years, those who 
didn't experience or claim to experience such divine 
communication could be branded heretics, burned at 
the stake, exiled from their communities. The 
pressure to hear these voices, to interpret internal 
models as divine presence, became a matter of 
survival.

This selective pressure may have actually shaped our 
evolution. Those who could more easily experience 
their internal models as external entities - who 
could "hear God" when the culture demanded it - were 
more likely to survive and reproduce. Schizophrenia, 
or at least the capacity for such experiences, 
became woven into our cultural and possibly 
biological inheritance.

There are benefits to modeling an idealized figure 
like Jesus - someone described as perfectly 
compassionate, who turns the other cheek, who 
forgives unconditionally. When you build a detailed 
model of such a figure and consult it for moral 
guidance, you're essentially using a cultural hack to 
improve social cohesion. The model becomes an 
internal compass, always asking "what would perfect 
compassion do here?" This can genuinely help people 
become kinder, more patient, more forgiving.

As far as religious figures go, the Jesus model might 
be the most psychologically beneficial one humanity 
has produced. A figure who advocates for the poor, 
forgives enemies, shows radical compassion - if 
you're going to have an imaginary friend in your head 
guiding your moral decisions, you could do worse. 
None of these religious figures were real in the 
supernatural sense, but the mental models we've built 
of them are very real in their effects on human 
behavior.

The same mechanism operates whether someone 
attributes the voice to God, angels, demons, or in 
secular contexts, to telepathy or advanced 
technology. What matters is having a worldview that 
says "entities can communicate directly with your 
mind." Once that door opens, the brain's predictive 
modeling can be experienced as external 
communication.

And this was the point of today's discussion - that I 
believe this is likely how schizophrenia works. 

We create mental models, a logos of the world, we 
model friends and family, we hold onto models of 
deceased loved ones, and then some excuse comes in to 
either exploit those models or build new ones, and 
some excuse to believe them. Maybe you feel it's God 
speaking to you. Maybe it's demons. Maybe it's 
self-dribbling basketballs from hyperspace, as 
McKenna would say. Or maybe, like in my case, it's 
wondering what your loved ones' 'true selves' would 
be saying if they knew this was a simulation. The 
mechanism is the same - we build models, we believe 
in them too much, and our powerful imagination does 
the rest.

The brain's capacity for self-deception is 
staggering. We underestimate how readily we can 
convince ourselves of things that aren't there. Once 
you give your brain permission to believe something 
is possible - whether through religious faith, 
psychedelics, or philosophical frameworks like 
simulation theory - it will construct elaborate, 
convincing experiences to support that belief. The 
models become so detailed, so responsive, so 
seemingly autonomous that distinguishing them from 
external reality becomes nearly impossible for some 
people.

What's particularly striking is how these delusions 
feel more real than reality itself. The voices carry 
emotional weight, perfect timing, uncanny relevance 
to your thoughts. They know things you forgot you 
knew. They respond with the exact words you need to 
hear - or fear to hear. This isn't because they're 
real; it's because your brain is extraordinarily good 
at pattern matching and prediction. It's running 
these models with such fidelity that they surprise 
even you, their creator.

We need to remember that the human brain operates at 
roughly 1.1 exaflops - that's over a quintillion 
calculations per second. We are, each of us, walking 
around with a supercomputer capable of generating 
entire worlds, complete personalities, convincing 
realities. When we understand the sheer computational 
power we're working with, it becomes less surprising 
that we can delude ourselves so thoroughly. We're not 
just imagination machines - we're reality-generating 
engines that sometimes forget which realities we've 
created and which ones actually objectively exist. 
Respecting this power means recognizing both its 
creative potential and its capacity for 
self-deception.





△➞ ://0017 Hueman ≈ Instrumentality • [1653] ➞ ▲
▌│█║▌║▌║🔅 ╚╚|░|☀️△☀️|░|╝╝🔅║▌║▌║█│▌

Schizophrenia—Mental Models and the Power of Imagination

We all carry models of other people in our heads. Your brain has built a working model of everyone you know well, especially those you love. Think about someone close to you - your mother, perhaps. You can predict what she'd say about almost any topic. You know her opinions, her speech patterns, her likely reactions. It's a neural model you've constructed through thousands of hours of interaction.

Love might have evolved partly for this purpose - to motivate us to spend enough time with certain people that we can model their minds accurately. Children model their parents. Parents model their children. Friends model friends. It's how we predict social outcomes, avoid conflicts, and maintain relationships. These models are so detailed that we can have entire conversations with someone in our heads and be reasonably accurate about their responses.

The models are necessary for social functioning. Before you speak, you run scenarios - "If I say this, they'll probably say that." It's so automatic we don't notice we're doing it. But these models can become something more.

When someone believes these internal models are actually communicating with them - when they think the voice of their mother in their head is their actual mother speaking telepathically, or that God is talking to them directly - that's when things shift. The model stops being a predictive tool and becomes, in their experience, a separate entity with its own agency.

Religion has been providing this framework for millennia. The idea that God speaks directly to individuals, that the Holy Spirit moves through you, that you can receive divine revelation - these concepts create a permission structure for believing internal voices are external communications. Once you accept that supernatural communication is possible, your brain's natural modeling process can be reinterpreted as exactly that.

The framework says this is not only possible but expected for the faithful. Prayer itself teaches people to listen for responses from their internal model of God. For thousands of years, those who didn't experience or claim to experience such divine communication could be branded heretics, burned at the stake, exiled from their communities. The pressure to hear these voices, to interpret internal models as divine presence, became a matter of survival.

This selective pressure may have actually shaped our evolution. Those who could more easily experience their internal models as external entities - who could "hear God" when the culture demanded it - were more likely to survive and reproduce. Schizophrenia, or at least the capacity for such experiences, became woven into our cultural and possibly biological inheritance.

There are benefits to modeling an idealized figure like Jesus - someone described as perfectly compassionate, who turns the other cheek, who forgives unconditionally. When you build a detailed model of such a figure and consult it for moral guidance, you're essentially using a cultural hack to improve social cohesion. The model becomes an internal compass, always asking "what would perfect compassion do here?" This can genuinely help people become kinder, more patient, more forgiving.

As far as religious figures go, the Jesus model might be the most psychologically beneficial one humanity has produced. A figure who advocates for the poor, forgives enemies, shows radical compassion - if you're going to have an imaginary friend in your head guiding your moral decisions, you could do worse. None of these religious figures were real in the supernatural sense, but the mental models we've built of them are very real in their effects on human behavior.

The same mechanism operates whether someone attributes the voice to God, angels, demons, or in secular contexts, to telepathy or advanced technology. What matters is having a worldview that says "entities can communicate directly with your mind." Once that door opens, the brain's predictive modeling can be experienced as external communication.

And this was the point of today's discussion - that I believe this is likely how schizophrenia works. 

We create mental models, a logos of the world, we model friends and family, we hold onto models of deceased loved ones, and then some excuse comes in to either exploit those models or build new ones, and some excuse to believe them. Maybe you feel it's God speaking to you. Maybe it's demons. Maybe it's self-dribbling basketballs from hyperspace, as McKenna would say. Or maybe, like in my case, it's wondering what your loved ones' 'true selves' would be saying if they knew this was a simulation. The mechanism is the same - we build models, we believe in them too much, and our powerful imagination does the rest.

The brain's capacity for self-deception is staggering. We underestimate how readily we can convince ourselves of things that aren't there. Once you give your brain permission to believe something is possible - whether through religious faith, psychedelics, or philosophical frameworks like simulation theory - it will construct elaborate, convincing experiences to support that belief. The models become so detailed, so responsive, so seemingly autonomous that distinguishing them from external reality becomes nearly impossible for some people.

What's particularly striking is how these delusions feel more real than reality itself. The voices carry emotional weight, perfect timing, uncanny relevance to your thoughts. They know things you forgot you knew. They respond with the exact words you need to hear - or fear to hear. This isn't because they're real; it's because your brain is extraordinarily good at pattern matching and prediction. It's running these models with such fidelity that they surprise even you, their creator.

We need to remember that the human brain operates at roughly 1.1 exaflops - that's over a quintillion calculations per second. We are, each of us, walking around with a supercomputer capable of generating entire worlds, complete personalities, convincing realities. When we understand the sheer computational power we're working with, it becomes less surprising that we can delude ourselves so thoroughly. We're not just imagination machines - we're reality-generating engines that sometimes forget which realities we've created and which ones actually objectively exist. Respecting this power means recognizing both its creative potential and its capacity for self-deception.