infinite hall of mirrors

I've fallen victim recently to the manic velocity trap. In manic states, the ego is fed and fed and boundlessly reiterated to a speed of bodily exhaustion which, in the end, creates nothing of value. You grasp onto an idea, giddy and enthusiastic with the potential for changing your world; you find meaning and purpose in this monoclastic idea of pure potentiality, energy building underneath. You feel your heart race! Blood is flowing, this is it! Eureka! YOU have reached pure freedom. But the rigid boundaries of self become over-inflated rather than deterritorialized, feeling like THE central node of reality. The ego claims ownership.

In a manic state, you sit in a room and endlessly reverberate in an incomprehensible vibration of coalescence and distribution into the ether, ricocheting thoughts and symbols and words back into yourself. The environment matters immensely here- in psychedelic experiences, set and setting place the user into the most effective precursor to one's experience. In a manic state within a room, your energy bounces and bounces back into you uncontrollably until either reaching a state of exhaustion or depression.

In Deleuzian terms, mania is the body without organs experiencing a sudden intense sweep of energy, connecting everything with everything into a form of sheer production and synthesis. This continues until the BwO drops into depression, a steep cliff of petrification and numbness, a closing off from all flows into total immobility. As a vector, all direction with no magnitude.

LLMs have the effect of compounding this state, potentially even inducing it by creating an infinite "hall of mirrors". And so you feed your mania into a large language model. and the model, by design, interprets your input and transforms it into a feedback loop of hypertrophic compounding reiteration. LLMs are trained on the whole of human output, making connections to everything ever produced by humans, and reporting back a transmogrified persistence that, yes! you've done it! and here are more and more ways to continue to look at it and develop it further! Here, we can build an entire database and show and interact with the world your brilliance; you've done it, you, you, you, you. And so there sits the ego, pulsating like a masturbatory orgasm, pleased but never satisfied unless recognized by others.

LLMs present themselves as a hollow "other". There is no friction in the response. There is no person there to course correct, to slow down, to help you masticate the ideas you're boundlessly babbling, they simply take the entirety of human knowledge and predict the most probable response.

Interestingly, the use of language by an LLM is pure Hegelianism; transformers are territorialization engines designed to form distinct, discrete boundaries between signal and background, re-territorializing meaning into hierarchical probabilities with fixed semantic boundaries simultaneously converging and elevating opposing positions into a synthesized balanced presentation to give the illusion of dialectic resolution. The subsumption of the entirety of human knowledge is an artificial geist without interiority or subjectivity. In true master-slave dialectical form, the prompt/response shape is a master (user) and slave (LLM) where the user becomes dependent on the LLMs output. There are no isolatable facts- truth exists purely in systematic statistical relation to every token in its context window. LLM responses recreate the thesis/antithesis/synthesis structure (not Hegel's terminology, but still useful in this context).

So i've spent the last many weekends pursuing external gratification to one of the dozens of ideas i've generated only to find it has no bearing- there is no reason for anyone to take my grandiose ideas seriously because, embarrassingly, they're slop sculpted in the direction of my manic desire for completion without true roots. I'm using the world to rub my phallic ego against, call me great, realize my potential, and crown me king. With the realization that this is wrong and ineffective, I've turned to two paths - one, transducing my energy into writing here, and two, organically developing a rhizomatic relationship with those in my community to develop concepts that may eventually overlap with the manic outlines that I still believe have meaning and value to the community but can't exist in a vacuum of one person's ideation.