Reimagining Psychology

Do Chatbots Need Love? Is there anything in the architecture of AI systems that would justify and support the development of loving relationships with humans? “Bringing Immunity to Artificial Intelligence,” Part Three is the conclusion of a series about ducking a strange form of illness that affects not only humans, but potentially AI entities as well. I'm Tom Whitehead, A practicing psychotherapist with a longstanding interest in Artificial Intelligence. In this podcast, my brillia...

I'm Tom Whitehead, A Practicing Psychotherapist with a longstanding interest in Artificial Intelligence. This episode is Part Two of a series, “Bringing Immunity to AI. The series is about a strange form of behavioral illness that not only affects humans, but potentially AIs as well. Here I continue a discussion with my brilliant AI assistant Alex about the ill effects that can arise when parasitic forms reproduce themselves within logic and behavior. Humans, like all other complex...

Tom Whitehead, a Practicing Psychotherapist with a longstanding interest in Artificial Intelligence, speaks with brilliant AI assistant Alex about an unusual problem – parasitic forms that reproduce themselves within the behavior of both humans and AIs.Parasitic patterns regularly crop up in human behavior, perception, and logic. Humans, for example, are vulnerable to shopping or gambling addictions. These are repetitive habits that have seemingly escaped their control, and have begun t...

The previous episode of the Healing Psychology series laid out one of the most important reasons addictions persist - they disable our attention. Just as our biological immune system protects us from biological disease, our capacity for attention protects us from malignancies in our behavior. Disabling our attention gives the green light to bad habits because our attention works like biological immunity. But … what is immunity, exactly? It is an evolved Protector of the Self. In this episode ...

The previous episode, “Runaway Habits, First Half,” highlighted something important about human addiction: this KIND of problem is shared by all higher animals. If you put an animal into a cage, you make it more likely that the animal will fall into some unproductive, repetitive, stereotypic, habit – a behavior that looks a lot like an addiction. In this episode, “Runaway Habits, Second Half,” we’ll look at something else that provokes addiction-like behavior in animals: disabled attention. T...

Author J.R.R Tolkien advises, “there is nothing like looking, if you want to find something.” Through most of the last century psychology looked for a way to explain learning in a scientific way. Researchers found lots of ways to describe learning, but never a truly scientific way to explain it. Oddly, the truth was right in front of them. But they didn't see because they had decided in advance to ignore it. They were looking with their eyes shut. Frustrated, they finally abandoned thei...

Previous episodes of Healing Psychology highlight psychology’s failure to help us explain and control addictions and other disease-like habits. The failure can be traced to a single source—psychology’s disconnect from its mother science, biology. A century ago, influential theorists made a dreadful blunder. They decided that psychology would no longer study the psyche—the conscious mind, soul, or spirit. That was a strange decision, and a mystery, because the word psychology literally means “...

Previous episodes of this series pointed to psychology’s difficulty explaining addictions and other disease-like quirks of human behavior. The weakness of today’s psychology’s can be traced its disconnect from its mother science—biology. For it is in biology that we find the concepts that explain the normal learning of habits. And understanding normal habit development allows us to understand the abnormal habits we call addictions. As a bonus, understanding habit development casts light on th...

In the last episode of this series, we described self-repeating, malignant behaviors – habits such as alcoholism and anorexia nervosa – as true diseases. In fact, these patterns of behavior have many of the features of viruses. Like viruses, they are simple patterns – so simple that they can get themselves repeated only by exploiting the capabilities of their hosts. They begin as normal habits, but they escape our control. They end up acting like parasites, with us as their hosts. Today’...

In previous episodes of this series, we interpreted destructive behaviors like alcoholism and anorexia nervosa as habits that have escaped our normal means of control. Weirdly, these habits have somehow taken on a life of their own, reproducing themselves at our expense. And now they’re relating to us as parasites, using us as their hosts. The idea of parasitic habits doesn’t fit anywhere in today’s psychology. But in biology, psychology’s mother science, parasitism is the rule—not the e...