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When Madness Looks Like the Future: Mike Jay on Mind Control and the Machinery of Belief
Mike Jay, historian of consciousness and author of The Influencing Machine. We asked:
In 1797, James Tilly Matthews believed a machine controlled his thoughts. Today, scientists are developing technologies that influence the brain. When yesterday’s delusion resembles tomorrow’s invention, what does that tell us about madness, and technological progress?
Listen to his answer. #interview
So the question before me is: When yesterday’s psychiatric delusion begins to resemble tomorrow’s engineering proposal, does that change how we should understand madness, or does it reveal something more disturbing about technological progress?
I’ll take the first half first. I think influencing machine delusions have changed the way that we understand madness.
So when James Tilly Matthews, you know, 200 years ago, became the first person on record to believe that his mind was being controlled by a machine that was operated by shadowy operators known to no one but himself, and that they had implanted a magnet in his brain to focus the beams and rays of their machine and control his thoughts and behavior. That was regarded as sheer madness. Nobody had ever heard anything like it before.
100 years later, when the term “influencing machine” was coined, it had become recognized that this was a common delusional framework experienced by and witnessed by many mental health practitioners, and that it was commonly a symptom of the condition that had recently been called schizophrenia.
Now, 100 years on from that, most psychiatrists, I think; would not diagnose somebody as schizophrenic or delusional based on the fact that they believed in what were previously called influencing machine delusions.
These days, they’re normally regarded as a kind of belief that is shared by a subculture of people that’s usually picked up on the internet and forums, and so on, and is not a sort of product of the individual mind.
As for the other half of the question about tomorrow’s engineering proposals, well, I think the idea of merging mind and machines and connecting brains to technology’s not really something that has just suddenly come into focus and is a sort of futuristic idea of today.
That’s an idea that has been current all the time from James Tilly Matthews to now, and I would say, in fact, it’s an idea that reached its peak in the second half of the 20th century.
I think it was really kicked off in earnest in the 1940s and 1950s by cybernetics and the early generation of computers, which brought with them the idea that the computer was in some sense a technological version of the brain, and that the brain was in some sense a biological version of a computer, and I think that’s been a very productive metaphor.
You know, it’s been very influential both in our science and in our culture. But it is only a metaphor, and I think the way that those two different domains have developed since then have made it obvious that the brain is not a computer. That neurons are not binary switches, and our brains don’t run code, and our conscious experience is not a data set, and so forth.
So I think it’s not surprising that in the 21st century we’ve moved on to the other half of that syllogism that emerged from cybernetics: the idea that the computer is a sort of brain.
So I think it’s no, it’s not surprising that our imaginations about the future are at this point much more easily captured by artificial general intelligence and the idea that a computer might come to resemble the human brain rather than the human brain becoming bootstrapped up into a new technological life.