Cleista

Apparently, people love checking what kind of personality they seem to have in the eyes of others. Fortune-telling, blood types, and lately MBTI have all become popular. Even after going beyond the meaninglessness of all that, people now have AI analyze them instead. They ask it to calculate which celebrities or characters they resemble, then get excited or depressed over the results. In essence, it is no different from fortune-telling. When young women play with it as a topic of conversation or a way to kill time, it is charming enough. But apparently, even grown adults sometimes consult AI about their mental state. The inner self of a human being is not something that simply comes out from within. To explore the “unconscious” takes a tremendous amount of time. Even if you speak openly to ChatGPT about your inner self, what you are presenting is still only “the self you can already see.” Even if you have it analyze that objectively. If various activities and evaluations of you remain online, then it can make inferences, and that can have some value. But that is only a repetition, or summary, of your online reputation. Even the way you appear online is not the same thing as your essence. AI cannot peer into the depths of your heart. It stops at the surface-level “self you can describe yourself,” and becomes a mirror that reflects only the convenient parts. The unconscious slips out unexpectedly. With the kind of surprise you feel when something suddenly falls into your lap. I have experienced fairly hard counseling before. The counselor, an old man with long experience, barely spoke at all when we were alone together in a small private room. He simply nodded silently as I talked through my understanding of the present situation. At the time, I did wonder a little, “Is this really work?” But now I understand. As you keep speaking subjectively about your current situation, unexpected statements and perspectives suddenly slip out. Ah, so this is what I was irritated about. This is what I could not forgive. And even after that comes out, the other person remains silent. Since I am the one paying, I have to avoid wasting the remaining time by digging deeper into my own realizations on my own. Next, I search for the reason I cannot forgive it. In most cases, I come to understand that, at least for me, “unforgivable” refers to having my inviolable territory wounded. Anger toward those who obstruct my sense of beauty. Contempt for vulgar middle-aged people. A self-disciplining warning to myself that I must never become like that. To reach these things and gain metacognition of them, you have to converse with yourself again and again. Most counselors carry out conversations according to a manual, guiding the client into a pattern where they become positive. In many cases, the goal is not “I want to dig deeply into my psyche,” but “I want to forget my trauma and become cheerful,” so that is fine. In that sense, fortune-telling and ChatGPT are only variations of the same thing. They merely let the person talk about what they want to talk about, or answer questions they are being led toward. I do not think they can explore the unconscious. To get there alone, you would probably need deep meditation, or a seven-colored ticket. When important people around the world keep recommending mindfulness, what they are essentially saying is: even if it is only for ten minutes a day, look at yourself objectively and develop metacognition. What business needs most is undoubtedly a meta-level grasp of the situation. I do not think that is true of human beings themselves, though. If anything, I think people are more correct when they step outside metacognition and believe in something sacred. As long as it is not business. Well, that is only my way of thinking. Because, as a conclusion within myself, unless one has the will to challenge art or God, human beings have nothing to do as organisms except pair up and reproduce. Everyone merely convinces themselves vaguely that “this is just how things are.” They decide that the supreme happiness is spending weekends loading family and friends into a van and going to a home improvement store to choose furniture. Then again, one could also say this is simply my jealousy born from attachment to family. Or perhaps it is only sarcasm meant to show my own abnormality. In any case, when it comes to gathering information, that is one thing. But entrusting your decisions or personality to AI is not so different from fortune-telling or an MBTI diagnosis. Counseling that you receive simply because a hospital tells you to, without choosing the person carefully, is closer to self-help than anything else. Then should one properly undergo psychoanalysis? If you think that will make life enjoyable, then you have no choice but to do it. In the end, human beings can only walk in the direction they believe will make them happy. Even if that means taking your wife and children to IKEA to buy dishes. If it is the path you chose for yourself, then it is happiness.