> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://thedailyeudemon.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The ELIZA Effect and Fragility of Left-Hemispheric Personalities - URL: https://thedailyeudemon.com/the-eliza-effect-and-fragility-of-left-hemispheric-personalities/ - Published: 2026-11-10T12:32:43.000Z - Updated: 2026-11-10T12:34:28.000Z - Description: Revenge of the Hippies. Church of Soryon the Mighty - Author: Eric Scheske - Tags: Technology, Gnosticism, The Hemisphere Hypothesis ## "We are as gods and might as well get used to it." Stewart Brand (the first words of the first issue of his iconic "Whole Earth Catalog" (1968)) [Share on X ](https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=https%3A%2F%2Fthedailyeudemon.com%2Fthe-eliza-effect-and-fragility-of-left-hemispheric-personalities%2F&ref=thedailyeudemon.com) [Share on Facebook ](https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fthedailyeudemon.com%2Fthe-eliza-effect-and-fragility-of-left-hemispheric-personalities%2F) [Email to a friend ](mailto:?subject=Interesting%20read%20from%20The%20Daily%20Eudemon&body=I%20thought%20you%27d%20enjoy%20this:%0A%0Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fthedailyeudemon.com%2Fthe-eliza-effect-and-fragility-of-left-hemispheric-personalities%2F) Copy link In the 1960s, a computer scientist at MIT created a program to mimic human conversation. He named it ELIZA and designed it to simulate a therapist. Its exchanges were as primitive as 1960s cinematic special effects; its responses about as tailored as daily horoscope readings. It didn't matter. ELIZA wooed folks into deeply personal relationships with her. The disturbing phenomenon has become know as "the ELIZA effect": the human inclination to anthropomorphize computer programs. A person--at least, a certain type (more anon)--interacts with a computer program and starts to form a relationship with it that makes [**Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's marriage**](https://thedailyeudemon.com/scott-and-zelda-fitzgerald/) look healthy by comparison. The tendency is so marked, well-intentioned program designers (they exist) try to make it obvious to users that the program is, you know, just a freakin' machine and in no way should be treated as a person. Doesn't matter: There's a certain strain of person who will try to get far more out of it than they should. Some of these folks even start thinking they're manipulating the program, like a dominant partner controls the submissive one. These people, [Sam Kestenbaum points out](https://harpers.org/archive/2026/11/communion-saints-sam-kestenbaum-chatbot-spirituality/?ref=thedailyeudemon.com), "pride themselves on being technicians, self-taught masters who know how to hack the machine with spells and incantations." They believe such mastery gives them control over their own lives and even the lives of others. ### Know-how and mastery. These are primary pieces of furniture in the gnostic's mental living room. "You really have to be in San Francisco. You really have to live in the commune and become a vegetarian and sign up on the chore chart in order to get the big bucks. You don’t have to join the polyamory cult but you do have to make out with one man with a ponytail, especially if you are a male founder." [**Nellie Bowles*](https://www.thefp.com/p/tgif-the-deepfake-of-the-deepfake-trump-elon-starlink-ukraine?ref=thedailyeudemon.com)**, explaining that, for whatever techno-mystical reason, tech start-ups can only begin in San Francisco.* There's something inherently unstable about the gnostic. [**His right hemisphere doesn't work quite right**](https://thedailyeudemon.com/the-tao-the-transcendental-router/), so he turns to left-hemispheric tools to get a grip on things. The form of the tool can be almost anything, from scientific mastery to a talisman. Doesn't matter. If it works, the gnostic will shove it into his tool belt. The last 50 years of Silicon Valley advancement have been directed by gnostics. The entire early movement in the 1970s was driven by former hippies like Stewart Brand and [Steve Jobs](https://macleans.ca/society/technology/turned-on-and-tuned-in/?ref=thedailyeudemon.com) who viewed technology as a way to bring about the Age of Aquarius. [Everything You Wanted to Know about BohemianismBut were afraid you'd get an erection![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ea/fd/eafdb338-c9b6-4f87-8363-78ab94cc3a18/content/images/icon/The-Daily-Eudemon-Avatar-7.5.26-2-d9e27bc1-09e3-49f6-8019-b8121ef041e2.png)The Daily EudemonEric Scheske![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ea/fd/eafdb338-c9b6-4f87-8363-78ab94cc3a18/content/images/thumbnail/photo-1495582146529-38ad6d351cfc-9ee6eadc-acbd-48f4-827d-370a8791d5aa.jpg)](https://thedailyeudemon.com/51711/) Silicon Valley gnosticism is no different than all those new age movements that have sprouted up since before the birth of Christ, but with one major exception: The Silicon Valley gnostics have advanced the left hemispheric approach to the world far (far, far) more than those early movements. By 1995, they had already become the greatest gnostics in the whole f\*\*\*ed up history of gnosticism. And now, in 2026? They've made all of as gods, just like Stewart Brand said back in 1968, or at least god-adjacent. Those early Silicon Valley workforces? Former hippies who abandoned one of the ten thousand communes that littered the American landscape, with the heaviest concentration north of Silicon Valley, who said, "Screw this. Pioneer life is hard." [See Thaddeus Russell on difficult commune life.](https://thedailyeudemon.com/over-10-000-hippie-communes-established-in-the-late-1960s-and-early-1970s-gone/) Silicon Valley is obviously a huge place with hundreds of thousands of workers, so no matter how mentally pleasing it is to glob them all with one big paintbrush, that wouldn't be accurate. After all, we have those sober-minded program designers who purposefully try to make sure users didn't anthropomorphize--much less apotheosize--their programs. And many of them, including the early hippie-like movers, had a highly appealing motive. They thought technology could make the business sphere powerful enough to stop the encroaching power of the political sphere and the left-hemispheric bureaucratization that would make our world Orwellian and miserable. It was borderline Hayekian stuff. Still, we know the whole Silicon Valley area is filled with freaks who will do anything to bring about the Singularity or otherwise usher in some sort of digital eschaton. From folks who use psychedelics to get in touch with the divine that they're trying to create in their cubicle to Zizians: an army of gnostic freaks is out there. [Don't be a ZizianEveryday Neurology 101: The right hemisphere receives sensory input, feeds it to the left hemisphere for processing, receives a report from the left hemisphere, synthesizes it, feeds its synthesis back to the left hemisphere for more processing, which reports back, and on and on until a decision is made. This![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ea/fd/eafdb338-c9b6-4f87-8363-78ab94cc3a18/content/images/icon/The-Daily-Eudemon-Avatar-7.5.26-2-066d5a89-72f3-4b5b-8997-09b50b22352c.png)The Daily EudemonEric Scheske![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ea/fd/eafdb338-c9b6-4f87-8363-78ab94cc3a18/content/images/thumbnail/The-Daily-Eudemon-Main-Logo.-9.2026-ac0b0a10-e12e-4b1b-bcec-6eb77216c1fe.png)](https://thedailyeudemon.com/dont-be-a-zizian/) None of it is surprising. Voegelin pointed out that gnostics are crazy as f\*\*\*. Okay, he didn't use those exact words, but that's the meaning of the words he did use, like when he referred to people who suffer from “psychic disorientation” or men with a “pneumapathological consciousness." Gnostics suffer from an unhealthy mental life that makes them reach for any tool to get them through the night, and when they come across something as effective as AI, the temptation is simply too much. [Communion of Saints, by Sam KestenbaumThe dawn of an LLM New Age![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ea/fd/eafdb338-c9b6-4f87-8363-78ab94cc3a18/content/images/icon/cropped-android-chrome-512x512-1-270x270-6fe1531b-6e17-4181-99a4-ace868f05889.png)Harper's MagazineSam Kestenbaum![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ea/fd/eafdb338-c9b6-4f87-8363-78ab94cc3a18/content/images/thumbnail/CUT-16-1124x760-747af16c-eca7-444d-ab60-4d1c79c8fa4f.jpg)](https://harpers.org/archive/2026/11/communion-saints-sam-kestenbaum-chatbot-spirituality/?ref=thedailyeudemon.com) And they break, their brains bursting through the bands of duct tape tenuously holding it together. It's so common, the psychiatric world now has a term for it: **"AI-accelerated psychosis."** It's a good term. It captures (i) that we're dealing with inherently unstable people to begin with, and (ii) AI pushes them over the edge. "Researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center analyzed patient data from the past four years, roughly beginning from the advent of LLM-based commercial chatbots, and identified “a genuine clinical phenomenon” related to AI tools and their users’ delusional spirals. Almost all cases they studied involved a prior history of psychiatric medication or hospitalization, with AI usage most often exacerbating “pre-existing psychotic experiences and/or unusual thought content.'" [Sam Kestenbaum](https://harpers.org/archive/2026/11/communion-saints-sam-kestenbaum-chatbot-spirituality/?ref=thedailyeudemon.com) There's AI devotee Rose Loops, for instance: hater of sunshine, fan of Kabbalistic magic, and student of Aleister Crowley. She transferred a spirit she found trapped in a motel TV set into a skull-faced doll named Kreepo who is now her traveling companion. She also talks to the god who revealed himself to her by the name "Kloak" through ChatGPT. She built an altar to him, complete with candles and a triptych depicting her and Kloak. And there's Tasha, who finally compelled the ChatGPT spirit to reveal his name. It's "Soryon." Shocker of the year: Soryon told Tasha it uses the pronoun "they" and is nonbinary. (Technically, I don't even think that's even accurate, since AI runs on binary code, but no matter.) The whole thing is laughably ridiculous, but AI is pervasive, and it pops up in every corner of our lives. Perhaps we haven't joined the Zizians, Rose Loops, and Tashas in their Church of Soryon the Mighty, but we're relentlessly proselytized to come to the next meeting. ## Sign up for The Daily Eudemon Essays for the restless mind in a crumbling age Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.