To Hallucinate Is Human

Do you know the names of the three wise men in the Christmas story? They are Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar.

Image by Midjourney

We know quite a lot about them. Caspar, the gold-giver, was an old man from Tarsus. Melchior, a middle-aged man from Arabian, brought the frankincense. And the myrrh came courtesy of the young man from Saba, Balthazar. This was all carefully recorded, as you know, in the Bible. Or rather, it might have been, if anyone had thought to write it down when they came a-visiting. But nobody did. The actual biblical text simply refers to an unspecified number of wise men and their gifts. Into this void, different traditions have supplied wildly varying backstories. Now might be a good time to mention that according to Armenian Catholics, the wise men are named Kagpha, Badadakharida, and Badadilma, while in the Syriac tradition, there might be a dozen of them. That’s a lot of myrrh.

Where do all these extra details come from? Nature abhors a vacuum, and humans abhor a vacant backstory. Somewhere along the way, somebody just made them up, and it stuck. In short, they were hallucinated.

Hallucination also happens to be a naughty habit of modern AI Large Language Models. Ask ChatGPT to describe what’s on a blank piece of paper, and it can fabricate the most wonderful details. Ask it for the biography of a semi-famous person, and some details will be accurate, while others will be reasonable-sounding fictions. We call this pathological, but we shouldn’t act so surprised. Hallucination is a hallmark of intelligence. Humans do this shit all the time.

Here’s another story I like, about the island of California. The first maps of California depicted it as an island, and this error persisted in hundreds of other later maps well into the 17th century. Take a look.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

It’s not wholly inaccurate. It represents Baja California reasonably well. But note that there are two kinds of lines on this map. One is based on actual observation and may be said to represent reality. The other kind is a bullshitter’s ramble, a fabrication, a hallucination. The mapmaker crafted reasonable-looking wiggles for fictional rivers and coastlines (“I bet it probably looks like this…”). The problem is that the two kinds of lines look the same. It would have been nice if they included little footnotes like “Seriously, don’t sail here or you will hit these rocks and sink” or “I just made this river up LOL.”

The big question is: when is hallucination acceptable, and when is it a sin? The question comes down to this: what job is the text being hired to do? The map’s job is to describe the landscape, to prevent shipwrecks. It does this by being accurate. Over time, the map will become more accurate. Hallucination in cartography is a sin.

But religion isn’t cartography. The stories can shift so long as the truth they point to is stable and meaningful. This shows up in religious traditions all the time, and it just goes to show that the purpose of religion is not factual accuracy. Sometimes, hallucination is the right tool for the job. I think of it this way. Culture is a sort of big brain. Culture thinks in myth. Culture creates myth the way humans create memory. We continuously construct it so that we might make the world plausible and legible. We hallucinate. Sometimes that causes shipwrecks, but sometimes it’s freaking brilliant.

People get upset about AI’s tendency to hallucinate, but the AI is really just breezing through one section of the Turing Test. There are things that we think of as pathologies that can never be purged from intelligence because they are a consequence of it.

Hallucination is, of course, just a start. Once AIs start to insist that the world is flat, we’ll know they have at last arrived in the land of the truly intelligent.