"So, let's return to classic literature and take a look at a 19th-century idea that feels remarkably relevant today. It's the danger of too much thought. Many writers have understood the power and peril of thought (and consciousness) long before algorithms began to mimic it. They felt, unlike the LLMs, that the very thing that makes us intelligent can also make us suffer."
"The man lived in the underground. We live in the digital. This Underground Man is obsessed with prediction. "I tried to get ahead of them, to anticipate their thoughts," he says. It could have been written today by an engineer describing a large language model. He seeks safety in simulation, building upon thought and analysis until he's protected or even insulated from the world he's trying to understand. The more he analyzes life, the less he can inhabit it."
Outsourcing cognition to machines that display confident answers risks voluntary surrender of agency and critical judgment. Excessive self-awareness and constant prediction create paralysis, rehearsed responses, pervasive doubt, and loss of spontaneity. Dostoevsky's Underground Man embodies hypercognition as a disease that isolates, overanalyzes motives, and estranges the self from lived experience. Contemporary digital habits, including compulsive phone-checking and frequent Slack use, industrialize thought and reinforce simulation-based coping. Large language models mimic human prediction and invite reliance on simulated thinking, further reducing direct engagement with reality. Voluntary surrender of independent thought can produce meaninglessness greater than inevitable mortality.
Read at Psychology Today
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