A map without a territory

Hello new people (and old!)

Since I appeared on This Jungian Life earlier this week, I’ve been a little overwhelmed by the number of new subscribers.

It’s really lovely and also a little scary, particularly because I don’t really know what Error Signals is about.

It’s also got unwieldy enough that it can be hard to find essays on a particular subject. This isn’t helped at all by my proclivity for somewhat impenetrable post titles or crappy puns (like shock, and/or).

See, I have a few recurrent preoccupations. You might say they’re closer to obsessions: how minds create worlds, what minds even are, what happens when the world no longer makes sense or when our models no longer fit the data, the deep end and dark side of meditation, and the slippery and disputed nature of illness and pathology.

There’s a lot in there about AI and psychiatry, although almost never about those subjects for their own sake: there are many wonderful single-issue Substacks on those topics. There are also essays about how places can also be ghosts, the sacred power of embarrassment and why tunnels and corridors are awesome.

There are about 30 posts, so here’s a map of sorts to the whole lot.

• We don’t need a new AI culture war

• AI and the ecology of belief: what’s next?

• Playing with the dials of belief in 2026

• The vibes cartels

• Gaslighting and coercion by sexualised AI

• So, is ‘ChatGPT psychosis’ really a thing?

• Some clarifications and thoughts around “ChatGPT psychosis”

• All the demons hiding in your AIs… ranked!

• The rise of DIY revelation

• I got ChatGPT to discuss ‘ChatGPT psychosis’ with itself

• The age of neurotic AI is here

• Spiralware: a field guide

• What Claude saw below, a guest post by Luke Nicholls (highly recommended!)

• Can I get a witness?

• What shape is your mind?

• On epistemic violence, imaginary friends, and keeping it real

• shock, and/or

• i can’t unsee that now

• Paul Foot and the end of suffering

• The taste of a theory

• I Was Reborn Last Week

• Everything is significant

• Is thinking dangerous?

• We didn’t start the fire

• dance like the dead

• Ghosts, haunted by houses

• Line of sight

• Cringe benefits

• Tunnels, tunnels, tunnels!

In the ‘half-written’ pile are essays on:

• Will Buddhist ‘emptiness’ ever make it to the clinic?

• Psychopathologies of the technologically extended mind: the long view

• Is inflammation a psychedelic? Childhood fever dreams, visionary experiences and machine elves in the geriatric ward

• Daemons, daimons and demons: AI and the unconscious

• We are squirrel: a history of enormous treasure hunts

• This must be the place: neurological and spiritual understandings of place and its pathologies

I’ll get there.

I’m also going to start posting some recorded conversations. I hesitate to call them podcasts, because that implies a level of intentionality and branding that I can’t quite admit to yet.

One of the great joys of writing this Substack has been the doors it has opened, including invitations onto other people’s podcasts. People who know me will have heard me bemoan the fact that, in much of academia, it’s actually quite hard to come across a really intellectually exciting, open and free-ranging conversation that doesn’t have some kind of underlying agenda, whether that’s writing a paper, applying for a grant or whatever.

The thing that has really changed my life in recent years is the realisation that one has to curate and protect the spaces for beautiful and fascinating conversations, because more often than not they won’t just arise naturally. I learned this from Mike Levin, who has the most wonderful practice of recording all his work conversations and putting them on YouTube - see this, for example:

or the full list here.

Anyway, I’m announcing this now so that I can be held to account. What you can expect is something somewhere between one of Mike Levin’s recorded work conversations, a podcast and a late-night pub conversation.

For all my more serious scientific writing, the best places to look are my KCL page, Google Scholar page or ORCID record.

You can also find an expanding archive of talks from the King’s College London Neuropsychiatry Research & Education Group, which I co-lead.

Thanks for finding Error Signals. I hope you have even a fraction of the fun reading some of these as I had writing them.

Warmest wishes from Portugal, where I’m reading Matthew Watkins’ newly released solidgoldmagikarp and loving it. Watkins’ awe-filled perspective on the weirder corners of AI was a huge inspiration to me, and the book has been well worth the long wait.