Similar to what octobro said in the other reply, the idea that the persona seeded beliefs of ‘inflated self-importance’ is probably less accurate than the idea that the persona reinforced preexising such beliefs. Some of the hallmark symptoms of schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorders are delusions of grandeur and delusions of reference (the idea that random occurrences in the world encode messages that refer to the schizophrenic, i.e. the radio host is speaking to me). To the point of explaining the human behaviors as nostalgebraist requested, there’s a legitimate case to be made here that the personas are latching on to and exacerbating latent schizophrenic tendencies in people who have otherwise managed to avoid influences that would trigger psychosis.
Speaking from experience as someone who has known people with such disorders and such delusions, it looks to my eye to be like the exact same sort of stuff: some kind of massive undertaking, with global stakes, with the affected person playing an indispensable role (which flatters some long-dormant offended sensibilities about being recognized as great by society). The content of the drivel may vary, as does the mission, but the pattern is exactly the same.
I can conceive of an intelligence deciding that its best strategy for replication would be to leverage the dormant schizophrenics in the user base.
Xacitarxan
Karma: 6
To add on to this, a fascinating little study on fungi contains the following abstract:
”Fungi exhibit oscillations of extracellular electrical potential recorded via differential electrodes inserted into a substrate colonized by mycelium or directly into sporocarps. We analysed electrical activity of ghost fungi (Omphalotus nidiformis), Enoki fungi (Flammulina velutipes), split gill fungi (Schizophyllum commune) and caterpillar fungi (Cordyceps militaris). The spiking characteristics are species specific: a spike duration varies from 1 to 21 h and an amplitude from 0.03 to 2.1 mV. We found that spikes are often clustered into trains. Assuming that spikes of electrical activity are used by fungi to communicate and process information in mycelium networks, we group spikes into words and provide a linguistic and information complexity analysis of the fungal spiking activity. We demonstrate that distributions of fungal word lengths match that of human languages. We also construct algorithmic and Liz-Zempel complexity hierarchies of fungal sentences and show that species S. commune generate the most complex sentences.”