Maybe it isn't entirely a hardware issue. Maybe it is a software issue.

Where do persons get their software from? The environment. Observing how their parents/family/etc interact.

I think it's fair to say that communication matters and that communication & experiences will have an affect on peoples perceptions.

Depression is clearly a hardware issue. So also ADHD.

Depression very clearly is both a hardware issue and a software issue.

rolled 0.6 on hardware + 0.4 on software = 1.0

rolled 0.4 on hw + 0.6 on sw = 1.0

rolled 0 on both = 0.0 = maximum depression

rolled 1 on both = 2.0 = golden retriever with good owner

So riddle me this.

Hypothetical situation.

Take two dogs from the same litter.

Raise one with love and kindness. Play with it. Socialize with it.

Then take the other one and neglect and abuse the hell out of it.

Which dog do you think will show signs of depression?

Still think it's clearly just a hardware issue?

If you give all the love in the world to a schizophrenic, will he stop hallucinating?

We're looking at cause here not 'cure' or treatment.

Regardless schizophrenic individuals probably would do better with being treated with kindness, respect, compassion, and love than with derision and rejection. At least observational that has been my experience.

If you put an LLM on better hardware, will it stop hallucinating?

Anthropomorphization of LLMs is bad, but the reverse is worse. This is not psychology.

Although... has anyone tried quantizing schizophrenia?

depends on if you consider message passing (neuro-transmitters) in a graph NN as a hardware or software.

I'm not sure the distinction is meaningful at a high level. That which can be implemented in hardware can be emulated in software.

It may be significant with respect to a specific implementation. Do you mean to imply that the current crop of LLMs hallucinate only due to some flaw in the hardware they run on?

There is no software at all, it is all hardware. These are mere abstractions because the reality offers some guarantees which allows one to transfer one system onto another as if the underlying system didn't matter. Those guarantees allows one to speak of commonalities between one stuff and another.

ref : The Universe is Hostile to Computers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaZ_RSt0KP8

In that vein, there is no hardware either. It too is just an abstraction. However, that is not particularly meaningful. We draw lines around those abstractions and are able to compartmentalize them when discussing them.

I think we agree. If hardware was perfect, we wouldn't need ECC in RAMs. The reason to do this is we are poking the walls of compartments here.

Once someone's lost touch with reality, maybe not. In the earliest stages? Maybe, yeah:

> McFarlane believes that psychosis can be prevented with a range of surprisingly low-tech interventions, almost all of which are designed to reduce stress in the family of the young person who is starting to show symptoms.

> McFarlane cites research done at UCLA suggesting that certain kinds of family dynamics — families that don't communicate well, or are overly critical — can make things worse for a young person at risk of schizophrenia.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/10/20/3566400...

I can believe it. Not smoking is a great way to prevent certain types of lung cancer. However, if you have lung cancer, quitting smoking won't cure it.

This argument is genuinely horrible. Many times we have two “dogs”, same litter, same love and care, and one will be depressed and the other won’t be. Still think it’s just a software issue now hmmm?

Seriously, can you not just comprehend that it’s a complex issue and there is no singular source you can blame? If your kid committed suicide should I levy child abuse charges against you? And where does someone “learn” depression or schizophrenia anyway, especially if their parents are not acting the same way?

Hmmm:

"Maybe it isn't entirely a hardware issue."

Maybe read what I said first before going off.

"And where does someone “learn” depression or schizophrenia anyway, especially if their parents are not acting the same way?"

Man, I fear your family...

>like in the case of mental illnesses such as depression or Schizophrenia, scientists insist on looking for genes or even GWAS correlations and just aren't finding anything

Source? Wikipedia says:

>A central point of debate on GWA studies has been that most of the SNP variations found by GWA studies are associated with only a small increased risk of the disease, and have only a small predictive value. The median odds ratio is 1.33 per risk-SNP, with only a few showing odds ratios above 3.0.[1][46] These magnitudes are considered small because they do not explain much of the heritable variation. This heritable variation is estimated from heritability studies based on monozygotic twins.[47] For example, it is known that 40% of variance in depression can be explained by hereditary differences, but GWA studies only account for a minority of this variance.[47]

which admittedly isn't airtight proof for "depression is 100% genetic!!1", but isn't exactly "just aren't finding anything" either.

It is a bit more nuanced than that. An incorrect unstated assumption here is that schizophrenia or depression is a singular disease rather than a group of observable symptoms where any two cases may or may not have the same underlying cause.

There are certain types of schizophrenia that are highly heritable and others that are more sporadic. Highly pathogenic variants tend to be very rare because those regions of the genome are under evolutionary constraint.

GWAS are used is to figure out which genes may be involved in the pathology. So we are essentially looking at rare cases of inherited disease to figure out which genes might play a role in more common non inherited versions.

Environmental factors are certainly a part of those. I heard a story of someone being stranded at a lighthouse alone for many months, and he had a break from reality which affected him the rest of his life. It's always seemed interesting that the brain can be damaged by stress rather than physical injury – or that perhaps stress causes physical injury.