hallucination trip synonym

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noun as in hallucination

Strongest matches

Strong matches

• phantasmagoria

Weak matches

• figment of the imagination

noun as in daydream

• imagination
• woolgathering
• castle in the air
• figment of imagination
• fool's paradise
• pie in the sky

noun as in fantasy

• envisioning
• externalizing
• fabrication
• hallucination
• imaginativeness
• objectifying
• originality
• flight of imagination

noun as in trance

• unconsciousness
• abstraction
• insensibility
• petrifaction
• transfixion
• transfixture

noun as in high

• freaked-out

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Example sentences.

The Caldecott-honored Red Book by Barbara Lehman has been described as “a wordless mind trip for tots.”

He forgot to play tough, and seemed to lose himself in a mind-trip Out There—probably as far as he would ever get.

Related Words

Words related to mind trip are not direct synonyms, but are associated with the word mind trip . Browse related words to learn more about word associations.

noun as in fantasy thought of when awake

noun as in imagination, dream

• absent-mindedness
• castle-building
• castles in the air
• contemplation
• inattention
• pensiveness
• preoccupation

On this page you'll find 130 synonyms, antonyms, and words related to mind trip, such as: illusion, phantom, aberration, apparition, fantasy, and mirage.

From Roget's 21st Century Thesaurus, Third Edition Copyright © 2013 by the Philip Lief Group.

Related Words and Phrases

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• hallucinate

Synonyms for hallucinate

• have hallucinations

Words related to hallucinate

Perceive what is not there, related words.

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• Hall's honeysuckle
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Synonyms and antonyms of hallucinate in English

Hallucinate.

Word of the Day

hit the road

to leave a place or begin a journey

Searching out and tracking down: talking about finding or discovering things

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Synonyms of 'hallucination' in British English

Additional synonyms, synonyms of 'hallucination' in american english.

Browse alphabetically hallucination

• hallowedness
• hallucinate
• hallucination
• hallucinatory
• hallucinogenic
• All ENGLISH synonyms that begin with 'H'

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Synonyms of hallucinating

• as in seeing
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Thesaurus Definition of hallucinating

Synonyms & Similar Words

• daydreaming
• contemplating
• fantasizing
• envisioning
• visualizing
• reminiscing
• conjuring (up)
• re - creating
• manufacturing
• fabricating
• prefiguring

Thesaurus Entries Near hallucinating

hallucinates

hallucinating

hallucination

Cite this Entry

“Hallucinating.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/hallucinating. Accessed 20 May. 2024.

More from Merriam-Webster on hallucinating

Nglish: Translation of hallucinating for Spanish Speakers

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Why RAG won’t solve generative AI’s hallucination problem

Hallucinations — the lies generative AI models tell, basically — are a big problem for businesses looking to integrate the technology into their operations.

Because models have no real intelligence and are simply predicting words, images, speech, music and other data according to a private schema , they sometimes get it wrong. Very wrong. In a recent piece in The Wall Street Journal, a source recounts an instance where Microsoft’s generative AI invented meeting attendees and implied that conference calls were about subjects that weren’t actually discussed on the call.

As I wrote a while ago, hallucinations may be an unsolvable problem with today’s transformer-based model architectures. But a number of generative AI vendors suggest that they can be done away with, more or less, through a technical approach called retrieval augmented generation, or RAG.

Here’s how one vendor, Squirro, pitches it :

At the core of the offering is the concept of Retrieval Augmented LLMs or Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) embedded in the solution … [our generative AI] is unique in its promise of zero hallucinations. Every piece of information it generates is traceable to a source, ensuring credibility.

Here’s a similar pitch from SiftHub:

Using RAG technology and fine-tuned large language models with industry-specific knowledge training, SiftHub allows companies to generate personalized responses with zero hallucinations. This guarantees increased transparency and reduced risk and inspires absolute trust to use AI for all their needs.

RAG was pioneered by data scientist Patrick Lewis, researcher at Meta and University College London, and lead author of the 2020 paper that coined the term. Applied to a model, RAG retrieves documents possibly relevant to a question — for example, a Wikipedia page about the Super Bowl — using what’s essentially a keyword search and then asks the model to generate answers given this additional context.

“When you’re interacting with a generative AI model like ChatGPT or Llama and you ask a question, the default is for the model to answer from its ‘parametric memory’ — i.e., from the knowledge that’s stored in its parameters as a result of training on massive data from the web,” David Wadden, a research scientist at AI2, the AI-focused research division of the nonprofit Allen Institute, explained. “But, just like you’re likely to give more accurate answers if you have a reference [like a book or a file] in front of you, the same is true in some cases for models.”

RAG is undeniably useful — it allows one to attribute things a model generates to retrieved documents to verify their factuality (and, as an added benefit, avoid potentially copyright-infringing regurgitation ). RAG also lets enterprises that don’t want their documents used to train a model — say, companies in highly regulated industries like healthcare and law — to allow models to draw on those documents in a more secure and temporary way.

But RAG certainly  can’t stop a model from hallucinating. And it has limitations that many vendors gloss over.

Wadden says that RAG is most effective in “knowledge-intensive” scenarios where a user wants to use a model to address an “information need” — for example, to find out who won the Super Bowl last year. In these scenarios, the document that answers the question is likely to contain many of the same keywords as the question (e.g., “Super Bowl,” “last year”), making it relatively easy to find via keyword search.

Things get trickier with “reasoning-intensive” tasks such as coding and math, where it’s harder to specify in a keyword-based search query the concepts needed to answer a request — much less identify which documents might be relevant.

Even with basic questions, models can get “distracted” by irrelevant content in documents, particularly in long documents where the answer isn’t obvious. Or they can — for reasons as yet unknown — simply ignore the contents of retrieved documents, opting instead to rely on their parametric memory.

RAG is also expensive in terms of the hardware needed to apply it at scale.

That’s because retrieved documents, whether from the web, an internal database or somewhere else, have to be stored in memory — at least temporarily — so that the model can refer back to them. Another expenditure is compute for the increased context a model has to process before generating its response. For a technology already notorious for the amount of compute and electricity it requires even for basic operations, this amounts to a serious consideration.

That’s not to suggest RAG can’t be improved. Wadden noted many ongoing efforts to train models to make better use of RAG-retrieved documents.

Some of these efforts involve models that can “decide” when to make use of the documents, or models that can choose not to perform retrieval in the first place if they deem it unnecessary. Others focus on ways to more efficiently index massive datasets of documents, and on improving search through better representations of documents — representations that go beyond keywords.

“We’re pretty good at retrieving documents based on keywords, but not so good at retrieving documents based on more abstract concepts, like a proof technique needed to solve a math problem,” Wadden said. “Research is needed to build document representations and search techniques that can identify relevant documents for more abstract generation tasks. I think this is mostly an open question at this point.”

So RAG can help reduce a model’s hallucinations — but it’s not the answer to all of AI’s hallucinatory problems. Beware of any vendor that tries to claim otherwise.

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Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) charts his process — as a writer, reader and for living life

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Book Review

And Then? And Then? What Else?

By Daniel Handler Liveright: 240 pages, $26.99 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission form Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

To begin, a confession: I’ve never read much Lemony Snicket, neither the 13-book sequence “A Series of Unfortunate Events” nor the four-volume follow-up, “All the Wrong Questions.” This is not a matter of aesthetics but pragmatics. When my kids were young, their tastes ran in other directions: Percy Jackson, Harry Potter, “Twilight.” Although we read “The Bad Beginning” and perhaps part of “The Reptile Room” — I can’t remember — they never warmed to the author’s gothic sensibilities or allusive style.

This, I fully accept, represents a parental failing on my part.

Let me admit, too, that I had a little difficulty at first with “And Then? And Then? What Else?” by Daniel Handler, the writer behind the Snicket franchise — “aka Lemony Snicket,” he identifies himself on the cover. This has to do with the nature of the writing, which can feel diffuse before it grows into one of the enduring charms of the book. The reason? “And Then? And Then? What Else?” is a bit of a grab bag, starting in the middle and ending in the middle, while telling a series of stories that both connect and overlap.

That something similar might be said of the Lemony Snicket novels is the whole idea. Handler is skilled and nuanced as a writer, with a developed voice and point of view. He has never fit the categories, so why would we expect him to start here?

As an example, there’s the question of form or genre. “And Then? And Then? What Else?” comes positioned as a memoir, but that’s not quite accurate. Neither is “craft book,” although there are a lot of notes on craft. More accurately, it’s what I want to label a process book, walking us through the author’s process as writer and reader. It is also a book that means to tell us how to make a life.

Handler gets at this from the outset: “What am I doing?” the book begins. It’s not a rhetorical question but a reflective one, and it opens a line of free association, of opinions and observations, that push back against our expectations. Yes, the author recognizes, we will have preconceptions; how, after all, could we not? Regardless of whether we’ve read the saga of the orphaned Baudelaire children, Handler’s reputation, the work he’s produced, carries its own cultural weight.

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“I’m hunched over, headphoned,” he explains, describing himself writing on a legal pad in a cafe not far from his San Francisco home, “I look like a lunatic, which is likely the wrong word. It feels right, though.”

There it is, right from the get-go, a conditionality that might feel like a gimmick were it not also true to life. Likely the wrong word but it feels right? Here we get a glimpse of how Handler works. Throughout “And Then? And Then? What Else?” he highlights the tension between thought and feeling, the way we can infer something without fully knowing it. That’s a sensation familiar to every kid who reads “A Series of Unfortunate Events”: What adults are saying and what they’re doing are very different things.

For Handler, such suspicions didn’t disappear with childhood. Early in “And Then? And Then? What Else?” he recalls a party he attended where “real estate and traffic were the mandatory conversation topics,” all the boredom of the grown-up world. Eventually, he met a 6-year-old “and asked him what was up, in the hopes of a better conversation.” The child answered: “Last night I dreamed I was a horse.”

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It’s an instructive anecdote, Handler insists, because children “generally have a firmer grasp on what is interesting to say.” By way of elaboration, he continues: “If you had to sum up lasting literature in a single sentence, you could do worse than ‘I dreamed I was a horse’ — prophetic dreams and animal transformation appear much more frequently in the old epics than, say, which neighborhoods have the best schools.” A perception of the world, in other words, as magical, as inexplicable, as full of wonder, fear and awe. Isn’t this the reason so many of us started reading? Isn’t that what we look for most when we pick up a book?

In “And Then? And Then? What Else?” (the title, fittingly, comes from Baudelaire), Handler returns repeatedly to this notion, whether he’s discussing his books or the details of his life. He is frank without being overly revealing and always seeks out some larger integration, a place where thought and feeling might intersect. As an undergraduate, he suffered from recurring nightmares, populated by ghost-like figures, “naked, bald, painted or powdered white.” The resulting sleep deprivation led to seizures, as well as hallucinations in which these characters began to appear in the waking world.

Or perhaps, Handler conjectures, “hallucinations” is not the proper word. “Nabokov,” he writes, “famously said that reality was ‘one of the few words which means nothing without quotes,’ and this was an idea that kept visiting, bringing me comfort and bliss.”

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What he means is that we never know anything, not truly, and that what we think of as the real world is just another construct, built out of our desires and preconceptions (that word again), as subjective as the angle of our minds. That’s the craft lesson here, and the life lesson also: Be curious. Accept nothing at face value. Why couldn’t the figures from his dream exist — an acceptance that ultimately frees Handler from their influence — even if most of us don’t see them?

Of course, to believe that requires a creative leap. That disposition, that openness leads Handler to an especially acute critique of the pieties of cancel culture, with its distrust of work that some might suggest is “problematic” — a word, he explains, that “describes the entire human condition, which is to say it describes nothing.” Given the subjects and scenarios of his fiction, Handler has found himself in the cross-hairs of various self-appointed cultural guardians on more than one occasion, but while he shares some of those details, that is not what interests him. Rather, it is the question of human personality, human weirdness, which is, as it has ever been, the only source of art.

“The peculiarities of individual works,” he argues, “come from the peculiarities of the individuals who make them. All these peculiarities — all of them — are problematic to somebody or other. Luckily, your own choices about preferences, dictating what you decide to read, are problematic, too.”

If that’s the case, “And Then? And Then? What Else?” counsels, why not opt for joy? This, Handler wants us to understand, is the most important component of storytelling — of reading and writing — and of living too. I keep thinking of the conversation with the 6-year-old at that stultifying party, and the unalloyed pleasure of both the teller and the listener as they discover in the moment their own shared humanity.

“ Last night I dreamed I was a horse . You don’t say. Tell me more.” That is everything and all we need to know.

David L. Ulin is a contributing writer to Opinion. He is the former book editor and book critic of The Times.

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