@extended-brain.bsky.social
The "extended brain" concept expands beyond the physical brain, encompassing our gut, immune system, and heart, as well as artifacts like recorded writings and digital forms. 📍: South East Asia 🔗extendedbrain.substack. com
a video recap of Radical Creativity extendedbrain.substack.com/p/rad…
and The Flaw Is Source Code extendedbrain.substack.com/p/the���
In NCA, the gecko isn’t stored in a cell or in the weights. It lives in the dynamics—as an attractor. The pattern is real, but only while the process runs. Like a whirlpool.
Check out my new post: extendedbrain.substack.com/p/no-cell-se...
“Top-down causation” doesn’t mean spooky forces. It means global patterns constrain what local interactions are even possible—by shaping the environment the parts encounter.⬇️
Patterns, goals, and perception co-evolve. Forms are not merely descriptions; they become participants—stable, resilient, and causally consequential—so long as the process sustains them.⬇️🧵
A refreshing take on why human intent matters more than ever in the age of generative models. 🦋
Link: extendedbrain.substack.com/p/art-as-str...
New read: "Art as Structured Navigation."
The post argues that art functions as a cognitive scaffold. By creating specific constraints, artists allow us to navigate complex emotional and intellectual spaces that would otherwise be inaccessible.
🧵⬇️
Relevance Realization IS gradient perception.
Why does relevance involve transformation? Because participation is constitutive—the participant is itself a pattern within the coherence-landscape, and participation changes the pattern
The orientation thus supplies evaluative guidance, not just description.
Meaning is coherent participation in real patterns that transcend any individual.
I acknowledge the foundational influence of Michael Levin, Francisco Varela, Buddhist and Daoist world outlooks.⬇️
there is a felt sense of going toward or being for something. Because patterns are oriented, they embody normative structure—there are better and worse ways to engage with them. A wrong note violates the pattern’s orientation; a well‑chosen move honors it. ⬇️
That directionality is not just a causal tendency (like gravity) but a kind of purposive pull that can be perceived by an agent. In phenomenological language, “intentional” means the pattern is experienced as about or aimed at something—⬇️
An intro to my new philosophical lens, Orientational Realism. Patterns, agents as special patterns participating in patterns co-creating coherence landscapes. Agents have felt gradients or orientation. 🧵⬇️
On the Participational Realism view, we do not observe abstract objects across a causal gap, as if we were perceiving things in a separate realm. Rather, we participate in the same coherence-structures that define mathematical truth. ⬇️
The structure is real, constrains what is possible, and that constraint is what you experience as "forcing." The forcing quality indicates that you are participating in a real coherence-structure ⬇️
Participational Realism offers a third interpretation: the forcing quality indicates that you are participating in a real coherence-structure—not perceiving a distant Platonic object, but also not merely playing with arbitrary rules. ⬇️
Is Mathematics discovered or invented? We propose a third way, which Participational Realism: we do not observe abstract objects across a causal gap, as if we were perceiving things in a separate realm. Rather, we participate in the same coherence-structures that define mathematical truth 🧵⬇️
The central risk is not that AI will write poorly, but that it will solve the wrong problem too efficiently. If it satisfies only the average, statistical constraints of its training data, the outcome is generic “production,” not thinking.⬇️
We can formalize the dynamic by viewing the writer not just as a thinker, but as a System Architect, and the AI as a High-Speed Heuristic Solver. This framework transforms writing from a solitary CSP into a managed collaboration where the primary task is orchestrating intelligent friction. ⬇️
Writing as Thinking can be viewed from the lens of Constraint Satisfaction Problem: The modern writer’s condition is newly complicated by the presence of artificial intelligence. To understand this collaboration—and its pitfalls—we must move beyond vague warnings. ⬇️🧵
A recap of 2025 posts distills five surprising truths from cognitive science that challenge our old assumptions. Together, they offer a new framework for thinking, creativity, and learning, providing essential skills for navigating a complex world with greater clarity.🧵⬇️
In contrast, the Spiked Virus model asserts that "real ideas push back."
The framework addresses the challenge of teaching this critical literacy without stifling creative spontaneity.
Link: extendedbrain.substack.com/p/they-do-no...
The Failure of the "Connecting the Dots" Metaphor
The traditional view of creativity is criticized for its passivity. Dots offer no resistance, and a line can be drawn between any two points and be labeled an insight. ⬇️
The Geometry of Insight
The core argument is that creativity is not a linear connection but a profound cognitive recombination. This is illustrated by the experience of mathematician André Weil, who, while in prison, discovered a "Rosetta Stone" ⬇️
Creative Ideas: They do not knock, they dock. This post acts as a Folgezettel within the “Seeing X as Y” trilogy, expanding on why the “spiked virus” is a superior metaphor for ideation than “connecting the dots.”🧵⬇️
Many agents, one self.
[link: extendedbrain.substack.com/p/the-archit...
TL;DR: You're not processing reality. You're tuning it.
Scale to collectives: Stress sharing (load balancers) + Memory anonymization (checklists from crashes) = Joint Markov Blankets.
We become one mind by synchronizing our generative models—"sheet music" for social coordination.
⬇️
