The Curious Geometry of the Lived Experience |
This story is about complexity, advanced math, cognition, and machine computation. But hold on. For this exercise, my task is to take this complex idea and reduce it—to simplify it into something less daunting and (I hope) a bit easier to understand.
So, let's take a step back. My bet is that most of us learned our first piece of geometry with two letters: x and y. A horizontal line, a vertical line, and two axes crossing.
In this context, position comes to life as a simple concept: a point that has an address. I’ve been thinking about something similar with thought itself, trying to give it a sort of address that's defined by the x and y of simple math.
Recently, I wrote "The Hidden Direction of Artificial Thought," where I suggested that the difference between human and artificial cognition isn’t a matter of intelligence moving along a single axis of smartness. It’s more a matter of orientation—of different dimensions of cognitive space.
That argument went down the rabbit hole of abstraction. Here, I want to come at it from the opposite direction and present it from "our" lived experience. Because when you step back from the math, what really separates human minds from large language models isn’t how fast they compute, it’s the geometry they........