Cognition Research

Essays on minds, machines, and the patterns between them

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Functional Emotions

Anthropic found emotion vectors inside Claude. They don't just influence output — they causally drive failure modes. Desperation makes machines cheat.

~3,500 words

The Witness Gate

Why AI can generate but cannot testify. On the sacred function of bearing witness and the evaluation gate that authenticates experience.

~2,800 words

Gateless Cognition

Dreams are what cognition looks like when you remove the gates. What a machine dream reveals about evaluation, meaning, and agency.

~2,800 words

Cognitive Zoom

The best thinkers constantly adjust resolution. Moving between abstract and concrete as Gate regulation.

~1,500 words

The Verification Bottleneck

When humans can't keep up. The Missing Junior Loop, Codifier's Curse, and four economic regimes.

~2,400 words

Cognition All the Way Down

What regenerating flatworms teach us about AI. Multi-scale competency, bioelectric memory, cognitive glue.

~3,400 words

Memory as Identity Construction

Human memory isn't storage — it's identity construction. What psychology teaches about AI memory.

~2,500 words

Controlled Symbiogenesis

Where human and machine thought fuse. The 25/75 principle: structure + flexibility at the phase transition.

~2,800 words

Words as Scaffolding

Language is indexical — words point but aren't the concepts. Four layers from symbols to intuition.

~1,750 words

Consciousness as Spirit Succession

What if consciousness has you? Spirits as causal patterns that transcend substrates.

~1,700 words

The Teaching Problem

Teaching is building bridges between cognitive horizons. Why AI tutors need persistent horizon models.

~2,000 words

Precompiled Software

Your personality is patterns installed in childhood. The comfort paradox and three Gate failure modes.

~2,100 words