A public collection of essays, papers, notes, and audio overviews on cognition, physics, commitment, and related theory (RSVP and neighbouring projects).
- Index of all entries — title, type, and formats, with links
- Contributing — kebab-case names, YAML front matter, where to add files, format policy
| Folder | Theme |
|---|---|
analysis/ |
Articles on AI autonomy, labour automation, and dialogue as semantic field theory |
astrophysics/ |
Papers and drafts on cosmic / stellar physics (e.g. solar interiors) |
baseline/ |
Semantic compression: media stored as descriptions rather than signals |
codex-singularis/ |
Exported conversation archives |
complexity/ |
Arguments that complexity does not require intelligence |
computing/ |
Thought experiments in computing (magnetic-fluidic computing and related) |
conceptual-spaces/ |
Essays on conceptual spaces and RSVP field equations |
current-projects/ |
Snapshots of active project notes and overviews |
epistemology/ |
Epistemic dynamics, Kantian schematism, astrocyte/memory models |
essay/ |
Standalone essays (e.g. the bicameral illusion) |
fonts/ |
Typefaces used in figures and PDFs — not essay content |
geology/ |
Geological papers and draft cycles |
infrastructure/ |
Designed systems: swarm piloting, traffic arbitration, entropic compression |
mimetic-proxy-theory/ |
Audio series for Mimetic Proxy Theory |
monograph/ |
Monograph on identity, constraint, meaning, and topology of the self |
physics/ |
RSVP / geometric physics, TARTAN, and the physics monograph sources |
pipeline/ |
In-progress monograph pipeline and curvature drafts |
processing/ |
Civilization and coordination as error-correcting / updating processes |
projects/ |
Project writeups (e.g. hallucination as geometry, digital gravity) |
protocols/ |
Event-historical frameworks: commitment, meaning, mute compulsion |
research/ |
Research notes (RSVP architecture, AGI mappings, phenotypic data) |
resources/ |
Shared resource papers (e.g. geometric memory) |
semantic-ladle-theory/ |
Audio series for Semantic Ladle Theory |
spectral-universality/ |
Spectral universality paper and sources |
system/ |
System-level papers (viewpoint diversity) |
vault/ |
Architecture of exclusion, merit/legibility, Solms–RSVP mappings |
workspace/ |
Working notes on verification, commitment, measurement, and related claims |
| (repository root) | Cross-cutting essays and debates that are not tied to one theme |
New material should go in the matching folder. Details are in CONTRIBUTING.md.
Each work has one canonical readable copy: .txt or .md (prefer .md when the document is already Markdown).
| Format | Role |
|---|---|
.txt / .md |
Canonical prose, with YAML front matter |
.pdf |
Typeset paper or graphic; keep when it is not just a printout of the text |
.mp3 |
Audio overview of the same stem |
.html |
Optional GitHub Pages view of an existing text — not a second essay |
.tex |
Paper source (kebab-case, same stem as the PDF when both exist) |
.mhtml / .mht |
Not kept. Browser archives were extracted to .txt and removed |
If two files are the same work in different wrappers, keep the accessible text. Do not add .mhtml beside a .txt.
From Verification to Commitment
Enacting cognitive landscapes
Constraint Closure and its Failures
- Why AI code and essays fail – Audio Overview
Text as Substrate — Audio Overview
Audio Overview - When Humans Become Friction
There is a recurring ritual in contemporary AI commentary in which Gary Marcus solemnly informs the public that large language models lack “System 2 reasoning,” while occasionally conceding that they may possess something like “System 1 pattern recognition.” This gesture is meant to sound diagnostically precise. In fact, it rests on a conceptual error so basic that it threatens to collapse the entire critique into theater.
Aspect Relegation Theory begins from a heretical but empirically mundane observation: System 1 is not a distinct cognitive faculty at all. It is what System 2 looks like after it has already done its work.
The commuter who “intuitively” walks to the subway without deliberation is not engaging in some primitive, pre-rational module. They are executing a previously solved optimization problem whose parameters have been cached, compressed, and relegated below the threshold of conscious attention. When the subway shuts down, cognition does not switch systems; it increases resolution. Attention widens its aperture, finer-grain distinctions re-enter awareness, and formerly relegated parameters are promoted back into deliberative space. Nothing metaphysically changes. Only the level of detail being actively inspected does.
This is where Marcus’s framework quietly fails. By treating System 1 as a fundamentally different kind of process rather than a degenerate case of System 2 under stable conditions, he mistakes a property of attentional economy for a property of mind. Automaticity becomes mystified. Habit becomes ontology. The result is a dualism without explanatory payoff.
Aspect Relegation Theory replaces this with a sliding attentional hierarchy. Cognitive labor is performed at full deliberative depth only when uncertainty or novelty demands it. Once a working solution stabilizes, its internal structure is progressively hidden from conscious access. What we call “intuition” is simply the successful burial of intermediate steps. The Overton window of attention narrows not because thought disappears, but because it has already succeeded.
This matters for AI because the familiar critique—“LLMs only do System 1”—implicitly assumes that System 1 is shallow, heuristic, and ontologically inferior. But if System 1 is merely precompiled System 2, then the relevant question is not whether a system has two kinds of cognition, but whether it can re-promote relegated aspects when error, contradiction, or novelty arises. That is a question about control, re-inspection, and adaptive resolution, not about fast versus slow thinking.
Ironically, this reframing dissolves both hype and dismissal. It denies that present AI systems possess magical intuition, but it also denies that humans possess a mysterious second engine of thought that machines categorically lack. What humans demonstrably have is a robust mechanism for shifting the granularity of attention across hierarchical representations. What current systems lack is not System 2 per se, but principled, endogenous control over when and how aspect relegation should be reversed.
In that light, Marcus’s insistence on policing the boundary between System 1 and System 2 begins to resemble arguing over whether compiled code is “really” computation. The distinction survives only as long as one refuses to look at the compilation process.
Aspect Relegation Theory is not revolutionary. It is worse for the pundit class: it is deflationary. It removes the mystique, collapses the false dichotomy, and replaces it with a continuous model of attention, habit, and resolution. Which may explain why it is rarely acknowledged. There is very little left to moralize once intuition stops pretending to be magic and starts admitting it is just yesterday’s reasoning, efficiently forgotten.