We’ve spent the last few years marveling at how AI tools seem to think, with me, for me, and even a curious cognitive construct that I've struggled to put my finger on. I've pushed on these bounds by even calling artificial intelligence something antithetical to our human thinking—anti-intelligence. It's clear that these models complete our sentences, summarize our thoughts, generate prose, suggest decisions, and even pass for emotionally aware. But something isn’t sitting right. The more I push into this statistically rigid yet ambiguous space, the more it becomes clear that these systems aren’t thinking like us at all. They’re doing something else entirely.

Yes, it’s tempting to anthropomorphize AI and in many instances it seems inevitable. The conversation naturally shifts to frame AI like it’s a synthetic mind—one built in our image, or perhaps in our shadow. But the deeper truth, at least from my perspective, is more disorienting and perhaps even freakish. These models don’t reflect human cognition, they reflect something we haven’t named yet. Something that feels like a kind of mathematical terrain that doesn’t map to our human experience of thought. And as much as we seek to draw the map from our "

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