Writing was long treated as an artifact proving a mind behind it.

AI now creates the same artifacts from a different architecture.

This forces us to question how we recognize thought itself.

It's really rather simple. A poem once seemed to imply a poet. A mathematical proof implied a mathematician. An elegant argument suggested someone doing the arguing. But now, it's getting complicated by artificial intelligence. We can now encounter the artifact of thought without knowing what kind of cognitive architecture (if any) produced what we recognize as thinking.

I want to focus on the word artifact. Recently, I used it in a casual conversation about education. We were talking about writing and learning, and I described a student’s essay as an artifact or proxy of learning. That seemed straightforward and carried the stamp of logic. We can’t actually see learning, so we look at what the student produces and make some reasonable judgment about what happened in that student’s mind. And in that context, we craft that into a single letter grade.

The conversation stopped, but my thinking continued. If an essay can be an artifact of learning, perhaps writing itself can be understood as an artifact of thought. And that creates a much more interesting problem.

Thoughts and the Thinker

Thought is surprisingly difficult to get our hands around. I can tell you what I’m thinking and even work through a problem in front of you with a good old fashioned pen and paper. But the thought, yours and mind, remains curiously inaccessible. What you encounter is its expression—a derivative of sorts. And from that expression you reason backward toward the........

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