The map is not the territory, but the hallucination is not the map. –adapted from Alfred Korzybski

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rewriting the conditions under which our cognition forms meaning. This disruption isn’t merely economic and extends beyond the "job loss" perspective that is commonplace today. It is the widening mismatch between human intelligence and machine fluency. Four domains—meaning, value, knowledge, emotion—once anchored our human reality. When they shift together, our continuity of understanding begins to fall apart.

Think about this: Human thought generates meaning by choosing. And that means for us to commit. We collapse potential paths and accept the cost of selecting one. A thought becomes real when we decide what it is not. AI doesn't collapse possibility; it expands endlessly. One prompt can output a thousand plausible outputs without ever requiring a decision. And this changes something subtle yet foundational as humans begin to confuse the "comfort" of

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