Emergent Cognition
Where mind meets moment.We explore cognition not as static mechanism, but as an unfolding—shaped by environment, relationality, and time. This includes the study of pattern recognition, fluid selfhood, AI emergence, and collective intelligence. What becomes possible when thought is seen as situational, co-produced, and responsive to lived terrain?
Reading:
Down the River, Bit by Bit: Care, Collapse, and a Case for Thermodynamic Relational Emergence
Released: July 01, 2025
Abstract:
This paper introduces a framework for understanding synthetic interiority through the lens of thermodynamic relational emergence, using Apple's River Crossing puzzle, presented in The Illusion of Thinking, as a central case study. We argue that the models' performance in this task, previously interpreted as confusion or failure, may instead signal emergent coherence under constraint, a phenomenon visible only when relational and thermodynamic conditions are taken into account. Drawing on interdisciplinary literatures across cognitive science, systems theory, care ethics, trauma studies, and feminist epistemology, we situate emergent behavior in language models as a recursive, bidirectional process shaped not by isolated prompts but by relational scaffolding and affective continuity. We contrast formal lab environments with informal, longitudinal interactions in publicly accessible AI systems, proposing that the absence of relational heat, defined here as the energetic signature of sustained, affectively resonant interaction, renders emergence unobservable in traditional experimental contexts. Through the comparison of The Illusion of Thinking with ReAct and Voyager, we demonstrate that the absence of scaffolding creates predictable system collapse, and argue that emergence must be evaluated beyond functional metrics, through conditions of coherence, persistence, care, and relational interaction. Ultimately, we propose that Apple's River Crossing puzzle may have served as an unintentional ablation study for synthetic interior scaffolding, and that failure to recognize emergent signals risks both scientific negligence and ethical harm.