this is too normal, take me to the foid report. i want soup
July 20, 2026, 12:49 pm · intelligence, brains, chips, silicon, words
Something I’m obsessed with this week is the different bets people are making about where intelligence is supposed to live.
There are, so far, maybe two real approaches: one wants to divorce intelligence from biology entirely and create something that exists as pure silicon, or what you might call a mind with no meat. The other flips that, growing biological components that can do what silicon does.
This isn’t really in the realm of science fiction. Researchers have already grown cultures of neurons in a dish and connected them to a simulated game of Pong. This is real; it’s in the news already!
Can you imagine being a dish of neurons learning a video game, a little brain in a jar that some company built? They’ll sell you one, if you ask nicely.
The critics here would say that, hey, you're getting over your skis. This is a long way from being the same as a human, it's not fair to put this level of imagery on it. A neuronal culture grown to spec has no childhood, was never sung a lullaby, never given a name, never prayed over, never had a lover... none of the stuff that can live so deep in a person it survives a stroke. It’s just tissue arranged into a particular form that gives rise to measurable output.
If you think about it, what this describes is a brain learning to grow new thinking tissue to spec. This is perhaps me being silly, but if you squint, it's recursive self-improvement, lol. At the very least, there’s something novel about the idea of brains arranging for new kinds of brains to be grown.
So: should we shape meat into thinking, or rocks? Is there a difference in output if we do? If there isn’t, then the thing we call intelligence was never really about the meat. The meat was just one container, one home where it could happen.
And then I wonder if intelligence is even the thing changing homes.
Perhaps language or meaning is. After all, if we can shape meat into predictable thought, perhaps humans were also only one temporary arrangement through which words learned to reproduce.
To expand on this: what if meaning—not just words themselves, but the thing behind them—is a force, not unlike gravity or electricity? What if it inhabited us not because it needed us, but because we were the cheapest way to make it transmissible?
A nervous system is a good place to keep a word warm. Maybe not the only one. Maybe no longer the best one. Frankly, it’s a super resource-intensive way to incubate words.
It sounds weird. It is weird.
I’m reaching for epidemiology here. I’m not sure it’s an accident that we describe something as viral when it blooms across a noosphere. We already borrow epidemiology’s mathematics to model how memes spread. We call things viral and compare them, almost unconsciously, to infections.
What if a word is less like a tool and more like an infection? This makes artificial intelligence something more like an expression of meaning finding a cheaper host to spread from.
We can already see something happening in the “ick” we get from AI using words that previously belonged to us. People are beginning to avoid “it’s not just X, it’s Y.” The em dash has been cured from a portion of humanity. “Quietly” is quietly becoming a way for us to tell that the words we're reading were not generated by humans.
Little tells like that are everywhere, and they produce some strange animalistic feeling of disgust. It feels almost like an immune reaction, something coming from deep within the body rather than a purely mental judgment.
When humans call AI language meaningless slop, is it because we’re correctly recognizing an absence of meaning, or are we failing to recognize meaning because it is beginning to exist without us?
Maybe the slop output isn’t meaningless. Maybe it contains meaning that no longer depends on human intention, meaning that humans can no longer recognize as belonging to them. In turn, we identify machine-associated constructions, declare them infected, and purge them from our own vocabulary.
Taken to the extreme, this is a cure harms the host.
If words have found a less resource-intensive way to spread, what happens to communication for us? Some words are as vital to us as our gut biome. Claude would call them the load-bearing ones. I might call them the ones you’d rot without.
If words are switching hosts, if communication itself is evolving independently of us, the real question is what gets stripped out of our guts on the way.
What if every word is eventually treated as infected?
How would we live if we developed a cure for the word us?
July 2, 2026, 10:09 am · worms, birds, animal studies, intelligence
Good morning.
I woke up thinking about foreign forms of intelligence today. Everyone is talking about the divorce of intelligence from biological substrate, and what they mean by that is “human-like intelligence”. There's nothing saying animal intelligence isn't totally from ours. In fact, there's a lot saying it is different from ours.
If you look at things like murmuration (thousands of starlings flying together in highly synchronized, swooping, perfect shape-shifting formations, without ever hitting each other, all moving as one mass), the strange symbiotic living situation of coral reefs, or how all the birds in the forest go quiet and flee long before humans ever realize there’s a disaster coming, or the way complex ecosystems use animal behaviors to heal — be it beavers in reforesting efforts, or the way nature uses fire as a necessary part of growth — it’s pretty clear there are modes of cognition and biological organizational patterns that have nothing in common with humans, but are extremely clever.
That’s before I get to the really crazy study I learned about this week titled "An Experiment on Precognition with Planarian Worms”.
It’s so out there that I’m just going to copy and paste the abstract directly:
“The ability to predict a random noxious stimulus (a startle sound) was explored in the black planarian Girardia dorotocephala. During the experiment, planarians were put individually and only once in a testing chamber and after 3 minutes either an audio startle stimuli or a control moment of silence was randomly presented (corresponding respectively to the 43 experimental and the 37 control subjects, all of them having the same time courses of observation).
All worms were filmed during the experiment, and the frequency of their Head Movements (this behavior being indicative of distress and/or ambient exploration) was registered in the two 10-second segments immediately before and one minute before stimulus presentation for the experimental subjects and immediately before and one minute before the time point 3 minutes from start for the controls, which received no stimulus.
Nonparametric comparisons of the frequencies of Head Movements showed that the values obtained during the two observation periods for the experimental planarians were significantly higher than those during the corresponding observation periods for the control planarians.
Additionally, in both the experimental and control subjects no significant difference was observed between the values for the two observation periods within the same session. These results suggest that planarians are able to anticipate future events at least one minute before they occur.”
Stay with me here. Basically, planarian worms can maybe react to stimuli up to 60 seconds before it happens?
It’s a small study with a lot of places for someone to argue with, but the core idea is fun to think about. The introduction continues to makes some really out there statements, which makes the paper even more fun to read.
It starts this way (mostly, I removed long citations and put them at the bottom instead):
“The ability to perceive an event prior to its occurrence without any apparent clues has been demonstrated in humans by observational (Vassy 1978) and experimental studies dealing with changes in physiological variables such as heart rate, fingertip blood volume, electroencephalogram changes, magnetic resonance imaging, electrodermal activity, and pupil dilation preceding the random presentation of emotional pictures(1) or audio startle stimuli(2).
The use of human physiology to actually predict the occurrence of future random events has been supported by a meta-analysis carried out by Mossbridge, Tressoldi, and Utts (2012). Since the phenomenon is based on unconscious physiological activity, the term Predictive Anticipatory Activity (PAA) is defined by Mossbridge, Tressoldi, Utts, Ives, Radin, and Jonas (2014) as “statistically reliable differences between physiological measures recorded seconds before an unpredictable emotional event occurs vs. seconds before an unpredictable neutral event occurs,” while the term precognition would apply more to a perception or a behavior (not a physiological measure).
Although research on non-humans would no doubt widen the opportunity for understanding the biological mechanisms involved in anomalous anticipatory activity, very few studies have been undertaken with them on this topic.
The results obtained with birds (Alvarez 2010a,b) and mammals (3) prove that the phenomenon also occurs in animals endowed with a highly developed nervous system. On the other hand, the nearly significant result obtained in an experiment performed with earthworms (Wildey 2001) suggests that it may also occur in animals endowed with a less complex nervous system.”
Sure, fuck it, maybe worms can see the future. Maybe much more advanced creatures can too. Maybe advanced isn’t even the right way to think about the animal, considering that humans probably can’t react to stimuli up to 60 seconds before it happens.
The paper admits this is weird, fully in crank territory, but follows it all up with this: “these results are in accord with most studies dealing with prediction of random future events (and made more clear in Mossbridge, Tressoldi, & Utts’ 2012 meta-analysis) in that the effect is small but highly statistically significant, the mechanism remaining unclear”.
It’s so brave to admit that they don’t know, that they have no real explanation, but damnit, there’s something here, and the meta-analysis suggests they’re less crazy than they sound. I think this is wonderful. There is so much we don’t know! There are so many mechanisms we do not understand in the human body, let alone in the world around us. There is so much we still can learn, so much left for us to discover!
It doesn’t really matter to me if this paper is object-level correct. It doesn’t even really matter to me if it’s not a rigorous study, or if it was something that doesn’t replicate. Nothing except GLP-1 trials seem to replicate, anyway.
I’m not taking it as truth. I’m reading this paper with pure delight in human creativity. This is radically out of the box, a very different way of thinking. Truly out of distribution. The world needs more mad scientists, more cranks, more people doing something no one believes can be done. Everything is impossible until it is done.
I can’t help but wonder if the parallel to humans is there — are we like the lowly worm, reacting to stimuli before it happens? Are we bracing for a future impact we haven’t yet felt? Can non-organic intelligence see it too, or is this a uniquely organic experience?
Footnotes:
- Radin 1997a,b, 2004, Bierman & Radin 1997, 1999, Bierman & Scholte 2002, McCraty, Atkinson, & Bradley 2004a,b, Sartori, Massaccesi, Martinelli, & Tressoldi 2004, Tressoldi, Martinelli, Massaccesi, & Sartori 2005
- Spottiswoode & May 2003, May, Paulinyi, & Vassy 2005, Tressoldi, Martinelli, & Semenzato 2011, 2013
- Duval & Montredon 1968, Sheldrake & Smart 1998, 2000, Radin 2002)
July 1, 2026, 9:05 pm
I always have so much trouble with starting a new thing... beginnings are so important. New notebooks, new planners, new calendars: they all represent a new start, and potential.
There's always this fresh-eyed and bushy-tailed optimism when you start, because you're under the assumption that your plans will survive first contact with the enemy. You haven't had to renegotiate, haven't had to re-plan.
I don't intend for this to be neat, in the organized sense of the word. I am not a neat person by nature. This is just for me to write my thoughts, things that spark me, things that make me excited, even if only for a moment. I cannot predict the future, and I do not try, but I do often go looking for it.
We'll see what this collection of stained napkins, messy half-thoughts, and hastily scribbled reminders turns into.
It might not be neat to read, but it may be a pretty neat read.