Novel Cognition | Weeknotes #435

The page once opened inward.Now the screen answers back.We call both kinds of thinking.Still unsure. Novel Cognition On The Blog Start Select Reset 📑 Photo 365 The Ministry Of My Own Labour Terminal Access Dipping the Stacks Reading Music Remember Kids:Novel CognitionOne of the group chats I am in spent most of last week talking about AI psychosis, the claims around cognitive offloading, and cognition more broadly. What follows is me cherry-picking the threads I found most interesting and trying to make sense of what I took away.Chatting with an AI does not feel particularly new. As I’ve written before, the interface grammar is inherited wholesale from chat rooms and interactive fiction turntaking. What is novel is that what we perceive to be a conversation is detached from another person and turned into a private thinking space. Chat apps, MSN, WhatsApp, Signal or whatever are all conversations with another person, through a machine. Speaking to an LLM is a conversation with a…