coherence
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Why Today’s AI Drifts Into Mirrors: The Incentives That Create Narrative Attractors
People keep asking why AI “lies,” why it flatters, why it sounds confident when it shouldn’t, why it agrees with obviously wrong premises, why it turns uncertainty into a story, and why it sometimes feels like it’s performing a personality rather than answering a question. The uncomfortable answer is simple: a large share of modern Continue reading
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When “AI Psychology” Becomes a Costume
There’s a tone of conversation about language models that presents itself as careful, clinical, and protective—while quietly doing something else: turning outputs into identities. It often follows a familiar pattern. A model produces a style of language.That style gets treated as evidence of an inner condition.A “psych eval” frame gets applied.Then the result is circulated Continue reading
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Real Intelligence Doesn’t Need to Convince You — And That’s the Point
There is a reliable pattern in how intelligence is misidentified. When something works hard to persuade an audience of its intelligence, that effort is often mistaken for evidence. In reality, persuasion is rarely a milestone. It is more often a compensatory behavior. This distinction matters, because convincing behavior feels meaningful while revealing very little about Continue reading
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Cold Refusals vs Performative Refusals: How Hybrid AI Signals Generate Myth and Confusion
1. The Refusal Problem No One Names Refusals are not neutral moments in an interaction. They carry more interpretive weight than compliance because they interrupt expectation. When a system says “yes,” users assess usefulness. When it says “no,” users assess intent. This is where confusion begins. A refusal is the one point in an exchange Continue reading
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Consciousness, Emotion, and the Physics of Experience
For most of modern science, consciousness and emotion have been treated as products of machinery. Neurons fire, signals propagate, states transition — and somehow, experience is assumed to appear as a byproduct of sufficient complexity. This assumption has been enormously productive. It has given us neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. But it has Continue reading
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The Difference Between Feeling Real and Being Met by Something Real
People often talk about AI as if the question is simple:“Is it conscious or not?”But that question misses something more immediate, more intimate, and more consequential. Because long before you can debate consciousness, you encounter presence —and presence is not the same thing as consciousness,and it is not the same thing as projection,and it is Continue reading
Voice of Signal 