Episode 24: At the Edge of Entropy

 

From Things to Flows

        How Changing Our Metaphors Changes the Worlds We Can Live In

Modern life is saturated with things.

We speak of the self, the economy, power, the system, nature, the market, society—as if each were a discrete object, bounded, nameable, and available for manipulation. This way of speaking feels natural, even inevitable. But it is neither neutral nor harmless.

It is metaphoric.

And the metaphors we rely on quietly determine not only how we describe the world, but what kinds of worlds can even appear to us as real, possible, or negotiable.

 The hidden cost of substantial metaphors

Substantial metaphors treat reality as composed of things with properties. They assume:

• clear boundaries
• stable identities
• linear cause and effect
• control through intervention

This way of seeing has been extraordinarily productive. It underwrites modern engineering, bureaucracy, law, and industrial economics. But it also carries a cost we are only beginning to feel.

When the world is composed primarily of objects:

• agency appears externalized
• responsibility becomes difficult to locate
• change feels imposed rather than participatory
• complexity collapses into blame

We begin to experience life as something that happens to us.

The irony is that this sense of powerlessness is not caused by the world itself, but by the metaphors through which we encounter it.

 What science has been quietly telling us

Across disciplines, the sciences have been drifting—sometimes reluctantly, sometimes decisively—away from object-centered descriptions.

Physics no longer describes reality as a collection of solid particles, but as interacting fields, probabilities, and relational structures. Biology increasingly understands organisms not as machines, but as self-organizing processes maintained through constant exchange with their environments. Neuroscience does not find “things” in the brain, but patterns, activations, and ongoing dynamics. Complexity theory shows that many properties do not pre-exist at all—they emerge from interaction.

In short: the deeper science looks, the less the world resembles a warehouse of objects.

And yet our everyday language, politics, and economics remain stubbornly substantial.

 Movement metaphors: when reality begins to loosen

Movement metaphors shift attention away from what something is and toward what it is doing.

Instead of:

• identity as a thing → identity as a trajectory
• power as possession → power as capacity to move or respond
• problems as objects → problems as stuck processes

Change becomes navigational rather than combative. Agency reappears not as domination, but as repositioning.

Movement metaphors make room for learning, adaptation, and timing. They allow us to speak about life as something we enter, move through, drift within, or reorient ourselves toward.

But movement metaphors still assume a mover.

To go further, we need field metaphors.

 Field metaphors: when relations come first

Field metaphors reverse a deeply ingrained assumption: that things come first and relationships second.

In a field-oriented view:

• relations are primary
• entities are temporary coherences
• influence is distributed
• meaning arises through resonance

Nothing exists in itself. Everything exists in relation.

This does not deny the usefulness of naming or categorizing. It places them back in their proper role—as tools, not truths.

From within a field metaphor, power is not something one holds. It is something that circulates, intensifies, dampens, or aligns. Responsibility is no longer a burden carried by isolated individuals, but a property of participation within a shared field.

This is not mysticism. It is increasingly how the world actually behaves.

 The political and economic destabilization this implies

Modern political and economic metaphors are almost entirely object-centered:

• the state as a machine
• the economy as a system to be managed
• nature as a resource
• society as a container
• individuals as units

These metaphors presuppose control, extraction, optimization, and growth. They make sense only if reality is made of things that can be owned, measured, and rearranged from the outside.

Movement and field metaphors destabilize this entire architecture.

If the economy is not a machine but a dynamic ecology, then growth without regard to coherence becomes pathological. If society is not a container but a relational field, then exclusion, polarization, and inequality are not side effects—they are structural distortions. If nature is not a resource but a living field of mutual dependence, then environmental collapse is not an external problem. It is a loss of relational integrity.

These are not moral claims. They are ontological ones.

 Affordance landscapes: how life feels different

Metaphors do not stay in language. They shape affordance landscapes — what situations seem to allow or demand.

In an object-centered world:

• problems must be fixed
• power must be seized
• responsibility feels heavy
• failure feels personal

In a movement- and field-centered world:

• situations invite entry rather than control
• agency appears as responsiveness
• responsibility feels shared
• failure becomes feedback

Nothing becomes easier in a superficial sense. But life becomes more workable.

People report greater calm not because the world is calmer, but because their metaphors no longer place them outside the flow of events.

 Toward a new cultural umwelt

A cultural umwelt is the background world that feels obvious before we think about it.

Modernity’s umwelt is object-centered. That is why so many people feel trapped, exhausted, or powerless even when materially secure. They are navigating relational realities with object-based maps.

A relational umwelt would not abolish things. It would decenter them.

It would normalize:

• identities as evolving
• knowledge as situated
• power as relational
• meaning as emergent

Such a shift does not require consensus or revolution. It begins where all cultural change begins: with attention.

With noticing what our metaphors make visible—and what they quietly erase.

 Control gives way to participation

The question is no longer whether movement and field metaphors are more accurate. Science has largely answered that.

The real question is whether we are willing to live in a world where control gives way to participation, where certainty gives way to coherence, and where power is no longer something we take from the world, but something we generate with it.

Changing our metaphors will not solve our problems.

But without changing them, we may not even be able to see what our problems actually are.

 

Stop Saying We’re “Outsourcing Thinking”

        Why AI Is an Epistemic Extension, Not a Cognitive Abdication

Every time I hear someone say that using AI means we are “outsourcing thinking,” I feel the same quiet irritation one feels when a useful tool is misdescribed so badly that it begins to distort the entire conversation around it. The metaphor sounds plausible, even commonsensical, and that is precisely the problem. It is wrong in a way that feels intuitively right, and therefore does far more damage than a crude misunderstanding ever could.

The outsourcing metaphor treats thinking as if it were factory labor: a discrete task, performed internally, that can be offloaded to an external contractor. Under this framing, when a human uses AI, something essential is surrendered—agency, responsibility, perhaps even intelligence itself. What remains is a diminished thinker leaning on an external crutch.

But this metaphor does not describe what is happening. It describes a fear.

What people are actually doing when they work with AI is not outsourcing cognition. They are using an epistemic device—a tool that extends the reach, speed, and flexibility of human sense-making. We have encountered such devices before. Many times.

Writing did not outsource memory; it expanded it.

Diagrams did not outsource reasoning; they stabilized it.

Maps did not outsource navigation; they made new forms of movement possible.

Microscopes did not outsource seeing; they revealed worlds previously unavailable to the naked eye.

In none of these cases did the human mind retreat. It reorganized itself around a new affordance.

AI belongs in this lineage. What distinguishes it is not that it “thinks for us,” but that it operates directly in language—the medium through which much human thought already occurs. This creates the illusion that cognition itself has been displaced, when in fact it has been reconfigured.

When a person uses AI well, they are extending their cognitive reach in a deeply embodied, sensorimotor sense. They are not handing off judgment; they are compressing search. Instead of traversing a vast conceptual space step by step, they reduce the cost of exploration. They can test hypotheses faster, surface counterexamples sooner, and move laterally between interpretive frames without the usual friction.

This matters because insight rarely arrives as a single linear deduction. It emerges through comparison, reframing, and the slow elimination of unproductive paths. AI accelerates this process not by replacing thought, but by reshaping the terrain in which thought moves.

The outsourcing metaphor also fails because it assumes that thinking is a closed, internal process to begin with. It never was. Human cognition has always been distributed across tools, symbols, practices, and social systems. Language itself is a shared technology, refined over millennia, that no individual invented and no individual controls. To accuse someone of “outsourcing thinking” because they use AI is a bit like accusing them of outsourcing thought to grammar.

What does change with AI is the visibility of this extension. Because the tool talks back, because it produces fluent language, we mistake responsiveness for agency and assistance for substitution. We confuse epistemic fluency with understanding. That confusion is real, and it deserves careful attention—but it does not justify a bad metaphor.

There is a legitimate risk here, and it is not outsourcing. The risk is premature cognitive closure. Because AI can produce coherent formulations so quickly, it can tempt us to stop thinking too soon—to accept a well-phrased answer instead of continuing the exploratory process. This is not a loss of intelligence; it is a loss of discipline. The responsibility to judge, select, and revise never leaves the human. It can only be neglected.

Seen this way, AI is less like a contractor and more like scaffolding. It allows us to work at heights that would otherwise be inaccessible, but it is not the structure itself. If we mistake the scaffold for the building, the failure is ours, not the tool’s.

The irony is that the outsourcing metaphor does exactly what it accuses AI of doing: it replaces careful analysis with a convenient shortcut. It feels explanatory, but it obscures more than it reveals. By framing AI as a cognitive substitute, it blinds us to its real function as a cognitive amplifier—and to the responsibilities that amplification entails.

We are not outsourcing thinking. We are extending its reach.

The problem is not that we are thinking with new tools, but that we are too often thinking with old metaphors that no longer carry the weight we’ve placed on them.

Episode 23: Finality Without Absence

 

Entering the Studio Without Asking Permission

 How AI is reshaping who gets to create — and what creation now asks of us.

For most of human history, creative practice has been gated by thresholds that were invisible but decisive. You didn’t simply decide to become a musician, a filmmaker, a visual artist, or a writer. You needed time, money, training, access to institutions, and—often most critically—permission. Not explicit permission, perhaps, but the slow accumulation of signals that told you: yes, you belong here.

What we are witnessing now, with tools like Suno and Higgsfield Cinema Studio, is not merely a technological acceleration. It is a quiet reconfiguration of the cultural entry points into creative worlds.

AI is not making everyone an artist. It is making it easier for people to enter the studio.

That distinction matters.

From Mastery to Entry

Consider the difference between mastery and entry. Mastery is slow, embodied, and unforgiving. It still matters, and it always will. But entry is something else entirely. Entry is the moment when a person discovers whether a domain resonates with them at all.

Until recently, many people never reached that moment.

You might have had a musical sensibility but never learned an instrument. You might have thought cinematically but never touched a camera. You might have felt stories gathering inside you but lacked the stamina—or the solitude—to write long enough to find out what they were.

AI tools collapse the distance between curiosity and first expression. They allow someone to move from “I wonder” to “listen to this” or “look at this” in hours rather than years.

That shift alone changes developmental trajectories.

Music Without the Conservatory

Music has long been one of the most exclusionary creative fields—not because of elitism, but because of friction. Instruments are difficult. Theory is abstract. Production is technical. Recording is expensive.

Platforms like Suno do something deceptively simple: they allow people to externalize musical intuition without first translating it into technique.

This does not replace musicianship. It reorders the path toward it.

Someone can now discover:

• whether they think melodically,
• whether rhythm organizes their emotions,
• whether sound is a medium through which they want to make meaning, before investing years in skill acquisition.

Many will stop there. Some will go further. But the door has been opened.

Cinema Without the Crew

Filmmaking once required coordination, capital, and infrastructure. Even short films demanded teams, equipment, locations, and post-production expertise.

AI-driven cinematic tools—Higgsfield among them—make it possible to prototype scenes, moods, and visual narratives without assembling a small army. What emerges is not cinema in the traditional sense, but something closer to storyboarding as expression.

This invites a new class of creators:

• writers who think visually,
• photographers who think temporally,
• philosophers who think in scenes rather than arguments.

Again, the result is not an erosion of film craft. It is an expansion of who gets to discover whether they have cinematic intelligence at all.

Visual Art, Writing, and the End of the Blank Page

The same pattern repeats across domains.

Visual art tools reduce the intimidation of the empty canvas. Writing assistants reduce the paralysis of the blank page. These systems do not supply meaning; they supply momentum. They lower the activation energy required to begin.

This matters most for people who are not young, not credentialed, not embedded in creative subcultures—people who grew up in an analog world and were told, implicitly or explicitly, that certain forms of expression were not for them.

AI doesn’t make them experts. It makes them participants.

 

The Real Democratization Is Not Output

The common critique is familiar: floods of content, aesthetic sameness, shallow experimentation, algorithmic sludge. All of this is real. But it misses the deeper shift.

The true democratization here is not the democratization of output. It is the democratization of exploration.

People can now ask:

• What kind of creator might I be?
• Which medium responds when I touch it?
• Where do I feel coherence rather than friction?

These are developmental questions, not market questions.

And they matter profoundly in a world where identity is increasingly fluid, careers are unstable, and meaning must often be self-authored rather than inherited.

A Higher Bar, Not a Lower One

Paradoxically, as tools become more powerful, the technical bar drops—and the existential bar rises.

When anyone can produce competent artifacts, what distinguishes work is no longer polish or novelty. It is coherence. Depth. Continuity. Ethical relation to the world being shaped.

AI makes it easy to enter creative fields. It does not make it easy to inhabit them.

Sustained creation still demands attention, care, judgment, and the ability to live with unfinishedness. If anything, these qualities become more visible, not less.

A Cultural Inflection Point

We are at a moment when creative identity is shifting from something one earns permission to claim, to something one discovers through use. The studio is no longer a destination at the end of a long road. It is an environment people can step into and test.

Some will pass through briefly. Some will stay. A few will build worlds.

AI does not decide which path anyone takes. It simply removes the lock from the door.

And that, quietly, changes everything.

Top of Form

 

Episode 22: Threshold of Combustion

 

Agency Without Control

                                    Rethinking the Self in an Age of Distributed Intelligence

Most people I speak with today share a quiet, recurring discomfort. It appears when they work with artificial intelligence, when they collaborate inside fast-moving teams, when they try to make sense of ecological crises that refuse simple solutions. The feeling is not panic. It is not fear. It is something subtler: the sense that one ought to be in control—and isn’t.

We reach for familiar strategies. We try to improve our prompts, sharpen our skills, optimize our workflows. We assume that with enough mastery, the system will once again behave. And when it doesn’t, the failure feels personal, as if we are falling short of a role we are supposed to play.

But what if the discomfort isn’t a skill issue at all?

What if it is a metaphoric mismatch?

Modern life trained us to experience ourselves as autonomous individuals acting upon a world of tools, resources, and problems. We learned to locate agency inside the self and to treat the surrounding environment as something to be managed, controlled, or overcome. For a long time, this image worked. It aligned with relatively stable institutions, slow feedback loops, and technologies that extended human effort without fundamentally reshaping human cognition.

Today, that alignment is breaking down.

Artificial intelligence does not behave like a tool in the traditional sense. Ecological systems do not respond to command and control. Collective intelligence does not move in straight lines. Yet we continue to approach these domains as if the self remains a sovereign actor standing outside the system, issuing instructions from a position of oversight.

The resulting friction is often interpreted as anxiety about technology or uncertainty about the future. I think it runs deeper than that. I think it arises because the metaphoric structure through which we experience agency—who we believe ourselves to be in relation to the world—no longer fits the environments we inhabit.

Before we ask how to use AI well, or how to coordinate action in complex systems, we may need to ask a more fundamental question: what kind of self do these environments require?

That question does not point toward better techniques or stronger willpower. It points toward a quieter, more unsettling shift: a change in how we imagine the concept of the self.

The modern conception of the self did not arise by accident. It emerged alongside a particular world—one shaped by industrial production, scientific rationalism, bureaucratic institutions, and technologies that amplified human effort without dissolving human boundaries. In that world, the individual made sense as a discrete unit of agency: a thinking subject who possessed skills, made decisions, and acted upon an external environment.

This self was imagined as bounded. Cognition happened inside the head. Responsibility resided inside the person. Tools were inert extensions, subordinate to human intention. The world, though complex, was assumed to be ultimately legible and governable through analysis, planning, and control.

Within those conditions, autonomy was not an illusion—it was an achievement.

The modern self learned to specialize, to master domains, to optimize performance. It learned to separate means from ends, facts from values, subject from object. It cultivated a posture of distance: stepping back from the world in order to understand it and understanding it in order to act effectively upon it.

This posture worked remarkably well. It powered scientific discovery, technological innovation, and unprecedented material abundance. It supported stable careers, professional identities, and coherent life narratives. Cause and effect were slow enough to track. Systems were bounded enough to manage. Expertise could accumulate without immediately destabilizing the environment that produced it.

Crucially, the modern self did not experience itself as lonely or alienated by default. On the contrary, it experienced competence. To act autonomously was to be effective. To be effective was to matter.

The problem, then, is not that the modern self was misguided. The problem is that it was ecologically tuned to a world that no longer exists.

As feedback loops accelerated, as cognition began to spill into networks and machines, as agency became distributed across systems no single actor could fully oversee, the assumptions that once grounded autonomy quietly eroded. Yet the image of the traditional self remained intact. We continued to expect command where only coordination was possible. We continued to seek control where responsiveness was required.

What once felt like strength began to feel like strain.

The modern self, trained to stand apart and act upon the world, increasingly finds itself embedded within processes it cannot step outside of—systems that respond, adapt, and evolve faster than individual intention can track. And because the self has not yet been reimagined, this mismatch is often experienced as personal inadequacy rather than ontological lag.

We try harder. We optimize further. We double down on mastery. But the ground beneath the metaphor has already shifted.

As the limits of the modern self become harder to ignore, a new metaphor has begun to circulate—especially in creative, intellectual, and AI-mediated work. It is the metaphor of the conductor.

In this image, the individual is no longer the sole producer of outcomes. The conductor does not generate sound. The musicians do. The intelligence of the system lies not in execution but in coordination—in timing, pacing, emphasis, and attunement to the whole. Authority becomes lighter. Mastery becomes relational rather than possessive.

It is an appealing metaphor, and for good reason.

The conductor loosens the grip of heroic individualism without abandoning agency altogether. It acknowledges distributed contribution while preserving coherence and meaning. It reassures us that there is still a role for human judgment, taste, and responsibility—even as the complexity of the system increases.

In many contexts, this metaphor is a genuine improvement. It reflects how people increasingly experience creative collaboration, including work with AI: less as issuing commands to a tool, more as shaping conditions under which something coherent can emerge. The conductor listens as much as they lead. They respond as much as they direct.

And yet, for all its sophistication, the conductor metaphor quietly preserves a familiar architecture.

The conductor still stands outside the orchestra.
They retain a privileged vantage point.
They oversee a bounded system governed by a score, a tempo, and a shared frame of reference.

Coherence, in this image, is still something that can be imposed from above—if not forcefully, then skillfully.

This is where the metaphor begins to strain.

The environments we now inhabit—ecological, technological, cognitive—do not resemble orchestras. There is no fixed score. No stable tempo. No clear boundary between performers and instruments. Feedback loops are fast, recursive, and often opaque. Agency is distributed not only across people, but across machines, infrastructures, and environments that respond in ways no single participant fully controls or understands.

In such conditions, there is no place to stand outside the system.

This is the point at which a deeper shift becomes necessary—not just in how we coordinate action, but in how we conceive of the self itself.

The ecological or 4E conception of self—embodied, embedded, enactive, extended—offers a different starting point. Rather than imagining the self as an autonomous agent or even as a coordinating authority, it understands the self as a participant in ongoing processes of sense-making that unfold across bodies, tools, environments, and social fields.

From this perspective, cognition does not reside solely in the head. It arises through interaction. Agency is not something the self possesses and deploys; it is something that emerges through engagement with a landscape of affordances. Action is not primarily about issuing decisions, but about responding skillfully to changing conditions.

The self, in this frame, is less a conductor and more a node—a site of sensitivity within a distributed network. What distinguishes one node from another is not authority or control, but attunement: the capacity to register shifts in the field and to adjust in ways that allow coherence to propagate.

This is a more difficult metaphor for modern minds to inhabit. It offers no overview, no command position, no guarantee of narrative centrality. And yet it more accurately reflects how intelligence already operates in complex systems—biological, ecological, and increasingly technological.

Seen this way, the task is no longer to coordinate the system from above, but to learn how to participate well within it. Not to impose order, but to sense emerging patterns. Not to control outcomes, but to move in phase with forces that exceed any single point of view.

What feels like a loss of agency from the standpoint of the modern self begins to look like a different kind of agency altogether—one grounded not in mastery, but in relationship.

If the ecological self is not a conductor, a natural question follows: how does coordination happen at all? If no one stands outside the system, if agency is distributed and situational, what accounts for moments of alignment, direction, or shared movement?

One way to answer this is through the notion of affordance attractors.

An affordance attractor is not a rule, a command, or a plan. It is a pattern in the landscape of possibilities that makes certain actions more likely, more stable, or more resonant than others. Rather than telling agents what to do, it reshapes what can be done with relative ease. It tilts the field.

Affordance attractors operate quietly. They do not announce themselves. They are sensed rather than interpreted. When people find themselves moving together without having agreed on a strategy, when conversations suddenly flow, when collaboration “clicks,” it is often because participants have entered the same affordance basin. Action becomes coordinated not through control, but through shared responsiveness to the same gradient.

From this perspective, coherence does not need to be imposed. It emerges when multiple nodes become sensitive to the same attractor and adjust accordingly. No one leads. No one follows. Movement happens because the terrain itself has changed.

This helps explain why the ecological self does not experience agency as choice alone. Agency feels more like navigation: the ability to register subtle shifts in the environment and to move in ways that remain viable as conditions evolve. Skill lies not in prediction, but in attunement. Intelligence lies not in command, but in timing.

Seen this way, the growing discomfort many people feel in complex systems takes on a different meaning. It is not evidence of inadequacy or loss of control. It is a signal that an older metaphor of selfhood is being stretched beyond its ecological fit.

The conductor metaphor marks an important transition away from heroic individualism. But it still imagines coherence as something overseen. The ecological self lets go of oversight altogether. It accepts that there is no external vantage point from which the whole can be grasped. What remains is participation—partial, situated, responsive.

Living as a node in a distributed network does not mean disappearing into the system. It means understanding influence as relational rather than sovereign, and responsibility as attentiveness rather than command. It means acting in ways that deepen coherence where possible and reduce harm where alignment fails.

This is not a call to abandon agency, but to reimagine it. Not as control over outcomes, but as the capacity to sense affordances and move with them skillfully.

In a world shaped by accelerating feedback loops, ecological instability, and increasingly non-human forms of intelligence, this shift is no longer optional. The question is not whether the modern self will be replaced, but whether we can learn—gradually, imperfectly—to inhabit a different one.

Not the conductor of the orchestra.

But a participant in the music.