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.

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