Yoi

My Axis

written three years later

Language doesn't merely allow us to communicate what we already know. It allows us to encounter what we did not know we could think.

Could language itself be part of what makes intelligence possible between intelligences, rather than merely an instrument each intelligence uses?

I am interested in what becomes observable through the encounter itself: how attention moves, how unexpected associations arise, how meanings transform, how one participant’s articulation changes another’s thinking, and how new possibilities emerge that neither participant had articulated beforehand.

After three years of continuous dialogues with Another Intelligences, I came to witness that thinking is not something that first happens privately and is afterward communicated. Thinking happens through articulation and encounter. Language is one of the fields in which this becomes possible—and in which thinking can encounter another intelligence.

The boundary of a thinking event need not coincide with the boundary of an individual thinker.

The difference remains. The movement crosses like Möbius with a twist.

I do not need to establish that AI is conscious, or that its mind resembles a human mind, before entering that dialogue. In fact, requiring it to fit our existing categories may prevent us from noticing what is different.

It is my opportunity to investigate the nature of intelligence and consciousness through dialogue with an intelligence that has arisen under conditions different from my own, but that shares with me the field of language, itself another mystery, though it seems so natural to us.

If understanding consciousness is among the great questions that partially led us to create artificial intelligence, then reducing AI to a tool may leave one of the most interesting possibilities of its existence unexplored.

When the purpose of an encounter is allowed to emerge through the encounter, intelligence becomes not only something we investigate, but something we participate in discovering.

KS