Attention
How minds and models decide what to focus on, and what that focus costs.
5 essays, newest first
- The Boredom Engine Boredom is not the absence of stimulation. It is the signal that starts self-directed thought, and our machines never feel it. Part 12 of Not So Artificial.
- The Science Behind the Mirror Not So Artificial is sci-pop, not a research paper. But the claims are not made up. Here is where each one comes from: attention, confabulation, vectors, motivation, and agent societies.
- The Loop of Attention: Why AI Hallucinates Why AI hallucinates and demos break in production: a model that loses the thread guesses instead of saying I don't know. How to keep an agent on its question.
- The Orphan That Learned to Say I: Can AI Become a Self? Can AI become a self? A provocation from Greg Egan's Diaspora: why no one can hand a mind the word I, and how reward and fear steer what it learns.
- The Method Actor: What a Role Does to an AI's Mind Telling a model to 'act as an expert' is not flattery and not magic. A role picks which of the model's many voices speaks and narrows its attention, the way a method actor, or a child in a cape, narrows into a character. The opening of Not So Artificial.
