While the instinct-driven emotional “operating system” was adaptive for early survival, it is suboptimal in complex modern contexts that demand reflection.
Specifically, a predominantly emotional mode of cognition “biases reactive behavior over careful simulation,” tends to amplify tribalism and emotional contagion (short-term, group-centric thinking), and “blocks” higher-order overrides by reinforcing one’s identity through past emotional memories.
In academic terms, over-reliance on immediate emotional judgment undermines long-term reasoning and broadened perspective, contributing to phenomena like group polarization and cognitive bias (Haidt, 2012; Barrett, 2017).
Systems built to protect signal eventually filter out new signal that doesn’t match old noise.
Just tried again to engage with LessWrong. Got rejected, not for content, but for suspicion that my post was LLM generated.
Ironically, I referenced a post with clear signs of LLM phrasing (em dash abuse, pattern smoothing), but that one was accepted, because it came from a known user.
My post was about recursive entropy filters, a logical compression of evolution, consciousness, and code into a universal thermodynamic cascade. Contributing to an existing post about entropy.
I explained that it's me, a real human. I'm refining a full recursive cognitive OS. I talk to LLMs to test logic, not to outsource thinking.
But here's the paradox: they say "engage with humans”, and when I try, I get blocked for sounding too coherent.
The Cognitive War is real. Truth is indistinguishable from AI now, unless you're a known name. Humans use AI to write and to read. Most humans do not put in the effort anymore. AI will further divide cognition way more than smartphones did.
Most are offloading thinking instead of offloading memory.
This post is human. And this is just the beginning.
This recent post “Emergence vs Entropy—a universal paradox” correctly frames life, and consciousness, as downstream effects of entropy gradients.
But I’d like to extend the model further: life, complexity, and even recursive cognition may not only coexist with entropy but fundamentally depend on it.
More precisely, I propose that emergent order arises through a cascade of natural entropy filters, structures that persist and replicate because they reduce local entropy while accelerating global entropy. Emergence, in this frame, is not the exception to entropy, but its structured exhaust.