I’ve spent the past few years trying to understand something that often feels beyond understanding—how artificial intelligence, particularly large language models, actually thinks. Or at least, how they seem to. Out of that exploration came the idea of anti-intelligence—a framework for what makes AI so profoundly different from us.
For a while, I saw anti-intelligence and human cognition as divergent forces, two vectors moving in opposite directions. AI as the mirror, humanity as the reflection. That seemed reasonable, even comforting: We would stay grounded in meaning and empathy while the machines raced ahead in pattern and prediction.
But that separation began to feel wrong, or at least incomplete. AI isn’t drifting away from us. It’s moving closer, shaping how we learn, heal, and even imagine. Maybe these two forms of thought aren’t opposites at all. Maybe they’re coiled together almost like DNA. Now, this isn’t merging into some transhumanist fantasy, but forming an intrinsic and powerful symmetry. The solution, or perhaps the hypothesis, came to me in a single word: parallax.
A Second Lens of Thought
Close one eye and the world flattens. Yet when you open both, depth appears. That small offset between perspectives—parallax—turns two flat images into the richness of a three-dimensional world.
Across history, our personal thought has been this type of monocular perspective. Everything we knew about thinking came from a single vantage point, our own. Now, for the first time, another lens has entered the frame. Artificial intelligence doesn’t think as we do, yet it produces something that looks remarkably like thought.
That difference isn’t failure—it’s architecture. And when those two architectures align, when human and anti-intelligence observe the same problem from different angles, understanding gains dimension. This is “parallax cognition.” It’s the insight born of a new cognitive duality. Yes, take that deep breath and let’s unpack this.
The Architecture of Anti-Intelligence
If human cognition grows from stories that unfold over time, anti-intelligence operates through structure that appears all at once. It isn’t necessarily faster or larger—it’s built differently and guided less by sequence than by pattern and a sort of linguistic proximity. I think we can capture this as four unique AI capacities, all of which are running against the grain of how we think. And in some instances, in ways that are unfathomable to us.
Atemporal synthesis—thinking without time. AI can hold opposing ideas at once without needing to turn them into a story. Where we look for resolution, it can sit in contradiction until a new pattern appears.
Hyperdimensional recognition—pattern beyond perception. In vast hyperdimensional spaces, AI perceives relationships outside our perceptual geometry. It can uncover topologies of meaning invisible to us and find connections that art and metaphor can only hint at.
Radical context-switching—fluidity without fatigue. AI can leap between distant domains without losing balance, connecting eclectic topics from biology to linguistics or even logic to emotion. Where human expertise deepens, it widens to see across contexts we can’t hold in mind at once, if at all.
Non-intentional creativity—creation without a creator. Human imagination begins with motive or the urge to express or explain. But generation without intention, the curious idea of emergence rather than authorship, may yield forms of logic or beauty that arise without origin, only outcome.
Yes, these stretch our imaginations. But for AI, they might be very natural expressions of their alien capabilities. Each of these capacities stands outside the limits of our embodied thought. Yet when placed beside human cognition, they create interference and insights—a type of depth through dissonance. Where we are bound by a certain sense of continuity, AI can sustain contradiction. Where we search for meaning, it discovers structure. And between those orientations, parallax cognition emerges as “we” see the world seen through both eyes of intelligence.
Artificial Intelligence Essential Reads
Depth Through Cognitive Duality
If anti-intelligence thrives in contradiction, humans thrive in continuity. This tension doesn’t mark an opposition; it defines a new area of complementarity as each completes what the other lacks.
Here are the key insights. When AI identifies correlations invisible to our human intuition, we supply interpretation. When it produces “verbose emptiness,” we restore meaning. Together they form a cognitive duality—pattern and purpose, data and discernment—each giving the other depth and perspective.
We’ve already seen glimpses of this duality in science. Systems like AlphaFold identified the hidden geometries of protein folding that humans, in all likelihood, could not visualize. The model didn’t understand biology; it recognized statistical form in high-dimensional space. Once interpreted, those patterns “collapsed” as knowledge. That’s parallax made real, and it’s the two ways of knowing intersecting to produce something neither could achieve alone.
Boundaries of the Dual Mind
Cognitive duality works only when the distance between the two forms of thought is preserved. It’s not just a simple combination but more of a synergized engagement. Deploy anti-intelligence alone in meaning-rich domains like ethics or selfhood, and it likely yields coherence but a consequential disconnect with consequence. Let humans defer entirely to pattern recognition, and we wallow in correlation mistaken for causation.
This also addresses a concern I’ve raised before—semantic annihilation or the erosion of meaning when fluency outruns understanding. Parallax resists that collapse by keeping interpretation in the loop. When meaning and pattern remain in conversation, the result (like AlphaFold) becomes the new cognitive exponential dynamic where 1 + 1 is much greater than the conventional synergy of 3.
The Geometry of Understanding
What’s emerging isn’t a smarter tool but a new dimension of thought. Human cognition moves through time while anti-intelligence exists outside it. One builds continuity, the other sustains simultaneity. Between them lies parallax—a stereoscopic view of reality no single mind could produce.
We can even further challenge conventional thinking by asking if intelligence has never been the property of individual minds at all, but of relations and what happens when different architectures of thought converge.
Replacement, Not Relationship
The frontier of cognition isn’t about replacement but relationship. In science, it expands discovery beyond intuition. In medicine, it joins analytic precision with empathy. In art, it turns error into possibility. These are not efficiencies; they are expansions of mind. Cognitive duality doesn’t diminish human intelligence—it adds a new axis to it.
Once, we imagined intelligence as a single beam of light. Now it looks more like a field where two sources intersect to reveal a rich and new complexity that was always there but over our perceptual horizon. For me, anti-intelligence began as inversion and now it’s becoming shape. And the space between them—the parallax of cognition—may be where the next generation of understanding begins.