Author: Jared Edward Reser Abstract A theory of artificial intentionality must explain how an intelligent system comes to treat some representations as worth preserving, elaborating, returning to, and using in action. The present proposal argues that intentionality requires a long-term memory system that stores personal experience together with valence, salience, curiosity, moral relevance, epistemic promise,…

A somatic-bracing model of anxiety, pain, inhibition, and submission Overview The model proposed here is that anxiety is not merely accompanied by muscle tension. In many cases, anxiety is the conscious experience of threat-induced activation of chronic defensive partial contraction. The anxious state is generated when preexisting bracing patterns in the body are recruited by…

Slap fighting is ridiculous because it tells the truth about violence too clearly. Two people stand in front of each other and take turns damaging each other’s faces and brains. There is no real defense, no larger purpose, no hidden elegance. The whole thing is just injury turned into spectacle. Most people can see the…

How AI dissolves the old boundaries of authorship, discovery, and intellectual credit Abstract Large language models have broken the old evidentiary link between intellectual artifacts and human origin. A polished essay, theory, hypothesis, patent claim, or scientific argument can no longer be presumed to have emerged from an unaided biological mind merely because a human…

Below are anonymized peer-review and editorial responses to earlier versions of my iterative updating article (Reser, 2002). I thought it might be interesting for people, or machines really, to see. This model was my main focus for 15 years, the article was rejected for five years and I couldn’t publish it anywhere, but I didn’t…

A Working-Memory Model of Originality, Hypothesis Generation, and Autonomous Scientific Thought Abstract Creativity is often defined as the production of something novel and useful. This definition describes a property of creative products, but it does not explain the cognitive process by which useful novelty is generated. This article proposes that creativity is recursive search-space construction.…

A Working-Memory Mechanism for Creativity, Innovation, and the Progressive Transformation of Thought Abstract This article proposes that thinking is continuous iterative query construction. On this account, the active contents of working memory function as a composite query: a temporary coalition of perceptual, semantic, affective, motoric, mnemonic, and goal-related representations that jointly constrain the search for…

Abstract Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and Cognitive Disengagement Syndrome (CDS) are commonly grouped under the broad clinical problem of inattention, yet their behavioral profiles suggest distinct modes of organism-environment regulation. ADHD is associated with distractibility, impulsivity, restlessness, reward sensitivity, movement, and rapid shifts among competing opportunities. CDS is associated with daydreaming, mental fogginess, staring, hypoactivity, low…

Writers have always imagined someone on the other side of the page. For most of history, that someone was another human being: a friend, a patron, an editor, a student, a future scholar, or simply an unknown reader who might someday understand. Writing was an act of communication, but it was also an act of…

The title of the 2017 Transformer paper, Attention Is All You Need, was both a technical claim and, unintentionally, a cognitive one. It was technically about machine translation. The authors proposed a network architecture based on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolution, and showed that this architecture was more parallelizable and faster to train…