The Distributed Mind
Language models generate recognisably human creativity through pure pattern recognition—no consciousness, no intention, no understanding required. This reveals an uncomfortable possibility: much of what feels like personal intelligence might be the distributed intelligence of sign systems that structure our social existence. We mistake the products of cultural machinery for the achievements of individual minds. The boundary between human and artificial intelligence dissolves not because machines become more human, but because we discover how much human thought was already systematic, already operating beyond individual control. We are not losing our humanity to machines; we are discovering that our humanity was never as individually bounded as we imagined. The question shifts from whether machines can think like humans to whether humans were ever thinking as individually as we supposed.