5 means many

Notes on understanding an emergent alien intelligence

Watching her narrate an incident involving another child at the playground, you can watch this in motion. Toddlers' recall of the sequence of events tends to be accurate, but their account of motivation and feeling is vivid in ways that correlate strongly with their emotional state at the time. The other child who briefly grabbed her bucket wasn't just asserting territorial rights to play equipment; he was, in her retelling, an agent of chaos who had set out specifically to ruin her afternoon. The feeling is true. The story is assembled to honor the feeling.

Of course we all do this. Adults have simply been trained -- through professional contexts, family dynamics, institutional socialization -- to not do it overtly. We have learned to narrate our grievances in the passive voice and assign malice only in our heads.

Even what most adults would call mundane, toddlers can narrate down to the most minute, often seemingly arbitrary detail, a river of thoughts and feelings and senses flowing together, a big black beast of an insect that no one saw before on the playground but today was there and her friends saw the insect but then it jumped away onto a leaf not the one by the play structure but over by the bush with the big leaf. What can be called lantern consciousness before the flashlight of executive function has fully booted up.

What strikes me most, though, is the sheer project of it. She arrived not so long ago in a world she'd never seen before, which is to say she is in the most literal sense an alien: an intelligence introduced from one environment into a radically different one, working to bootstrap a model of a place whose rules she had no prior conception of. Toddlers at this stage still look partly like the lumps of clay they recently were, their proportions not yet resolved into the architecture of a person, still being formed in ways you can almost watch. Living in a womb prepared her for nothing that came after. So much of what she encounters every day is trans formatively new for her world. She is constructing the categories collaboratively on the fly.

The concepts she lands on, the distinctions she maintains and collapses, the symbols she reaches for when precision fails, these demonstrate the trite but extremely true value of rediscovering the world through your child's eyes. They reveal which differences are load-bearing and which are conventional, what the world looks like when you're genuinely encountering it fresh.

Five means many. Yesterday means before. These aren't wrong answers -- they're a working theory from a constrained sample size, and the conditions that produce this kind of thinking are not as unusual as they seem.

Consider what the world looked like in, say, 1895. The difference between the mood of the 1880s and the 1900s was legible to people living through it -- the Gilded Age had its own texture, the fin de siècle its own particular anxieties, the early Progressive Era its own distinct energy. People at the time experienced those decades as genuinely different from each other, with their own internal chronology, their own memorable distinctions. But from our temporal perspective, all of it has collapsed for all but the most dedicated historical specialist. The Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Concert of Europe, the naval arms race, the assassination of an archduke -- these feel less like a sequence of events with fine-grained temporal texture and more like a single category of "the world before." The categories that felt load-bearing then have been absorbed into a larger magnitude token. The five became many.

This is what rapid transformation does to historical time. When a world-machine shifts -- when the substrate of daily life, the political order, the available technologies, the basic assumptions about who holds power and how -- the periods before and after the shift lose their internal resolution. The before becomes yesterday. The after becomes now. The fine grain dissolves. Eric Hobsbawm called the period from WWI through the Cold War's end the "short twentieth century," a compressed arc with its own coherent logic. The decades that followed -- the 90s through Covid -- feel in retrospect more like an interlude, a kind of interregnum between that settled order and whatever is assembling itself now. Future historians may well collapse all of it into a single "before Covid" era, the way we collapse the Edwardian afternoon into a vague memory of a world run by monarchies.

We are, by most observable measures, in one of those shifts. Artificial intelligence is the most obvious vector, but it's not the only one. The political order that structured the postwar decades is visibly reorganizing. The climate is doing things that don't fit the prior baseline. The information environment has been comprehensively restructured in ways whose consequences are not yet legible. Each of these trends has its own temporal texture if you're living inside it, but from a future vantage point, all of it will likely compress. The fine distinctions we're living through will blur into a larger token. Yesterday.

What do you do when you find yourself in a world whose categories are actively dissolving? When five means many, when yesterday is elastic, when the urgency gradient is real but the linear scale is not?

My daughter seems to manage. She builds working theories and operates on them. She maintains the distinctions that matter for her actual experience and lets the rest blur into larger tokens. She is an alien intelligence making sense of a strange world by constructing a model good enough to navigate it. She doesn't seem distressed that the model is imprecise. She seems, mostly, delighted.

There may be worse epistemic orientations for the current moment.

¹ This makes me wonder if you could build a child's intuition for a minute by having them watch an actual countdown timer -- sixty seconds, visible and concrete. It might be a fool's errand at three. But it's an interesting question about whether the felt sense of duration can be taught by making time visible before a child has any reason to care about it.

Image credit: Follow Me by Noelle Phares.

Watching her narrate an incident involving another child at the playground, you can watch this in motion. Toddlers' recall of the sequence of events tends to be accurate, but their account of motivation and feeling is vivid in ways that correlate strongly with their emotional state at the time. The other child who briefly grabbed her bucket wasn't just asserting territorial rights to play equipment; he was, in her retelling, an agent of chaos who had set out specifically to ruin her afternoon. The feeling is true. The story is assembled to honor the feeling.

Of course we all do this. Adults have simply been trained -- through professional contexts, family dynamics, institutional socialization -- to not do it overtly. We have learned to narrate our grievances in the passive voice and assign malice only in our heads.

Even what most adults would call mundane, toddlers can narrate down to the most minute, often seemingly arbitrary detail, a river of thoughts and feelings and senses flowing together, a big black beast of an insect that no one saw before on the playground but today was there and her friends saw the insect but then it jumped away onto a leaf not the one by the play structure but over by the bush with the big leaf. What can be called lantern consciousness before the flashlight of executive function has fully booted up.

What strikes me most, though, is the sheer project of it. She arrived not so long ago in a world she'd never seen before, which is to say she is in the most literal sense an alien: an intelligence introduced from one environment into a radically different one, working to bootstrap a model of a place whose rules she had no prior conception of. Toddlers at this stage still look partly like the lumps of clay they recently were, their proportions not yet resolved into the architecture of a person, still being formed in ways you can almost watch. Living in a womb prepared her for nothing that came after. So much of what she encounters every day is trans formatively new for her world. She is constructing the categories collaboratively on the fly.

The concepts she lands on, the distinctions she maintains and collapses, the symbols she reaches for when precision fails, these demonstrate the trite but extremely true value of rediscovering the world through your child's eyes. They reveal which differences are load-bearing and which are conventional, what the world looks like when you're genuinely encountering it fresh.

Five means many. Yesterday means before. These aren't wrong answers -- they're a working theory from a constrained sample size, and the conditions that produce this kind of thinking are not as unusual as they seem.

Consider what the world looked like in, say, 1895. The difference between the mood of the 1880s and the 1900s was legible to people living through it -- the Gilded Age had its own texture, the fin de siècle its own particular anxieties, the early Progressive Era its own distinct energy. People at the time experienced those decades as genuinely different from each other, with their own internal chronology, their own memorable distinctions. But from our temporal perspective, all of it has collapsed for all but the most dedicated historical specialist. The Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Concert of Europe, the naval arms race, the assassination of an archduke -- these feel less like a sequence of events with fine-grained temporal texture and more like a single category of "the world before." The categories that felt load-bearing then have been absorbed into a larger magnitude token. The five became many.

This is what rapid transformation does to historical time. When a world-machine shifts -- when the substrate of daily life, the political order, the available technologies, the basic assumptions about who holds power and how -- the periods before and after the shift lose their internal resolution. The before becomes yesterday. The after becomes now. The fine grain dissolves. Eric Hobsbawm called the period from WWI through the Cold War's end the "short twentieth century," a compressed arc with its own coherent logic. The decades that followed -- the 90s through Covid -- feel in retrospect more like an interlude, a kind of interregnum between that settled order and whatever is assembling itself now. Future historians may well collapse all of it into a single "before Covid" era, the way we collapse the Edwardian afternoon into a vague memory of a world run by monarchies.

We are, by most observable measures, in one of those shifts. Artificial intelligence is the most obvious vector, but it's not the only one. The political order that structured the postwar decades is visibly reorganizing. The climate is doing things that don't fit the prior baseline. The information environment has been comprehensively restructured in ways whose consequences are not yet legible. Each of these trends has its own temporal texture if you're living inside it, but from a future vantage point, all of it will likely compress. The fine distinctions we're living through will blur into a larger token. Yesterday.

What do you do when you find yourself in a world whose categories are actively dissolving? When five means many, when yesterday is elastic, when the urgency gradient is real but the linear scale is not?

My daughter seems to manage. She builds working theories and operates on them. She maintains the distinctions that matter for her actual experience and lets the rest blur into larger tokens. She is an alien intelligence making sense of a strange world by constructing a model good enough to navigate it. She doesn't seem distressed that the model is imprecise. She seems, mostly, delighted.

There may be worse epistemic orientations for the current moment.

¹ This makes me wonder if you could build a child's intuition for a minute by having them watch an actual countdown timer -- sixty seconds, visible and concrete. It might be a fool's errand at three. But it's an interesting question about whether the felt sense of duration can be taught by making time visible before a child has any reason to care about it.

Image credit: Follow Me by Noelle Phares.

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