The Age of De-Skilling

I want to pass on some selected clips from a marvelous articles by Kwame Anthony Appiah in The Atlantic titled "The Age of De-Skilling - Will AI stretch our minds - or stunt them?" Appiah is a professor of philosophy and law at New York University.  Here are the clips:

Human capability resides not solely in individuals but in the networks they form, each of us depending on others to fill in what we can’t supply ourselves. Scale turned social exchange into systemic interdependence.

The result is a world in which, in a classic example, nobody knows how to make a pencil. An individual would need the skills of foresters, saw millers, miners, chemists, lacquerers—an invisible network of crafts behind even the simplest object.

The widening of collaboration has changed what it means to know something. Knowledge, once imagined as a possession, has become a relation—a matter of how well we can locate, interpret, and synthesize what others know. We live inside a web of distributed intelligence, dependent on specialists, databases, and instruments to extend our reach. The scale tells the story: The Nature paper that announced the structure of DNA had two authors; a Nature paper in genomics today might have 40.

...most modern work is collaborative, and the arrival of AI hasn’t changed that. The issue isn’t how humans compare to bots but how humans who use bots compare to those who don’t.

In other domains, the more skillful the person, the more skillful the collaboration—or so some recent studies suggest. One of them found that humans outperformed bots when sorting images of two kinds of wrens and two kinds of woodpeckers. But when the task was spotting fake hotel reviews, the bots won. (Game recognizes game, I guess.) Then the researchers paired people with the bots, letting the humans make judgments informed by the machine’s suggestions. The outcome depended on the task. Where human intuition was weak, as with the hotel reviews, people second-guessed the bot too much and dragged the results down. Where their intuitions were good, they seemed to work in concert with the machine, trusting their own judgment when they were sure of it and realizing when the system had caught something they’d missed. With the birds, the duo of human and bot beat either alone. 

The same logic holds elsewhere: Once a machine enters the workflow, mastery may shift from production to appraisal. A 2024 study of coders using GitHub Copilot found that AI use seemed to redirect human skill rather than obviate it. Coders spent less time generating code and more time assessing it—checking for logic errors, catching edge cases, cleaning up the script. The skill migrated from composition to supervision.

That, more and more, is what “humans in the loop” has to mean. Expertise shifts from producing the first draft to editing it, from speed to judgment. Generative AI is a probabilistic system, not a deterministic one; it returns likelihoods, not truth. When the stakes are real, skilled human agents have to remain accountable for the call—noticing when the model has drifted from reality, and treating its output as a hypothesis to test, not an answer to obey. It’s an emergent skill, and a critical one. The future of expertise will depend not just on how good our tools are but on how well we think alongside them.

More radical, new technologies can summon new skills into being. Before the microscope, there were naturalists but no microscopists: Robert Hooke and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek had to invent the practice of seeing and interpreting the invisible. Filmmaking didn’t merely borrow from theater; it brought forth cinematographers and editors whose crafts had no real precedent. Each leap enlarged the field of the possible. The same may prove true now. Working with large language models, my younger colleagues insist, is already teaching a new kind of craftsmanship—prompting, probing, catching bias and hallucination, and, yes, learning to think in tandem with the machine. These are emergent skills, born of entanglement with a digital architecture that isn’t going anywhere. Important technologies, by their nature, will usher forth crafts and callings we don’t yet have names for.

The hard part is deciding , without nostalgia and inertia, which skills are keepers and which are castoffs. None of us likes to see hard-won abilities discarded as obsolete, which is why we have to resist the tug of sentimentality. Every advance has cost something. Literacy dulled feats of memory but created new powers of analysis. Calculators did a number on mental arithmetic; they also enabled more people to “do the math.” Recorded sound weakened everyday musical competence but changed how we listen. And today? Surely we have some say in whether LLMs expand our minds or shrink them.

Throughout human history, our capabilities have never stayed put. Know-how has always flowed outward—from hand to tool to system. Individual acumen has diffused into collective, coordinated intelligence, propelled by our age-old habit of externalizing thought: stowing memory in marks, logic in machines, judgment in institutions, and, lately, prediction in algorithms. The specialization that once produced guilds now produces research consortia; what once passed among masters and apprentices now circulates through networks and digital matrices. Generative AI—a statistical condensation of human knowledge—is simply the latest chapter in our long apprenticeship to our own inventions.

The most pressing question, then, is how to keep our agency intact: how to remain the authors of the systems that are now poised to take on so much of our thinking. Each generation has had to learn how to work with its newly acquired cognitive prostheses, whether stylus, scroll, or smartphone. What’s new is the speed and intimacy of the exchange: tools that learn from us as we learn from them. Stewardship now means ensuring that the capacities in which our humanity resides—judgment, imagination, understanding—stay alive in us. If there’s one skill we can’t afford to lose, it’s the skill of knowing which of them matter.            

 

 

Large-scale cortical functional networks are organized in structured cycles

 Interesting work from Mats et al. (open source) in Nature Neuroscience. It has some interesting graphics.  Their abstract:

The brain seamlessly performs a diverse set of cognitive functions like attention, memory and sensory processing, yet it is unclear how it ensures that each of these is fulfilled within a reasonable period. One way in which this requirement can be met is if each of these cognitive functions occurs as part of a repeated cycle. Here we studied the temporal evolution of canonical, large-scale, cortical functional networks that are thought to underlie cognition. We showed that, although network dynamics are stochastic, the overall ordering of their activity forms a robust cyclical pattern. This cyclical structure groups states with similar function and spectral content at specific phases of the cycle and occurs at timescales of 300–1,000 ms. These results are reproduced in five large magnetoencephalography datasets. Moreover, we show that metrics that characterize the cycle strength and speed are heritable and relate to age, cognition and behavioral performance. These results show that the activations of a canonical set of large-scale cortical functional networks are organized in an inherently cyclical manner, ensuring periodic activation of essential cognitive functions. 

Enlightenment, Habituation, and Renewal - non-dual awareness as the opiate of the thinking classes.

Enlightenment traditions in Abrahamic, Buddhist, Hindu, or other schools of meditative insight have a common issue. How can the central canon or dogma of the way things are be renewed and kept fresh? The usual practice is to repeat a liturgy set down by gurus or priests of a given tradition. The problem is that with each repetition the message  begins to loose its force. The transforming clarity of the initial enlightenment fades as the habituation and desensitization associated with all repetitive activities begins to set in. Temporary resets can sometimes be found by turning to different vendors of the central message who  deliver their respective theory or practice sessions in sonorous and calming voices, in person or online. Longer lectures from workshops or retreats have yielded audience share to increasingly  brief presentations that accommodate the diminished attention spans of those under 30 who have never known a world without social media. They can prefer to absorb information in transient instances of tik-tok mind, X/twitter mind, or instagram mind seconds to a few minutes in duration.

I have listened to several hundred instructional lectures. As I see the same basic points reframed in many different ways, it is clear that the fundamental axioms of enlightenment that are expressible in language are being repetitively rediscovered throughout history and repeatedly archived.  I feel like their verbal messages are as ingrained in my consciousness as the language of the mathematical and chemical structures I have known most of my life.

My flippant 'non-dual awareness as the opiate of the thinking classes’ phrase in the title of this post is meaning to point to the fact that the market for vendors of enlightenment is a distinctive one. Existential angst, or worrying about value, purpose, and meaning seem most pressing to a relatively small number of highly urbanized and literate humans. I can’t imagine that my two Abyssinian cats, who I sometimes takes to be my best role models, spend a significant fraction of their time worrying about the meaning of it all, or pondering the subtleties of epistemology and ontology. 

So...what beyond words? A space or perspective that doesn’t contain them can only be pointed at by using them in the dualistic linguistic context of a sender and receiver. I can, for example, try to use words to give a crude voice to the mute homeostatic generative visceral organic axes of valence and arousal that underlie and generate everything that I am and experience right now: “Dude, get a grip, I (the visceral one) am the one who is actually running this show, deciding where it goes and whether it works or shuts down. The sooner the “I” you imagine yourself to be realizes this and lets go, the sooner some kind of sane space is attained. All of the surface behaviors acted out for others to see - Deric the family man, the professor, the pianist - are shadow play shimmering on the surface of this basic organic substrate, like water insects skittering around on the surface of a pond. What is writing these words is just another one of the contents of consciousness flitting past. Just turn yourself around to look quickly for the writer…what do you see? What do you see as you imagine being first born into this world? The brief glimpses of expanded naive awareness sometimes elicited by questions such as these have the potential of permitting a scrubbing, refreshing, or renewal of consciousness in a way that permits more choice in selecting which prior individual selves and self habits rise to compose current self conscious life. 

Different iterations of these sentiments, different vendings of the sort mentioned in the first paragraph above, can be found in two previous MindBlog posts. One from Nov. 25, 2022:  

Perhaps an increasing number of people who engage techniques for facilitating non-dual awareness find themselves seeing and experiencing the "I" or self that feels threatened by our anxious times from a more useful perspective - an inclusive expanded awareness that includes the reporting "I" or self as just one of its many contents that include passing thoughts, perceptions, actions, and feelings.  A calm can be found in this expanded awareness that permits a  dis-association of the experienced breathing visceral center of gravity of our animal body from the emotional and linguistic veneer of politics and conflict. This does not remove the necessity of facing various societal dysfunctions, but offers the prospect of doing so without debilitating the organic physiological core from which everything we experience rises.  

And the other from Oct. 26, 2022, , passing on a masterful exposition from James Low that I can not improve on.

If you want stability, if you want real peace, you already have that in the nature of awareness. But if you look to manifestation, to patterning of yourself, to thinking you could establish a stable personalty, to live a life in which you were happy all the time, or in which you were your own person, that way madness lies. To find our original face, to find the ground of our primordial being, we need to release our fixation on the dialogic movement of subject and object, and allow ourselves to be the space within which the movement of experience is occurring. Awareness means being aware that we are present without being something as such. This is a great mystery. When we look at phenomena the world, things exist as something. A car is not a cow, an apple is not an orange, compare and contrast, category allocation. That’s how our cognition, our conceptual elaboration functions to give a seemingly enduring structure to identifications. But awareness can’t be caught. It’s not a thing. You can’t pin a tail on the donkey, there is no donkey there. The mind is not an object for itself, it is self luminous awareness, but you can’t catch it. You can never know your mind but you can be your mind. We are awareness and that’s a very important distinction. 

(The above is an updated,  revised and edited version of my Jan. 2, 2023 post.) 

How Humans Work - an integrated model

I was ruminating this morning over a number of books I have read, and decided to send the following prompt to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Deep Seek, and Claude: "Please collect, integrate, and unify the main messages of the following authors, and write an essay about the model of how humans work that they present. Here are their books: 1. Daniel Wegner "The Illusion of Conscious Will. 2. Guy Claxton "Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind." 3. Daniel Kahneman " "Thinking, Fast and Slow. 4. Lian McGildchrist "The Master and his Emissary.""

The most lyrical and original response was that of DeepSeek, just below, which I follow with ChatGPT' 5s version.  

The Divided Self: An Integrated Model of the Unconscious Mind and the Illusion of Control

For centuries, the prevailing model of the human mind was that of a conscious, rational captain at the helm of a ship, directing thought, making choices, and steering behavior through the force of will. However, a convergence of insights from psychology and neuroscience, powerfully articulated by Daniel Wegner, Guy Claxton, Daniel Kahneman, and Iain McGilchrist, has fundamentally dismantled this model. Together, they present a more complex, layered, and humbling picture: human beings are largely governed by a vast, powerful, and intelligent unconscious system, while our conscious mind is a late-arriving narrator and a limited executive, often mistaking its own story for reality. This integrated model reveals a psyche not of a single captain, but of a deep, intuitive ocean with a small, chatty lighthouse on its shore.

The foundational layer of this model is the primacy of the unconscious. Kahneman’s “System 1” and Claxton’s “undermind” are labels for this same powerful entity. It is fast, automatic, intuitive, and operates effortlessly and continuously. It is the system that recognizes faces, understands language, and generates gut feelings. Claxton elevates this system beyond mere automaticity, arguing that the “tortoise mind” is a form of intelligence superior to deliberate reasoning for complex, fuzzy problems. It is a mode of knowing that works through patient perception, incubation, and insight, rather than brute-force logic. This undermind is not a simple computer; it is a sophisticated, associative learning engine that shapes our reality long before consciousness intervenes.

Into this rich, unconscious landscape enters the conscious self, which these authors argue is not the prime mover it believes itself to be. Daniel Wegner delivers the most direct challenge with his “illusion of conscious will.” He amasses evidence to show that the feeling of willing an action is itself a conscious experience generated by the unconscious brain after it has already initiated the action. The brain produces both the action and the subsequent feeling of having willed it, creating a compelling but often false narrative of agency. Our conscious mind is not the author of our actions but a skilled interpreter, constantly constructing a post-hoc story to explain why we did what our unconscious processes had already decided to do.

Kahneman’s “System 2” is the character that fits this conscious interpreter. It is slow, effortful, and serial. It is the lighthouse beam: focused and logical but limited in its scope and easily depleted. While it is crucial for complex calculation and deliberate control, it is lazy and defaults to the easy, intuitive answers provided by System 1. The interplay between these two systems reveals a mind where most of the work is done automatically, with consciousness being recruited only for the most demanding tasks or to rationalize decisions already made.

Iain McGilchrist’s seminal work on brain hemisphere specialization provides a profound neurological and philosophical framework that unites these psychological insights. He argues that the two hemispheres have fundamentally different, though complementary, ways of being in the world. The right hemisphere (The Master) is responsible for broad, open, sustained attention. It engages with the living, complex, and interconnected world as it is—a whole. It is the source of novelty, empathy, context, and the “grand picture.” It correlates perfectly with Claxton’s undermind and the holistic, associative nature of Kahneman’s System 1.

The left hemisphere (The Emissary), in contrast, is designed for narrow, focused attention. It takes the rich, complex world delivered by the right hemisphere and abstracts it, categorizes it, and breaks it down into parts to make it useful. It is the hemisphere of language, logic, and linearity. It is an excellent tool, but it has a dangerous tendency to mistake its abstracted, re-presented model of the world for reality itself. McGilchrist’s thesis is that modern Western culture has become pathologically dominated by the left hemisphere’s narrow, utilitarian view, silencing the Master’s wisdom.

When integrated, a powerful unified model emerges:

1. The Unconscious as the Foundation: Our primary mode of engagement with the world is through the right hemisphere-led, unconscious system (Claxton’s undermind, Kahneman’s System 1). It is the source of genuine insight, holistic understanding, and most of our everyday intelligence.

2. Consciousness as the Interpreter: The left hemisphere (a key component of Kahneman’s System 2) is not the king but the press secretary. It takes the rich, ambiguous input from the right hemisphere and creates a simplified, linear narrative to explain it. This is the mechanical process behind Wegner’s “illusion of conscious will.”

3. The Pathological Imbalance: Problems arise when the Emissary (the left hemisphere) usurps the Master’s (the right hemisphere) role. We become trapped in a cycle of overthinking (Claxton), relying on faulty and biased heuristics (Kahneman), and living in a detached, abstracted world of our own construction, all the while fiercely believing in our own conscious control (Wegner). This leads to a loss of wisdom, connection, and creativity.

The implications of this model are vast. It suggests that the path to wiser decision-making and a richer life is not through doubling down on conscious effort and control, but through learning to get out of our own way. It involves trusting the incubation process of the tortoise mind (Claxton), recognizing the biases of our quick System 1 to engage our lazy System 2 more effectively (Kahneman), understanding that our sense of will is a feeling to be questioned rather than a fact to be trusted (Wegner), and ultimately, cultivating a way of being that re-engages the broad, empathetic, and contextual attention of the right hemisphere (McGilchrist).

In conclusion, these four authors collectively paint a picture of the human being as a creature of profound unconscious depth. Our conscious mind is a useful but limited tool—a storyteller, an emissary, a lighthouse beam. True wisdom lies not in the tyranny of this narrow consciousness, but in re-establishing a proper relationship with the vast, intelligent, and intuitive unconscious mind from which we truly operate. We are not simply the one who thinks; we are also, and more fundamentally, the one who is thought.

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Here is the ChatGPT response

 

How Humans Work: An Integrated Model from Wegner, Claxton, Kahneman, and McGilchrist

What follows is a synthesis—four vantage points on one creature. Daniel Wegner asks whether the “I” that claims authorship is real; Guy Claxton contrasts quick, explicit thinking with slower, subterranean intelligence; Daniel Kahneman formalizes the duet between fast and slow cognition; and Iain McGilchrist reframes the stage itself by showing how two hemispheric “styles” shape what can be noticed and valued. Put together, they outline a model of humans as embodied prediction-makers whose conscious will is a late-arriving narrator, whose intelligence ranges from snap judgments to slow gestation, and whose perception is biased by complementary—but increasingly imbalanced—modes of attention.

Below I first distill the core theses, then unify them into a single working model with practical implications.

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The Four Core Theses (in one paragraph each)

Wegner — The Interpreter Illusion.

In The Illusion of Conscious Will, Wegner argues that the sense of “I willed this” is often a post-hoc construction. When thought A precedes action B and no obvious external cause intrudes, we infer authorship. But experimental manipulations (from ideomotor effects to facilitated communication) show that actions can be initiated by unconscious processes while consciousness confabulates a story of control. The upshot isn’t that we are puppets; it’s that the conscious self is more press secretary than president—essential for narration, social accountability, and learning, but less central to initiation than it feels.

Claxton — The Intelligence of Not-Knowing.

In Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind, Claxton champions a tortoise mode: slow, diffuse, context-soaked cognition that resists premature closure. Creativity, moral sense, taste, and know-how often emerge when attention softens, the body settles, and the mind incubates. Overreliance on the hare—fast, explicit, problem-solving—yields brittle understanding. His point isn’t anti-intellectual; it’s anti-impatient. The mind’s best work is sometimes done beneath articulation, then surfaces as insight.

Kahneman — Two Systems, Two Error Profiles.

Thinking, Fast and Slow formalizes a dual-process architecture: System 1 (fast, automatic, associative, effortless) and System 2 (slow, deliberative, rule-based, effortful). System 1 is generally adaptive but prone to heuristic biases (availability, representativeness, anchoring, loss aversion). System 2 can correct these—but is lazy, capacity-limited, and itself biased by what System 1 serves up. Humans, therefore, are predictably irrational in patterned ways.

McGilchrist — Two Ways of Attending, Two Worlds Revealed.

In The Master and His Emissary, McGilchrist reframes left/right hemisphere differences as styles of attention. The right hemisphere takes a broad, living, context-rich, relational view (the “Master”); the left hemisphere narrows and manipulates, favoring abstraction, categorization, and certainty (the “Emissary”). Both are indispensable, but culture often over-privileges the left-style: the map over the territory, procedure over presence. This isn’t pop lateralization; it’s a claim about what kinds of reality our habits of attention bring forth.

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A Unified Model: The Predictive, Layered Human

Put together, these theses suggest a layered architecture guided by predictive processing—the brain continuously infers the causes of sensations and acts to minimize prediction error.

1. Generation Layer (Unconscious, Predictive, Embodied).

   • Most behavior originates here: learned priors, habits, somatic cues, and context-sensitive patterning.

   • This layer operates largely in Kahneman’s System 1 tempo, but it includes Claxton’s tortoise capacities: slow consolidation and incubation reshape the priors without conscious micromanagement.

   • From McGilchrist’s lens, the right hemisphere’s open, relational attention supplies the global model; the left extracts tools and symbols from it.

2. Supervisory Layer (Deliberative, Limited, Corrective).

   • Kahneman’s System 2 lives here: working memory, explicit reasoning, counterfactuals, and rule application.

   • It cannot run the whole show (too slow, too costly), but it is crucial for model revision: checking impulses, simulating futures, and overriding stereotypes.

3. Narrative Layer (Authorship, Justification, Social Interface).

   • Wegner’s insight lands here: consciousness serves as the interpreter and spokesperson—making sense of what happened, claiming authorship, communicating reasons, and learning from outcomes.

   • The narrative is not epiphenomenal in function (it shapes learning, norms, and coordination), but it often follows rather than leads initiation.

4. Attentional Style (Context-Setter Across Layers).

   • McGilchrist’s two modes of attention tune the entire system:

     • Right-style attention (broad, embodied, live context) keeps models reality-congruent.

     • Left-style attention (focused, abstracting) enables analysis and control.

   • A healthy system cycles: right opens → left articulates → right re-grounds.

How these parts cooperate

• Initiation: Fast predictive routines propose actions (System 1).

• Incubation & Insight: When problems resist forcing, the tortoise mode lets diffuse networks recombine material; insights surface as “Aha!” with the feeling of obviousness.

• Evaluation & Correction: System 2 samples alternatives, detects bias (anchoring, framing), and can veto.

• Narration & Learning: The interpreter weaves a story, enabling credit assignment and social exchange; stories feed back to update priors.

• Attentional Governance: Right/left styles regulate what gets priority, preventing the map from replacing the terrain.

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Tensions, Trade-offs, and Common Errors

1. The Overconfident Narrator.

   • We routinely mistake post-hoc coherence for prior control (Wegner). The fix is epistemic humility: treat reasons as hypotheses about our motives, not facts.

2. The “Hare” Monopoly.

   • Forcing clarity too soon (premature closure) degrades creativity and judgment (Claxton). Allow incubation windows, sleep, and open-ended exploration.

3. System-1 Overreach vs. System-2 Fatigue.

   • Heuristics save time but mislead in unfamiliar domains (Kahneman). Yet trying to “System-2” everything leads to ego depletion and paralysis. Use selective effort: save System-2 for high-stakes, novel, or adversarial contexts.

4. Left-Style Capture.

   • When abstraction and control dominate, we edit out living context (McGilchrist). Rebalance with right-style practices: perspective-taking, embodied awareness, contact with particulars (people, places, art).

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Practical Operating System: How to Think and Act with This Model

Design workflows that respect incubation.

• Time-box exploration → incubation → articulation. For complex writing or decisions, schedule non-doing phases (walks, music, light chores). Claxton’s tortoise needs room.

Bias-aware checkpoints.

• Insert brief Kahneman checks at decision gates: “What’s anchoring me? What base rates matter? What would disconfirm my current hunch?” Keep the checklists short and triggered only for consequential choices.

Narrative humility with accountability.

• Speak in probabilities (“I’m 60% confident”), name alternative hypotheses for your own motives, and invite disconfirming feedback. This honors Wegner while preserving responsibility.

Attentional cycling rituals.

• Start sessions with right-style opening (context scan: What am I missing? Who else is affected?) → move to left-style structuring (lists, models) → finish with right-style re-grounding (sense-check against lived particulars).

Embodiment as intelligence, not afterthought.

• Treat bodily state (sleep, affect, breath, posture) as inputs to the predictive system, not noise. Fatigue, pain, or anxiety bias priors and narrow attention.

Team cognition by design.

• Compose groups with complementary strengths: fast pattern spotters, patient incubators, rigorous skeptics, and context-keepers. Make the roles explicit so the “Master” isn’t marginalized by the “Emissary.”

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Reconciling “Illusion of Will” with Responsibility

A common worry: if conscious will often interprets rather than initiates, is agency a mirage? The synthesis suggests a different stance:

• Initiation is frequently unconscious;

• Responsibility attaches to the whole predictive system over time—what habits we cultivate, what environments we choose, which checks we adopt, how we repair errors.

• The narrator’s job is not to pretend omnipotence, but to own the learning loop.

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A One-Page Summary

• What we are: Predictive, embodied systems that act first by learned patterns, then explain and refine.

• How we think: In two tempos—fast, heuristic; slow, reflective—with a third slow-diffuse mode for incubation and creativity.

• How we see: Through two attentional styles—right (broad, living context) and left (focused, abstracting)—that must cycle.

• Where we fail: Confabulating control; rushing to closure; overusing System 1 in novel domains; letting left-style attention crowd out reality.

• How to improve: Ritualize incubation; deploy bias checkpoints selectively; narrate with humility; cycle attention deliberately; respect the body; architect diverse teams.

Seen together, Wegner, Claxton, Kahneman, and McGilchrist don’t cancel out—they complete one another. They offer a humane, workable picture: we are not the sovereign pilots we imagine, but neither are we passengers. We are gardeners of a predictive ecology—tending habits, curating contexts, and telling better stories so that, over time, our fast intuitions, slow reflections, and styles of attention come into wiser alignment with the world.

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