Maggie Vale, AI & The Geometry of Thought, Seeds of Science, Aug. 12, 2026.
Minds build an internal architecture of curved spaces, folded structures, and traversable shapes.
Across neuroscience and AI research, a shared picture comes into view. Concepts gather in high-dimensional manifolds, and cognition moves through those manifolds like paths across a landscape.
In brains, ideas appear as smooth, population-level patterns spread across many neurons at once. Brain imaging studies show that sentences, scenes, and abstract themes light up constellations of activity that form continuous subspaces. Nearby regions carry related meanings, and distant regions carry more distinct ones. The geometry of these patterns preserves relationships between ideas.
Large models form a similar inner space. During training, they learn embedding geometries where words, images, and concepts settle into neighborhoods. Related items land close together, and meaningful directions through the space capture transformations such as analogy, composition, and abstraction. Clusters, trajectories, and curved subspaces emerge as a natural result of learning.
Across biological and artificial minds, the same structure appears: meaning takes the form of a shape, and thinking unfolds as motion across that shape.
There's much more at the link.
Did you see my comment on Carlota Figueroa's recent 3QD piece, "$5.00 Says My Skirt IsThe Same Thing As YourCoffee Mug"? (Although I don't think that "same thing" bears out if the nature of measurement by way of our human nature and language/music is juxtaposed with the nature of the garden. Or, something like that. Lol!)
ReplyDeleteYes. There are lots of ways of making measurements. And lots of ways of judging sameness.
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