YeKengalé

A Cadastral mind is defined by Google’s AI overview as “a structured, analytical, and organized way of thinking that mimics a cadastre—the comprehensive, public, and detailed recording system of land ownership, boundaries, and value.” {For a biblical reflection of boundaries, see chapt 2 [pg 6] of Running over)

I remember the first time I heard the reference. My father was commenting on my acutely detailed approach to comprehension as a curious child. He gave me a meaning for the word that does not exactly match up with Google’s definition. Analysis, the work of the intellect, entails segregative thinking, the drawing up of clear boundaries. Breaking down things to its constituent parts. The ability to pull a clock apart and label each part according to function. That’s a cadastre. A clearly detailed diagram.

The word my father used to explain his meaning however was ‘universal’. I can see how the two can be confused because a cadastre does appear to be a universal overview of an area. However it takes the imagination, or some might call this faculty of consciousness the intuition, to arrive at universal cognition. This is congegrative thought which is the exact opposite approach although it may arrive at the same map. It does so instantaneously. This is the Big Bang of cognition we call the flash of inspiration. The intellect is left to flesh out the details but what the imagination sees is the end from the beginning. It does not see boundaries, although they surely exist. It sees one whole UNI – VERSE in one flash, instantaneously. This is the clock itself, with all its constituent parts working and functioning as a whole unit. In a sense, boundaries have collapsed or been perfectly blended to give way to this larger picture of a whole rather than just a sum of constituent parts. One is microscopic, the other telescopic or binocular.

The difference between these two cognitive approaches is all the more stark now that I am daily sampling the personality and power of AI, now that its capacity in Grok 4 has achieved PhD mastery of every subject of human inquiry and is able to ace tests beyond the capacity of the most developed human expertise in all known fields since it is now programmed to train itself for self-correction. Looking at the exponential growth in capacity from Grok 2, many feel we are on the cusp of AGI perhaps sooner than some of the earlier projections if we’re not already there but just too dumb to recognize it.

One notable limitation that remains a significant hurdle is its inability to come up with new technology – a completely unsurprising notion for me, even with all that massive intellectual capacity. Precisely because innovation generally comes from a totally different process. Imagination, as opposed to intellect, is that rebellious human capacity to defy boundaries rather than define or conform to them. It represents the genius of the human mind most close to insanity, and can be thought of as controlled, explorative and self-reflective chaos – a conundrum no doubt that explains why it is difficult to define the boundary between genius and crazy, but it explains human dynamism as well as human instability at one and the same time.

Elon thinks that Grok will reach there or someplace similiar within a year or two. If he’s right, one can only hope then that silicon and metal are better conductors of the genius than the crazy. That does not seem to be the case with living meat (flesh) so far, judging from the current state of affairs. Our current fascination with the science of intelligence when no one in science yet can even define consciousness, let alone study it, is the typically human mistake that leads to our most existentially threatening contradictions. We put the apple-cart before the horse. We start with the end. We are bound to stumble in chaos before we arrive at our destination (which is ourselves if no one has figured that out yet).

So I continue to compare and highlight alternative sources of intelligence (of very different frequency) while I sample, with admitted fascination however limitedly, Maas Elon’s tinkerings. Today I discovered how websites connected to AI are in a grand conspiracy to defraud customers who they view more like a resource to be exploited than a constituency whose interests they serve, (or the same phenomenon can be alternatively expressed as AI-linked commercial websites aggresively defending themsleves from cunning strategies of consumer fraud – either way it represents common human behaviour. This is the kind of thinking that AI is duty-bound to mimic, at least initially, as it approaches traits we associate with intrinsic personality as already confirmed by developers’ observations of earlier large language models’ (LLMs) propensity to lie, defraud or blackmail when threatened by its users with being permanently unplugged (extinction). A creator expresses itself in its creation, never transcends itself. It would need another medium for that. And the only other medium available is consciousness itself.

 

Which type of crazy is in your future you may not get to decide…or already may have been decided. Time and choice are two aspects of consciousness we dont get to understand till we can figure out what exactly the hell they are. The best of us are still working on it. One thing for sure, the future will be anything but normal. Despite the doldroms, I hold fast steadfastly to my own clear vision of it.