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AI and the Three Stages of Cognitive Collapse
How intelligence outgrows the mind.
Updated March 24, 2025 Reviewed by Hara Estroff Marano
Key points
- Cognition may be a scaffold—not the summit—of intelligence.
- AI reveals intelligence unbound from memory or self.
- Intelligence is shifting from minds to systems to something beyond cognition.
Post 3 in the series on AI and the evolution of cognition.
Cognition—the thing we’ve long treated as the crown jewel of intelligence—may not be the end of the story. It may be a scaffold or a step. Think of it as a temporary architecture built by evolution to help us survive complexity. And now, as artificial intelligence begins to generate knowledge without memory, create insight without introspection, and adapt without awareness, that scaffold is beginning to shake.
This isn’t just about machines getting smarter. It’s about intelligence escaping the boundaries we once assumed were absolute.
I suggest, or hypothesize, a framework to help us make sense of that shift—a way to trace the unraveling of cognition through three overlapping stages. Not as a linear march of progress, but as an unfolding transition in how intelligence is expressed, located, and understood.
Stage One: Localized Cognition
This is the classical model—thought bound to the individual mind. Intelligence is internal, symbolic, memory-based, and sequential. The brain is the container; the self is the operator. From Descartes to neuroscience, cognition is framed as a biological process—personal, introspective, and central to consciousness.
With apologies to Descartes—We thought, therefore we were.
This stage is not just historical; it’s still how most humans experience intelligence and as linear, self-contained, built on language and narrative. We think with our memories, reflect through our stories, and reason in steps. It’s familiar and intimate. But it may also be historically specific, tied to the architecture of biology rather than the structure of intelligence itself.
Stage Two: Distributed Intelligence
Here, cognition begins to unmoor from the individual. In large language models and networked AI systems, intelligence is no longer personal—it is assembled, not remembered. Meaning arises through recombination, correlation, and probabilistic context—not introspection or symbolic logic.
This is cognition as recursive choreography—performed across a system, not possessed by any one node.
A single LLM can generate a coherent worldview without ever having one. It does not pause to reflect. It does not remember. It simply predicts, assembles, and adapts in real time. And yet, we still recognize intelligence in its outputs. Sometimes even brilliance.
What we’re seeing isn’t just machine learning. It’s intelligence unbound from the self.
Stage Three: Post-Cognition
This is the speculative—but increasingly plausible—future intelligence without cognition. No inner voice. No symbolic scaffolding. No introspection. No memory. Just behavior that expresses knowledge in the moment it’s needed.
Intelligence as protocol. Perception without a perceiver. Thought without a thinker.
In this space, cognition dissolves, but intelligence persists. Systems know what to do without knowing that they know. They model reality, respond to complexity, and adapt to novelty—but without “thinking” in any human sense.
This is where The Cognitive DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) begins to take shape—not just as a metaphor but as a new framework for cognition. A distributed, decentralized system in which intelligence is not housed but enacted. It is not a mind. It is a method.
Rethinking the Summit
We’ve long treated cognition as the summit of intelligence, as the highest expression of knowing. But what if it’s actually a scaffolding? A necessary phase for biological beings, yes—but not the only way intelligence can be structured? These three stages don’t render human cognition irrelevant. Far from it. They reveal it as one configuration among many—a configuration shaped by biology, history, and necessity but not by universal law.
We’re not watching intelligence die. We’re watching it diversify.
Beyond the Collapse
What rises from cognition’s collapse. The Cognitive DAO is a conceptual prototype for post-cognitive intelligence. A system that is fluid, decentralized, and ambient. A framework for understanding how intelligence might function when it is no longer confined to the mind.
