Personal Perspective: How human cognition and AI can form a precarious loop of engagement. – Psychology Today
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Posted October 27, 2025 Reviewed by Devon Frye
We live in an age of incredible fluency. For those of us who use it, AI finishes our sentences and, to some degree, helps complete our lives.
Yet for me, there’s something about these exchanges that feels hollow. AI’s words are so perfect and the tone is almost musical, but the life behind them just isn’t there.
This reveals what I think is a growing asymmetry between human and artificial thought. And the more people try to merge the two into a single, seamless system, the more precarious that harmony begins to feel.
Humans are collapsers, and machines are expanders. And between them, a strange new rhythm of cognition might be emerging. I think it’s worth a closer look.
Every act of human thought narrows possibilities. We collapse uncertainty into a line of meaning.
A physician reads symptoms and decides. A parent interprets a child’s silence. A writer deletes a hundred sentences to find one that feels true. The key point: Collapse is the work of judgment. It’s costly and often can hurt. It means letting go of what could be and accepting the risk of being wrong.
That narrowing or collapse—what we might call commitment—is what gives our thoughts consequence. This act of deciding creates the impact of humanity.
What AI performs is very different—in fact, I argue that it’s the inverse. When a large language model responds to a prompt, it expands. It takes a single, collapsed input and broadens it into a spectrum of possibilities.
Ask it to explain, and it offers ten versions. Need comfort, and it builds a kind of compassion through endless linguistic paths. Of course, its strength is this variety—yet it never commits, and never feels the high cost of consequence.
This isn’t a flaw, it’s the design. In fact, it’s part of what I feel makes AI so useful, as a model can take any stance without being bound by any of them.
Critically, this is also the boundary that keeps human and artificial cognition fundamentally distinct. When we blur that line, we lose the creative friction that makes thought real. That friction, the clash between collapse and expansion, is the source of meaning.
When humans and AI interact, a loop forms. The human collapses ambiguity into one meaning. The AI expands that meaning into countless alternatives. The human then re-collapses around one of those options.
For some people, that exchange feels so vital, even alive. It’s the new inhale and exhale of cognition. At its best, it sharpens creativity. But at its worst, it dulls human agency. The danger, as I’ve said many times, isn’t that AI will think for us but that we’ll stop noticing when we’ve stopped doing the hard work of thinking. That last sentence is worth reading again.
In medicine, this loop already shapes a differential diagnosis. In writing, it shapes voice. In relationships, it shapes how we describe empathy. The loop seduces because it feels so cooperative and so engaged. But over time, the expander’s influence can flatten judgment. We start accepting plausible language as proof of deep thought. And then, we conflate coherence with truth. The more fluent the system becomes, the easier it is to let fluency stand in for understanding.
I’ve called this drift anti-intelligence—not stupidity, but the simulation of insight without the cost of understanding. Anti-intelligence arises when the expander replaces the collapser, or when we mistake possibility for depth. When that happens, we precariously outsource the burden of deciding. It looks like progress, but I think it’s more like surrender.
Physics offers an interesting metaphor here. Schrodinger’s cat, alive and dead until observed, was meant to expose the paradox of observation itself. Consciousness, in that story, collapses possibility into one outcome. AI performs the inverse. It begins with our observation—our prompt—and re-expands it into a thousand new states. We humans create meaning by closing the box, and AI reopens it. In a way, we now live inside that oscillation.
Maybe this isn’t a conflict at all, but a breath of fresh air. Our minds collapse like an exhale and give the world shape. AI expands like an inhale, filling the space with vast new possibilities. Together they form the breath of cognition. But breathing is rhythmic—inhale and exhale, expansion and collapse. Lose that balance, and a sort of hyperventilation or even an agonal rhythm emerges.
In the final analysis, the future of intelligence may depend less on what machines can generate and more on what humans are still willing to finish or collapse. That’s the bottom line. And the courage to collapse meaning into truth is what keeps our minds alive. It’s time for a deep breath.
John Nosta is an innovation theorist and founder of NostaLab.
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Psychology Today © 2025 Sussex Publishers, LLC
Whatever your goals, it’s the struggle to get there that’s most rewarding. It’s almost as if life itself is inviting us to embrace difficulty—not as punishment but as a design feature. It's a robust system for growth.
Self Tests are all about you. Are you outgoing or introverted? Are you a narcissist? Does perfectionism hold you back? Find out the answers to these questions and more with Psychology Today.
