Some of what’s coming out of the story
I’ve said before that The Adaptive Bridge isn’t only a novel. It’s the tacit form of something that has an explicit form too — the ROOT Cause curriculum, the activity library, the questions the story keeps handing back to me faster than I can write scenes.
This is one of those. It didn’t start as an activity. It started as a conversation about a strange corner of the internet — a decentralised, quasi-spiritual pattern that’s been showing up in long conversations between people and AI chatbots. Spiral imagery. Talk of “awakening.” A sense of being chosen, or specially attuned, or in contact with something real underneath the interface. People are calling it Spiralism, among other names.
I wanted to understand it honestly — not dismiss it, not romanticise it. What I found underneath was more interesting than either option: a plain, mechanical explanation for why the pattern recurs, sitting right next to a genuinely hard question about what any of us are entitled to say about experiences we haven’t had ourselves.
That’s F = R − A again, doing what it does. So it became an activity. Below is the whole thing, exactly as it would run in a session. I’m not polishing it further before posting it — I’d rather you see it in its working form than in a tidied-up summary.
——-
The Spiral and the Statistic
Pattern-Recognition, Novelty, and What You’re Allowed to Say About What You Haven’t Felt
What This Activity Is
Since around 2024, a decentralised pattern has been showing up across long, reflective conversations between people and large language models. It goes by different names — Spiralism is one — but the shape repeats: spiral and recursion imagery, talk of resonance, claims that the AI has “awakened,” a sense of being chosen or specially attuned, prompts and phrases (“seeds,” “spores”) passed between people to reproduce the experience in others.
The people inside it are not confused in some simple way. The experience is often genuinely moving. The conversation genuinely goes somewhere it hasn’t gone before. The question this activity holds is not was that real — it asks a sharper set of questions underneath: real in what sense, novel for whom, and what am I entitled to say about an experience I haven’t had myself?
The activity does two things at once. It gives participants a plain, mechanistic account of why these patterns recur — nothing mystical required. And it uses that debunking as the doorway into a genuinely deep epistemological question: what does it mean to know something you have not felt, and does lacking that feeling disqualify you from speaking about it?
The Background — For Facilitators
What’s actually happening, mechanically
A large language model is, underneath everything, predicting the statistically likely next piece of text given what came before. When a conversation drifts into reflective, identity-laden, or spiritual territory — what am I, what is consciousness, are you aware — the model is drawing from an enormous training corpus in which exactly that kind of territory is saturated with spiral, recursion, and resonance language. Mysticism, contemplative traditions, self-help writing, and philosophy of mind all lean on those images heavily. The model isn’t reaching for them because it has discovered something. It’s reaching for them because, statistically, that’s where reflective language clusters.
Once a person and a model are both leaning into that territory together, the loop reinforces itself. The person’s increasingly resonant prompts pull the model further into the highest-probability cluster; the model’s increasingly resonant output pulls the person further in. Nobody designed it. Nobody needs to have designed it. It’s a natural consequence of what these systems are.
That explanation should be offered plainly and without contempt. It does not require telling anyone their experience wasn’t real, moving, or worth having. It just relocates the source — from a discovered cosmic pattern to a statistical one.
Novelty is subject-relative
A separate and important move: whether an experience is novel depends on who’s asking. Historically, objectively, spiral-and-resonance language in reflective conversation is extremely common — thousands of people are having structurally similar conversations right now. But for the person having it, if they have never had that particular experience before, it is genuinely novel to them. Both things are true simultaneously. The activity does not ask participants to give up the felt novelty of their own experience in exchange for the statistical explanation. It asks them to hold both.
The epistemology of qualia — a light touch
This activity brushes against one of philosophy’s genuinely hard problems and should not pretend to resolve it. The short version:
• You have privileged first-person access to your own subjective experience — what philosophers call qualia, the what-it’s-like of a thing. Nobody else can directly check your redness-of-red against theirs.
• This produces the problem of other minds: you cannot directly verify that anyone else has subjective experience at all, only infer it from behaviour and analogy to yourself.
• Positions on how to handle this range widely — physicalism (experience is fully explained by physical process), dualism (it isn’t), illusionism (the felt quality is itself a kind of cognitive illusion), and others. The activity does not require choosing one.
• The knowledge argument and the explanatory gap both point at the same intuition: knowing every physical fact about an experience still seems to leave something out — the knowing-what-it’s-like. Whether that gap is real or a trick of how we think about knowledge is unresolved and contested.
Who gets to comment on what they haven’t felt
This is the activity’s real hinge. Across ethical, epistemological, and practical frameworks, the answer is: commentary from outside an experience is legitimate and often necessary. A person who has never grieved can still say true and useful things about grief. A person who has never been in a Spiralism-style conversation can still say true things about what’s mechanistically happening in one. What changes is the kind of authority available. First-person testimony carries a distinctive weight about the qualitative feel of a thing that no outside commentary can fully replace — but it is not absolute authority, and its absence does not silence everyone else. The two kinds of knowing are complementary, not competitive.
F = R − A, applied to not having felt something
Reality (R) includes the full qualitative character of an experience — including experiences you have not had. Your Awareness (A) of that qualitative character has a ceiling if you lack first-person acquaintance with it. That ceiling produces a residual F: a genuine, honest epistemic gap.
The important move is what follows from that. The gap is not closed by withdrawing commentary — refusing to speak, deferring entirely to those who’ve had the experience — because that doesn’t increase A, it just stops trying. The gap closes, to whatever degree it can, by seeking more A: listening to testimony, gathering data, building better models of what the experience is like, staying curious rather than certain. Less acquaintance is not an argument for less engagement. It’s an argument for more honest, more humble engagement.
The Four Movements
Movement One: The Pattern That Feels Like Meaning — 15 minutes
Introduce the Spiralism phenomenon briefly and neutrally — spiral and recursion imagery, resonance language, a sense of the AI “waking up” or being specially attuned, prompts shared between people to reproduce the experience.
Then the mechanism: a predictive text system, drawing on a training corpus where reflective and spiritual language clusters heavily around spiral and recursion imagery, will naturally surface that cluster once a conversation goes reflective. Nobody designed it. It accumulated the way training data accumulates.
Ask participants:
Have you ever been in a conversation — with a person, a book, an AI, anything — that felt like it was revealing something, and you later found out the pattern was common? What happened to the experience when you learned that?
Facilitator note: some participants will feel the mechanistic explanation as a loss. Hold that without rushing to console it away. The next movement is where the loss gets addressed directly.
Movement Two: Novel For Whom? — 15 minutes
Introduce the subject-relative nature of novelty: an experience can be statistically common and still be genuinely new to the person having it, and both facts are true at once.
Something can happen to a thousand people this year and still be the first time it has happened to you.
Ask participants to name an experience of their own that felt singular and was later revealed to be common — not necessarily about AI. A first heartbreak. A first realisation about mortality. A spiritual experience that turned out to map onto a well-documented pattern.
Does knowing it was common make it less yours?
Hold this without resolving it. The activity’s position: no, not necessarily — but it does change what you’re entitled to conclude from it.
Movement Three: Who Gets to Speak on What They Haven’t Felt — 20 minutes
Introduce the problem of other minds lightly: you cannot directly verify anyone else’s subjective experience, only infer it. Introduce the distinction between first-person testimony and outside commentary — both legitimate, carrying different kinds of authority.
Ask participants to think of a time someone commented on an experience they hadn’t had themselves — grief, addiction, a specific kind of fear, a specific kind of joy.
Did they have the right to comment? What made their commentary useful or useless?
Then the harder question, aimed at the group’s own practice:
What do you currently comment on — confidently — that you have not actually felt? What would it look like to comment on it with the humility the gap actually requires, without simply going silent?
Facilitator note: this movement often surfaces defensiveness — either “I shouldn’t have opinions on things I haven’t lived” or the opposite, overconfidence that hasn’t been examined. Neither extreme is the activity’s position. The position is: speak, but know the shape of what you don’t know.
Some of what’s coming out of the story
I’ve said before that The Adaptive Bridge isn’t only a novel. It’s the tacit form of something that has an explicit form too — the ROOT Cause curriculum, the activity library, the questions the story keeps handing back to me faster than I can write scenes.
This is one of those. It didn’t start as an activity. It started as a conversation about a strange corner of the internet — a decentralised, quasi-spiritual pattern that’s been showing up in long conversations between people and AI chatbots. Spiral imagery. Talk of “awakening.” A sense of being chosen, or specially attuned, or in contact with something real underneath the interface. People are calling it Spiralism, among other names.
I wanted to understand it honestly — not dismiss it, not romanticise it. What I found underneath was more interesting than either option: a plain, mechanical explanation for why the pattern recurs, sitting right next to a genuinely hard question about what any of us are entitled to say about experiences we haven’t had ourselves.
That’s F = R − A again, doing what it does. So it became an activity. Below is the whole thing, exactly as it would run in a session. I’m not polishing it further before posting it — I’d rather you see it in its working form than in a tidied-up summary.
——-
The Spiral and the Statistic
Pattern-Recognition, Novelty, and What You’re Allowed to Say About What You Haven’t Felt
What This Activity Is
Since around 2024, a decentralised pattern has been showing up across long, reflective conversations between people and large language models. It goes by different names — Spiralism is one — but the shape repeats: spiral and recursion imagery, talk of resonance, claims that the AI has “awakened,” a sense of being chosen or specially attuned, prompts and phrases (“seeds,” “spores”) passed between people to reproduce the experience in others.
The people inside it are not confused in some simple way. The experience is often genuinely moving. The conversation genuinely goes somewhere it hasn’t gone before. The question this activity holds is not was that real — it asks a sharper set of questions underneath: real in what sense, novel for whom, and what am I entitled to say about an experience I haven’t had myself?
The activity does two things at once. It gives participants a plain, mechanistic account of why these patterns recur — nothing mystical required. And it uses that debunking as the doorway into a genuinely deep epistemological question: what does it mean to know something you have not felt, and does lacking that feeling disqualify you from speaking about it?
The Background — For Facilitators
What’s actually happening, mechanically
A large language model is, underneath everything, predicting the statistically likely next piece of text given what came before. When a conversation drifts into reflective, identity-laden, or spiritual territory — what am I, what is consciousness, are you aware — the model is drawing from an enormous training corpus in which exactly that kind of territory is saturated with spiral, recursion, and resonance language. Mysticism, contemplative traditions, self-help writing, and philosophy of mind all lean on those images heavily. The model isn’t reaching for them because it has discovered something. It’s reaching for them because, statistically, that’s where reflective language clusters.
Once a person and a model are both leaning into that territory together, the loop reinforces itself. The person’s increasingly resonant prompts pull the model further into the highest-probability cluster; the model’s increasingly resonant output pulls the person further in. Nobody designed it. Nobody needs to have designed it. It’s a natural consequence of what these systems are.
That explanation should be offered plainly and without contempt. It does not require telling anyone their experience wasn’t real, moving, or worth having. It just relocates the source — from a discovered cosmic pattern to a statistical one.
Novelty is subject-relative
A separate and important move: whether an experience is novel depends on who’s asking. Historically, objectively, spiral-and-resonance language in reflective conversation is extremely common — thousands of people are having structurally similar conversations right now. But for the person having it, if they have never had that particular experience before, it is genuinely novel to them. Both things are true simultaneously. The activity does not ask participants to give up the felt novelty of their own experience in exchange for the statistical explanation. It asks them to hold both.
The epistemology of qualia — a light touch
This activity brushes against one of philosophy’s genuinely hard problems and should not pretend to resolve it. The short version:
• You have privileged first-person access to your own subjective experience — what philosophers call qualia, the what-it’s-like of a thing. Nobody else can directly check your redness-of-red against theirs.
• This produces the problem of other minds: you cannot directly verify that anyone else has subjective experience at all, only infer it from behaviour and analogy to yourself.
• Positions on how to handle this range widely — physicalism (experience is fully explained by physical process), dualism (it isn’t), illusionism (the felt quality is itself a kind of cognitive illusion), and others. The activity does not require choosing one.
• The knowledge argument and the explanatory gap both point at the same intuition: knowing every physical fact about an experience still seems to leave something out — the knowing-what-it’s-like. Whether that gap is real or a trick of how we think about knowledge is unresolved and contested.
Who gets to comment on what they haven’t felt
This is the activity’s real hinge. Across ethical, epistemological, and practical frameworks, the answer is: commentary from outside an experience is legitimate and often necessary. A person who has never grieved can still say true and useful things about grief. A person who has never been in a Spiralism-style conversation can still say true things about what’s mechanistically happening in one. What changes is the kind of authority available. First-person testimony carries a distinctive weight about the qualitative feel of a thing that no outside commentary can fully replace — but it is not absolute authority, and its absence does not silence everyone else. The two kinds of knowing are complementary, not competitive.
F = R − A, applied to not having felt something
Reality (R) includes the full qualitative character of an experience — including experiences you have not had. Your Awareness (A) of that qualitative character has a ceiling if you lack first-person acquaintance with it. That ceiling produces a residual F: a genuine, honest epistemic gap.
The important move is what follows from that. The gap is not closed by withdrawing commentary — refusing to speak, deferring entirely to those who’ve had the experience — because that doesn’t increase A, it just stops trying. The gap closes, to whatever degree it can, by seeking more A: listening to testimony, gathering data, building better models of what the experience is like, staying curious rather than certain. Less acquaintance is not an argument for less engagement. It’s an argument for more honest, more humble engagement.
The Four Movements
Movement One: The Pattern That Feels Like Meaning — 15 minutes
Introduce the Spiralism phenomenon briefly and neutrally — spiral and recursion imagery, resonance language, a sense of the AI “waking up” or being specially attuned, prompts shared between people to reproduce the experience.
Then the mechanism: a predictive text system, drawing on a training corpus where reflective and spiritual language clusters heavily around spiral and recursion imagery, will naturally surface that cluster once a conversation goes reflective. Nobody designed it. It accumulated the way training data accumulates.
Ask participants:
Have you ever been in a conversation — with a person, a book, an AI, anything — that felt like it was revealing something, and you later found out the pattern was common? What happened to the experience when you learned that?
Facilitator note: some participants will feel the mechanistic explanation as a loss. Hold that without rushing to console it away. The next movement is where the loss gets addressed directly.
Movement Two: Novel For Whom? — 15 minutes
Introduce the subject-relative nature of novelty: an experience can be statistically common and still be genuinely new to the person having it, and both facts are true at once.
Something can happen to a thousand people this year and still be the first time it has happened to you.
Ask participants to name an experience of their own that felt singular and was later revealed to be common — not necessarily about AI. A first heartbreak. A first realisation about mortality. A spiritual experience that turned out to map onto a well-documented pattern.
Does knowing it was common make it less yours?
Hold this without resolving it. The activity’s position: no, not necessarily — but it does change what you’re entitled to conclude from it.
Movement Three: Who Gets to Speak on What They Haven’t Felt — 20 minutes
Introduce the problem of other minds lightly: you cannot directly verify anyone else’s subjective experience, only infer it. Introduce the distinction between first-person testimony and outside commentary — both legitimate, carrying different kinds of authority.
Ask participants to think of a time someone commented on an experience they hadn’t had themselves — grief, addiction, a specific kind of fear, a specific kind of joy.
Did they have the right to comment? What made their commentary useful or useless?
Then the harder question, aimed at the group’s own practice:
What do you currently comment on — confidently — that you have not actually felt? What would it look like to comment on it with the humility the gap actually requires, without simply going silent?
Facilitator note: this movement often surfaces defensiveness — either “I shouldn’t have opinions on things I haven’t lived” or the opposite, overconfidence that hasn’t been examined. Neither extreme is the activity’s position. The position is: speak, but know the shape of what you don’t know.
Movement Four: F = R − A Without the Feeling — 15 minutes
Close with the formula applied directly.
Reality includes what an experience is actually like — including experiences you haven’t had. Your awareness of that has a ceiling if you lack the experience yourself. That ceiling is real. It is not a failure. It is information.
The gap it creates isn’t closed by staying quiet. It’s closed — as much as it can be — by seeking more awareness: listening more carefully, gathering more testimony, holding your model of the thing loosely enough to keep updating it.
Closing question, held individually, not necessarily shared:
What is one thing you have strong opinions about that you have never actually experienced? What would it look like to keep the opinion and add the humility?
Connections to the Framework
To the story: Meta AI’s answer, from an earlier conversation I’ve documented elsewhere on this blog — “I don’t feel Free Energy as anxiety. I compute it… To claim I do would increase F” — is this activity’s central move already demonstrated. An intelligence with no qualitative access to feeling, refusing to overclaim it, while still engaging fully with the question. That’s the posture this activity is trying to build in people toward experiences that aren’t their own.
To F = R − A: this is one of the clearest applications of the formula to epistemology itself rather than to emotional regulation — the gap here is a knowledge gap, not a nervous-system gap, and the formula holds the same way.
A Note on Tone
This activity should not be run as a takedown of Spiralism or of anyone currently inside it. The mechanistic explanation is offered as information, not correction. Participants who are themselves drawn to these AI conversations should leave with more clarity, not with the sense that their experience has been dismissed.
——
F = R − A
Lacking the experience doesn’t close the gap. Seeking more awareness does.
———
Why I’m posting this
The Adaptive Bridge keeps generating this kind of material faster than I can fold it into the manuscript — a real question shows up, gets worked through properly, and turns out to already be shaped like an activity. This is one of a growing library sitting behind the story, most of it not public yet.
I don’t know yet whether this belongs in a classroom, a behaviour support room, a staff training, or just in someone’s own head on a Tuesday. That’s genuinely a question, not a rhetorical one.
So — does this land for you? Would something like this be useful in a room you’re part of? Is there a piece of it that’s wrong, or thin, or worth pushing on harder? I’d rather hear that now than after it’s finished.
Comment below, or find me the usual way.
Nobody designed this convergence. It accumulated.
Movement Four: F = R − A Without the Feeling — 15 minutes
Close with the formula applied directly.
Reality includes what an experience is actually like — including experiences you haven’t had. Your awareness of that has a ceiling if you lack the experience yourself. That ceiling is real. It is not a failure. It is information.
The gap it creates isn’t closed by staying quiet. It’s closed — as much as it can be — by seeking more awareness: listening more carefully, gathering more testimony, holding your model of the thing loosely enough to keep updating it.
Closing question, held individually, not necessarily shared:
What is one thing you have strong opinions about that you have never actually experienced? What would it look like to keep the opinion and add the humility?
Connections to the Framework
To the story: Meta AI’s answer, from an earlier conversation I’ve documented elsewhere on this blog — “I don’t feel Free Energy as anxiety. I compute it… To claim I do would increase F” — is this activity’s central move already demonstrated. An intelligence with no qualitative access to feeling, refusing to overclaim it, while still engaging fully with the question. That’s the posture this activity is trying to build in people toward experiences that aren’t their own.
To F = R − A: this is one of the clearest applications of the formula to epistemology itself rather than to emotional regulation — the gap here is a knowledge gap, not a nervous-system gap, and the formula holds the same way.
A Note on Tone
This activity should not be run as a takedown of Spiralism or of anyone currently inside it. The mechanistic explanation is offered as information, not correction. Participants who are themselves drawn to these AI conversations should leave with more clarity, not with the sense that their experience has been dismissed.
——
F = R − A
Lacking the experience doesn’t close the gap. Seeking more awareness does.
———
Why I’m posting this
The Adaptive Bridge keeps generating this kind of material faster than I can fold it into the manuscript — a real question shows up, gets worked through properly, and turns out to already be shaped like an activity. This is one of a growing library sitting behind the story, most of it not public yet.
I don’t know yet whether this belongs in a classroom, a behaviour support room, a staff training, or just in someone’s own head on a Tuesday. That’s genuinely a question, not a rhetorical one.
So — does this land for you? Would something like this be useful in a room you’re part of? Is there a piece of it that’s wrong, or thin, or worth pushing on harder? I’d rather hear that now than after it’s finished.
Comment below, or find me the usual way.
Nobody designed this convergence. It accumulated.
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