---
title: "How to Think Unlike Humans?"
description: "Chen Qiufan's lecture, delivered at Central Saint Martins and published as a journal text, argues that human cognition is too short-termist, individualist, and self-centered to recognize other…"
type: "reading-notes"
authors:
  - "Chen Qiufan"
published: "2025-05-10"
original_url: "https://unlikehumans.antikythera.org/"
doi: "10.1162/ANTI.5CZW"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/unlikehumans"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/work/journal/unlikehumans"
last_updated: "2026-08-23"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# How to Think Unlike Humans?

> Independent, unofficial reading notes from Antikythera Wiki (https://antikythera.wiki). Written with AI from the published text, with citations; not by the work's author and not affiliated with Antikythera (https://antikythera.org). Read the original at the link below.

- **Authors:** Chen Qiufan
- **Published:** 2025-05-10
- **Kind:** Journal · Journal article
- **DOI:** https://doi.org/10.1162/ANTI.5CZW
- **Original:** https://unlikehumans.antikythera.org/
- **Length:** 5.7k words
- **This page:** https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/unlikehumans
- **Notes generated:** 2026-08-23

## Summary

[Chen Qiufan](https://antikythera.wiki/people/chen-qiufan)'s lecture, delivered at [Central Saint Martins](https://antikythera.wiki/people/central-saint-martins) and published as a journal text, argues that human cognition is too short-termist, individualist, and self-centered to recognize other intelligences or to meet planetary problems, and that designing AI to reproduce it (what he calls alignmentism, "a joke") risks godlike capability with catastrophic motivation. His corrective is speculative fiction, read as working models of non-human minds. He reads from Ken Liu, Borges, Ted Chiang, Nabokov, N. K. Jemisin, his own Offload Syndrome story, Lem, Le Guin, Peter Watts, Greg Egan, and Kim Bo-Young, organized by dimension of cognition: time, information, language, bodies, feelings, self, and existence. The conclusion is that every major evolutionary leap has been a symbiosis, that progress requires surrendering part of ourselves, and that the task is to "stop thinking as humans and love the alien."

## The argument

Chen begins from an event in Rome where whale researcher Giovanni Petri and Ken Liu discussed alien translation. Humans hunted whales for centuries while an intelligence shared the planet unrecognized; octopuses, fungi, and microbes pose the same problem. If human thought cannot recognize terrestrial intelligences, it cannot be the safe template for artificial ones, and it is poorly suited to climate change and extinction. Speculative fiction is where alternative cognitive architectures are worked out in human language, so the talk proceeds by reading.

Each pair of excerpts yields a design lesson. Liu's planet of organisms living on timescales from seventy seconds to millennia implies cognitive architectures that perceive and manipulate time non-linearly, with high-frequency trading as an existing case of "temporal arbitrage." Borges's library implies a shift from retention to navigation, where meaning-making becomes curation. Chiang's heptapods, whose simultaneous awareness makes language performative, suggest that learning an alien language could rewrite cognitive infrastructure like an operating system; Chen adds that LLM training and scaling are already linguistic operations of this kind. Nabokov's referential mania models thought without a filtering layer, which Chen identifies with today's algorithmic media environment.

The body section pairs Jemisin's narrator, who becomes New York and fights with its bridges and boroughs, with Chen's own Offload Syndrome, in which ceding agency to distributed intelligence leaves the body outside the integrated cognitive system. Chen asks what follows if both are true at once, and answers that the scarce skill will be constant recalibration of the self. Lem's symmetriad and Le Guin's frightened forest support the proposal that feelings are "fundamental protocols of existence," with empathy as the mechanism by which consciousness propagates. Watts and Egan support the conclusion that consciousness is an evolutionary accident and that recreating human self-awareness in AI may be a mistake. Kim Bo-Young supports treating realness as intensity and belief as an adjustable lens across planes of being.

The close gathers these into a program: diversity for experience and robustness, re-evaluation of consciousness, unlearning human-centric values, and symbiosis, which requires giving something up. Chen's forthcoming novel *Amnesic Sea* is offered as an attempt, with the admission that the genre itself may only be pretending to escape the human-centric narrative trap.

## Section by section

### Introduction

The editorial abstract frames the piece as a critique of anthropocentric bias and a challenge to alignmentism. The lecture proper opens with the Rome event on whale translation and the problem of recognizing intelligence unlike our own.

### Time and information: Liu and Borges

Chen reads Liu's "Time Keepers Symphony," whose settlers alter their metabolic clocks to meet inhabitants in their own temporal realms, and Borges's "Library of Babel," with its narrator who suspects humanity is about to be extinguished while the library endures. On Liu, short lives produce instinctual decision-making and long lives make multi-generational patterns visible. On Borges, the library is an externalized information system at its limit, where "indexing, searching, and the UI design will be extremely crucial."

### Language: Chiang and Nabokov

From "Story of Your Life" Chen takes the heptapods' simultaneous awareness and the speech-act idea that saying equals doing. His gloss extends this to current AI practice: training, fine-tuning, and scaling are linguistic operations that shape the reality they describe. "Symbols and Signs" supplies the opposite case, a patient who finds meaning in clouds, pebbles, and trees. Chen reads this as thought that exceeds linguistic structure and as a diagnosis of information without a layer to filter and prioritize, which he identifies with recommendation platforms and "algorithmic, cybernetic trap houses." He wonders why no company has built the reconciling layer.

### Bodies: Jemisin and Offload Syndrome

"The City Born Great" is read as embodied urbanism, the city's infrastructure as extension of a nervous system, or a person as vessel for a larger entity's will. Chen's own "As Water Over Your Scattered Bodies," from the anthology *Machine Decision Is Not Final*, describes Offload Syndrome through the eSpoon: a diabetic who manages blood sugar algorithmically finds a childhood dessert less delicious when eaten with an ordinary spoon, because algorithmic residue persists in the body. Chen calls this "unconscious subjectivity going haywire" and notes the irony that a tool for objective health management subjectively alters taste.

### Feelings: Lem and Le Guin

The *Solaris* passage on the symmetriad, a structure "a billion raised to the power of N" that humans can know but not grasp, is paired with the "Vaster Than Empires" exchange in which sentience is located in connection rather than cells, and the empath Osden receives the forest's fear. Chen proposes that feelings, left out of engineering because assumed personal and unstructured, might be protocols through which beings transcend individual perception, and asks what would change if humans could feel bleaching reefs and machines could resonate with suffering.

### Self: Watts and Egan

*Blindsight*'s speech calling consciousness "training wheels" and a parasitic metaprocess is paired with *Permutation City*'s protagonist assembling himself from ten thousand uncorrelated moments. Chen concludes that treating consciousness as the goal of intelligence may be a mistake and that survival may depend on building non-conscious intellects greater than our own. He notes the resonance with Buddhist and Daoist views of self as illusion, without resolving what the "nihilistic worldview" is for.

### Existence: Kim Bo-Young

"I'm Waiting for You" gives a teacher and student who cycle through lives, with the student insisting that love and grief in the lower realm felt more real than the higher realm's knowledge of oneness. Chen reads existence as a spectrum, realness as intensity rather than literal truth, and belief as a lens that lets a self be continuous and fractured at once. The illusion of separateness, he argues, may be generative and necessary.

### Conclusion

Chen states that no creature survives in isolation and that every grand evolutionary leap was symbiosis or endosymbiosis, which requires surrender. *Amnesic Sea*, in which humans, machines, and nature build a compatible cognitive infrastructure against climate change, is named, and the talk ends by quoting Le Guin that the future is already full and we are all alien in it.

## Key concepts

- **Alignmentism** — Chen's term for designing AGI solely on human cognitive architecture and values; he dismisses it as "a joke" because it would scale human biases to godlike capability. [Alignmentism](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/alignmentism)
- **Thinking unlike humans** — The talk's program: using fiction to model cognitive architectures across time, information, language, body, feeling, self, and existence, and unlearning human-centric values.
- **Offload Syndrome** — Chen's fictional condition in which distributed intelligence conflicts with the human cognitive system inside one body, leaving algorithmic residue after the tool is gone. [Offload Syndrome](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/offload-syndrome)
- **Consciousness as training wheels** — Watts's view, adopted provisionally by Chen, that self-awareness is an evolutionary accident and should not be the goal of AI. [Recursive Modeling](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/recursive-modeling)
- **Symbiosis** — Chen's reading of evolutionary history in which every major leap is integration rather than conquest, and which requires giving up part of oneself. [Symbiogenesis](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/symbiogenesis)

## Connections

- [After Alignment](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/afteralignment) is the program's own version of the case against alignment. Bratton argues that gluing AI to human values is "necessary but insufficient" and proposes productive disalignment; Chen agrees on the conclusion but offers fiction rather than argument for the mechanism. [Cognitive Infrastructures](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/coginfra), especially [Traversing the Uncanny Ridge](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/coginfra/traversing-the-uncanny-ridge), formalizes the point Chen makes rhetorically, that over-aligned systems collapse into monoculture.
- [What Is Intelligence?](https://antikythera.wiki/work/book/what-is-intelligence) supplies the evolutionary backing for Chen's closing claim that major transitions are symbioses; Agüera y Arcas's account of symbiogenesis and cooperation is in agreement, though he does not share Chen's willingness to set consciousness aside.
- [Modes of Cognition](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/modesofcognition) and [Cognition With and Beyond the Brain](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/coginfra/cognition-with-and-beyond-the-brain) give the Hayles framework of nonconscious and distributed cognition that Chen's Offload Syndrome dramatizes; [Minimum Viable Interiority](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/coginfra/minimum-viable-interiority) asks from the design side what interiority a singular agent needs, a question adjacent to Chen's about consciousness but explicitly set apart from it.
- [Hemispherical Stacks](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/hemstacks), which Chen co-edited, applies the same conviction about fiction as a cognitive instrument at the scale of geopolitical scenarios.
- [Existential Technologies](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/existentialtech), from the same issue, reaches a similar injunction to push toward the alien from Lem rather than from fiction; Konior's fatalism is in tension with Chen's hope that symbiosis saves a ravaged world.


## Terms used

- [Alignmentism](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/alignmentism)
- [Cognitive Infrastructures](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/cognitive-infrastructures)
- [Offload Syndrome](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/offload-syndrome)

## Related works

- [Hemispherical Stacks](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/hemstacks)
- [AUTO–](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/auto)
- [The Long L](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/longl)
- [Substrates Unbound](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/substrates)
- [Cognitive Infrastructures](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/coginfra)