Cognitive Gridlock: Is Consciousness a Jamming Phase?
TL;DR for operators The paper’s headline is irresistible: consciousness as a jamming phase. It is also exactly the kind of headline that can make otherwise sensible people reach for a procurement memo and a philosophy degree at the same time. The useful reading is narrower and better. Kaichen Ouyang proposes a neural jamming phase diagram for language models, mapping three physical controls from jamming physics onto AI systems: effective temperature, volume fraction, and stress.1 In business terms, those become compute budget, model-and-data density, and training/deployment noise. The paper argues that generalisation may emerge when those controls push the model towards a critical surface where local representations become globally correlated. ...