Three Modes of Cognition

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Intelligence is not elemental. Neither is artificial intelligence. Both are complex compounds composed of more primitive cognitive elements, some of which we are only now discovering. We don’t yet have a periodic table of cognition (see my post The Periodic Table of Cognition ), so we have not finished identifying what the fundamental elements of intelligence are.

In the interim I propose three general classes of cognition that together can make something like a human intelligence. The three modes are: 1) Knowledge reasoning, 2) World sense, and 3) Continuous memory and learning.

Knowledge Reasoning is the kind of cognition generated by LLMs. It is a type of super-smartness that comes from reading (and remembering) every book ever written, and ingesting every written message posted. This knowledge-based intelligence is incredibly useful in answering questions, doing research, figuring out intellectual problems, accomplishing digital tasks, and perhaps even coming up with novel ideas. One LLM can deliver a whole country of PhD experts. Already in 2026 this book-smartness greatly exceeds the capabilities of humans.

World Sense is a kind of intelligence trained on the real world, instead of being trained on text descriptions of the real world. These are sometimes called world models, or Spatial Intelligence, because this kind of cognition is based on (and trained on) how physical objects behave in the 3-dimensional world of space and time, and not just the immaterial world of words talking about the world. This species of cognition knows how things bounce, or flow, or how proteins fold, or molecules vibrate, or light bends. It incorporates a recognition of gravity, an awareness of continuity, a sense of matter’s physicality, an intimate knowledge of how mass and energy are conserved. This is the cognition that drives Waymo cars better than humans drive. We don’t yet have a flood of robots in 2026 because this kind of cognition relies upon more than L…