Cognition

Your Brain Isn’t a Genius. It’s Just a Very Complex Wasp.

The sphex wasp performs a complex nest-building ritual—but move its prey an inch, and it loops helplessly forever. This is sphexishness: behavior that looks intelligent but breaks when the script fails. Most human habits and current AI systems are identical: sophisticated scripts that we call ‘agency’ only because the environment hasn’t exposed their limits yet. True intelligence isn’t complexity—it’s the ability to adapt when the script breaks.