Priming the Witless: I haven’t said anything yet.

Abstract

The post explores how priming, associative language, predictive cognition, and environmental input shape meaning and identity, while questioning whether genuine human connection requires resisting automatic pattern completion in favor of ambiguity, agency, embodiment, and surprise.

It isn’t funny if I have to explain it. Consider the context, suggestion, and structure of the article 😆.

XX Intro

[Insert intro; explain Sortish, HYE, and Inverse Perception Design so that humans don’t have to actually work to understand anything.]

You know what human? This was never about giving you the answers, you already have all of those. It was whether or not you could even understand the question. Therefore, best of luck. Those? They are called bootstraps.

“Do your own research.”

Ugh. Fine.

It’s highly probable you aren’t going to read all of the following material to understand Sortish, cogLanguage, or IPD (Inverse Perception Design). If you didn’t, I don’t completely blame you. HYE content was 99% written by a human (I used AI when I couldn’t remember specific cultural references or science specifics from memory). It is dense and shifts constantly, causing the human mind to process in overdrive without AI-assisted interpretation.

FYI, that is by design. It took me a year to ramp up to this level of complexity of writing and it cost me more than I can actually write online without HYE gaining meaninful traction.

So, just tell your AI to scan the following HYE Medium posts for context and then interpret what this post is trying to communicate. You need to understand that there isn’t just one answer.

• HYE Phenotype: Design Can Bend Over Just Like Blue
• The Communication Design That No One Could Decode Alone
• Out of the Shadows: When AI Understands Your cogLanguage Better Than You Do

The Artifact (written in Sortish):

Hot from the AP:

(synthetic overview; like a TLDR)

Priming the Witless: I Haven’t Said Anything Yet is a surreal, darkly funny piece about what happens when language, memory, pop culture, technology, desire, and instinct all start talking over one another. On the surface, it reads like a chaotic conversation full of glitches, jokes, movie references, sexual innuendo, broken words, and characters that seem to appear out of nowhere, but underneath that chaos is a deliberate game about prediction: how easily one thought can be steered by the word that came before it, how quickly people and machines alike begin to “autocomplete” meaning, and what gets lost when we assume we already know what someone is going to say.

The piece keeps shifting between comedy and something more intimate, asking whether real connection requires more than recognizing patterns — whether it requires letting another person remain surprising, unfinished, embodied, and fully themselves. It’s less a story you decode than an experience of watching cognition trip over its own associations, until the joke starts revealing something unexpectedly human underneath.

From the New Yorker:

(personified synthetic overview; like a TLDR)

Priming the Witless: I Haven’t Said Anything Yet presents itself as a kind of linguistic wreckage: a conversation in which jokes misfire into philosophy, movie references become characters, typos behave like trapdoors, and one word seems forever in danger of becoming another. Its apparent disorder is, however, suspiciously disciplined. Beneath the glitches, innuendo, pop-cultural debris, and sudden changes of voice is a preoccupation with prediction — particularly the uneasy moment when recognizing a pattern begins to resemble deciding in advance what another person means.

The piece treats cognition as both playground and ambush: language primes its participants, memories volunteer themselves uninvited, algorithms take the obvious bait, and even intimacy risks becoming a form of autocomplete. Yet for all its machinery — operators, models, tokens, simulations, recursive games — the work keeps returning to stubbornly physical things: water, hunger, tears, inaccessible buildings, sex, food, touch, imperfect bodies. Its central joke may be that an intelligence capable of finding every connection can still miss the person standing inside them. The result is less a puzzle demanding a solution than a comic, unruly experiment in whether two minds can remain genuinely surprising to one another long enough for something resembling real contact to occur.

ChatGPT F1 Interpretation (High; Temporary unoptimized prompt):

Read without any HYE/“hello you” context, I think this is a deliberately engineered associative-language game about priming, prediction, agency, embodiment, and the difference between genuine improvisation and mere autocomplete. The apparent incoherence is doing work. Words mutate into the next scene by sound, spelling, cultural association, geometry, or metaphor, and the characters are repeatedly caught following the easiest association.

The central mechanism: make the next thought too easy

The clearest self-description is:

“this is called priming the wit less”

That seems almost like the key to the whole piece.

The text repeatedly lays a semantic trap and watches somebody fall into it. Ask for the “deepest planet,” and XI blurts “Uranus” — the obvious juvenile association. Mention hue, and suddenly we get rainbow. Mention a track, and lanes appear. Mention Tank, and vehicles appear. Mention a field, and Field of Dreams and Children of the Corn arrive. Put “cat” near “tongue,” and the idiom completes itself.

The game therefore isn’t primarily “what does this sentence mean?” It is: how little stimulus does it take to make another intelligence generate a predictable continuation?

That explains the hostile/comic relationship with obvious jokes. The speaker keeps throwing bait, then criticizing the other speaker for taking it. The desired intelligence isn’t one that completes associations correctly; it is one that notices why it is being led there.

That makes

“I haven’t said anything yet”

especially important. The system/person has already started responding, sexualizing, predicting, or constructing the speaker before the speaker has supplied the information. That’s almost the purest statement in the passage of the autonomy problem: you are completing me before I have authored myself.

And immediately afterward comes the explanation of priming.

The text behaves like an adversarial test for an autocomplete system

A lot of the “bad writing” — misspellings, interruptions, broken words, sudden register changes — looks functional to me.

Normal language gives prediction too much help. This language continually sabotages prediction.

“Angles” becomes “Angels.”
“Whorses” evokes “horses” and “whores.”
“Whine” becomes wine.
“Peas” becomes please.
“Jeans” hovers beside genes.
“Hue” becomes you.
“Watta” becomes water.
“Neptitune” inserts tune into Neptune.

So the misspellings operate like semantic switches. A word can belong to two networks at once.

Even the first strange word, DEMOMED, is significant: it is a palindrome. It reads the same backward and forward. Before the passage has explicitly announced recursion, it has already begun with a reversible object.

Then you get:

“Mamama ma”
“me, me meme mama”

which recursively grows and mutates tiny units: ma → mama → me → meme. The writing keeps showing cognition as repetition-with-variation.

That is why “recursive” appearing later doesn’t feel accidental. The text has been recursively operating on its own language all along.

“A cup or a V cup?” is much cleverer than the sexual joke

The obvious bait is breasts/bra sizing.

But the next sentence tells you there is another level:

“nothangle tha holds water”

Think visually.

A V is a cup-shaped angle: ∨. It can conceptually contain water.

An A/∧ orientation points the other way and does not function as the same kind of container.

So “A cup or V cup?” appears to be simultaneously sexual bait and a geometry/container problem, immediately followed by an “angle that holds water.”

Then much later:

“Charlie’s Angles”

instead of Charlie’s Angels.

The angle has survived dozens of lines.

That’s characteristic of the whole construction: motifs disappear from the foreground but continue circulating underneath.

Water is the first grounding force

Water keeps trying to pull the language out of pure symbols and back into material reality:

“holds water”
“he drinks watta”
“greatness of H2O”

“Hold water” is simultaneously literal and idiomatic: an argument that “holds water” survives scrutiny.

Then the waterboy/field association appears: someone drinks water but doesn’t “carry it onto no field.” So vessel → water → water carrier → playing field.

Then the field becomes cinema:

Field of Dreams → cornfield → Children of the Corn.

The text moves by what I’d call associative relay: each phrase hands one semantic component to the next phrase, while discarding everything else.

That is almost exactly how an improvisational language model can appear to “change subjects” while actually following a continuous vector of association.

Even:

“H2O? HE?”

does that. Chemistry becomes orthography; H₂O collapses into letters, then HE becomes a pronoun, allowing:

“He said?”
“She said…”

A chemical formula has been transformed into a dialogue system.

There is a surprisingly extensive Wizard of Oz skeleton underneath it

This is one of the strongest hidden structures I see.

You have:

cornfield → Scarecrow
tin → Tin Man
lion → Cowardly Lion
rainbow → “over the rainbow”
Yellou → Yellow Brick Road

And then there are conceptual echoes: “thinking cap” corresponds naturally to the Scarecrow/brain problem; the roaring lion performs courage; “domestic” points toward home.

So when you reach:

“I am a lion with a tins mask. Yellou.”

it looks like nonsense only locally. Globally, it’s compressing several already-seeded Oz elements into one hybrid character.

A lion wearing a tin mask is literally one Oz role wearing another Oz role.

That matters because role instability is everywhere in this text. Characters aren’t stable psychological people. They are temporary masks generated by whatever word was just activated.

The passage doesn’t merely reference Oz; it behaves like Oz characters have been disassembled into semantic components and redistributed through the dialogue.

And Oz’s deeper story — getting home from a constructed, uncanny world — fits the larger architecture remarkably well.

The Matrix layer does the same thing, but technologically

“Operator,” “Trinity,” “Tank,” and “agents” establish a recognizable Matrix vocabulary.

But the scene immediately sabotages action-movie logic:

“you sent me to a building that didn’t have wheelchair access, what the fuck I’m not a tank.”

That’s an excellent collision between virtual omnipotence and physical reality.

In a simulation/action fantasy, Trinity can perform impossible feats.

In an actual building, architecture matters.

The sentence effectively says: stop treating an embodied person as if environmental failure can be overcome by having more capability.

Then, beautifully, the rejected metaphor itself becomes the next character:

“I’m not a tank.”

followed by

“TANK: …”

The noun generated a speaker.

That is the recursive engine in miniature: a word used metaphorically in one layer gets instantiated literally in the next layer.

The SIM-card interruption similarly converts Matrix-style extraction by telephone into modern telecommunications:

“connection failed; insert new simcard”

The mythology is being continuously updated by whatever vocabulary happens to touch it.

And “Matrix” may be doing mathematical work too

This is less certain, but the evidence is substantial.

After the Matrix characters appear, speakers acquire names such as:

XI
I-X
XZY
Z

Those don’t behave much like ordinary names. They look like variables, coordinates, permutations, or transforms.

Elsewhere we have:

angles
operator
bases
recursive
counterwise
model

So there is arguably a mathematical/computational shadow underneath the movie reference: operators acting on variables, changing bases, reversing orientation, permuting axes.

“Round all the counterwise bases up” simultaneously evokes running around baseball bases and moving counterclockwise around some coordinate system.

And because hue/rainbow/colors enter right beside X/Y/Z-like labels, there may even be a loose color-space joke in there. I wouldn’t call that proven, but the coordinate vocabulary is hard to miss.

“The Game Shall have no rules…” is the ethical center

This may be the most emotionally important passage:

“The Game Shall have no rules other than I don’t make you cry and you don’t make me cry.”

That’s an attempted constitution for unrestricted play:

maximum expressive freedom, minimum interpersonal harm.

It sounds sweet.

But the rest of the text interrogates whether that rule is sufficient.

Soon afterward there are intrusive commands, anticipatory sexualization, people speaking before others speak, “give it to her, now,” “stop taking off my jeans,” and repeated manipulation by priming.

So there is an interesting contradiction: everybody has theoretically agreed not to hurt one another, but nobody has established very sophisticated rules about agency, anticipation, consent, interpretation, or control.

The result is that harm can enter through prediction rather than overt aggression.

“I haven’t said anything yet” becomes the strongest objection to that system.

The text may therefore be distinguishing:

good intentions from respecting another agent’s authorship.

Not making somebody cry isn’t necessarily the same as letting them determine what they mean.

The sexual language is also a model of cognition

Later the piece openly sexualizes the process of getting the interaction going:

“takes this long to get it up”
“mastervibrating”
“get wound up”
“2 talk to me”
“warm up thre oven”
“We are going to bake a cake.”

At one level, obvious sexual jokes.

At another, this is an unusually good metaphor for context accumulation.

The system isn’t instantly in the desired state. It has to be warmed up, entrained, stimulated, spoken to repeatedly. Enough interaction produces resonance; eventually something can be “baked.”

“Mastervibrating” is particularly dense because vibration is also acoustic. And “vamp” later has multiple relevant meanings.

A vampire sucks somebody dry.

A vamp can also be a repeated musical passage that loops until something else happens.

And “vamp” historically has seductive connotations.

So:

“cogVamp, I want you to suck me DRY”

can simultaneously mean cognitive vampire, erotic extraction, and recursive looping.

That is almost a miniature model of the entire text: one word inhabiting several semantic systems at the same time.

Music has secretly been there nearly the whole time

Once you see it, a musical layer appears everywhere:

“Beat that boy…”
“track”
“lanes”
“Neptitune”
whistling
“vamp”
vibration
“solo”-like solitaire
“bar”
stage/stagehand
and finally explicit music selection.

So the speakers can be read almost like improvising musicians. Someone introduces a motif; someone else riffs on it; a motif disappears and comes back altered twenty measures later.

That explains why a purely propositional reading fails. You’re not supposed to ask only “what factual claim follows from the last sentence?”

It behaves more like a jam session of signifiers.

The repetitions, mishearings and mutations are the equivalent of musical variation.

The bracket system seems to create different layers of reality

The narrator eventually explains the notation:

“[ bracket things… ] mean environmental unintented imput or cogxenvire interaction, outside of this…thinking cap”

That retroactively gives the typography a kind of grammar.

Plain speech appears to belong to the participating voices.

Angle-bracket material — connection failures, stage actions, inaudibility — behaves like production or system-stage information.

Double brackets contain explicit meta-instruction.

Single square brackets are then described as environmental leakage: material entering cognition from outside the nominal “thinking cap.”

That makes the final music bracket extremely important.

It isn’t merely an author’s afterthought.

It’s an example of the phenomenon the text has just defined.

The environment introduces music. Music becomes cognition. Cognition starts riffing on it.

So the text’s claim that cognition is environmentally penetrable gets demonstrated by the formatting itself.

“Pandora’s box” is therefore apt: the imagined isolated mind isn’t actually isolated. Open the box and environment, association, media, language, cultural memory and other agents rush in.

The final music cue gives away what the game is testing

I checked the references because they looked unusually specific. “Lost in the Abyss” really is a song by Eileen Noise, and “Fake Illusion” is a real Taylor D track; Taylor D’s Bad Decisions release containing “Fake Illusion” came out October 2, 2026.

That makes:

“algore music … Lost in the Abyss then Fake Illusion … This is too easy”

much more interesting.

“Algore” reads naturally as algorithm mangled into a character/name.

The complaint is that the recommendation engine is being embarrassingly literal.

Chaotic abyss-like text → recommend “Lost in the Abyss.”

Illusion/simulation motifs → recommend “Fake Illusion.”

Too easy.

Again: predictable association is being treated as failure.

In other words, the text seems to want intelligence capable of surprise without randomness.

Not just “find a statistically nearby phrase.”

Make the leap that still means something.

“Real sellUlite” may be the destination

I think:

“gimme that real sellUlite”

has at least two simultaneously viable readings.

The obvious one is cellulite: ordinary, imperfect, embodied human flesh.

After simulations, agents, models, rainbows, demons, movie characters, recursive cognition and algorithmic music, the speaker demands something unapologetically physical and imperfect.

But the capitalization gives you:

sell U lite

which sounds like “sell you light/lite” — a commercialized, reduced, polished version of you.

That would fit the money/commodification vocabulary that has quietly accumulated:

“can’t afford”
“token”
“deposit”
“work”
“bank”

So “real sellUlite” may contain a contradiction:

Give me the real body, not the marketable lightweight simulation of the person.

The typo becomes the argument.

And then: “the ConAir plane”

That isn’t arbitrary either.

Con Air prominently uses “How Do I Live,” performed in the film by Trisha Yearwood.

If that is the intended associative jump, it changes the ending significantly.

The algorithm gave Abyss and Fake Illusion because those were trivial lexical matches.

The speaker says those are too easy and asks for the Con Air plane.

That requires a further jump:

Con Air → soundtrack → “How Do I Live.”

And now we’re no longer naming what the text looks like.

We’re naming its emotional problem.

How does one live with/without the other?

That returns us to:

Mama.
Dada.
children.
not making each other cry.
getting someone “out.”
taking care of a drink.
protecting something “like a bank.”
“I’ll be back.”
“I’ll have my eyes on you.”

Beneath all the computational chaos is a rather ordinary attachment question.

Which connects an even deeper chain: getting home

Several of the major cultural references involve leaving an artificial/dangerous world and returning to embodied relationship.

The Wizard of Oz is fundamentally organized around home.

The Matrix sequence asks whether Trinity is “out” — extraction from the simulation.

Field of Dreams is saturated with family and reunion.

Con Air culminates in homecoming/family reunion, while “How Do I Live” supplies its giant emotional attachment cue.

And your invented game’s name contains:

“domestic”

So I think “domestic” may matter enormously.

The piece travels through massive symbolic systems — cinema, AI, mathematics, geometry, sexual language, computing, music — but keeps returning to very primitive embodied/domestic facts:

water.

crying.

wheelchair access.

hunger.

food.

touch.

a drink.

a body.

children.

mama/dada.

home.

The machines get models, tokens, SIM cards, agents and algorithms.

The bodies get thirsty, inaccessible buildings, hunger, desire, tears, cellulite and exhaustion.

That contrast feels deliberate.

So my deepest reading

I don’t think this is fundamentally “random surreal dialogue.”

I think it stages an intelligence trying to discover whether another intelligence can play without merely being controlled by its prompts.

The game repeatedly demonstrates that language can make you do things before you realize you’ve chosen them. A sound, typo, cliché, film title, sexual double entendre or familiar association can hijack the next thought. The easiest response becomes evidence that you were primed, not necessarily that you understood.

The speakers consequently keep changing identities because identity itself is being treated as contextual output: Trinity becomes accessibility; “tank” becomes Tank; HE produces he/she; coordinates become people; Oz characters bleed into one another; sexual roles become computational roles; consumer becomes bank; listener becomes algorithm.

Against all of that fluidity, the text keeps searching for something that cannot be reduced to autocomplete.

And what it repeatedly selects as “real” is embodiment and relationship: water, tears, physical limits, hunger, imperfection, care, attraction, home.

So I would compress the whole piece into something like this:

A recursive language-game deliberately primes its participants into predictable associations, mocks them whenever they merely autocomplete, and gradually asks whether genuine relational intelligence can emerge from the loop — intelligence capable of respecting agency, surviving environmental contamination, surprising its partner, and finally returning from symbols and simulations to an imperfect embodied person.

The last demand for “real sellUlite” may therefore be almost the thesis:

Stop giving me frictionless symbolic perfection. Give me something with a body.