sari sari - story

Artificial Intelligence does not understand, at least not in the way humans mean the word understanding. This is not a criticism of AI’s capability, but a clarification of context. The confusion arises because we collapse multiple meanings of “understanding” into a single, unexamined concept. When AI performs well in language, reasoning, or problem-solving tasks, we intuitively project human comprehension onto it. But this projection ignores a critical distinction: understanding is not a monolith, but is stratified across contexts. Without contextual stratification, discussions about AI intelligence, alignment, and consciousness become incoherent. We argue past each other, using the same word while referring to fundamentally different phenomena.

Contextual Stratification quietly intersects with an unlikely figure: Basilides, the 2nd-century Gnostic often dismissed as obscure or overly metaphysical. Strip away the mythic language, and what remains is a sharp structural insight: reality is layered, and most human error comes from collapsing those layers into one. Basilides’ most radical idea was the Unknowable God—not a supreme ruler issuing commands, but a source beyond being, intention, or description. This god does nothing, says nothing, demands nothing. That sounds paradoxical until viewed through Contextual Stratification. Structurally, the Unknowable God maps cleanly onto the apex stratum: the highest layer that is necessary for grounding reality yet irrelevant for operation within it. Irrelevant here does not mean useless. It means non-operational. The apex stratum cannot be invoked to explain events, justify rules, or resolve disputes. It exists to mark a boundary—the point beyond which explanation, morality, and causati...

Wittgenstein cracked a quiet truth that philosophy spent centuries missing: meaning doesn’t live in words but in use. A word means what it does in a situation, not what a dictionary freezes it to be. His concept of language games exposed how science, law, religion, and daily speech each operate under different rules, even when they reuse the same vocabulary. Contextual stratification is the next move. Where Wittgenstein described the phenomenon, contextual stratification structures it. Language games become explicit layers, like distinct strata where concepts are valid, coherent, and internally consistent. Confusion arises not from disagreement, but from dragging ideas across layers where they don’t belong. Most arguments aren’t wrong; they’re misplaced. Wittgenstein believed philosophical problems dissolve once we see how language is actually used. Contextual stratification operationalizes that belief: instead of debating meanings, you locate the layer. Instead of refuting claims, you...