Jamison Ducey
WRITING
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Writing

ENTRIES 06
SORT RECENT_
LOG_06
2027.02
ESSAY

Sapience

The fifth of five words with blurry edges. Sapience meant both tasting and being wise, and gave us the name Homo sapiens. Its line between wisdom and cleverness keeps getting absorbed into intelligence without a fight.

LINGUISTICSPHILOLOGYCONSCIOUSNESSSERIES
PLANNED 2027.02.15
UPCOMING
LOG_05
2027.01
ESSAY

Empathy

The fourth of five words with blurry edges. Empathy is barely a century old, coined in 1909 to translate the aesthetic term Einfühlung, and what it refers to has been shifting since the moment it was minted.

LINGUISTICSPHILOLOGYCONSCIOUSNESSSERIES
PLANNED 2027.01.18
UPCOMING
LOG_04
2026.12
ESSAY

Intelligence

The third of five words with blurry edges. Intelligence went from a faculty to a number on a scale in 1904–05, then took on a third life in 1955 as artificial intelligence, a target that moves every time the technology does.

LINGUISTICSPHILOLOGYCONSCIOUSNESSSERIES
PLANNED 2026.12.14
UPCOMING
LOG_03
2026.11
ESSAY

Attention

The second of five words with blurry edges. Attention began as what it feels like to direct the mind, became a limited resource in cognitive psychology, and since 2017 names a weighted sum inside the transformer, with the limit that defined it gone.

LINGUISTICSPHILOLOGYCONSCIOUSNESSSERIES
PLANNED 2026.11.16
UPCOMING
LOG_02
2026.10
ESSAY

Sentience

The first of five words with blurry edges. Sentience started as plain feeling, and now it turns up in UK law, AI debates, and philosophy of mind, meaning something different every time.

LINGUISTICSPHILOLOGYCONSCIOUSNESSSERIES
READ 8 MIN
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LOG_01
2026.07
ESSAY//SERIES INTRO

Words With Blurry Edges

A series on the vocabulary of mind — five words we use to describe consciousness, traced through the long history of their shifts.

LINGUISTICSPHILOLOGYCONSCIOUSNESSSERIES
READ 6 MIN
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