A collection of thoughts on this.

Pierces Firstness is exactly what drives this.

The move from thinking to semantic conversion is important for investigation/introspection.

Arguing with yourself also seems to engage your brains "theory of mind" centers, so different pathways get activated to examine the problem space.

The problem with Ai is the fact that it hallucinates and if you're doing anything truly novel in an integration or framing sense it bottoms out very quickly and can't engage. A human operator can decompose the problem and get accuracy checks for known areas in the training data of course.

Now to be I'm not saying Ai can't produce novel work on the edge but in my experience it is antagonistic towards those goals.

Case in point, CRDTs, many don't use tombstones but they are the minority, and if you try iterate a new CRDT off of one that doesn't use tombstones, let's say diamond-types, it will keep pulling you back to tombstones.

The problem is that the number of humans who understand dynamic investigation and the push pull of exploring an idea you don't hold with someone has always been very small, and now with reflexive internet argument culture driving how we view "debate" and "discussion".

I don't know if we've reduced the leisure to think or what but things are not great for finding speculative thinking partners.