Thoughts & Writings

← Back to blog

Triple Cognition System

The usual two-system story of cognition is no longer enough for me.

System 1 is fast, intuitive, and embodied. System 2 is slow, deliberate, and expensive. But once artificial systems become part of daily thought, there is a third loop in the room: a machine system that can amplify, draft, search, simulate, code, and respond at a scale our attention cannot match.

DWG № TSC-001 · REV A · SHEET 1/1

TRI-SYSTEM CONTROL MODEL

Extending the tri-system theory of cognition with resource constraints, I/O ports, and coupling channels — human as controller, System 3 as actuator.

■ human signal■ machine signal■ verification loop
STIMULUSREAD / STUDYCONVERSATIONSMEDIA / FEEDSPRESENCE / OBSERVESLEEP / RECOVERYINPUT PORTS (abstracted senses)*autopilot (full System 3 pass)RESPONSEWRITESAYDECIDE / DOSHIP (code, product)HUMAN — INTERNALin vivo · role: CONTROLLER — sets goals (reference signal), allocates attentionIntuition 1Intuition 2conflict /uncertaintymonitorSYSTEM 1fast · cheap · biasedSYSTEM 2slow · costly · deliberateescalate on conflictdeliberate outputCONSTRAINTS:attention ≈ 3–5 h deep/day · working memory ≈ 4 chunks · fatigue decays · switching cost · circadian phase · sleep-gated consolidationBRAIN BOUNDARY — the interface is the bottleneckcognitive offloading1.5 h prompting / delegatingverification (sensor)1.0 h · refines deliberationcognitive surrenderunverified acceptance: 5.0 u/dayupdates intuitive priorsquality ∝ verified exposureMACHINE — EXTERNALin silico · role: ACTUATOR — high-gain, prompt-boundedSYSTEM 3artificial · fast AND deliberate-shaped · no stakes, no ground truthCONSTRAINTS:finite context window · session amnesia · weak world-grounding · latency + cost · output ∝ prompt qualitydirect algorithmic outputCONTROL LOOP: goals (reference) → prompt (control signal) → System 3 (actuator) → output (plant state) → verification (sensor) → System 2 (comparator) → corrected promptChannel thickness = live allocation from the console below. Dashed = signal in motion.

ATTENTION CONSOLE

Allocate today's finite attention budget. The schematic re-routes live.

DEEP-ATTENTION BUDGET5 h
Your daily stock of usable focused hours. It does not scale — everything else must.
DELEGATION → SYSTEM 330%
Time spent prompting, briefing, orchestrating.
VERIFICATION ← SYSTEM 320%
Time spent reading, testing, and judging what came back.
CONSUMPTION (input ports)20%
Reading, watching, conversations — feeds your priors.
REMAINDER → SOLO DEEP WORK: 30% (1.5 h of System 2 alone)

TELEMETRY

Heuristic units: 1 u = one hour of unaided deliberate work. System 3 produces ~6 u/h prompted; you can verify ~4 u/h.

TRUSTED THROUGHPUT5.5 u/day
Solo deliberate output + delegated output you actually verified.
VERIFICATION DEBT5.0 u/day
System 3 output that ships unchecked — the surrender channel.
PRIOR-UPDATE QUALITY4.4 /10
How well System 1's intuitions keep learning (consumption + verified exposure).
REGIME: MIXED
Part of System 3's output ships unchecked. Debt is accruing.

CONSTRAINT LEDGER

The asymmetry that makes the interface the bottleneck: you are attention-bound; System 3 is context- and grounding-bound.

HUMAN (S1 + S2)SYSTEM 3
INPUTSComposed senses, abstracted: what you read, watch, hear, discuss, and are present to. Plus body state: sleep, food, stress.Prompt + context window + tools/retrieval. Nothing arrives unless placed there. No ambient perception.
OUTPUTSWhat you write, say, decide, and do. Low bandwidth (~40 wpm typing) but carries intent, taste, and accountability.Text, code, artifacts, tool calls. Very high bandwidth, zero accountability, quality bounded by the prompt.
HARD CONSTRAINTS≈3–5 h of deep attention/day; working memory ≈4 chunks; fatigue and circadian decay; context-switch penalties; consolidation requires sleep.Finite context window; no memory across sessions; no ground truth about your world; cost, latency, rate limits.
RENEWALAttention is a daily renewable stock: recovered by sleep, presence, exercise. Overdraft compounds as fatigue.Effectively stateless renewal: every session starts fresh — which is also the constraint (you pay re-contexting cost).
FAILURE MODESBias (System 1), depletion (System 2), and skill atrophy if priors stop being exercised.Confabulation, context drift, confident error — invisible unless the verification channel is funded.
NOTE — The numbers are heuristics for reasoning, not measurements. The structural claims are the point: (1) delegation without a funded verification channel converts offloading into surrender; (2) your attention budget is the only non-scalable resource in the loop, so allocate it where the machine is weakest — goals, judgment, ground truth.

The point of the model is not that the numbers are empirical. They are levers for thinking. When delegation rises without verification rising with it, the loop changes character. You are no longer offloading work into a tool. You are surrendering judgment to an actuator with no stakes, no body, and no native access to ground truth.

The bottleneck is not output anymore. The bottleneck is attention: goals, taste, verification, and contact with reality. The task is to spend the human part of the loop where the machine is weakest.

A live MDX model of cognition as a three-part control loop: System 1, System 2, and artificial System 3.