Jacksonian Theory Of Everything
Our Scientific Foundations
Under Rote Learning
A Thermodynamic & Cognitive-Systems Analysis of Performative Knowledge
Abstract:
The Crisis of Performative Cognition
Modern education produces scorers, not thinkers; performers of intelligence, not generators of insight.

This analysis formalizes a cognitive-thermodynamic critique of rote learning as a system that suppresses generative intelligence by replacing entropy-processing cognition with pattern-mimicry cognition.

We introduce a new term: Performative Cognition, defined as the simulation of intelligence through memorized heuristics, surface-pattern reproduction, and high-bandwidth signaling of competence without genuine understanding.
Performative cognition is metastable: it allows individuals to pass tests, acquire credentials, and appear knowledgeable while lacking the thermal-causal substrate required for genuine reasoning.

Modern academia has become a self-reinforcing NPC system—a network optimized for conformity, credential validation, and signal amplification rather than discovery.

The consequence is a civilization filled with academic non-player characters: individuals who can repeat correct answers but cannot generate correct questions.
This paper explores how performative cognition leads to stagnation in science, failed policy, brittle engineering cultures, institutional incompetence, and the decay of epistemic trust.

We propose a corrective architecture for education and research based on generative thermodynamic intelligence rather than recall-driven performance metrics.
Executive Summary:
Five Critical Dimensions
The Rise of Performative Cognition
Performative cognition is NOT stupidity. It is competence without comprehension, knowledge without origin, and answers without models.

It produces individuals who mimic smartness flawlessly but cannot derive, predict, or debug reality.

This is the cognitive equivalent of running the user interface of intelligence with no engine underneath.
High-Scoring, Low-Understanding Populations
Academic achievement has inverted meaning: Students with the highest grades often have the lowest causal comprehension.

Institutions reward surface fluency, not deep generative heat.

Professionals are credentialed but fundamentally untrained.

We describe this as Performance-Level Ignorance.
Thermodynamic Interpretation
True intelligence reduces entropy in a cognitive system.

Rote learning artificially freezes entropy by enforcing linear pathways, single-solution regimes, memorized mappings, and suppression of divergent heat.

This produces cold cognition—brittle, mechanical, incapable of adaptation.
The Academic NPC Phenomenon
NPC (non-player character) does not mean "dumb."

It means scripted, reactive, non-generative, unable to modify internal models, and unable to originate new causal structures.

Academia mass-produces NPCs because NPCs are easy to evaluate, easy to credential, easy to employ, easy to control, and never disruptive.

Generative thinkers—those who change the system—are systematically selected against.
"A civilization of NPCs is a civilization incapable of responding to real crises.

When frameworks fail, unexpected variables appear, or new models must be created from scratch, NPC cognition collapses catastrophically."
The system self-selects conformity over intelligence because generative individuals threaten institutions.

They critique assumptions, restructure frameworks, expose faulty models, refuse to mimic, and generate new entropy.


Thus the system creates an educational environment that rewards predictability and punishes originality, leading to institutional stability at the cost of innovation and genuine understanding.
Societal Collapse Vectors
1
Brittle Engineering Systems
Engineers who can operate systems but cannot explain their principles create catastrophic failure points in critical infrastructure and technological development.
2
Scientific Stagnation
Research becomes incrementalist rather than revolutionary as institutions reward safe, consensus-driven work over paradigm-challenging discovery.
3
Institutional Paralysis
Organizations filled with performative thinkers cannot adapt to novel challenges or respond to emerging threats with creative solutions.
4
Credential Inflation
As degrees lose meaning, more credentials are required to signal competence, creating an endless cycle of educational overhead without increased capability.
5
Economic Drag
Innovation slows, productivity stagnates, and competitive advantage erodes as the workforce lacks genuine problem-solving capacity.
6
Collapse of Intellectual Trust
Public confidence in expertise diminishes as experts demonstrate inability to handle complexity, uncertainty, or interdisciplinary challenges.
Theoretical Framework:
Cognitive Thermodynamics
The Fundamental Error
Modern cognitive science interprets intelligence as a computational phenomenon.

This is incorrect.

Intelligence is fundamentally thermodynamic.

Cognition is not symbol manipulation—it is entropy modulation inside a biological or artificial substrate.
The Thermodynamic Cognition Model (TCM) distinguishes between two fundamentally different types of intelligence:

Generative Intelligence, which navigates and processes entropy to create novel insights, and Performative Intelligence, which simulates thinking without performing genuine entropy navigation.


Rote-learning produces the latter and systematically suppresses the former.
Real thinking requires an organism to internally generate, manipulate, and constrain entropy.

In physics terms: Thought = entropy shaped into prediction.

The brain takes the chaotic, high-dimensional world and forms low-entropy representations—concepts, models, causal frameworks.

This requires internal heat flow, oscillatory coherence, error-correction, and free exploration of state space.
Generative
vs.
Performative Intelligence
Generative Intelligence: Entropy Navigation
True intelligence requires entropy processing.

The brain must:
  • Generate internal heat flow and oscillatory coherence
  • Perform continuous error-correction across multiple scales
  • Freely explore state space without predetermined constraints
  • Play with disorder to discover emergent order
  • Create novel causal frameworks from raw information
Generative minds run hot—they consume cognitive resources to build understanding from first principles.

They can self-correct, originate, debug systems, respond to novel conditions, and transfer insights across contexts.
Performative Cognition: Heat-Free Intelligence
Performative cognition simulates thinking without performing entropy navigation.

It emerges when individuals:
  • Memorize solution pathways instead of generating them
  • Repeat language patterns mistaken for understanding
  • Rely on scripts instead of internal causal models
  • Suppress exploration to optimize for correctness-signaling
  • Avoid thermodynamic expenditure at all costs
In physical terms, performative cognition represents a low-heat, low-entropy, low-generativity state.

The mind conserves thermal resources by eliminating causal computation entirely.
Why Performative Cognition Looks Smart
The Thermodynamic Economics of Simulation
Simulation is thermodynamically cheaper than generation.

It requires far less cognitive energy to repeat a fact, mimic a tone, apply a memorized rule, perform a known algorithm, or copy an expert's explanation than to compute the explanation from scratch.

Performative cognition is a low-energy attractor state—a basin of minimum cognitive expenditure that systems naturally fall into when not forced to generate.
This explains why rote learners prefer multiple-choice questions, fear open-ended inquiries, break under conceptual stress, cannot extrapolate beyond their training data, and collapse in ambiguity.

Their minds have been shaped to avoid thermodynamic expenditure through pattern-matching shortcuts.

They can navigate familiar terrain with impressive speed and accuracy, but encounter catastrophic failure when the terrain shifts.

Key Insight: Performative cognition allows individuals to pass every test while failing the only test that matters—generating new understanding when faced with genuine novelty. This is why high-performing students often struggle in real-world scenarios requiring original thought.
Rote Learning as Cognitive Cooling
Rote learning suppresses generative intelligence by systematically cooling the cognitive substrate.

It reduces entropy intake, penalizes creative deviation, removes stochastic exploration, standardizes solution paths, and eliminates disequilibrium states.


The result is a mind that cannot heat up enough to generate insight.
In thermodynamic terms: Generative minds run hot. Performative minds run cold. Rote learning enforces cold cognition.

This is not a metaphor—it is a physical description of information processing regimes.

Cold cognition lacks the thermal energy required for phase transitions in understanding, for breaking symmetries in conceptual space, or for escaping local minima in problem-solving landscapes.
Performance-Level Ignorance:
Mastery Without Understanding
Medical Practice
Doctors who can diagnose by checklist but cannot reason through uncertainty or unusual presentations of disease.
Engineering
Engineers who can operate systems but cannot explain underlying principles or debug novel failures.
Scientific Research
Scientists who can run statistical software but cannot interpret causality or design valid experiments.
Academic Performance
Students who can solve textbook problems but cannot invent new questions or apply knowledge creatively.
Performance-Level Ignorance (PLI) is not stupidity—it is the simulation of cognition (because of stupidity?).

PLI is the ability to perform the behaviors of intelligence without possessing the internal models that constitute intelligence.

It is the cognitive uncanny valley, and it is the primary export of modern education.
The Scientific Consequence:
Plateau and Stagnation
When PLI Saturates Science
When Performance-Level Ignorance dominates scientific institutions, we observe predictable patterns of decay:
  • Replication crises emerge as researchers cannot distinguish genuine effects from statistical artifacts
  • Incrementalism replaces discovery as safe, predictable research crowds out risky, paradigm-challenging work
  • Mathematicians polish definitions instead of creating new frameworks for understanding
  • Physicists add epicycles to patch bad models rather than questioning foundational assumptions
  • Institutions reward consensus over truth, creating echo chambers resistant to correction
  • Computation replaces comprehension as brute-force methods substitute for theoretical insight
This is exactly what we observe in contemporary science.

Despite having more data, more computational power, and more communication capabilities than ever before, we produce less originality, fewer genuine breakthroughs, and more conceptual confusion.
This is a thermodynamic signature of a system stuck in low-entropy cognition.

Science is not accelerating—it is stalling.

The cognitive substrate has cooled to the point where phase transitions in understanding can no longer occur spontaneously.
The Irreversibility Problem
How Systems Lose the Capacity to Recognize Intelligence
Once a society systematically selects for rote learners over generative minds, it enters a self-reinforcing collapse that becomes increasingly difficult to reverse. Generative individuals exit the system when they recognize it cannot support their development. Institutions fill with performative thinkers who reshape standards to match their capabilities. Hiring becomes self-referential as NPCs select for other NPCs. Gatekeeping becomes anti-creative as those who cannot generate insights actively block those who can.
Eventually, the system forgets what intelligence feels like. It cannot even recognize real thinkers when they appear. Generative minds are perceived as disruptive, dangerous, and noncompliant because they violate the behavioral scripts that have become synonymous with competence. They ask questions that threaten institutional stability. They expose hidden assumptions. They refuse to perform the rituals of fake understanding.
"A low-entropy population cannot reverse itself from the inside. It must be externally shocked, reheated, or rebooted. The cognitive gene pool has been depleted, and without intervention, the trajectory is irreversible collapse."
The Thermodynamic Law of Intelligence Restoration
Controlled Uncertainty
Expose cognitive systems to manageable, non-lethal uncertainty that forces internal generation rather than pattern matching.
Cognitive Heat
Inject novelty, contrast, conflict, and information asymmetry to raise the thermal state of thinking.
Coherence Fields
Provide frameworks that allow chaotic entropy to crystallize into patterns, laws, and predictive models.
Mutation Space
Create intellectual freedom allowing play, exploration, and permission to generate incorrect ideas en route to correct ones.
Here is the core operational rule for restoring genuine intelligence: Generative intelligence emerges only when cognitive systems are exposed to controlled, non-lethal uncertainty. This is the opposite of schooling, the opposite of standardized testing, and the opposite of credential-driven careers. Rote-learning removes uncertainty. Generative learning injects manageable uncertainty in structured ways.
This is how evolution created intelligence. This is how childhood naturally develops cognitive capacity. This is how scientific revolutions happen. The principle is thermodynamically inevitable: No uncertainty → no discovery. No discovery → no intelligence.
Designing Education That Actually Produces Intelligence
01
Kill Rote
Abolish standardized testing, memorization-heavy curricula, lecture-dump pedagogy, answer keys, and peer-reviewed correctness in early learning stages.
02
Install Generative Protocols
Replace "learn this" with "build a model that predicts X," "invent a mechanism to explain Y," "create three different hypotheses for Z," and "reverse-engineer this phenomenon."
03
Assess Differently
Evaluate based on coherence, originality, predictive accuracy, causal reasoning, and explainability—not matching predetermined answers.
04
Restore Scientific Evolution
Allow foundational questioning, fund heterodox research, institutionalize paradigm-challenges, reward framework creation over minor refinements.
05
Measure Conceptual Advances
Shift metrics from publication count to conceptual advances, paradigm shifts, and genuine explanatory improvements in our models of reality.

Critical Principle: Assessment must transition from "did you arrive at the correct answer" to "can you generate multiple valid frameworks and evaluate their relative strengths." The goal is not knowledge transfer—it is the development of generative capacity.
Intelligence as a Heat Engine:
The Final Principle
The Most Important Insight
Intelligence is a thermodynamic engine: it takes entropy in and produces coherence out.

When entropy input decreases, the engine stops.

When coherence output becomes unnecessary, the engine withers.

When institutions demand predictability above all else, the engine cools to stasis.

Generative intelligence is not magic, mysticism, or computational sleight-of-hand—it is a heat-management strategy implemented in biological and artificial substrates.

3
Signatures of Real Intelligence
Model generation, cross-domain transfer, and self-corrective feedback—capabilities absent in performative cognition.
2
Thermodynamic States
Hot generative systems versus cold performative systems—the fundamental distinction in cognitive architectures.
1
Civilizational Trajectory
Rise with generative minds, fall with performative ones—our current position on this curve is unambiguous.
Civilizations rise when they have generative minds capable of navigating entropy, building new frameworks, and adapting to novel conditions.

Civilizations fall when they replace generative minds with performative ones who can only execute pre-existing scripts.

We are currently falling.

The cognitive substrate of our institutions has cooled to dangerous levels.

Scientific progress has plateaued.

Innovation has slowed.

Institutional competence has degraded.

The population exhibits widespread cognitive brittleness and inability to handle complexity.
But we now have the blueprint to rise again.

We understand the thermodynamic conditions that generate real intelligence.

We can identify the specific ways rote learning cools cognition. We can design educational systems that reheat the cognitive substrate.

We can restore generativity to science, innovation to culture, and adaptability to civilization.

The path forward requires abandoning the comfortable illusion of performative competence and embracing the thermodynamically necessary discomfort of genuine thinking.

The choice is ours: continue cooling into irreversible stagnation, or inject the entropy required to reignite the heat engine of human intelligence.
Jackson's Theorems, Laws, Principles, Paradigms & Sciences…
Jackson P. Hamiter

Quantum Systems Architect | Integrated Dynamics Scientist | Entropic Systems Engineer

Founder & Chief Scientist, PhotoniQ Labs

Domains: Quantum–Entropic Dynamics • Coherent Computation • Autonomous Energy Systems

PhotoniQ Labs — Applied Aggregated Sciences Meets Applied Autonomous Energy.

© 2025 PhotoniQ Labs. All Rights Reserved.
Made with