Phase 3.2 — Computational Illumination of Psychoanalytic Concepts

Status: Not started — Target: Weeks 17–24

Objective

The reverse direction: using computational findings to sharpen or revise Lacanian theory.

Analysis 1: What Does Superposition Reveal About Condensation?

Question: Does the structure of superposition follow the logic of overdetermination (features combine based on associative links) or pure information-theoretic efficiency?

Background

Anthropic’s work on superposition shows that features compress into shared representational space in structured ways — not randomly, but according to patterns related to feature frequency and co-occurrence.

Method

Findings

To be completed.

Implications for Lacanian Theory

Analysis 2: Attention Patterns and the Signifying Chain

Question: When a transformer processes psychoanalytically rich material (a Freudian slip, a joke, a poetic metaphor, a passage from a clinical case study), does the computational path mirror the associative path a psychoanalyst would reconstruct?

Method

• Map information flow through a transformer processing:
  • A Freudian slip
  • A joke
  • A poetic metaphor
  • A passage from a clinical case study
• Trace which tokens attend to which, at which layers
• Compare computational path to psychoanalytic associative reconstruction

Findings

To be completed.

Where Computational and Psychoanalytic Paths Converge

Where They Diverge

Analysis 3: Locating the Point de Capiton Computationally

Question: Can we identify and characterize the representational phase transitions that correspond to Lacan’s quilting points?

Method

• Using methods from Prediction 2, identify phase transitions where distributed, ambiguous representations suddenly resolve into coherent interpretations
• Attempt to characterize these transitions formally

Findings

To be completed.

Toward a Computational Operationalization

Summary