Between Impulse and Understanding

What happens to us when machines provide all the answers?

This book begins with artificial intelligence, but quickly raises a larger question: What distinguishes human understanding—and our capacity for ethical judgement—from mere data processing?

Through two radically different movements, Erik Palsbo explores the distinction between intelligence and consciousness. First, the mystery is stripped away: in a rigorous model, the mind is deconstructed into mechanisms and feedback loops. We must understand ourselves without poetry if we are to understand the machine. Then the model is given flesh and blood. Drawing on a long career in technology and management, Palsbo invites the reader into the lived world—a world filled with noise, filters and organisational conflict.

Between Impulse and Understanding does not present a finished theory, but a field of tension. Perhaps what is uniquely human lies precisely in our ability to remain within that unresolved space—long enough for something new to emerge.