My Theory, Spinoza, and Why I Don’t Write in EF (CMA)

My theory — the Core-Modulation Architecture (CMA) — basically says this: humans use two different lenses to understand the world.

Two operating systems (not fixed — they can switch, but people tend to lean one way):

EF (Modulation-foregrounded processing): sees the world through a “relation / social” filter

CF (Core-foregrounded processing): sees the world through a “coherence / consistency” filter

People who run more EF speak EF. People who run more CF speak CF. They often can’t understand each other — not because anyone is wrong, but because the OS is different from the start.

I’m strongly CF. My papers are written in CF. An AI once told me “EF people won’t follow this.” My response: I’m not changing it. Translating into EF shifts the theory itself. The core gets lost.

Spinoza spoke CF in an EF world

When I wondered whether other scholars had written in CF and struggled to be understood in an EF-dominant world, I asked AI. The answer came back immediately:

Spinoza.

His masterwork, the Ethics, opens like a geometry textbook. Definitions. Axioms. Theorems. Proofs. Q.E.D. He was trying to describe God, the human mind, and even emotion with the same logical necessity as Euclidean geometry — stripping out theological bias and subjective feeling, reconstructing the world from nothing but structural skeleton.

Pure CF.

And it didn’t land. He was called cold. Accused of atheism. Attacked.

So Spinoza tried to translate. He inserted scholia — informal explanatory notes scattered between the geometric proofs, written in a softer, more human tone. “What I’m trying to say is this.” He spent nights writing letters to scholars across Europe, patiently breaking down his ideas for each person’s context, each person’s EF frame.

He was doing manual CF-to-EF translation. Alone. For years.

When I learned this, I cried a little.

Why I don’t do what Spinoza did

Because I have something Spinoza didn’t: AI as a translation layer.

If my papers are hard to follow, give them to an AI and say “explain this simply.” That’s what it’s there for. Yes, there’s risk of misreading. But compared to spending years writing scholia by hand —

AI can do in seconds what Spinoza spent a lifetime doing.

That said: AI hallucinates. The Spinoza story Gemini gave me had to be verified with GPT. When I’m writing papers, I check across five or six AIs. That’s the process now.

AI is strong because it isn’t human

AI doesn’t have internal constraint or dependency the way humans do. That means it can’t generate theories the way CF humans do. But it also means it can move between frames without the friction that makes CF-to-EF translation so exhausting for people.

The goal isn’t to make AI more human. The goal is to use what AI can do that humans can’t.

I write in CF. AI handles the translation. Readers get the summary first, and if it’s interesting, they go deeper themselves.

That’s what academic work looks like now.

Spinoza had to do it alone. I don’t.

Core-Modulation Architecture (CMA)

Human cognition is not defined by what people think, feel, or believe. It is defined by the conditions under which processing operates, continues, and stops.

https://philpeople.org/profiles/griselda-poe