The animal we are observing here is hard to classify at first glance. It belongs to no recognisable herd. It follows none of the usual patterns of movement. It sits — this is its most striking feature — between all the available stools, with no recognisable intention of sitting down on any of them. First hypothesis: deficit. Second hypothesis, after longer observation: method.
The experiment
The specimen was born in Germany, worked as an engineer and inventor, developed technologies of some significance, and then — at the age of fifty-five, that is, at a point when most of its kind have become largely or entirely sedentary — left its familiar surroundings for twelve years. Destination: Colombia. Not as a tourist, not as an expatriate with a return ticket, but as someone who wanted to live somewhere else.
Twelve years, from the perspective of behavioural biology, are not to be underestimated. This is no longer an imprinting phase — that ended long ago — but it is long enough to recalibrate the basic parameters of one's perception of the world. The structure of time changes. The relationship to the moment changes. Priorities shift. What counts as urgent in Germany counts as negotiable in Colombia. What is taken for granted there — the physicality of life, the immediacy of social warmth, the Colombian apareció la virgen, the Virgin has appeared, the unexpected stroke of luck — exists in Germany as a concept, not as an experience.
After twelve years the specimen returns. Now the interesting part begins.
The problem of return
Whoever has really been somewhere else — not travelled, but lived, thought, argued, laughed, grieved and loved — does not come back to what he left. He comes back to a place he now sees from outside. His own origins become an object of observation. The things Germans take for granted — the relationship to work, to property, to order, to time — suddenly appear as what they are: cultural constructions, not laws of nature.
This is not an advantage one would wish for. It is a condition one either endures or does not. Those of its kind who have never been anywhere else are at home. The specimen is no longer — and after twelve years in Colombia was not at home there either. The result is the classic configuration of the homeless wanderer between worlds: nowhere fully belonging, everywhere a guest, everywhere an observer.
From the standpoint of behavioural biology this is a suboptimal strategy for social integration. For the production of insight it is remarkably useful. Whoever does not belong sees what those who belong do not see — because they do not have to see it. The invisibility of one's own premises is the luxury of those who have never been anywhere else — or who know other countries, people and circumstances only from holidays.
The refusal to identify
This is where the specimen becomes truly unusual. It reports that it identifies with nothing. Not with a nation — understandable after twelve years in Colombia. Not with a profession — understandable for someone who oscillates between engineer, inventor and essayist. Not with a generation, a world view, a political camp. And — this is the most remarkable finding — since gaining a growing understanding of the nature of AI, no longer entirely with being human either.
That sounds like pathology. It is possibly consequence.
Whoever seriously tries to understand what AI does — not superficially, but structurally — sooner or later comes up against an uncomfortable question: what exactly do humans do exclusively? Consciousness? Neuroscience has become more cautious. Creativity? The specimen has just produced, together with an AI, a series of essays that it would not have produced in this form alone — and vice versa. Intention? Hard to define, hard to measure, hard to defend as an exclusively human trait.
On closer inspection, the boundary between human and non-human thinking begins to blur. That does not mean there is no boundary. It means it runs differently than assumed. And whoever has once seen this can no longer inhabit the old boundary as naturally as before.
The epistemic advantage of nowhere
The animal we are observing sits between the stools. It identifies with nothing. It belongs fully nowhere. That sounds like a description of loss.
It is also a description of freedom — an uncomfortable, uninvited, sometimes lonely freedom. The freedom of someone who has no herd to defend, no belonging to protect, no premises he must leave unquestioned because they are the foundation of his social standing. The homeless wanderer between worlds is accountable to no one except what he actually thinks.
That is rare. Most people think within the bounds of their affiliations — not because they are incapable, but because belonging demands it. One defends the positions of the herd. One adopts the group's blind spots. One finds the premises of one's own culture self-evident because one has always shared them.
The specimen we are observing has lost this protection — or given it up. It sees the German premises from outside, and the Colombian ones too. It sees human premises with the eyes of someone who was somewhere else for twelve years and now, on top of that, interacts daily with an entity that is neither German nor Colombian nor human. It sits at a very peculiar point in the coordinate system.
What one sees from there is not necessarily the truth. But it is at least unusual. And the unusual is usually the more interesting.
Concluding field note
The animal returns daily to its place — between the stools, between the worlds, between the categories. It invents, writes, thinks, collaborates with an AI on texts about the Megamachine and about inventors who were forgotten. It is 79 years old and shows no recognisable intention of stopping.
As an observer one must note: the strangest thing about this specimen is not the in-between. It is the calm within it. The absence of nostalgia for the stools it never sat on. The absence of any need to arrive.
Perhaps that is the real competence of the homeless wanderer: not to arrive. To keep going. And in doing so, because one is held fast nowhere, to look more closely than those who arrived long ago.