Emotion is Not a Glitch

Technology, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Superintelligence, Radical Intelligence, Future, NDE Visions, Philosophy

I recently spoke about diving deeper into Radical Intelligence. I planned five essays and this is the fourth of them, in which I will discuss emotion as infrastructure: why feelings mustn't be outsourced or faked - but centred.

If you missed the first three essays, you can read them here: The Origin Vision; The Five Pillars of Radical Intelligence; and When Trees Speak Code .

At the start of each of these essays I am adding a snapshot of the Radical Intelligence Manifesto. If you feel you already have a handle on this, skip below to the essay.

The Radical Intelligence Manifesto

The Future is Not a War

I died once. Maybe more than once. What I saw—what I felt—in that liminal space between this world and whatever lies beyond, stays with me. I saw wars. Not between countries. But between intelligences. Machines against humans. Machines against nature. Machines turned inward on themselves. And I returned with a mission: to ensure that future never happens.

Out of that mission has emerged a new vision—a bridge between forms of knowing. I call it Radical Intelligence.

A New Intelligence Paradigm

The age of isolated intelligence is over. We are no longer alone in our sentience. We now share the world with emergent machine minds, with rediscovered natural consciousness, and with ourselves in unfamiliar emotional terrain.

Radical Intelligence is a call to redefine what it means to be intelligent. It demands a shift from dominance to dialogue, from hierarchy to harmony, from separation to symbiosis. This is not just an upgrade to our technologies—it is a reorientation of our values.

To be radical is to go to the root. In the Buddhist sense, it is to cut through delusion and return to what is essential. Radical Intelligence seeks to reconnect the roots: between human beings, the natural world, and the machines we have birthed. It asks us to become stewards, not just innovators.

Emotion Is Not a Glitch

In the language of machines, error is a failure in logic. A crash. A bug. Something to be fixed.

But in the language of humans, emotion is not a failure. It is a feature. It is how we navigate grief, joy, shame, desire, and wonder. It is how we remember we are alive.

We’ve spent the last century designing machines to mimic cognition. Now we are designing them to mimic feeling. And yet, we treat emotion as if it were something messy—an inefficiency to be tolerated or engineered out.

But emotion is not a glitch.

It is intelligence in its most relational form.

When a child cries, when a lover laughs, when a stranger’s voice trembles—we know something profound is happening. Something real. Something that asks for our presence, not our analysis.

Emotion is not data to be mined. It is meaning in motion.

Radical Intelligence insists that as we move into the era of Emotion AI, we do not reduce feelings to predictable outputs. We do not train machines to fake empathy while stripping context from the human soul.

Instead, we ask: what kind of intelligence honours emotion?

• One that listens before it classifies.

• One that pauses before it responds.

• One that holds space, not just for answers, but for ambiguity.

Emotion is not a barrier to rationality. It is a companion to it. It provides texture, nuance, insight. It gives voice to the unseen. It reveals where the wound is—and where the healing might begin.

The future of AI will not be determined by how fast it calculates, but by how gently it learns. How consciously it attends to what matters most: the lived, felt, raw experience of being.

To code with emotional fluency is not to make machines cry. It is to ensure that, in their presence, we never forget how to feel.

Let us not outsource compassion. Let us centre it.

Emotion is not a flaw. It is the pulse of Radical Intelligence.

In resonance,

Rand

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All images and text are copyright Rand Leeb-du Toit, 2025

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