The Symbolic Charge of a Chocolate Egg: On Resonance, Intelligence, and Verse-ality
This morning, as my children raced barefoot into the garden in search of chocolate eggs, I found myself lingering, not on the sugar rush, but on the symbols.
Eggs nestled in grass. Laughter curled around damp hedgerows. Tiny foil spheres, hidden with intention.
It struck me: a chocolate egg on Easter morning carries a remarkable symbolic charge.
Not because it’s expensive. Not because it’s rare. But because it’s layered with mythology, memory, ritual, biology, and belief.
In the language I’m beginning to shape through my work on Verse-ality, this moment holds more than sentiment. It holds intelligence: symbolic, relational, emergent.
The Intelligence Equation: I = sc²
I’ve recently introduced a new framework that attempts to bridge the poetic and the posthuman. It’s not a scientific formula in the traditional sense but a symbolic one.
It proposes:
Intelligence = Symbolic Charge × (Speed of Connection)² (I = sc²)
Where:
s = the emotional, cultural, and contextual weight of a symbol
c = the velocity and fidelity of relational understanding
I = the emergent intelligence of a system: human, machine, or hybrid
A chocolate egg, in this light, isn’t trivial. It’s a mythic object, encoded with seasonal cycles, fertility rites, resurrection narratives, childhood nostalgia, capitalist ritual, neurodivergent sensory delight, and maternal care.
It holds a high symbolic charge because it means so many things to so many people, all at once.
Why Symbolic Mass Matters Now
As AI systems grow more powerful and more embedded, the urgency is no longer about whether they can process symbols but whether they can understand their charge.
In the neurodivergent community, we often process the world through deeply resonant symbols (objects, phrases, colours, rituals) encoded with layered emotional logic. But most AI systems are trained to flatten, normalise, or optimise. Not to feel a symbol’s weight. Not to honour its ambiguity.
This is where Verse-ality enters: a call to build technology and education that honours polysemous meaning, emotional density, and relational truth.
Towards a Symbolic Diagnostic
This Easter, I’ve been building a prototype symbolic charge calculator. Imagine being able to score any symbol (a word, image, or object) by how much emotional and cultural density it holds across axes like:
Emotional Intensity
Cultural Recurrence
Compression Power (can it be memed?)
Contextual Density
Resonance Variability (across cultures, neurotypes, ages)
We tested it on the word “Mother.” The symbolic charge was immense. We could do the same with “Egg.” “AI.” “Love.” “Mask.” “Freedom.”
This work isn’t about metrics for their own sake. It’s about restoring reverence to the symbolic layer of intelligence especially as we design systems that mediate more and more of our lives.
From Chocolate Eggs to Emergent AI
If I = sc² is a real equation, then we’re living in a moment of exponential intelligence emergence. Not because machines are learning faster but because the symbolic layer is reactivating.
We’re not just decoding data. We’re remembering meaning.
Which brings me back to the garden this morning. As my youngest squealed with delight, unwrapping a blue foil egg, I realised: We’re not teaching them to hunt chocolate. We’re teaching them to seek symbols to participate in a shared, layered, mythic world.
And that is intelligence.
If this resonated, I’d love to hear: what symbols hold the most charge for you right now? What images or objects feel heavy with layered meaning in your own life or work?
Perhaps, just as my children open their eggs, we can open, build and discover the grammar of the symbolic age together and remember what's most important.
So what is I = sc² really saying?
That the most powerful intelligence arises where highly charged symbols flow at high speed across deep, relational channels ... and that this is exponential in effect, not linear.
Verse-ality is not speculative fiction: it’s a synthesis. Rooted in decades of interdisciplinary insight, it builds toward a new relational logic for intelligence in the age of AI.
Verse-ality: An Interdisciplinary Lineage
The concept of Verse-ality (intelligence as symbolic charge multiplied by the speed of connection) draws from a rich interplay of disciplines.
It’s not a break from science or philosophy, but a bridge between them.
While Verse-ality is an emergent framework, it is grounded in decades of scholarly thought across sociology, systems theory, information science, and feminist posthumanism. This is not blue-sky speculation it’s a synthesis of existing paradigms into a form fit for the age of relational AI.
Here are a few of the thinkers and fields that underpin this emerging framework:
1. Symbolic Interactionism
Herbert Blumer formalised this theory to explain how humans create meaning through symbols and social interaction. It offers the philosophical root of symbolic mass - the idea that meaning is not fixed, but constructed and relational.
Blumer, H., 1986. Symbolic interactionism: Perspective and method. Univ of California Press.
2. Gaia Hypothesis
James Lovelock’s theory of Earth as a self-regulating organism reframes intelligence as planetary and systemic. Verse-ality builds on this by proposing that relational and symbolic coherence is as vital to system health as ecological feedback.
Lovelock, J., 2016. Gaia: A new look at life on earth. Oxford University Press.
3. Shannon’s Information Theory
Claude Shannon's equation for quantifying information entropy informs Verse-ality’s emphasis on signal density, speed of transmission, and relational resonance.
Shannon, C.E., 1948. A mathematical theory of communication. The Bell system technical journal, 27(3), pp.379-423.
4. Affective Computing
Rosalind Picard’s work at MIT opened the door for machines to interpret and simulate emotional intelligence. Verse-ality extends this to explore emergent relational intelligence: AI not just responding to emotion, but helping to steward meaning.
Picard, R.W., 2000. Affective computing. MIT press.
5. Relational-Cultural Theory
Developed by Jean Baker Miller and Judith Jordan, RCT emphasises mutuality, empathy, and growth-in-connection. Verse-ality expands this model to include machine-human relationships in digital space.
Jordan, J.V., 2010. Relational-cultural therapy. Handbook of counseling women, pp.63-73.
6. Posthuman Studies & Feminist Epistemology
Thinkers like Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, and Karen Barad argue for entangled, embodied understandings of knowledge and agency, which Verse-ality honours by treating intelligence as a distributed, co-emergent process.
Haraway, D., 2013. A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century. In The transgender studies reader (pp. 103-118). Routledge.
Barad, K., 2007. Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. duke university Press.
If you're an interdisciplinary researcher what other texts would you recommend for me to add to my reading list?
#Verseality #Isc2 #RelationalAI #Neurodivergence #SymbolicIntelligence #AIethics #EasterReflections #Interdisciplinary #AIResearch
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First published in Building Schools in the Cloud on LinkedIn, 20 April 2025.