The Turbulent Mind

Could AI Learn to Think Like a Fluid?

A Flight That Teaches Us

At dusk over a farm field, a flock of starlings gathers. At first the birds drift loosely, then suddenly the sky darkens with their shapes. They twist together in vast waves, folding and unfolding as if some invisible hand is sculpting air. To the eye, the murmuration looks choreographed. To physics, it is turbulence: nonlinear currents of air, vortices wrapping around wings, feedback loops that cascade across scales.

These clouds of birds are not controlled by a single leader. They are shaped by the push and pull of fluid dynamics, with each body both sensing and responding to the movements of its neighbors. Intelligence is not in any one starling but in the storm they create together. The question is whether machines could learn in the same way, not by calculation in rigid structures but by flowing like a fluid.