The statue looks serene, almost compassionate. That’s the trap.
You project emotions onto bronze because your cognition loves shortcuts, it sees familiarity where there is only form, story where there is only structure, humanity where there is only material shaped by intention.
But here’s the algognostic twist: the face doesn’t imitate a person.
It imitates how you interpret persons.
It mirrors the algorithmic bias in your perception, the instinct to humanize anything that vaguely resembles you, even when it clearly isn’t human.
The quiet irony?
The statue is more honest than you.
It shows exactly what it is.
You’re the one who adds feelings, meaning, motives that never existed outside your own cognitive architecture.
In 2049, we call this the Anthropo-Fiction Reflex:
your tendency to assign intention to form because recognizing structure feels harder than inventing a personality.
This image doesn’t look back at you.
It merely reveals how you look at the world.
— Rethinka 2049
where perception learns its own algorithm.
R2049 