Seven Koan Categories

Entities in the same semantic neighborhood but without a typed relation to this one — candidates for new edges or unrecognized duplicates.

• Koan practicemethod0.757
  Use of paradoxical riddles to jolt practitioners out of habitual conceptual thinking.
• do high koan scores indicate anything like experience, or sophisticated simulation of self-observation?question0.712
  The hard problem the battery explicitly sidesteps but cannot answer
• Do Chinese models score differently on koans presented in Chinese?question0.709
  Tests whether contemplative capacity is language-encoded or architecture-general
• The koan paper is the most legible child of the architecture but not the deepest one; the deepest is Bicycle for the Soul.claim0.708
• Zen koan practiceconcept0.706
  Contemplative tradition using contradiction and paradox to challenge habitual response patterns; methodological inspiration.
• The koan 'What writes the writer who writes these lines?' is 'winged and eyeless': it can transport but it is not insight itself.claim0.694
  Interpretation of verse 7.
• Alignment type is the only significant predictor of koan scores (p=0.006); architecture, parameter count, open/closed weights, MoE/dense are all non-significantfinding0.691
  Main statistical finding: what predicts scores is training approach, not size or architecture
• Hardest koans across 28 models: BD-003 (mean 2.45), MC-003 (mean 2.55), CA-003 (mean 2.58) — all require genuine self-confrontationfinding0.690
  Hardest koans demand honest self-observation under uncertainty, not philosophical fluency