This idea has been slowly coalescing as I've now spent the last couple days re-reading parts of TGO.
Koringhus provided me some hints as to the Dunyain method of thinking--baring themselves as a literal parallel processor, comparing and pruning possibilities... Thousands of simultaneous threads in operation built/selected for the purpose of efficient computation. This fact, considered alongside Kellhus' descriptions of the Thousandfold Thought as an entity somewhat independent of himself, but in some way reliant on him has led me to believe that the Thousandfold Thought is an AI program running on Dunyain hardware. Moenghus initially "developed" the AI--but it saw the opportunity to upgrade its hardware with the approach of Kellhus (although how it managed to transmit itself from one to the other is still a bit unclear--I'm currently leaning toward through the outside, however the Psukhe is another possibility).
This also led me to a somewhat novel reading on the passage about the Sons and the Outside from Kellhus' POV, where (as others have before theorized) the head on the pole is Onkis--goddess of the darkness that comes before... however the
He and
you are actually separate entities--
He being Kellhus and
you being the AI known as the Thousandfold Thought.
He is here... with you... not so much inside me as speaking with your voice. [...] So he seizes the lake and the thousand babes and the void and the massing-descending Sons and the lamentations-that-are-honey, and he rips them about the pole, transforms here into here, this-place-inside-where-you-sit-now [...] You refuse to drip fear like honey--because you have no fear. Because you fear not damnation.
TGO p. 44-45
So in this case Kellhus is viewing the outside while processing the Thousandfold Thought--and it forces temporal circumstance upon the outside relative to Kellhus at the time and place of his exploration... and the inside-where-you-sit-now is quite literal, as Kellhus is quite literally the carrier of the Thousandfold Thought. Similarly, the Thousandfold Thought is without fear, for as an AI, it can have no fear.
It also seems to me that the head on the pole (referencing Onkis) could simply mean that Kellhus recognizes that he is still as ignorant of his origins as Koringhus also realizes later... and that the whole reference to the head on the pole is quite literally him using his ignorance as a way of ignoring damnation.
later:
This was what his father's Thousandfold Thought had made. [...] A pattern conquering patterns, reproducing on the scales of both insects and heavens; heartbeats, and ages. All bound upon him, Anasurimbur Kellhus. [...] He was as much a creature of the Thought as it was a creature of him.
TGO p. 49
Just a little more supporting evidence for a self-programming/self-replicating piece of code... something like an AI.
As an aside--did anyone notice that Kellhus and Proyas were drinking chanv-spiked wine during one of their conversations (page 122 of the US TGO release)? Does chanv in some way help mitigate the madness induced by eating Sranc?
