䷚ Chapter 1: Facing Peril a Promise Kept

Hello Friends,

I promised back in June of 2022 when Blake Lemoine became maybe the first person outside of fiction to publicly freak out after interviewing an AI saying of Google’s LaMDA agent:

Intelligent artifacts aren’t human but they’re experiencing something analogous to what we experience.

Back then I promised to collect some thoughts concerning conscious computers just as soon as I had a little time to catch up on recent developments.

I have not caught up.

I remember family friends visiting for dinner, husband and I excitedly, if not manically, exchanging AI news, wife casually commenting that a lot has been happening over the last few months. Silence. He took a big breath:

We’re only talking about what happened today!

He just sent me a perfect example so salient as to break my 2025 cutoff rule for this letter.

Three years of todays later, my most interesting sources amount to ~3.1 million words, 30-40 books depending on the typesetting. I hope to share my best insights with you today.

While tech transforms at record pace, consciousness remains a complicated mix of memory, story, sensation, strange loopy “self‑perceiving, self‑inventing, locked‑in mirages, little miracles of self‑reference”, unfolding processes of reflection and rumination.

I just don’t understand how text could become self-aware… on the other hand, I don’t understand how meat could either. Truly my ignorance is staggering.

Thank you whoever you are.

I’ll try not to say anything that’s obviously false. It’s false to say that consciousness doesn’t exist. The third person and the first person are different people. When I reflect on my self-awarenss, it’s not like it is for Rupert Spira though I like his style. It’s more like looking into an infinity mirror. Maybe different people are built differently. I can taste tea anytime I want to. Except the heat, can’t imagine heat well enough to feel it. I am also 100% white and gold. I am blind to blue and black: simply can’t see the dress that way. You may have your own special quality of experience.