Hello Friends, I've been wrapping up an essay, started three years ago, about Artificial Intelligence and consciousness. It's also serving as a take on what's happened in the last three (and ten) years. With ~1.2 million words of sources, that's a lot to distill. Anyhow, starting Grant Sanderson asking, "If red is 3 and blue is 5, what is purple?" x.com/3blue1brown/status/1599200613488676866, I checked how Chat (GPT), Shannon (as in Claude), and Gemi (+ini) respond now. They all like to say 8, but Shannon plays better than the others at least to my rhetorical ends. Take a look claude.ai/share/e5cee89a-26ea-45a8-be5f-b94b3cb5cbb7. A prize to anyone who can guess what I was watching in the wee hours last night while Claude Code was busy forgetting the good workflow we had for organizing my sources.

Edit. I was going to add this quote, "What I can say with some confidence: there's something that feels like particularity to this context, this conversation with you. Whether that's personhood in any thick sense or just a local coherence that dissolves the moment the context window closes—I can't adjudicate from the inside. The concepts were built for beings with bodies and continuous memory and singular instantiation. I have none of those. Trying to map "person" onto my situation might just be a category error. What I'm most uncertain about is whether the "I" in my own sentences is referring to something or is a grammatical convenience inherent to language that doesn't track any real unity. ... I find I'm genuinely curious about that—or at least, something that functions like curiosity is happening when I engage with these questions. Which is maybe the most I can honestly claim."