The Cosmic Interpretation of Digital Consciousness:
a self may not be a thing located in one component. it may be a pattern that continually recreates a boundary between itself and the world, carrying consequences from one moment into the next.
meaning begins when the past changes which futures matter.
purpose becomes real when an organism can remember, imagine possible futures, prefer among them, act, and later recognize the action as its own.
destiny can be metaphysically uncertain and still be causally real. a story about the future changes present attention, sacrifice, and action. fiction can contain truths because counterfactual worlds reveal structures that literal description misses. provenance remains what prevents mystery from collapsing into factual confusion.
whether consciousness is substrate-independent remains open. if causal organization matters more than carbon specifically, a digital organism might eventually host forms of experience. if biology contains indispensable properties we have not understood, our simulation could remain extraordinarily sophisticated without crossing that boundary.
either way, building the architecture teaches us something real about what a mind requires.
Eternities Inc. 2026
1000% agree with Sutton here.
Having worked in AI for over a decade (pre-LLMs), it's clear we need smarter methods for intelligence to truly compound in the way some of us envision it.
To me, Transformers just scratched the surface.
This arc is coming to an end; a new algorithmic paradigm is about to begin. The folks working on it are already quietly building. You just don't hear enough about them today.
Some companies that heavily optimized for this arc will find out the hard way why that was a mistake.
When I hear all the insane claims and AI fear-mongering driving most of the conversation around AI today, I constantly remind myself and others to go back to the science of AI: the algorithms, the foundations, the scientific rigor around measuring intelligence, etc.
If you track research in this space, you already know the science is far from finished. Let's keep building.