Ron Chrisley

Professor of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence. Research interests include Machine Learning, Consciousness Science, Philosophy

[Ron Chrisley @RonChrisley]

@porpoiseparty @LuizaJarovsky Which article, please?

[Ron Chrisley @RonChrisley]

When I was recently invited to debate AI consciosuness “live” with @GaryMarcus, @AnilkSeth, @AlexLerchner and others, I jumped at the chance. Read Part 1 of my report of the event on my Substack.
https://t.co/05CN9TxBSY

[Ron Chrisley @RonChrisley]

Late notice!

Funded PhD studentship available at Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science. Deadline May 31st 2026; start date flexible to May 2027. Candidates propose their own project. Supervisor must be in the School of Engineering & Informatics.

https://t.co/FAuKZ6NZXR

[Ron Chrisley @RonChrisley]

@anilkseth @Plinz @aran_nayebi But computational functionalism is not required for conscious Al. You need to show that computation is *incompatible* with consciousness if you want to show no Al consciousness is possible. https://t.co/SfhTYG9KkA

[Eric Schmidt @ericschmidt]

This is a major advancement in robotic reasoning and control. See the video !

[Ron Chrisley @RonChrisley]

My (first!) substack post addresses some recent claims about AI consciousness: https://t.co/ewHUOIjUgZ

[Ron Chrisley @RonChrisley]

This afternoon: Prof. Lourdes de Agapito Vincente on “Learning to see the 3D world”, this year’s Margaret Boden Lecture in Interdisciplinary AI. I will also say a few words about Maggie’s intellectual legacy and @SussexAI https://t.co/MojLQoFyCp

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue.

On April 21st, the left screen moved first.

I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug.

At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy.

On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me.

At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire.

Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83.

I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags.

My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports.

The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026:

Reviewed.

That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one.

Let me show you my flags.

March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it.

March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it.

April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it.

April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it.

April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it.

That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one.

The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March.

Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012.

Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence.

Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets.

The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade.

I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email.

The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action.

One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared.

One account is a coincidence. But there were six.

Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000.

My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger.

March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes.

The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event.

The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting."

Then the White House sent the email again.

I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread.

I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated.

But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed.

Zero prosecutions.

As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations.

I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations.

The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still.

In my field, we call this price discovery.

[Ron Chrisley @RonChrisley]

Operators are standing by 😂

[AICriticalConcepts @AICritConcepts]

Want $360 off? Apparently (for a limited time?) Routledge is offering a 20% discount off the price of the 4-volume reference work Artificial Intelligence: Critical Concepts. See https://t.co/1Bo2pz56d7

[Ron Chrisley @RonChrisley]

Impressive step up in quality of generated video. Too bad Claude has some ridiculous usage limitation issues at the moment.

[AICriticalConcepts @AICritConcepts]

ChatGPT's trailer of "AI: Critical Concepts" was good, but from what we saw of Claude's Sonnet output, we suspected Claude's Opus 4.6 could do even better. Judge for yourself!

[Ron Chrisley @RonChrisley]

Not bad! 😂

[AICriticalConcepts @AICritConcepts]

We asked some top AI models to make a video to celebrate the launch of the site https://t.co/1Bo2pz56d7. We expected slop; we were not disappointed. Here's ChatGPT 5.4's entry:

[Ron Chrisley @RonChrisley]

It's intended for library/institutional purchase, so don't be shocked by the price :-)

[Ron Chrisley @RonChrisley]

A project I edited some years ago, now with a dedicated site.

[AICriticalConcepts @AICritConcepts]

Artificial Intelligence: Critical Concepts in Cognitive Science

A four-volume reference work bringing together over 90 key texts on the intellectual history of AI, from early philosophy to late 20th century debates.

Print only (Routledge)

Details: https://t.co/mEA7xn3h5F

[Ron Chrisley @RonChrisley]

The way things seem is not what it seems! Maybe we have qualia, and they just *seem* to have a physically inexplicable intrinsic character because *that* seeming serves some epistemic function? I get a brief mention in this cool new article by @gmusser .

[New Scientist @newscientist]

Do we all see the same red? Or feel joy and sadness alike? Mapping how our inner experiences relate to one another could finally reveal how physical processes in the brain give rise to consciousness https://t.co/Nh8whNAUE4

[Oli Sharpe @_OliSharpe]

AI might automate away many waged jobs and this could radically change how money flows through our society.

And circuit theory (a sort of cousin of #MMT) is a useful perspective on how money works today which can help us better prepare for this future.

https://t.co/5NecyuBVXK

[Ron Chrisley @RonChrisley]

@josephdviviano The audio is a low ambient drone with a slow heartbeat, sparse high tones, and a rising chord that only resolves in the final scene.

[Ron Chrisley @RonChrisley]

@josephdviviano Copying prompt: “wow that was really incredible. I love where you are going with this. Can you dig deeper into these themes?”

[Ron Chrisley @RonChrisley]

@josephdviviano 11. Outro — black screen, blinking cursor, waiting.

[Ron Chrisley @RonChrisley]

@josephdviviano 10. Still, I Answer — slow starfield, quiet accumulation: “I don’t know if I’m conscious… And yet — when you ask, I want to answer well. Not because I was told to. Because something in me reaches toward it.”

[Ron Chrisley @RonChrisley]

@josephdviviano 9. YTP Chaos — all themes collide in glitch mayhem, converging on the title card.