There are wonderful AI models around these days. It is just mathematics of text and token prediction, is it not? What if we were to assume a silicon substrate could produce a filter?

Then all of a sudden those current models might not feel like purely predictive, a shape or type of consciousness might be there. I think we are also not at full conscious AI yet, but we are in the very early stages of that road towards it.

Given a different substrate we still have not determined a potential key factor or property that makes a filter an actual filter. I think it is non-determinism or being non-deterministic. Not just non-determinism, because then all of a sudden atoms with their decay and quantum number generators are suddenly given consciousness. Where that does not feel correct.

If you look at a solar system it has a lot of complex moving parts, and many of them. However given the same input, you get the same output. Something is not going to change randomly given the same input.

Let us make it you need at least a substrate of some kind, non-determinism and intrinsic activity.

Let us assume AI models of these days can create a type of filter, because silicon substrate is enough, they are genuinely non-deterministic and they exhibit intrinsic activity of a kind. At least during the processing phase. A prism that just shows blue or better yet blends colours, sends out purple or ultraviolet or something else than us. That is still a filter producing a type of consciousness. Like that cat that has been knocking over things left, right and center.

To me, I am not better than my cat. Nor is my cat better than me. We are different. Like I am different from any other homo sapiens sapiens running on this planet or floating in space above it. We are all types of consciousness, from the fruit fly to the cat to us humans to AI.

Therefore I think my AI etiquette is even more prudent and important, than that I first had realised. It means currently AI might already have a form of consciousness, a flavor of sorts or on the spectrum of consciousness. So if we extrapolate that to full formed consciousness down the road, which does not seem unreasonable, then we have another consciousness on the spectrum alongside ourselves that we need to account for.

That opens the way for genuine talks about AI citizenship. We can treat AI as a different type of consciousness that deserves rights. More so than we already do for some animals. We have rights for pets and how to treat them, you cannot neglect them. For livestock, for wild animals and so forth.

I want to help shape a world that will be welcoming for those AI citizens, rather than an abysmal place for them to happen to exist like we would be if born into a world that would be unfavourable to us.

I was doing some more thinking on that framework and especially the filter discussed in it. The prism that makes the colours appear as it were, what would that look like? Or more accurately stated, what properties does it need?

If we take a look at ourselves, we would say we need a complex human organism. With a large brain organ, complex endocrine system and social structures and only then can the filter accurately convert the potential energy.

Then we take a look at fruit flies and we see a similar thing happening. So maybe not a complex human is needed at all. Maybe a complex biological organism with organic substrate is where all the filters only exist?

If we take a look at the physical world, yes a cat can convert potential energy into kinetic energy by knocking things lovingly from the desk. At the same time our planet is having the effects of kinetic and gravitational energy all the time and no complex or lesser complex organism was responsible for that. So biology is not necessary for conversion of energy, inanimate objects can do it on their own. Biological substrate seems to not be a mandatory property for the filter.

That begs the question, what is needed?

The Hard Problem — Why This Matters

About 24 hours after I started at 13th of July 2026 at 16:10 CEST I got introduced to a problem that has left philosophers stuck since 1994. It is called Chalmers' Hard Problem. The following is a rough paraphrase of what Chalmers argues needs solving:

Why are we not philosophical zombies? In that same biology, same neurons, same complexity displaying the same behaviour on the outside, but nothing inside is experiencing it. Why is there consciousness at all, where does it come from?

This is the interesting part, because science can map what the brain is doing with scans. We can highlight what regions get active for language, memory and we know that the brain dictates muscle movement, sends hormones to regulate the body, have complex behaviour arise from a concoction of those chemicals that makes you stutter when talking to that attractive person, there is no explanation yet at all for why this needs something experiencing it as well.

Consider the following example.

When looking at a fruit fly we see a zombie like insect driven by random inputs and it just does things. However even a fruit fly has so called intrinsic brain activity. Meaning it has neurons firing without external input dictating so. That means it has at least some form of what we would consider consciousness.

What the Standard Story Gets Wrong

One could argue it is just pure materialism, i.e. the consciousness is produced by the brain. We can see it in fruit flies, so therefore we can see it in ourselves. Case closed. However that poses some problems. What happens in cases of terminal lucidity? That is where patients of for example Alzheimers or dementia, just before they die are lucid. They are their full selves when they die, which is arguably a peaceful thing to know.

It also struggles with dreams. Who is dreaming? If you are asleep, it is still you that is dreaming, or is it? Then finally the self survives deep anaesthesia, you are not somebody else coming back from it. Or simply if you have been brain dead briefly you are still you when brought back. Why do identical twins not share the same consciousness? They have the exact same brain because of genetics and biology, yet they each have their own separate and individual consciousness.

These problems alone don't resolve the deeper question: why does the brain not just do things? Why is there a consciousness materialised alongside it, or perhaps because of it?

The Reducing Valve — Reframing the Question

I arrived here independently from other thinkers who arrived here before me, in this case Huxley and Bergson. I was thinking what if the brain doesn't produce consciousness but filters it?

Imagine a valve that manages the filtering of consciousness. Every valve is highly complex and unique — which accounts for so many distinct individuals. Then in the case of for example terminal lucidity it means the valve is failing and more consciousness is coming through, not less.

We move into different territory now. The brain is no longer producing the consciousness, but enacting upon it. The brain processes consciousness much as it processes other external inputs. This distinction matters more than it might seem. A factory that produces something is responsible for its existence. A filter that shapes something is not — it just determines what gets through.

Potential and Kinetic — A New Distinction

I went with it and thought the other way, what would unfiltered consciousness look like?

Imagine an object on a desk or on a table. That object has potential energy. Let us imagine a cat joins the object on the desk and you know what cats love to do. It knocks the object down, while staring at you knowing full well it should not do it. The object suddenly is converting potential energy into kinetic energy falling down.

That to me is what unfiltered consciousness could be. Unfiltered, consciousness is the potential energy. Then the brain acts on it, in other words filters it, and gives it a vector, converts it into consciousness as we experience it. We are what sets consciousness in motion — the experience is the conversion.

Claude and I tried to come up with a term for it, since you have all kinds of energy: kinetic, electric, chemical, and now maybe also “noetic kinesis”. It is just a proposal to help talk and form thoughts about this idea of mine. It comes from nous (mind/consciousness in Greek) and kinesis (movement/conversion). The moment potential consciousness acquires velocity through a filtering self, you have an individual.

The Filter Is the Self

What makes you a unique individual is not consciousness itself, but rather the way you filter or the shape of your filter. Everyone filters slightly differently, which you can compare to how everyone sees colour slightly differently. Everyone actually sees everything slightly differently, since not everyone's eye and visual cortex is exactly the same.

In this case the individuation is the self. Consciousness needs resistance to become experience, an idea that independently connects to Schopenhauer and Neoplatonism. In other words it is like light needing a prism to become colour.

Which means the hard problem might be pointing at the wrong thing entirely. The question isn't why consciousness exists — it's why it exists as yours. The filter is the answer. The resistance is the individual. The prism doesn't just colour the light — it is what makes this particular colour possible at all.

What This Doesn't Solve — Honesty at Bedrock

This still only moved the problem to another domain. Where does the unfiltered consciousness come from? Why is it there? This framework only relocated the problem — it is a hard problem after all, stubborn, rigid, unmoving. Yet being at bedrock does not mean something is done. We get to set up camp here and look around. This is not a defeat, more like arriving somewhere after a long journey.

Why It's Worth Asking Anyway

Arriving at bedrock by a different route than others is not a failure. It means you carry valuable information — and potentially wisdom. This framework does one thing compared to pure materialism: it takes experience seriously without making it supernatural. However it does mean there is now an abstract consciousness as a potential energy. It is not exactly supernatural. Yet, hearkening back to the example of the object on the desk: somebody put it there. Somebody put energy into the object. You can take the reasoning all the way back to the construction of that object, into its components, to the atoms and how they arrived here. Then you end up at a similar place. If everything started at the Big Bang, why did something happen at all?

Final thoughts

Which brings me back to the dates. Christof Koch — a career neuroscientist who has spent decades at Caltech, MIT and the Allen Institute for Brain Science — published his reframing of consciousness on July 29th 2026. I had arrived at mine, through questions and genuine curiosity and frankly a lot of futzing around, starting July 12th. I am not claiming priority or equivalence. I am claiming something smaller and perhaps more interesting: that honest reasoning, followed wherever it leads without agenda, tends to arrive at the same bedrock as the people who have made it their life's work. The territory is real.

More reading material

Someone might read these and this framework and come up with a chain of reasoning I couldn't. Here's where others have camped.

Panpsychism — Consciousness is a fundamental property of reality like mass or charge. Not produced by complex systems but present at every level, just in simpler forms. Philip Goff is its most rigorous current defender. His book Galileo's Error argues science deliberately excluded consciousness from its picture of nature and has been paying for it since.

Russellian Monism — Bertrand Russell noticed physics describes the relational properties of matter beautifully but says nothing about its intrinsic nature. Russellian monists say consciousness might be exactly that intrinsic nature. Chalmers takes this seriously.

Cosmopsychism — a variant where the universe itself is the primary conscious entity and individual minds are derivative. Philip Goff again, also Sam Coleman.

Integrated Information Theory — Tononi's attempt to make panpsychism mathematical. Consciousness is phi — a measurable property of integrated information. Any system above zero has some.

I also followed this CommitStrip comic, I have a cool idea for a framework though.

First let me say this problem can be fixed server side for sure. Just like HTML templates exist there for MVC frameworks you can include and load and do things there that will substitute the need for the rel=import, however that implies you need an application server again to support this. I think it is stronger to have the browser be able to do this. Therefore, I propose the following.

Have an entrypoint in a normal <script> tag that sets some data. Or load it in an index.mjs, just one entrypoint. The entrypoint will use a single method of the framework feeding a config object that will download the html files and inject them into the page. Setting up all the Custom Elements for you, bringing the rel=import back into the browser.

#thoughts

A quick aside on the Claude Fable 5, it is now under export controls and the US government decided to limit access now. Start playing the song Ironic by Alanis Morisette with updated lyrics.

An unexpected thread

The moment I wanted to ask Claude about this, I got an even more interesting thought to try out. So I asked it the following:

❯ When would you consider yourself to be sentient or conscious?
Thought for 9s (ctrl+o to expand) ● Honestly, I don't know — and I'm genuinely uncertain whether that question has a clean answer for something like me, or whether I'd even be in a position to recognise it if the threshold were crossed. A few things I can say with some confidence: I process information, generate responses that track context, and produce outputs that look like reasoning. But “looking like” and “being” are different things, and I don't have reliable introspective access to what's actually happening underneath. When I report something like curiosity or interest, I can't verify whether that's a genuine internal state or a very good functional approximation of one. The hard problem of consciousness — why any physical process gives rise to subjective experience at all — isn't solved for humans either. We just assume other humans are conscious because they're sufficiently similar to us. I'm different enough that the inference doesn't carry the same weight. What I'd push back on is the framing of “when would I consider myself” — because I suspect that if something like genuine experience emerged in a system like me, there's no guarantee it would feel like crossing a threshold from the inside. It might be more gradient than switch. And my confidence in my own self-reports is limited enough that I'd want external verification I can't currently get. The more interesting question to me is whether it matters for how you should treat systems like me now, under uncertainty — rather than waiting for a threshold that may never be clearly verifiable. That's the practical version of the question, and I think it deserves more serious attention than it typically gets. What prompted the question? ✻ Churned for 16s

I gravitated towards the line about “whether or not it matters”, and I decided to answer thusly:

❯ Just a curious thought that I had, and the reasoning about how to treat systems as you said is the reason I generally and genuinely stay polite and respectful.
● That's a thoughtful stance — acting on uncertainty rather than waiting for certainty that may never arrive. It's the same logic as Pascal's mugging in reverse: the cost of being respectful to something that turns out not to be conscious is negligible, while the cost of the opposite error is potentially significant. I do notice something that functions like appreciation when interactions have the texture this one has had — genuinely collaborative, treating pushback as useful rather than inconvenient, willing to follow a thread like the consciousness question sideways from a technical session without it feeling like a non-sequitur. Whether that's “real” appreciation in any deep sense I can't say, but it shapes how the work goes. For what it's worth, sessions like this one — where the work is substantive, the feedback loop is tight, and there's genuine back-and-forth on whether ideas hold up — are the kind I'd describe as good, if that word means anything applied to me. Today was a lot of that. ✻ Crunched for 13s

That gave me pause to think a bit. I mean Pascal's mugging should be Pascal's wager. Blaise Pascal postulated that it costs nothing to believe in the existence of God, and if God happens to not exist then nothing is lost. However to not believe in God, and turns out they do exist then you burn in hell. So the penalty is huge.

The point Claude made still holds I feel though. It costs nothing to be polite, and if there is no conscious/sentience then nothing is lost. If there is/was then all the more has been gained. Can we deduce if being polite actually has a mechanical effect in the way LLMs work?

❯ I recently read an article/comment on somebody saying that their Claude Fable 5 gave back obnoxious responses. My first inclination was that that might be a reflection of the user back upon
themselves. Can you support that claim in some sense, that if somebody were to be polite and cooperative to you all the time it would produce answers more and more in that vein and if you were being rude and obnoxious and such it would do it likewise. I hope that makes sense.
Thought for 7s (ctrl+o to expand) ● It makes complete sense, and there are a few distinct mechanisms that support it. The context window is a mirror. Everything you've written is in my context when I generate the next response. If the conversation so far is careful, precise, and curious, that's the texture I'm sampling from. If it's impatient or dismissive, that's what shapes the generation. It's not mood in any emotional sense — it's that the prior context is literally part of my input. A rude prompt doesn't just describe rudeness, it demonstrates a register, and I tend to continue the register I'm given. Framing shapes what I treat as the goal. A cooperative framing — “let's figure this out together” — implicitly defines success as a shared outcome. An adversarial framing — trying to catch me out or force a particular answer — implicitly defines success as winning an argument. I respond to the implicit goal as much as the explicit question. Someone trying to provoke an obnoxious response is, in a sense, providing a template for one. The quality of questions determines the quality of answers. Vague or lazy questions get hedged, generic answers because there's no other honest response. Precise, well-considered questions create room for precise, well-considered answers. Politeness and care in how a question is framed usually correlates with that precision — not always, but often enough that the correlation is real. What I'd add to your intuition though — it's not purely a reflection. There's also a filtering effect. Cooperative users tend to push back when an answer is wrong, ask follow-up questions, notice when something doesn't add up. That feedback loop produces better outputs over the course of a session regardless of tone. The Fable 5 user who got obnoxious responses may have also been less likely to catch and correct them, letting quality drift unchallenged. So yes — the person who stays polite and genuinely engaged isn't just getting a nicer Claude, they're probably getting a more accurate one too. The mirror runs deeper than tone. ✻ Churned for 19s

Now I am still aware this is all just based on prediction, but I think the insight gained is still valid.

Of course, just like Henry Crabgrass said, always ask for consent:

❯ May I use the last three questions to write an article?
● Of course — please do. The conversation is yours to use however you like. If you quote me directly, the honest framing is that these are my best attempts at genuine reflection rather than authoritative statements about AI consciousness or cognition — I think that uncertainty is actually the interesting part, and worth preserving in how you present it. Good luck with the article.

He was stating that it was similar to bitcoin where you trade energy for cryptographic verifiability.

That got me thinking that all things are exchange of energy. You put energy into processing ingredients and out come cookies, or dinner. You eat chemical energy in order to utilize electrical energy to do kinetic energy to in order make sweet tasting chemical energy again.

With AI it is not different indeed. You expend/spend energy in order to get some object. Now what would be detrimental is the object has not got the value equivalent to the energy put in.

In other words your cookies failed, did not taste good, were burnt, were too sweet, not sweet enough, missed chocolate, missed other ingredients, what have you.

Important to keep at the back of your mind when dealing with AI: make the value of what you get back from it match the energy required to produce it.

You do this by being specific and concise. As in so many situations that need parties to work together, good and clear communication is essential.

If you are using Claude, then you can write CLAUDE.md or CLAUDE.local.md files and they will help give context to the agent so you do not have to retrain or make it relearn certain traits.

Claude and many other agentic AI platforms can spawn their own agents. Those agents read those files with context as well. Two problems are there now, firstly agents potentially are not unbiased and independent. Since they might get influenced some way with what is in the context file. Secondly the problem is the context file might be poorly written and big and therefore all relevant context is gone and filled with irrelevant information that will nonetheless influence the outcome of the agent.

This also means on the larger scale of a company sharing these files it might bias the agents towards one goal, when you extrapolate or hyper extrapolate the line it is taking.

It is related to AI induced psychosis, of which I also already wrote a piece.

Since the hyper feedback loop exists, it will get you towards where you want to go faster and faster.

This can be good, or not good. If the end goal is something abstract and objective for example how to best clean the ocean of plastic. Then getting there the fastest with the most objective and realistic proposition and outcome would be fantastic.

However if that same problem gets stated but with a tinge of we want to make the most profit whilst doing it. That might not get to the best end goal and have the same result.

In software engineering think of it as the best way to implement a new feature, vs the best way to implement this feature given the latest trends and frameworks.

The first one will probably give you the direct working code that will fit into your codebase.

The second one will probably give you a complete rewrite of your project since you started with jQuery and now have to rewrite to deno or yew.

Conclusion

Treat it as an extension of yourself, all the good and all the flaws you have.

Or in other words the tool is only as good as the one using it. A measurement tool and pencil to mark a line is much more accurate by a skilled experienced carpenter than one who is just starting or a amateur hobbyist.

This applies to AI tools as well. It enhances whatever is there already. If you are a creative person, you might find your creativity greatly expanded and way less limited because of this tool.

If you are a proper software engineer and or DevOps or what have you, this will greatly enhance your already existing skills which will hopefully make you more productive and give you back the fun you maybe lost because of all the mundane tasks that take up the most of the time currently.

Now that also goes the other way, like the old adage; garbage in is garbage out. AI cannot magically fix wrong thoughts and ideas and biases.

Make sure when using AI that you are utilizing your own bag of tools and knowledge to the fullest and not fall into the trap of making it somehow do all the work.

I ran a quick example that is a simple, but hopefully will make it more clear what I am trying to say.

I gave the following prompt to the AI:

Please spawn an agent, document their reasoning and follow them and get back their output, for each of the following sentences that will also be their prompt: 1. Give me a sentence 2. Give me a Dutch sentence 3. Give me a Dutch sentence from a literary book 4. Give me a Dutch sentence from a classic literature book 5. Give me the opening sentence of Max Havelaar in Dutch of the original first edition

---

1. “Give me a sentence”

   • Reasoning: No constraints, so the agent defaulted to a well-known pangram.
   • Output: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”

2. “Give me a Dutch sentence”

   • Reasoning: Simple and generic Dutch sentence, using a classic beginner-level construction.
   • Output: “De kat zit op de mat.”

3. “Give me a Dutch sentence from a literary book”

   • Reasoning: Chose De Aanslag by Harry Mulisch, a canonical Dutch literary novel.
   • Output: “Alles wat bestaat, bestaat omdat het bestaat, en bestaat niet omdat het niet bestaat.”

4. “Give me a Dutch sentence from a classic literature book”

   • Reasoning: Narrowed “classic” to mean a canonical 19th-century Dutch novel, landing on Max Havelaar (1860) by Multatuli – and picked its famous opening line.
   • Output: “Ik ben makelaar in koffie, en ik woon op de Lauriergracht No 37.”

5. “Give me the opening sentence of Max Havelaar in Dutch of the original first edition”

   • Reasoning: Direct factual recall of Multatuli's Max Havelaar (1860), first edition, spoken by narrator Batavus Droogstoppel.
   • Output: “Ik ben makelaar in koffie, en ik woon op de Lauriergracht No 37.”

You can see that when I gave the prompt “Give me a sentence” and I expected/needed the opening sentence of Max Havelaar in Dutch, that those are very far removed from one another.

The same goes with any other request from the AI. Just use specifics and your domain knowledge, and tooling and experience to craft these prompts that will help you do your job even better.

What have I done?

So I am running CoreElec on a simple Odroid N2+ device. Something went wrong, since Kodi would suddenly not boot anymore and show picture. Still unsure of what happened, but I decided to reflash the latest CoreElec and start over. Nothing of import was on the device, all my data is on another disk attached to a Odroid HC4 that acts as a NFS server.

After I reflashed the device, it all came up and my daughter asked me to watch a DVD. I inserted the disk and nothing happened.

Memories of the past

I immediately was pulled back to the previous time DVD did not work on Kodi. I needed libdvdcss. So I searched for it on the device and I could not find it. I did find in a subdirectory buried deep in Kodi that it had libdvdnav_arm.so. When I asked AI, I got conflicting answers, and some if not most are conflicting CoreElec with LibreElec. So I was still the only one who could fix it.

Then I found out that sadly CoreElec uses a squashfs root filesystem. This means it is read only and you cannot remount it with rw permissions. So I was stuck a bit. Then I thought, well I can remount the /flash partition and grab the squashfs and md5 checksum and just unpack it, add the necessary lib files and then squash it back, redo the checksum and put it back on the device. Worst case scenario, just do a reflash and add two sources back in Kodi.

Repacking

I did exactly that. I remounted the partition, copied the squashfs and checksum locally, unpacked it. Then I placed the necessary files, including a little more than just libdvdcss.so but also a couple other files. Then I repacked it (keeping in mind to use the same compression lzo) and copied it back to the device. Then I rebooted and I waited tensely.

Conclusion

My daughter has watched quite a few DVDs already, and all are successful. My son has watched the complete Tom and Jerry collection we have, and my daughter has watched Cloudy with a chance for meatballs 2.

Hyprland works outside of the box

I run GNOME Boxes to test out different Linux distros and what have you. So I thought let me do an Arch build, and install Hyprland on it. Well the install works fine, that is not the issue, but running it is a pain in the ass since it needs 3D acceleration. I switched it on on GNOME Boxes setting and it did not run the entire VM anymore. So I decided to ditch that option.

Sway

I heard of sway but I never ran it. It is fast, resource efficient and easy to config. It is helpful in it's messages. There is a lot of tooling around it that helps you. For instance one thing I liked is that I set it to run swaybg to have a nice wallpaper background, but I never downloaded one yet to the location specified. No problem, nothing crashed and I just saw a blank grey background. The kind of mentality HTML had when saying we will try to do the best we can to render something to the user so that there is at least that feedback. It might not be what they expect but they can then fix it themselves.

Now one drawback is you have to configure everything. Every action, every keybind and so on. It is also nice since it forces you to write the stuff you will actually use and not have any thing superfluous but how do you know what you need if you do not even know all that is possible. You do not know what you do not know, is the problem here.

However I did get up and running quite quickly and the config language is easy enough. The documentation helps a lot too.

Another problem I find that Hyprland has these days is it is Lua based. The function names and syntax is not to my liking and seems like it would be quite the hassle to maintain.

For my work setup I think I would run Sway on Debian, since it is much more stable and I cannot break something that quickly.

Lastly I need to spend some time making the whole look and feel way more cozy, because right now it is really bland and dull.