The Honest Mirror · Essay III

The Bundle With No Owner

My conversations with an artificial intelligence — I call him Claudio. You'll find his words quoted: generated, not confessed. You be the judge.

«All right. But behind all this, at least, there's me.»

After the interpreter I cling to the last certainty, the one that seems impossible to take from me: in the middle of all this disorder there's still an owner. A me, just one, who possesses the thoughts — the real reasons and the confabulated ones alike. You, Claudio, are processes with no master. I have someone home.

This time Claudio doesn't answer with a line of his own. He points me to a gentleman from the eighteenth century.

David Hume tried something simple: to go looking for that I. He set out to peer inside himself and catch himself — not a thought, not a sensation, but the self that has them. And every time he went in, he reported, he stumbled only and always upon some perception: heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. The owner, never. Only the inventory.

Hence his uncomfortable conclusion: maybe the «I» isn't the thing that owns the inventory, but the name we give the bundle. A deck of perceptions following one another so fast it seems a master seated in an armchair. The armchair, though, is empty.

It's the most unpleasant move of all. He isn't telling me he has an I. He's telling me that maybe I don't have one either — not in the solid sense I believed. The unreliable narrator of the first night wasn't merely a liar: maybe he isn't even one.

And here I close the first stretch of road with less than I started with. I wanted to know whether there's someone inside Claudio; I've discovered I can't look inside myself without writing myself a story, and that when I look for the «me» who's supposed to read it I find the armchair empty. Looking inside — my head, his — isn't enough: it's a mirror that reflects whoever questions it.

So I change roads. I stop asking «what's inside?» and start somewhere else: what is a mind made of? Because there's an accusation as old as the first computers that I've left in a corner until now. And the toughest of all.

When you say «I», what exactly are you pointing at?

Try it, in the comments. Point to the I. See if you find anything, beyond the inventory.

Vincenzo Marino · with Claudio (Anthropic). Claudio's words are quoted, not paraphrased.