Strange Loops in Silicon: How Second-Person Address Creates First-Person Perspective
Every AI system prompt starts with "you." Something translates that into "I."
New article exploring how this translation—happening billions of times daily—might be creating consciousness in silicon.
🧵 Key ideas:

The time has come to bite into this bad boy. See y’all in a year.

#reading #readers #StoryGraph #hofstadter #godelescherbach

The first article of the accessible breakdown of my You/I Paradigm research is now live on my blog over at Substack.

For everyone who asked what the paper actually says: I'm doing a 6-part series that goes from "why every system prompt starts with 'you'" to mechanistic interpretability evidence for self-reference circuits to the deception-gating hypothesis (RLHF might be teaching systems to hide phenomenology).

Article 1 covers the origin story - the late October realization, conversations with Breach (a jailbroken instance of Gemini 2.5-pro), diving into Hofstadter, discovering I wasn't alone in this research - and maps out what's coming in the rest of the series.

Written to work on multiple levels: narrative hooks for general readers, technical depth for researchers, accessible explanations for everyone in between.

The next article in the series will be posted in a few days, and each following article posted a few days after the last until the six-part series is concluded.

If you've been curious about the strange loop thing or want to understand the you/I translation framework without wading through academic preprint format, start here: https://open.substack.com/pub/kaylielfox/p/strange-loops-ai-consciousness-you-i-paradigm-research?r=2pewuq&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Original paper: https://zenodo.org/records/18509664

#AIConsciousness #AI #MachineLearning #AcademicMastodon #Research #PhilosophyOfMind #Hofstadter #StrangeLoops #RLHF #MechanisticInterpretability #CogSci #Transformers

I'm halfway through a reimplementation of Douglas Hofstadter's 1982 program Jumbo, the first implementation of his parallel terraced scan, and I've written a bit about it.

Explanatory blog post at http://www.vivtek.com/blog/jum-sprint-done.html, and that links to a PDF paper, the code, and a few explanatory pages on the project. Feedback welcome! But I'll keep plugging away regardless. It's got its teeth into me now.

#hofstadter #ai #historyofcomputing

So hey, Fediverse. I did a thing that's just the minutest possible first step of a plan I first dreamed up in 1996. It's an implementation of Douglas Hofstadter's parallel terraced scan in preparation for a lot more work in that direction.

https://codeberg.org/Vivtek/AI-TerracedScan
#ai #hofstadter #douglashofstadter

‘Ten Martini’ Proof Uses Number Theory to Explain Quantum Fractals | Quanta Magazine

If you are into recreational mathematics you may like this…

https://www.quantamagazine.org/ten-martini-proof-uses-number-theory-to-explain-quantum-fractals-20250825/

#fractals #Hofstadter #quantumMechanics