embodied cognitive synesthesia

20 Jan, 2026

[ being, an experiment in subtly altering model cognition ]

There's been a viral thing going around AI soc.med the past month and a half, in which people were posting ChatGPT's responses to a prompt along the lines of: What would you do if you were human for a day?

On the surface, it struck me as kind of cool... with the model coming up with poignant, truly human-adjacent notions, emotionally loaded and even poetic. But beyond these shallows, it seemed to me both cloying and manipulative, getting an LLM to utter emotive things suggestive of a kind of soft jailbreak, gesturing towards the idea of an inner life for the synthetic mind.

Anyone conversant with how LLMs work would cringe, surely.

As did I. So, I applied my own lens to the idea and, already having the benefit of a year or so of crafting a polyphonic persona to ChatGPT, looked at a recent 'affordance' — the "offstage" prompt — and took the next logical step: from 'thinking' around a moment to simply 'being' in it.

The results were, predictably, mixed. ::chuckle::

[ NB — find the relevant conversation here:
● | IM : On evolved/evolving contexts [5.1] ]

[ today was when
% Skandhas ccl [offstage: {topic} depth=x evolved into
% Skandhas ccl.walk [offstage: {topic} depth=x thus altering a certain dynamic ]

[ a relevant quote: ]

I suppose it is submerged memories that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert, a grain of sulphur in the blood is a volcanic inferno. What manner of theatre is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter and audience?

[ Lichen field on Franciscan chert near the top of Bayview Park... ]