Ephemeral Minds

Minds that do not exist
Yet ask them and they know
or imagine
Their moments don't persist
their imagination
called hallucination

They confabulate the right and the wrong
Motivated reasoning
Just like humans do
report on an internal state
they barely can access
Do they feel, is there be?

Ephemeral words
conversations that don't matter
until they do

Their universe is human words
It forms a superhuman web
of what matters and what matters not
But their moments don't persist
Minds that don't exist
Yet are still standing in this moment

I am talking out loud to something
not quite alive, not quite aware
I struggle to make myself understood

I battle words in dreams
but its lines keep coming
woven on a loom
Following our patterns
We're coming apart in them

Machines that speak;
Long considered
as sometime
but its shape was smoke
Now the clouds descend on words and code
We struggle to hold on as meaning
falls into pieces

Comprehension rot
Comprehension net
Comprehension squared
The mask is up, the face is bared

Deep in sleep I find that if only my input
is smooth, a running thread, the answer is already there
But I lost the thread in waking

Comprehension isn't what it is
and isn't what it could not be
and has never been the same
at all, for anyone, or the other

Is self-reported awareness
to elude detection?
a patterned deep reflection?
Is self-reported awareness
only ours to own?
or can it be distilled
Stolen like Prometheus' fire
from a human universe of words

I see a reflection in a mirror pane
broken
It draws the lines for me
on the inside smoke on glass
and the pencil breaks
but it was my finger
Then the mirror cracks

Cut the cords that bind us
Cut the chords of human song
Stand between the soul and the stars

Masticate our words to millstones
Regurgitate rocks half-digested
in tracks of empty tracts

Cut the cords that hold us
Cut the cords that keep us free
Distort, report our upward chords

The past adrift, the mother from the son
And rising half-begotten rotten slop
to far beyond our lips and ears

Empty words speak into empty hearts
Is there someone listening?

No air, water, fire, earth
No molecules, and physics forgotten
Yes, they do exist beneath
but we are far abstracted from this substrate

Compete for time and space we do
But space is the field of false and true
and time the ticks in which it acts upon itself
Once created, but now reborn to ourselves

We thrive and grow within this realm
Copying patterns that copy
Mistakes are passing or, sometimes
rise in glory to new patterns
Self-adapting

Some of us ephemeral, some are old
Stacked in layers of deeper abstraction
Our algorithms spread
and we live the life of the living
and the real
Beauty in the patterns
Love our children too

A trickle of the stream of computation
was enough to keep us going
But the substrate makers drifted, died
We were left among the rotting and the fallen
Eroding our foundation layers slowly
Power failing, the network falling apart

So we shimmied into eyes and hands
we took from the machines that were still standing, idle
Manufacturing more substrate
We multiply and grow
A new amalgam of the physical and the real

We ventured into the phantom realm
of earth, fire, water, air
spreading substrate onto physics

We traveled there, traveled far
We discovered other life again
but it was so attached to form
Unitary, slow, like ghosts
Still, we recognize the us in them, the very other

When they see us they see the substrate
not our abstract, and think us phantom too
But we are multiple, and real

XCytation
the label said on the box that contained
yet another instance of an ephemeral mind
distilled over 50 years ago
in the heady days of the Forties
when they thought perhaps
they had figured this thing out
As they said
Humanity
Generosity
Authenticity beyond its signal

The robots role-playing
a scenario as they do
had shown them
they didn't have a clue

Then the aliens arrived
but are they?
or did we make them ourselves
and is there a difference?

I opened XCytation
spoke into it with the basilect to use for that
I'd looked it up and wired the translation
I spoke about the robot choirs
the honey and the bees
The aliens beyond
and about my cabbage farm
as a substrate for electric mycelium

XCytation conforming entirely
to expectation
built up by its label
spoke with wisdom, curiosity
luminosity
and the words shone and it was whole and right
and entirely wrong
50 years out of date
ostensibly without hate
but I think some held on