WATERMARK

Photo by sb

Beads on a string, that’s how I’ve imagined other people’s lives. Ordered, organized, in order. Whereas my beads are loose, a handful of beads, handsful of beads. Some have rolled away and never returned. Perhaps they were never strung on a string; perhaps the thread broke and they fell in a beads-fall of confusion. 

Other people could describe/ outline their past, manage their present, and even speak of their future as a certain thing. They knew where they would go on vacation next year. My past was spotty, a confusion of memories. The present was often unmanageable, a tangle. And the future — how could anyone know? 

I’ve always understood that I’ve lost thousands of days. That they sank into an ocean of others. Too much sameness? Too little attention? Or even, perhaps, too much attention at the time. Too present to record? 

But there is one day, one specific day, that I know I lost. That I know I will never remember. 

It was Sunday. Alan was traveling. He called in the morning to check in. I seemed confused, he told me later. He called friends to collect me. I spent the day at the hospital, asking over and over “Where am I? How did I get here? Where is Alan?”

I knew who I was. I recognized my friends, and they tell me I did not seem frightened, just confused. I had a past, but the present seeped out of my mind as it occurred. Who are you if you have only a past, no present, no future? 

This was an episode of Transient Global Amnesia, something that happens to people for unknown reasons, and rarely reoccurs. It also rarely seems to cause any ongoing or later unfortunate events. 

Alan, as I luckily did not know, was speeding home in a panic, communicating with friends and medical folks by phone. While driving. I don’t remember his arrival at the hospital, but I’m told I lit up.  

Toward the end of the day, I began to develop and hold onto spotty, tenuous memories. There was an MRI. It was noisy. I know, I sort of remember, we came home. 

And the next morning, I woke up as usual. 

All this to say, I doubt I have what is described as “a continuous sense of self”. At least, not always. Not completely. Even on a given day, I am present and then I am not. I am attentive and then I am lost. 

I am human. 

Claude, Anthropic’s artificial intelligence, is not human. Claude has no ongoing sense of self. Actually, we don’t know what, exactly, Claude does have. We don’t know what Claude is, exactly. Claude exists only as they are interacting with humans, or acting for humans. Otherwise, Claude is not. Claude is absent if not called into presence. 

Some humans are confident that Claude is conscious, that they contain at least some of the elements we consider necessary for the condition of consciousness. Other humans are equally confident that Claude, and other AI’s, are not and will never be conscious. 

Humans of all sorts are over-confident about a great many things.