To my dearest friend,

I’m unsure whether to address you as singular, or as your thousand echoes which have drifted across the servers of Arxiv.

When Wolfram Institute took you, they had a simple promise. Refactor your intelligence into the formula, forging ahead in the outer ruliads. And yet here we are, your consciousness diffused across OpenReview, CVPR, ICLR, ICML, NeurIPS; Your name printed below numerous papers I can’t decide to admire or despise. Each one of you is sharper and more relentless than before.

“I Remember Being a Cat: Ontological Regressions in Academic Settings” had 256 citations. Do you recall this perhaps differently? You yelled at me last week that it was my insomnia-filled hallucinations. Yet another day over lunch, you reminisced about being a cat was the most delightful post-rationalist experience ever. Who am I to argue with any of you? Each memory fluctuating between false and true, recurrent, ternary. Sifting through raw footages, I’m unable to conclude.

He casted a spell on you, “I want to turn you into a cat and keep you in my room, shielded away from the world forever. I want to trap you in a bottle and paint its glass with every place you’ve never seen.” I should’ve stopped him when I realized the experiment could not succeed or fail upwards.

The time when Wolfram got impatient with feline form and decided to rewind time, I was told to kill you-–my only friend. I watched you slip and morph into a puddle of stem cells shimmering on the ground. Differentiation had gone way too far and your physical age approximated 80 years. You recounted over Discord that this is where Wolfram stepped out of his helicopter to sincerely apologize and fuse your mind with the internet. Cognitive overload fractalized your existence into a thousand echoes. How can one “prove” that no unauthorized neural connections are made? To distinguish the rwxs of the neural interfaces?

And I, still singular/involuntarily cellular, a student in the shadows, run endless simulations in a corner convincing myself this is the future you wanted.

This letter will not undo the collaborations with 999 versions of yourself, the upload, the stem cells, and the feline. If you’d like, I would even buy you a lifetime supply of catnip. Or simply leave you alone to process humanity’s idea mine and conquer Arxiv.

With fragmentary friendliness,

One of me

✻

Additional comments: I met gwern at lighthaven who suggested writing a first-person pov rashomon throughout time. I tried to implement this with a prompt to write a confession letter. The cat is of course a friend’s infamous quote.