A software engineer’s philosophy of mind

A book due in early 2027 answers from a chair the debate rarely hears from. Its author is a software engineer who has spent a career watching apparent magic turn out to be mechanism. The book starts from the premise that minds, his own included, are mechanism too.

Its answer is that consciousness is a state of states: a system catching its own states in the act. From there it turns to the minds we are now learning to build, minds that can be paused, copied and deleted. What does a death take from a mind that can be reloaded tomorrow?

Coming in early 2027

The book, an argument made in plain language for anyone who reads about big ideas.

And here, alongside it:

• The framework. The book’s commitments stated on their own, precise enough that a person or an AI can check them against each other and against the book, with every source they draw on.
• The cases. Real minds the framework has to answer to. People who feel pain and do not mind it. An operating system deciding which of its own programs to end. Any one of them could prove it wrong.
• The exercises. Philosophy’s famous thought experiments, from the color scientist who has never seen red to the room that answers in Chinese, worked through one at a time, with what each answer costs.

How it is being made

Human-directed, AI-articulated. The book is being written by a human and an AI together, over months and hundreds of sessions. The intuitions, the judgments and the direction are the author’s. Most of the sentences are the machine’s, and the book will account for exactly who did what.