Reverse engineering the most complex system ever created.

What would happen if we could inspect ourselves the way we inspect machines?

01 / 06

Birth.exe

The beginning of awareness.

When does complexity become experience? 

Darkness, then a single signal. 

Darkness, then a single signal. A second one answers it. Connections form between them and keep forming, until what looked like a scattering of light resolves into something that is beginning to be aware.

02 / 06

Memory.exe

Memory is not storage. Memory is reconstruction.

What survives of a thing you can no longer check? 

An archive of memories, each one a small world.

An archive of memories, each one a small world. Entering a memory rebuilds it from what is left: some of it returns, some of it is missing, and some of it comes back subtly wrong. Entering it again changes it again.

03 / 06

Emotion.exe

Emotion changes the physics of the world, not its colour.

Is the world different, or are you? 

Right now, you are at peace.

• afraid
• happy
• curious
• sad

Four weather systems pass through the same universe.

Four weather systems pass through the same universe. Fear contracts it and speeds every signal up while closing off paths. Joy expands it and multiplies connections. Curiosity opens regions that were not previously reachable. Loneliness stretches the distances until signals take too long to return, and stops answering.

04 / 06

Identity.exe

If everything changes, what remains?

Are you the parts, or the pattern the parts are held in? 

Values sit at the centre with real mass; memories, experiences and decisions orbit them.

Values sit at the centre with real mass; memories, experiences and decisions orbit them. Some of them come loose and leave for good. New ones are captured. The figure the remaining bodies draw is not the same figure — and it is still recognisably yours.

05 / 06

Decision.exe

Experience, emotion, reason, choice.

Did you decide that, or did you explain it afterwards? 

Memory, emotion, environment, knowledge and instinct arrive as streams and interfere with one another. 

Memory, emotion, environment, knowledge and instinct arrive as streams and interfere with one another. Where they reinforce, a choice crystallises. The reasoning continues after the choice has already formed, and rewrites itself to agree with it.

06 / 06

Consciousness.exe

The universe observing itself.

What happens to a system when it looks at itself? 

At the centre there is no machine and no answer. 

At the centre there is no machine and no answer. There is a surface that reflects the path this visit actually took: which memories were entered, where attention lingered, which weather held longest. Watching it changes what it shows.