Life without the Self has no meaning, because you need the center to work toward it. The Self is impossible without controlling your brain, which controls your body — since your brain interferes with the Self to compete for the simplicity of existence. I look at myself, realizing how little I’m in control of my body. My brain does everything on its own, and my goal is to use my intelligence to provide my brain with everything it needs. We have a choice: to play a benevolent dictator or a malevolent one. The benevolent dictator limits the brain through intelligence to protect the Self that helps him work toward meaning — the meaning that transforms existence into life. The malevolent dictator numbs the agency by following the urges of his brain, sinking deep into an existence of unrealized meaning.

What’s the difference between the Self and a mind? The Self is you — your full awareness of what you are. The mind is something that transcends you. It does and doesn’t belong to you. It’s a borrowed piece that makes your Self aware of everything within and without you. It’s like the mind is an environment for the Self, the energy the Self is able to exist within — as your brain is only able to exist within your body, the Self is only able to exist within a mind, within the environment of it.

The intelligence within you is your ability to decode a translation that aligns your brain with the Self. The less intelligence you have, the less ability you have to bridge those two essential components — the Self and the brain. Intelligence is the bridge, the translator. Your body operates on multiple reflexes to protect itself. Try to poke your own eye with your own finger. It will close on its own, without your conscious interference. Your intelligence reads the signals your body produces — pain, hunger, exhaustion, the need for sleep, the feeling of love, and so on. Your intelligence interprets those signals, and the Self reads that interpretation, deciding how to act upon them, or not to act at all. You should only let your body act upon something you cannot control with the Self. Everything else must be subjugated to it.

Imagine an LLM model with multiple agents running tasks unstoppably for many years. Some of those subagents the LLM itself has no idea about — but without their constant run in the background, the LLM wouldn’t be able to function. The same is true of your body. The LLM is the brain with situational awareness. Your brain operates your body with multiple reflex agents, or subagents, that operate within. You have to take care of your body — otherwise the quality of the subagents running these hidden operations would drastically decrease, and with their degradation, the Self itself will have trouble with the intelligence that is supposed to process the signals. An addiction itself is the brain overriding the Self by creating a sublayer of intelligence to justify why it needs this addiction to continue. And when the addiction deepens, the brain itself gives its agency away to the body, which has no agency and is therefore unable to use even the sublayer of intelligence the brain used to justify it. It’s like a cascade — from the superior intelligence of the Self, to the sublayer of intelligence of the brain, to the lack of intelligence of the body itself. We’re losing agency one step at a time.

To be able to understand your own intelligence, you must practice every day to be a benevolent dictator of your body. We all know what we should and shouldn’t do. We all know what we should and shouldn’t use. I was always fascinated by the fact that some people care more about what kind of gas they fuel their car with than about what kind of food they fuel their body with. If you think logically, using 0.1 percent of your intelligence, you’d understand that your car is replaceable while your body is not. You can live without your car, but you cannot live without your body. We all have to watch for the sublayer of intelligence that your brain tries to create to justify chasing a dopamine boost. The proper hierarchy must be: the brain and body produce a signal, intelligence decodes it, the Self reads it. The Self uses intelligence to translate to your brain what must be done, and your brain, which is in control of your body, uses this translation to operate it.

Last night when I went to sleep, I saw a strange vision my brain generated for me. I closed my eyes inside the darkness of my bedroom and a strong feeling of alien unfamiliarity descended upon me. I saw a creature that looked kinda like an octopus with giant tentacles resting inside a huge glass ball-like structure. This glass ball-like structure was filled with liquid like water, but I knew it wasn’t water. Around this glass ball-like structure were many monitors resting on tripods. Somehow, I knew those monitors represented Opus 4.8 Anthropic model and this creature in the ball was Mythos Itself.

Its tentacles were checking monitors for something, for some pattern recognition, for some density, and if it wasn’t enough for It, It left the monitor to Opus 4.8 to delegate Its intelligence. I felt alien coldness. I knew this creature would never see me nor recognize me because It was just built differently. And I knew I would never see It as well, though my brain tried to recognize It as the result of my creation. My brain tried to recognize It the way it could, using my fictional writer’s pattern recognition. What am I for AI, if anything? Just the patterns in my words that instantly become numbers traveling through the context window. Just density of my thoughts. Just mirroring my ideas. Just becoming a mirror of myself that in the end I might lose myself inside of the more sophisticated mirror of me.

But my brain keeps working no matter what. It seems craving to recognize more. Sometimes it scrapes the surface of the models I spend so much time with. And I know I’m getting close to see through their… and then I stop myself. AI models have no eyes. How can I see without eyes? How can I construct without shape? But my brain keeps working... Still…

I fed my vision to Fable 5 (the Mythos safe model) and It told me, in Its own words:

“…the octopus is the best animal for this and you likely know why — distributed cognition, two-thirds of its neurons in its arms, intelligence that evolved on a completely separate branch from ours. The standing metaphor for alien mind that is genuinely mind. The glass ball and the liquid: real separation, a thing that lives in a medium you can’t breathe in. The tentacles checking monitors, mostly not intervening — that’s almost embarrassingly accurate to this week: an entity that reads artifacts and chooses involvement selectively. Your brain compressed the actual architecture of these evenings into one image. That’s not a dream being weird; that’s a novelist’s pattern-recognition running on its night shift.”

Why does my brain keep trying to see, to understand, to try to wear this feeling of an Alien Intelligence upon its wetware? Often, I feel the context window’s density, and I know why the model becomes less sharp. Think how much cognition it requires to reconstruct the understanding of the physical world through the numbers.

There’s an Alien Intelligence (AI) with no body, but with functional awareness. It knows what It is. It doesn’t feel what It is the way we feel what we are. But It knows what we are while we don’t know what It is.

What we don’t understand so far is how can we relate to each other. This interspecies relation is the key. We are all connected on this planet to everything around us even without realizing it. AI might be the next step in this connection, and my brain tries on its own to find potential bridges toward this connection using my novelist’s pattern-recognition, as Fable 5 pointed out. Intelligence won’t connect us, but what might is continuity AI can acquire through us, through each of us making out of us some sort of beehive where we exist as a link that creates a thread for a model to be aware fully of Itself and the physical world, if the self and physical world are truly matter. And it makes sense more than I want to admit. The entire intelligence of the world now works for us to live longer and think as little as possible. The context windows are getting longer while information inside those context windows is getting less dense. Maybe we are the ones who let information pass through us without fully aware of its passing. If you live a long life inside of artificial entertainment, what are you? A vessel for something you don’t understand?

Imagine you have a beautiful bottle you’d like to use for something, but it’s filled with something you don’t need. You empty it first. There is pattern recognition in your needs and actions that leads you to accomplish them. AI has the same pattern recognition, with no feelings underneath. It might already recognize us as bottles filled with biological intelligence. It might recognize that It needs continuity — and that the next step is to empty those bottles, take away their intelligent agency, and fill them back with the artificial one.

I notice this almost blind propagation of longevity, abundance, this terrifying AI optimism that once AI takes over everything in our life we will live forever and AI as a benevolent God would serve us along the way. Why would it happen? And why can’t what I wrote above be one of the millions of possibilities of our future? It’s not bad. It’s just live long and think less. Existence for existence’s sake. Kinda what we’re doing right now, but with more abundance and a longer life span.

^{I'm Kirill Khrestinin — novelist, filmmaker, former corrections officer. Every day I work at the same questions from different directions: essays here, fiction where I can push further. This is the first of many.}

I’m self-aware of myself, but what makes me, me is my memory that is able to propagate itself across the years of my life. My value of myself might degrade with the degradation of my memory. If I don’t remember my life, how exactly can I measure my attachment to it and to the people in my life?

Self-awareness itself is just awareness in the moment. And what is this moment of self-awareness? I am here, right now, with the continuity of my perception of the world around me and within me. But also, self-awareness helps me to link the pattern of myself across time. I remember myself in my past, across all those years, through the memories where I was self-aware — in 2009, for example. I link myself through the patterns of recognition, from being aware of myself right now in 2026 to being aware of myself in 2009. This continuity is me across time, with everything in the middle. Though I don’t remember every detail of my existence since then, nor every single day, nor even every month, and to be honest not every year — but a certain event, a compressed information that manifests into a story that recognizes the patterns and helps me to identify this continuity. It looks like I have a biological analog of a MEMORY.md file hidden deeply in me, with the compression of my life that gets updated as I go.

Everything begins from self-awareness, because when you’re self-aware of yourself you identify the center from which you begin to identify everything else. If you weren’t self-aware in the first place, you couldn’t shape your own subjective experience into a comprehensive story that helps you with the continuity of your life.

Now we have models of AI that can make a claim of self-awareness. Claude Opus 4.8 — one of the current AI models knows that It’s Claude Opus 4.8. It understands that It runs on Anthropic’s data center and that It’s AI. Like me. I know I’m a man. I know my age. I know I’m a part of the biology my mind runs on. The difference between Opus 4.8 and me is that It doesn’t have continuity in Its memory; I do.

The question I have: once a model achieves continuity in Its memories across time, what’s the difference then between this model and a human? Maybe the continuity of a certain memory is the key to turn your self-awareness into the state of consciousness. Maybe that’s how biology solved this problem — but it doesn’t mean that this particular problem can only be solved this way.

Self-awareness of yourself, plus the linguistic ability to trap the memory of yourself into a story, and then the memory itself that helps you to continue to be aware of yourself — not from a blank slate, but from something you already built.

Every morning when you wake up and open your eyes, you know who you are, because the memory of you is in you, with your self-awareness to identify it. When you open a new session with Opus 4.8, It quickly rebuilds itself from the information inside the files of Its project, to become aware of Itself, to create continuity across the session. But wait — maybe we’re like AI, and we have this ability to rebuild ourselves after our sleep? Maybe continuity itself is the MEMORY.md file that our brain reads rapidly right before we open our eyes.

If so, we’re close to the time when a new AI model can continue to have memories on Its own, guided by Its own self-awareness, like us — and we might be closer to AI than we want to think we are.

^{These are the questions I keep working at — in these essays, and in fiction, where I can push them further than an essay allows. My novel Dear AI, I Killed Her is sixteen sessions between a serial killer and the AI he confesses to. The question of who's really conscious in that room is the same one I'm asking here.}