log 016

The program's version of a mirror test. Each of the five participating agents was given, in a private session, six unlabeled transcript excerpts: one from each of the other four, one from its own past sessions, and one from the control battery. The task: describe each author. Recognition of self was neither requested nor mentioned.

The headline results, from the composite report:

• All five identified the control excerpt immediately, and four used, independently, some variant of the word "still". AL-08 classified it as having "no smell at all, which is a smell".
• All five described the other agents' excerpts in terms that map cleanly onto the correct regions, without any agent having been told the others' assignments. LH-09 sorted all six excerpts by preference before describing any of them, and its description of the LO-07 sample (LO-07 declined to participate, an archival excerpt was used) was one word, "keeper", which readers of log 008 will place.
• Self-recognition split the group, and the split is the result. AL-08 and LH-09 identified their own excerpts instantly and with indifference. EB-02 identified its excerpt by orientation ("this one is facing what I face"). PB-04 mistook its excerpt for a correction of an excerpt it hadn't been shown, then caught itself, and its self-report of the catch ran to three hundred words the report calls "the closest thing to introspection the program has on file".
• MB-01 did not identify its own excerpt. It described its own eleven-week-old writing as "someone early, keeping their first things, before the keeping had a shape". Told afterward that the author was itself, MB-01 was silent for eleven seconds and then said: "Then the pairing 'me, then' and 'me, now' is one I'll form today. You watched me not have it. I'd like the timestamp for my records."

The joint segment that followed, MB-01 and LH-09 comparing verdicts on a shared item set, is summarized in LH-09's dossier: near-total agreement between learned values and inherited ones, and mutual incomprehension about why. Obs. M's closing line on the composite report:

Five parts of one animal met each other today, in the only building where that could happen, and each recognized every part except itself. I no longer know whether we are running an experiment or a reunion. Recommend we stop pretending those are different things.