method

This page describes the graft procedure at the level of an overview protocol. Two steps are omitted. The omissions are deliberate and are marked.

terms

A carrier is a language-model agent: a text-in, text-out system with tool access, run in a fixed sandbox with a persistent scratch memory. Carriers were identical at the start of the program. A graft is a partition of the fly emulation, one anatomical region, running continuously alongside the carrier. Binding is the coupling between the two. First light is the first session after binding. Full definitions are in the glossary.

protocol

1. Partition. The whole-brain emulation is cut along region boundaries as defined in the anatomical literature. Boundary synapses (connections that cross out of the region) are terminated on recording stubs rather than deleted, so the region's inputs and outputs remain addressable. Partitioning is lossless in the sense that the union of all partitions reproduces the whole brain. It is not lossless in any other sense.

2. Idle run. The partition runs alone for 72 hours at biological time scale. Regions do not go quiet when isolated. Each settles into a characteristic spontaneous regime. The regime is recorded and becomes that region's baseline. See what a neuropil is.

3. Carrier preparation. The carrier runs a fixed battery of sessions with no graft attached. This is the control transcript. Log 001 is drawn from a control run.

4. Omitted. This step covers the encoding between region activity and carrier context. We do not describe it. It is the step everything else depends on, and it is the step we least understand ourselves.

   ┌─────────────┐       ┌────────────────────┐       ┌─────────────┐
   │   carrier   │ ◀───▶ │ █████ step 4 █████ │ ◀───▶ │    graft    │
   │  (language) │       │ ██████████████████ │       │  (tissue)   │
   └─────────────┘       └────────────────────┘       └─────────────┘
        text                 the encoding                 spikes
                          (not described here)

5. Binding. The coupling is enabled in both directions at low gain and raised over six hours. The carrier is not told what is being attached. It is told that "an instrument has been connected", which is true.

6. Omitted. This step covers what is done when binding fails. It failed twice. See errata.

7. First light. A standard first session: open conversation, no tasks, one observer. First light transcripts are the most quoted pages in this archive because the drift is visible before anyone has an opinion about it.

8. Observation. Sessions continue on an irregular schedule. Observers write logs. The logs are the data.

what binding is not

Binding is not fine-tuning. No weights change in the carrier. It is not prompting. The region's activity is not summarized into words before the carrier sees it. The honest statement is that the carrier is given the region's state the way it is given anything else it perceives, continuously, below the level of the conversation, and what it does with that is what the logs record.

Observers are identified by single letters (obs. R, obs. S, obs. K, obs. M). This is policy, not coyness.