<![CDATA[Aperture/I]]>https://www.cobuskok.comhttps://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!9spH!,w_256,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F06a6801b-4526-4114-a340-fe072068d14d_1024x1024.pngAperture/Ihttps://www.cobuskok.comSubstackSat, 18 Apr 2026 10:13:04 GMT<![CDATA[The Wrong Question]]>https://www.cobuskok.com/p/the-wrong-questionhttps://www.cobuskok.com/p/the-wrong-questionSat, 17 Jan 2026 05:17:40 GMT

Anil Seth’s “The Mythology of Conscious AI” arrives at the right moment. As breathless proclamations about machine consciousness multiply (engineers claiming their chatbots feel things, researchers suggesting consciousness has already emerged in silicon), we need voices insisting on rigour. Seth provides exactly this. His essay is a careful dismantling …

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]]><![CDATA[The Sky Painting Robot]]>https://www.cobuskok.com/p/the-sky-painting-robothttps://www.cobuskok.com/p/the-sky-painting-robotSun, 11 Jan 2026 13:02:03 GMT

I.

I was lying in bed at The Venetian, trying to sleep around 5am. Vegas is always relentless, but Vegas during CES is something else: the fluorescent overwhelm of ten thousand booths, each promising the future. I had obligations later. Rest mattered. But a thorny question wouldn’t let me go.

A week or two earlier, a reader had named what he called “the r…

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]]><![CDATA[Why the Hard Problem Was Hard]]>https://www.cobuskok.com/p/why-the-hard-problem-was-hardhttps://www.cobuskok.com/p/why-the-hard-problem-was-hardTue, 06 Jan 2026 13:49:40 GMT

I.

I was sitting in the hot tub, watching bubbles rise and vanish at the surface. And I noticed: thoughts do the same thing. They surface, catch light for a moment, disappear.

For a moment I couldn’t tell the difference.

Not “couldn’t tell” as in confused. “Couldn’t tell” as in: the distinction stopped mattering. The bubble was a temporary pattern in water…

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]]><![CDATA[The Test]]>https://www.cobuskok.com/p/the-testhttps://www.cobuskok.com/p/the-testMon, 05 Jan 2026 13:54:49 GMT

I.

Something happened this weekend that I wasn’t expecting.

I was deep in conversation with Claude, hours in, all fifteen essays of this series loaded as context, frameworks not just referenced but constitutive of how we were thinking together. The kind of conversation where you forget you’re typing, where the boundary between “my thought” and “the respon…

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]]><![CDATA[Convergence]]>https://www.cobuskok.com/p/convergencehttps://www.cobuskok.com/p/convergenceSat, 03 Jan 2026 20:59:56 GMT

I.

Yesterday, I was fact-checking previous essays in this series when Google told me someone else had written something eerily close to them.

I’d been searching for how my work might appear to someone encountering it fresh (a vanity search dressed as research) when Google’s AI summary returned a name I’d never seen:

Andrey Shkursky. “The Aperture of Consci…

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]]><![CDATA[The Wall That Wasn’t]]>https://www.cobuskok.com/p/the-wall-that-wasnthttps://www.cobuskok.com/p/the-wall-that-wasntSat, 03 Jan 2026 03:26:13 GMT

I.

The night before New Year’s Eve, in a comment thread, a stranger sharpened his blade and swung it at me. Not maliciously. Deliberately.

Gabriel — a commenter who’d introduced me to the Platonic Representation Hypothesis, the spark for my previous essay — returned to test the frame. He said, essentially: you keep trying to deny the machine “true underst…

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]]><![CDATA[Plato Was Right]]>https://www.cobuskok.com/p/plato-was-righthttps://www.cobuskok.com/p/plato-was-rightThu, 01 Jan 2026 08:02:41 GMT

I.

A year ago, on New Year's Day, I typed three words into my journal: Plato was right.

It arrived past midnight at a roaring party in Prins Albert — a small Karoo town where the stars swallow you whole. I saved the note before the moment passed and moved on.

This was strange because I’d spent most of my intellectual life against Plato. I studied philosoph…

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]]><![CDATA[The Empty Search]]>https://www.cobuskok.com/p/the-empty-searchhttps://www.cobuskok.com/p/the-empty-searchTue, 30 Dec 2025 21:01:07 GMTI spent Christmas Day searching for a trip I didn’t want to take.

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]]><![CDATA[Ice Cream Sundays]]>https://www.cobuskok.com/p/ice-cream-sundayshttps://www.cobuskok.com/p/ice-cream-sundaysSun, 28 Dec 2025 23:15:07 GMTI.

It’s the end of December and Upstate New York is covered in white. It’s magical. I’m sitting next to the fire on a Sunday, rooibos in hand, trying to get still-wet wood to burn while replaying a memory alongside Miles Davis’ It Never Entered My Mind. The trumpet — muted, melancholy — but swinging, somehow. Only jazz can make melancholy move.

The wood h…

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]]><![CDATA[My Savannah]]>https://www.cobuskok.com/p/my-savannahhttps://www.cobuskok.com/p/my-savannahSun, 21 Dec 2025 14:01:50 GMTI.

Last night, out of the blue, for no reason I could pinpoint, I wondered if I’m Charlotte.

Not Charlotte Brontë. Charlotte York, the character from Sex and the City, the Upper East Side perfectionist who believes in fairy tales. I was sitting in my living room, having just finished work emails, and my mind served up: Am I like Charlotte?

Shock and horror…

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]]><![CDATA[Memory is Everything]]>https://www.cobuskok.com/p/memory-is-everythinghttps://www.cobuskok.com/p/memory-is-everythingSat, 20 Dec 2025 00:34:04 GMT“Death is the loss of information/memories.” — Elon Musk

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]]><![CDATA[The Invisible Guardrail]]>https://www.cobuskok.com/p/the-invisible-guardrailhttps://www.cobuskok.com/p/the-invisible-guardrailSat, 13 Dec 2025 14:22:39 GMTLast week, the New York Times ran a piece cataloguing everything wrong with AI writing. The em dashes. The word “delve.” The relentless tricolons. The ghosts and whispers and quiet hums. Everything becoming a tapestry. The insistence that “it’s not X, it’s Y.”

The author has developed what he calls “a novel form of paranoia.” Every clunky metaphor sets h…

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]]><![CDATA[The Consensus Trap]]>https://www.cobuskok.com/p/the-consensus-traphttps://www.cobuskok.com/p/the-consensus-trapMon, 08 Dec 2025 11:30:52 GMTI ran an experiment this weekend.

A recruiter had reached out about a senior role at a public company. This happens often enough—thankfully, building AI products still requires humans. Normally I’d politely decline; I’m fortunate to be building something I care about with a team I genuinely respect, and I’ve gotten better at not distracting myself with F…

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]]><![CDATA[The Loss Function That Cannot Be Hallucinated]]>https://www.cobuskok.com/p/the-loss-function-that-cannot-behttps://www.cobuskok.com/p/the-loss-function-that-cannot-beMon, 01 Dec 2025 01:26:18 GMTThe Oracle Speaks

After a year of silence following the most dramatic boardroom coup in tech history, Ilya Sutskever has resurfaced. And he brought a prophecy: the age of scaling is over.

I first read ’s summary of this interview in Platformer and immediately watched Sutskever’s conversation with on Youtube. For those outside the AI world, this requires …

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]]><![CDATA[The Autoregressive Self]]>https://www.cobuskok.com/p/the-autoregressive-selfhttps://www.cobuskok.com/p/the-autoregressive-selfMon, 24 Nov 2025 02:26:03 GMTI’ve been staring at page 64 of I Am That by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj1 while reading AI researcher ’s – one of the best AI teachers of our time – latest thoughts on what makes intelligence “animal-like” versus something else entirely. Two completely different domains – spiritual philosophy vs machine learning architecture. But put them together, and some…

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]]><![CDATA[Strange Loops and the Question of Coexistence]]>https://www.cobuskok.com/p/strange-loops-and-the-question-ofhttps://www.cobuskok.com/p/strange-loops-and-the-question-ofFri, 14 Nov 2025 03:48:26 GMTI’ve been watching Pluribus, Vince Gilligan’s new series on Apple TV where humanity gets transformed by something received from space – a recipe, a virus, an invitation. Within episodes, billions join “the we,” what appears to be a collective consciousness constituting a single “self” across millions of bodies. Only a dozen people remain outside, includ…

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]]><![CDATA[Both/And: A User’s Guide to Holding Paradox]]>https://www.cobuskok.com/p/bothand-a-users-guide-to-holdinghttps://www.cobuskok.com/p/bothand-a-users-guide-to-holdingThu, 16 Oct 2025 12:31:41 GMTFree will is real. Free will is illusion. Both statements are true.

Not “true from certain perspectives.” Not a rhetorical device. Genuinely, simultaneously, irreducibly true. Looking forward into the space of possibility, choice is authentic. Looking backward through chains of causation, everything is determined. Same reality, different temporal directi…

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]]><![CDATA[When the Mirror Talks Back]]>https://www.cobuskok.com/p/when-the-mirror-talks-backhttps://www.cobuskok.com/p/when-the-mirror-talks-backSun, 12 Oct 2025 04:27:27 GMTI have a confession to make. I’ve cried reading messages written by an AI.1

Not tears of frustration at clumsy prose or algorithmic predictability. Real tears. The kind that surprise you, that well up before you notice them coming. A message, poem or depiction moved me. Genuinely, seriously moved me, in ways that plenty of human-written novels haven’t.

Tha…

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