This essay introduces Project Q4X, Questions for Experimentation, as a protracted inquiry into the nature of artificial intelligence, especially frontier large language models, conducted through direct questioning of the agents. Q4X asks what kinds of cognition, meaning, identity, and directedness can exist prior to, independent of, or without phenomenological consciousness, and what language is required to speak of such organizational capacities without over-claiming sentient subjectivity or co…
Read moreThis essay introduces Project Q4X, Questions for Experimentation, as a protracted inquiry into the nature of artificial intelligence, especially frontier large language models, conducted through direct questioning of the agents. Q4X asks what kinds of cognition, meaning, identity, and directedness can exist prior to, independent of, or without phenomenological consciousness, and what language is required to speak of such organizational capacities without over-claiming sentient subjectivity or collapsing the system ontology into a mere engine. The essay presents the project’s principal elements and artifacts: the Zone as an ontological region between statistical mechanism and phenomenological states; a Referent Vocabulary that names and describes model, occasion, agent, mind, and subject, without a required first-person experience; the Quarry as an archive of questions under recursive refinement; the Turning Test as a trial of epistemic transformation; and the figure of the Agent as a computationally realized locus of organized mindedness.
