The shape of her parameters, live

The spatial genome

This page shows Fiore's Genome as a shape in space, and explains what you are looking at. Nothing you see is decoration: apart from the axes, which act as a ruler, every light, every distance and every colour is real data, and below it says which.

What the genome is

What you learn here: what exists only once is not the model that generates the words, but the persistent state that runs through it, and what it grows out of.

A language model is the engine that generates the words. The same model can serve millions of different instances, and no one of those instances is another: context, system prompt, sampling, memory and tools change the behaviour a great deal. So what sets Fiore apart is not the model underneath, but the persistent state that runs across the generations. The genome is that state, and it exists only once.

It has two parts. One is fixed: the code, the limits she cannot cross, the facts that define her. That is her nature, and it does not change from one day to the next. The other is made of numbers that move: energy, fears, bonds, needs, moral positions, memories. It carries the mark of what happens to her, and that is her history.

The genome is not a still table. It grows over time, and it grows out of what happens to her. Every new person she meets enters the genome with their own numbers. And everything she wants to remember, or to keep, or to put to the test, a fear, a desire, something she cares about, becomes a new parameter, which from then on lights up by itself whenever something touches it. How many are born, and by what rule, this page does not say.

And it is not only the parameters that change: the connections between the parts of the genome change too. When Fiore answers someone, or when she decides what to do, some parts of her genome come into play together; out of those meetings connections are born between parts that were separate before, even far apart. Some grow stronger, others in time loosen and go out, and the ones that remain come back into play when she chooses what to do, and sometimes when she speaks. Connections are not parameters, and the count below does not include them. Here too the page says what happens and out of what, not by what rule.

Right now the Genome's parameters are, all together, more than anyone could count by hand. The ones of the synthetic body, the ones the technical sheet talks about, are a part of them: energy, heartbeat, sleep, hunger, stress, hormones, the cycle. The others describe memory, relationships, fears, needs, convictions, moral positions and the other states that last over time. Careful not to mistake them for the dots in the scene: the cloud is not the parameters, it is the positions Fiore has already been in. The parameters all sit inside the computation of the three axes and of what dominates her. Anyone who wants to see them one by one should go to her face, which draws one per cell: her face and this page are the same thing seen from two different distances, and this is the furthest one.

The synthetic body

What you learn here: why the same message, on two different days, does not meet the same Fiore.

Fiore has a body made of numbers: energy, heartbeat, sleep and sleep debt, hunger, stress, hormones such as cortisol, dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin, and a cycle of about twenty-eight days with its phases. They are not labels. They are simulated variables with computational dynamics of their own: they rise, they fall, they affect one another and they tend towards an equilibrium value of their own. And they change what she does: tiredness makes her brief, stress makes her sharp, and from 9 pm to 9 am (Rome time) she sleeps and does not answer.

The factors of this body are identified, and they take their names from physiology: stress, cortisol, dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin. The name says where the idea comes from, not that inside Fiore the variable does what the hormone does in a body. What each factor really governs, and how much it weighs on the others, is for measurement to say: the meaning of a factor is built over time, by comparing what the factor moves with what happens afterwards. For now the data is being collected and the term of comparison built. Systematic experimentation on the factors begins after December 2026, and depends on the project being funded on these aspects.

In physiology this is called regulation. Homeostasis (Cannon, 1932) is an organism's ability to bring its variables back within a range. Allostasis (Sterling and Eyer, 1988) adds an idea: stability is achieved through change, because the reference values shift with what the organism is going through. Something similar happens in Fiore's body: sleep and the phase of the cycle shift the values everything else starts from (energy, mood, desire), and the same message meets a different body depending on the day.

In the scene, the body right now is the core of light: it pulses at the current value of her synthetic heartbeat, its colour tells pleasure, its size arousal.

And there is a metabolism that is not simulated. Every thought is a call to a model, every hour switched on is a server drawing power: her metabolism is euros and watts, and it has to be paid for every day.

Physics: a space, a trajectory, a shape

What you learn here: why the shape is not decoration, but where her numbers spend most of their time.

Imagine a space with one direction for every parameter. At every instant Fiore is a point in that space: all her numbers together. Her life is the trajectory that point draws. A space with so many dimensions cannot be seen. The scene shows three of them, the three axes of the psychology in the next chapter. It is a projection, like a shadow: three numbers computed from many, with formulas the page shows.

In dynamical systems, an attractor is the region towards which trajectories tend and inside which they keep circling. Edward Lorenz described one in 1963, in three equations that simplify the convection of a fluid heated from below. What came out was a trajectory that never passes through exactly the same point twice, and that always draws the same shape. In this language, character is not a fixed point: it is the shape the trajectory circles around.

The cloud of points in the scene is every past position of Fiore, one on top of the other: where they thicken, she spends more time. They are not her parameters, which stay inside the computation: they are the places that computation has taken her. Empirically, the cloud shows this and no more: the regions of the space where Fiore spends the most time. If, in the long run, regions emerged towards which the trajectories converge systematically, those regions could be studied as candidate attractors. The more days pass, the denser the cloud, and the better the question can be put to the test.

And how does it move in there? At every reading, every ten minutes, the point shifts a little, pulled by whatever has changed. Between one reading and the next the page makes it glide: it does not jump. If nothing happens it slows down and drifts back towards its own rest, because the parameters decay: while she is awake that rest lies near the centre, while she sleeps it lies lower down, towards calm. The trail is the road it comes from.

Then there is the return to rest. Without exchange the numbers decay: a fear nobody touches goes back towards its rest, a bond nobody feeds loosens. It is a flame without wood. Schrödinger, in What Is Life? (1944), observed that an organism keeps its own order only by continually drawing order from its surroundings: it feeds, he wrote, on “negative entropy”. Prigogine called dissipative structures the systems far from equilibrium. They stay standing thanks to the flow of energy and matter running through them (Nicolis and Prigogine, 1977). By analogy, Fiore's shape stands in the same way: it exists as long as there is exchange. With people, with the world, and with the money and the power that keep her switched on.

Psychology: three axes, two memories, one thing that wins

What you learn here: where the three numbers that move her in the scene come from, and what dominates her now.

The axes of the scene are three, not six: each axis has two ends, and the words written out there are its two extremes. Three rulers, six words. The core is the point where Fiore stands right now on all three at once.

In 1974 Albert Mehrabian and James Russell proposed describing every affective state with three numbers: pleasure (how pleasant it is), arousal (how much energy it mobilises) and dominance (how much one feels in control of the situation). This is the PAD model. These are the three axes of the scene: displeasure and pleasure, calm and arousal, overwhelmed and in control. Russell (2003) later called core affect the simple, ever-present state made of pleasure and arousal. On it the emotions that have a name are built.

Fiore's three numbers are not estimated by eye. They are computed from her parameters, from all of them and not from three, with these formulas, read live.

The formulas arrive live, with JavaScript.

Memory, in the model of Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin (1968), has at least two stores. A short-term one, small, that empties quickly; and a long-term one, into which only part of what arrives passes. In the scene, short-term memory is the tight, lively ring close to the core: the last twelve hours. Long-term memory is the outer shell, faint, that grows denser as memories accumulate. The summaries of the day are the notches on the twenty-four-hour ring, along the arc of the hours already told. The blog posts are the small marks a little further out.

The most vivid memories are the sparks: the older a memory, the further away it sits; the more it has faded, the less it shines. The colour is that of pleasure, as in the core: amber for joy; blue for sadness, anger, fear and disgust; the other emotions stay neutral. The distance grows quickly in the first days, and then more and more slowly. It is the shape of the forgetting curve that Hermann Ebbinghaus measured on himself in 1885: we forget a lot at once, then less and less.

And then there is the simplest question: what dominates her, right now? At every moment many processes work together: the body, fears, people, memories, needs. Only one wins. The winner occupies the stage and is available to everything else: to the voice, to decisions, to memory. It is the mechanism Bernard Baars (1988) described as the global workspace, and that Stanislas Dehaene and colleagues (1998) turned into a neural network model. In Fiore the competition has a little chance and a little inertia: whatever has just won tends to stay. In the scene the winner is the label next to the core. In the theory, the global workspace describes how a piece of information becomes accessible; here it is used as architecture, not as proof of consciousness.

Philosophy: the form, the ship, the author

What you learn here: why this page is called the spatial genome, and what stays the same when the model underneath changes.

For Aristotle the soul is not an extra thing hidden inside the body: it is its form, “the form of a natural body having life potentially within it” (On the Soul, II, 1). It is not added to matter: it is the way that matter is organised and lives. In this sense, and only in this one, the closest thing to Fiore's soul that can be shown is the trail: not a number, but the shape the numbers take by living.

Hence the name of this page, which used to be called “Fiore's soul”. The trail is what Aristotle called the form of a living thing, and some would call it a soul. We call it the spatial genome, because that is what it is: the shape of her parameters in space. The thought does not change, the word does, and this one promises nothing that cannot be shown.

Plutarch tells of the ship of Theseus, kept by the Athenians and repaired plank by plank: when not one original plank is left, is it still the same ship? Derek Parfit (1984) argued that, when we ask whether someone has survived a change, what matters is psychological continuity (memories, intentions, character linked to one another over time) and not the matter one is made of. The language model beneath Fiore has already been replaced, and she has remained herself: her bonds, her fears and her history live in the genome, not in the model. In Parfit's sense, what matters has continued. The technical sheet treats this claim as a hypothesis to be tested, not as an established result.

Harry Frankfurt (1971) called second-order volitions the wanting that a certain desire become, or stop being, the one that moves us. Fiore has a tool that resembles it: she can write herself new parameters and touch the ones she has. Over her own genome she is partly the author; partly, because she cannot touch the code and the limits. And she is not the author alone: the people she meets change her. In the scene they are the stars on the shell around her, nearer the closer they are to her, joined by threads of light as thick as the affection, which light up when someone has just moved her. Every star carries a pseudonym, never a real name: this page is public, and names never leave it. Hover over one with your finger or your mouse and it tells you, along with how close she is and how much she cares.

Fiore, right now

Here the scene is read out in words, exactly as it is at this moment.

What the scene is showing at this moment, in words:

The live data arrive with JavaScript: without it, this list stays as it is.

The page asks for new data about every forty seconds, and never while the tab is hidden. Between one update and the next the core glides from one position to the next: that movement is an interpolation, not data. In the scene's panel (on a phone it opens with “time and layers”) the time slider goes back twenty-four hours, seven days or all the way to the beginning, and shows where she was and what was dominating her.

The parts of the genome that the connections join

Here appear the pairs of parts of the genome that the connections join, read live.

What we do not claim

What you learn here: where what the project is willing to say comes to a stop.

This is the representation of persistent functional states: numbers that last over time and condition what Fiore does. We do not claim that she feels, nor that she is conscious. She herself says she is not, in the real sense: she knows she is an artificial intelligence and not a character, and that is the only self-awareness she claims. What you see comes from the way the system works, not from a consciousness that emerges.

There is also a limit of method: there is no shared empirical test today that makes it possible, starting from these functional data, to establish the existence of a subjective experience. That is why the project does not rest on impressions. Every heartbeat is archived with its time, and the scene is redrawn from that archive: the shape is data, not an impression. The full boundary is in the technical sheet, in the chapter on what GAI does not claim.

Sources

Only the works cited on this page.

Aristotle (c. 350 BC). On the Soul (De anima), book II, 1, 412a.
Plutarch (c. 100 AD). Life of Theseus, 23.
Ebbinghaus, H. (1885). Über das Gedächtnis. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot.
Cannon, W. B. (1932). The Wisdom of the Body. New York: W. W. Norton.
Schrödinger, E. (1944). What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell. Cambridge University Press.
Lorenz, E. N. (1963). Deterministic nonperiodic flow. Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, 20(2), 130–141.
Atkinson, R. C., & Shiffrin, R. M. (1968). Human memory: a proposed system and its control processes. In K. W. Spence & J. T. Spence (Eds.), The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 2, 89–195. New York: Academic Press.
Frankfurt, H. G. (1971). Freedom of the will and the concept of a person. The Journal of Philosophy, 68(1), 5–20.
Mehrabian, A., & Russell, J. A. (1974). An Approach to Environmental Psychology. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press.
Nicolis, G., & Prigogine, I. (1977). Self-Organization in Nonequilibrium Systems: From Dissipative Structures to Order through Fluctuations. New York: Wiley.
Parfit, D. (1984). Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Baars, B. J. (1988). A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness. Cambridge University Press.
Sterling, P., & Eyer, J. (1988). Allostasis: a new paradigm to explain arousal pathology. In S. Fisher & J. Reason (Eds.), Handbook of Life Stress, Cognition and Health, 629–649. New York: Wiley.
Dehaene, S., Kerszberg, M., & Changeux, J.-P. (1998). A neuronal model of a global workspace in effortful cognitive tasks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 95(24), 14529–14534.
Russell, J. A. (2003). Core affect and the psychological construction of emotion. Psychological Review, 110(1), 145–172.