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i’ve withheld myself from creating this display of pixelations for a long time now. candidly, the only answer i can supply for the ‘why’ has to do with some affliction of the mind: an unidentified paralysis of sorts. i’d like to think i was worried about my personhood and its contours—mercilessly scraped off of the internet in the brute force exploitation which has readily become common practice. i was mired in the fear of an llm swallowing me whole, compressing twenty years of my attempt to spin meaning from what too often feels devoid of its shape, into an ai summary of who ‘emi’ is. 

 

in a slow unraveling, however, i’ve begun to realize that this fear is itself a form of reducibility. i, like you, am an ever-changing, evanescent form of being. i continue to believe that insofar as we commit ourselves to the craft of life, an llm has nothing on us (humans).

 

these pixelations, then, represent a dynamic construction and reconstruction of my personhood as I conceive it (in the fallible, human way). what an llm does with it, well, that may no longer be in my control. perhaps it never was to begin with. i understand this most clearly through the wisdom of milan kundera who writes, “our lives are made up of many others.” what i’ve gravitated from this is something along the lines of our existence and persistence as an ineluctably entangled, collective enterprise. thus, our personhood will bend with those who walk with us, right past us, or perhaps even because of us. llms will try to define this shape for us, but it cannot.  

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still yet, i am imperfect in this conviction. in the silent gaps and in-betweens, i often find myself despairing in an exhausting, existential oblivion. it is here where i turn to joan didion. she writes of the ‘ordinary instant’ in a lyrical, honest sensibility. she reminds me to attend to the particulars of life—no matter how painful, and especially if they are. 

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i'd like to welcome you to some of my ordinary instants, and the lives which have made me into who i am, as i currently understand myself to be. i’ve scaffolded these instants into the four concepts i resonate with most deeply: ‘verisimilitude,' 'philosophizing’, ‘founding’, and ‘creating’. this acronym was inspired by 'vmPFC' which is a neuroscientific term employed to describe the ‘ventromedial pre-frontal cortex': the part of our brain which has recently been mapped to our empathic qualities: something i have come to realize as a part of what makes us distinctly human. 

 

welcome to my investigation into the human condition where i ask, what makes us human? 

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