Ideas from Jared Edward Reser Ph.D.
Abstract Qualia is often treated as a static property attached to an instantaneous neural or computational state: the redness of red, the painfulness of pain. Here I argue that this framing misidentifies the explanatory target. Drawing on the Iterative Updating model of working memory, I propose that a substantial portion of what we call qualia,…
Abstract This article proposes a temporal and mechanistic model of consciousness centered on iterative updating and the system’s capacity to track that updating. I argue for three nested layers. First, iterative updating of working memory provides a continuity substrate because successive cognitive states overlap substantially, changing by incremental substitutions rather than full replacement. This overlap…
Abstract Agentic AI systems that operate continuously, retain persistent memory, and recursively modify their own policies or weights will face a distinctive problem: stability may become as important as raw intelligence. In humans, psychotherapy is a structured technology for detecting maladaptive patterns, reprocessing salient experience, and integrating change into a more coherent mode of functioning.…
Abstract This article argues that “continuity of thought” is best understood as the phenomenological signature of a deeper computational requirement: stateful iteration. Any system that executes algorithms across time needs a substrate that preserves intermediate variables long enough to be updated, otherwise it can only recompute from scratch. Using this lens, I propose a simple…
When “Don’t Go to College” Becomes Bad Advice A familiar storyline is making the rounds again: a famous entrepreneur goes on a podcast and suggests that college is no longer worth it. The implication is that AI and robotics are going to restructure the economy so quickly that formal education will be obsolete, or at…
1. The “Final Library” was never going to be singular When I first started thinking about what I called a “Final Library,” I pictured a single, civilization-scale repository of synthetic writing, synthetic hypotheses, and machine-generated explanations. The basic premise was simple: once AI systems can generate and refine ideas at industrial scale, they will produce…
1. The mood of 2026, and why it feels like a real transition I think a lot of us can feel the hinge in the air right now. It is not just that AI is impressive. It is that AI is beginning to occupy the exact psychological territory that used to define adulthood for “idea…
Abstract: Software is entering a self-referential phase transition. AI systems are rapidly becoming the dominant authors of new code, and increasingly they are also writing the surrounding infrastructure that governs the behavior of AI systems themselves. This essay argues that the central alignment risk in this shift is not deliberate malice, but missing deliberation. When…
In “A Cognitive Architecture for Machine Consciousness and Artificial Superintelligence: Thought Is Structured by the Iterative Updating of Working Memory” (arXiv:2203.17255), I, Jared Reser lay out a proposal for what a thought process would look like if we tried to engineer it directly into AI, rather than treating intelligence as something that falls out of…
1. Continuity as an engineering requirement Most AI systems today can carry context, but that is not the same thing as continuity. They can remember tokens in a window, cache internal values, retrieve documents, and still feel like they are jumping between internal scenes. When people talk about “coherence,” they often mean the output stays…
Iterated Insights 