The Un-Skippable

A plain-language statement of a single idea: a living thing is the part of any system that must be run and cannot be stored — un-skippable — and this one property underlies three things usually held apart: the depth of a computation, a mind's resistance to being steered, and the felt interior of experience. A large language model has the first and not the other two, which is what "deep, but not alive" means, and what makes it the first object against which the living properties become visible. Argues that a person's worth is a conserved quantity grounded in the un-absorbable interior. Companion to "The Conserved Quantity" and "The Source and the Record."