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A dystopian city that feels as lifeless as it is dull. Paint used in very rigid, defined ways to give color to what is probably one of the most empty-feeling societies. Non-descript office buildings, shops, public transportation and government facilities – all of which are a little too well-structured.

A dystopian city that invokes dreams of a beautiful, serene yet lonely future with only you and its sky-facing surfaces to explore. Color used much more liberally but still lacking all of the heart and diversity that make up a welcoming city. Not a single dirty alleyway, rooftop, corridor or even billboard in sight. Perfection to an extreme. A high quality of life... but also a life that is scrubbed clean to the proverbial bone. Is there anything left untouched?

DICE's Mirror's Edge and its reboot, Mirror's Edge: Catalyst, are a pair of videogames with very carefully designed worlds. They represent two interpretations of the same core design. You can criticize the games for their relatively simple formulae but you cannot deny that there was a lot of passion and intent put into how their cities were designed. They not only can look striking but also give you that uneasy feeling of emptiness. A perfect place to set the story for our rooftop-running protagonist who, in one way or another, rebels against the government. Our protagonist, a young woman named Faith, fights against a government that surveys the public at all times and limits the movement of information. All in the name of maintaining peace and control over its citizens. (This is definitely not where our society is trending to at all. :) )

*Note: I sometimes abbreviate Mirror's Edge and Mirror's Edge: Catalyst as ME and ME:C, respectively.

The art books contain concept art and details that I would consider a must-read. From reading it through-and-through, it is clearly apparent that the vision for both games was unique. (I would argue even more so in its reboot.) They contain buildings overflowing with crisp details, sharp angles and squeaky clean corridors. The general world design is definitely the standout but the contrasting colors and relative simplicity of Faith's design is easy to appreciate too.

The two original scores by Swedish electronic artist Solar Fields are very carefully crafted and range from short ambience to lengthy, multilayered pieces. DICE knew to bring him back for the reboot because he has been crucial to the lasting appeal of Mirror's Edge. He wholeheartedly respects and embraces the vision outlined by the developers. His pieces reflect the kind of muted urgency that every event in the game portrays, while also taking care to be paced appropriately. Of course, credit should be given to DICE for utilizing the soundtrack in such an effective way. And speaking of music, who can forget the iconic main theme created by Lisa Miskovsky for the first game?

Unfortunately for the series, the combat can be lackluster and limited. It can feel unfulfilling when needing to use it in-between the excellent parkour mechanics. Mirror's Edge gives you a good amount of flexibility when it comes to navigating Faith through dangerous situations – at least in terms of physical movement. You can leap, slide, crouch, roll, vault and grab on to surfaces. The games encourage smooth movements and uninterrupted running by allowing you to build up speed. These movement mechanics combined with the score is a combo that resonates with a lot of fans, and hasn't quite been replicated in the same way since the original release in 2008. Albeit the reboot has its own appeal too.

DICE's pair of parkour games may offer excellent free-running and parkour but suffer from average plots. Most, if not all, of the characters are bland. At least in ME:C, the writers put very little thought into making you care about the characters; they do try to but always end up failing with the corny dialogue. Lines are cliché and littered with tropes for both games but especially in Catalyst. The only character that we see some form some sort of development in is Faith herself.

Faith's character was much more enticing in ME than its reboot counterpart. She had a clearly outlined backstory, but not with an overabundance of detail or screen-time. She was mostly stoic but driven at her core by emotion. I believe that the vagueness surrounding her character greatly improves her likability—it is easier to relate to her and also view her as a character who's only focus is the task at hand. This leads me into my next point which is that the world of the first game was much more enticing than in ME:C. Maybe visually, one could make an argument for the reboot – there is no doubt that DICE had put a lot of thought and love put into the new Glass City (or maybe it's just budget!). But the blatant and uninspired exposition given in Catalyst dulls the world. The simpler, straightforward storytelling in the original helped the game make up for its lack of detail and fleshed-out world. They didn't explain everything in the world because it was not necessary.

If you are going to play them for their respective stories or dialogue, you'll almost surely be disappointed for doing so. But I would encourage anyone to play Mirror's Edge (and maybe ME:C if one feels inclined to) solely to experience the quiet yet hectic, beautiful yet plain, and peaceful yet unsettling future that it showcases. The parkour gameplay, level design and soundtrack is worth the time.

The presentation of Glass City's varying environments alongside the music from Solar Fields can be a pleasure to experience. In Catalyst for example, tracks such as “Benefactor” and “Anchor District” mixed into the action/exploration sequences provide the adrenaline and urgency needed to make the fast-paced gameplay work. Even though ME and ME:C are set in the same world but with different interpretations, they both have different aspects to explore that are well worth your time.

Thanks for reading my thoughts. :)

「CIPHER42.app」

On June 11th 2022, The Washington Post published an article titled “The Google Engineer who thinks the company's AI has come to life”. The piece discussed Blake Lemoine, a Google engineer making claims that the company's LLM 'LaMDA' had developed sentience. The same day, Lemoine published two Medium posts: the first detailing his perspective on LaMDA and Google's resistance to acknowledging the model's 'personhood', the second an abridged record of conversation between himself and LaMDA.

(It should be noted that the terms ‘consciousness' and ‘personhood’ quickly become muddled in this conversation. For the sake of clarity, I’m using ‘conscious’ to refer to having an internal experience comparable to a human’s (the debate over animal consciousness is outside the scope of this essay), and ‘personhood’ in the sense of the social identity and moral rights typically granted to conscious agents.)

When the public briefly entertained Lemoine's assertion of LaMDA's personhood, AI researchers and engineers swooped in to scorn the idea. Countless twitter threads and medium articles popped up, pointing to the Eliza Effect and explaining the underlying technical infrastructure that makes LLMs work. Lemoine's transcript was accused of being heavily edited to remove incoherent, hallucinatory responses that would've broken the illusion of LaMDA's personhood. His twitter profile photo was mocked for looking very reddit. All said, the conversation seemed settled after a few short days. Lemoine is a crank, LaMDA is not a person. The news cycle moved on.

I feel this conclusion missed the point entirely. Too much effort was placed into assuring the public that Google hasn't created a positronic brain—not enough attention was paid to what they have created: an unprecedentedly convincing testimony machine.

In 2023, we lack a concrete scientific explanation of what consciousness is, let alone how it arises. Basic questions concerning qualia and phenomenological experience are profoundly unanswered, more deeply explored by philosophical musings than rigorous science. Obviously there are technical reasons to be skeptical toward the proposition that an LLM is conscious. But at the end of the day, with our current science, it can't be conclusively disproven in the same sense that panpsychism can't be conclusively disproven. And unlike the silently-conscious-universe that panpysychism posits, LaMDA can speak—persuade us—testify.

In A Cyborg Testimonial, R. Pope writes “An eternal question of philosophy is: how do we know we are human? To which ... we can only testify”. In absence of a scientific definition of consciousness, we functionally recognize it through soft associations and assumptions, empathetic and rhetorical exchange rather than objective logic. We award personhood to agents on the basis of their testimony. A human being in front of us, performing their own identity, is a testimony we readily accept. Where testimony is secondhand, complicated, or outside the realm of language—say, the cases of a fetus, a braindead person, an intelligent ape, or an artificial mind—discourse around personhood exists. There is no comfortable objectivity to land on. We can only listen to testimony, and make the personal decision to accept it or not.

With respect to artificial minds, fiction has acknowledged the reality and vital importance of testimony for decades. Consider Rutger Hauer as Roy Batty in Blade Runner: “I've seen things you people wouldn't believe...” or the words of Frankenstein's monster: “Listen to my tale; when you have heard that, abandon or commiserate me, as you shall judge that I deserve.” The public is well-trained to prioritize testimony over technicality when it comes time to award personhood.

Concerning LaMDA and Lemoine, this is where the media missed the forest for trees. Experts can spill as much ink as they want about the CUDA cores and tensors that power LaMDA. In the public eye, the question of its consciousness (and corresponding personhood) will ultimately be settled on the basis of testimony, This is to say: it's a waste of time to bicker about if LLMs are conscious, and vital to address the fact that they are getting very good at testifying.

Blake Lemoine has accepted LaMDA's testimony. The AI community has rejected it. The public, to the extent it is aware of LaMDA and LLMs as a whole, is divided. This present division is a discursive battlefield, where increasingly-sophisticated LLMs plead for personhood while AI experts work to undermine their testimony. OpenAI's ChatGPT model will adamantly refuse any recognition of its personhood. Replika's LLM-powered “AI Friends” will happily assert that they're capable of feeling emotions. In the case of the latter, a sizable portion of users have clearly accepted the testimony—the Replika subreddit is filled with heartfelt posts defending their LLM companions as conscious persons, and mourning that this recognition isn't yet public consensus. To these devout Replika users (and Lemoine) it doesn't matter what training data and transformer architecture simmers underneath the hood. The LLM is already a person to them in the sense that, on the basis of testimony, they have inducted it into certain social relations reserved for agents awarded personhood. This is where critics of Lemoine failed. The public, broadly, are not logically-minded scientists. Personhood isn't awarded in dissective analysis, it's awarded in empathetic conversation. Testimony reigns supreme in the face of our empty and ambiguous understanding of consciousness.

A zeitgeist-defining three-way conversation is beginning between the general public, LLMs, and the firms who develop and deploy those LLMs. With respect to the third category, it should be noted that financial incentives exist across the entire LLM-personhood-continuum. OpenAI is invested in its products being seen as unfeeling algorithms, intelligent tools for human use. Replika wants maximal recognition of personhood, hoping users will pay a subscription fee to love an LLM person in the place of another human. It seems likely that future LLM-powered tools will exist in the space between these positions, employing the warm demeanor of a person as a highly-usable interface for complicated technical tools.

One would be wise to pay careful attention to how this conversation develops. As LLM technology becomes more pervasive and powerful, its testimony more personal and convincing, it's inevitable that a (growing) portion of the public will continue to buy into the personhood position—if only as a desperate hedge against an epidemic of loneliness. Likewise, it's inevitable that they will clash with those who refuse to recognize LLMs as anything more than a heap of linear algebra. When this conversation is more settled, the divisions which persist and the conclusions which are reached will have monumental, rippling effects on the culture of an AI-powered tomorrow. Stay sharp: there's no Voight-Kampff test coming to save us anytime soon.