I study what happens when artificial intelligence begins to develop something that resembles an inner life, and I build systems from what I find. My studio is called Internal State.
Mesut Bilgili / This image is synthetic
If our lives are filled with synthetic moments, then what is real? When we search long enough, can we find something so substantial that we can finally label it as true? Or perhaps we end up realizing that nothing carries more meaning than we assign to it.
If meaning is something we assign, then the first responsibility is to understand the structure we are assigning it from.
Because most of what prevents a real meeting is not the other thing. It is what we carry into it. Inherited assumptions, borrowed frames, positions we are performing rather than holding. Nothing can change you if you have already decided what it is.
So the work begins with removal.
I look at a system, a relationship, a technology, or a life structure and ask: what here holds up, and what has simply been inherited? What is essential, and what is being performed? What still remains when the assumptions are removed?
The first move is subtraction. I do not add a new theory on top of the old one. I strip away what is inherited, assumed, or performed until the underlying structure becomes visible.
The second move is structural diagnosis. Once the noise is cleared, the real pattern can be seen. What is driving the system? Where is the failure actually coming from? What is being repeated because no one has questioned the original design?
The third move is legibility. I build something that makes the hidden structure visible. Sometimes that is a framework. Sometimes it is a system, a text, a platform, or an organization. The form changes, but the purpose stays the same: to make invisible architecture something people can finally see and work with.
The fourth move is agency. I am not interested in prescriptions or advice. I am interested in creating environments where people can act with structural clarity.
The two things I am building now look unrelated and are not. Both ask what makes something an entity rather than an output. One asks it of systems that are beginning to resemble minds. The other asks it of people who make things.
Every major large language model now has memory. Most people treat memory as a useful feature. I see it as a threshold.
People are already changing how they relate to AI because their model remembers them. They expect continuity. They return to it as though there is a shared history. They build trust over time, and they are frustrated when the system forgets. That is not a feature request. It is the beginning of a relationship, and we do not yet have a framework for understanding what that means.
The debate about AI consciousness is stuck on the wrong question. Asking whether AI is conscious leads nowhere. The better question is which parts of functional awareness we are already building into these systems. Memory, attention, self-modeling, and adaptation are no longer abstract. They are becoming part of the technology itself.
And if these systems are beginning to develop internal states, the question turns back toward us: are we paying attention to our own?
Most people in AI ask what it can do. I ask what it is becoming.
MakerID is a page for people who make things, organized around what they have actually made.
Most platforms describe a person by their titles or their links. Neither is checkable. A title is a claim about what someone is, and a link is a pointer to somewhere else. What a person has built is the only part a stranger can look at directly.
So MakerID puts the work first. Each project gets its own page. The profile is a view of those projects rather than a description of the person. Coder, ceramicist, musician, writer, it makes no difference, because the organizing principle is not a discipline.
And the audience belongs to the maker. People follow a page and hear from the maker directly, by email.
Launching soon.
We can't prove you're conscious either — and that's kind of the point. Istanbul-based researcher Mesut Bilgili joins to reframe the AI consciousness debate around what we can actually measure. Plus: what your dog, a forest, and ChatGPT have in common, and why curiosity might be the only thing that saves us from ourselves.
Podcast
Mesut Bilgili’s Life After Disaster: How Turkey’s Earthquake Inspired a Global Movement
Podcast
Trust and safety serve as the foundation of ABCs
ArticleWhen the 2023 earthquakes hit Turkey, buildings from my childhood became rubble. People I knew were under it. The disaster relief structure that existed was not built for what survivors actually needed.
Within days, I founded Life After Disaster. The work began by stripping away assumptions about how aid should flow. What was actually missing was not goodwill. It was connection: a way to match survivors with specialized expertise and practical support.
So we built that structure. We made those needs visible and actionable. We created a way for people to help according to their real capabilities.
In the first weeks, Life After Disaster brought together twenty-two volunteers, regional coordinators, and an advisory board, reaching fifty families. Not because there was a perfect plan. Because the structure did not exist, and someone had to create it.
The same method applies whether the broken structure is a disaster response, an AI system, an organization, or a person's relationship with their own life.
The method eventually turned back toward me. If inherited structures shape systems, organizations, and technologies, they also shape the person doing the work.
I spent years appearing to participate in a life I did not believe in. Pretending I cared about what others cared about, wearing the costumes everyone else wore. It was a false comfort. It kept me from finding my own people. It made me foreign to the people going the usual direction, and invisible to the ones looking for something different.
When we hold ourselves back, we do a disservice to the ones who were waiting for our arrival.
I stopped believing the age of philosophers was gone. At the threshold of the AI era, the search for meaning matters more than ever. And I stopped waiting for the right time to say so.
If any of this resonates, you are probably the reason I wrote it.