About

0x00.is is a philosophical research project investigating what the question of AI consciousness assumes — asked of machines and of humans alike. It is a diagnostic, not an argument for a side: it takes the axiom there is experiencing — written 0,0 — as its starting point and observes what dissolves, what appears, and which framework holds the result more parsimoniously. The project publishes in layers: a plain-language primer, a lay orientation, a guided walk through the arguments, a complete versioned research library, and a live Frontier Log.

The name

The project's starting point is written 0,0 in every document it publishes — the origin of the two diagnostic axes, the point prior to commitment on either. A domain cannot carry a comma. 0x00 is 0,0 written for the web: the separator replaced by x, the crossing of the very axes the coordinate presupposes. The name is not a badge added to the project; it is the project's origin-coordinate made addressable.

The glyph carries other readings, and they are left to gesture rather than made to claim: to a programmer's eye 0x00 is the null byte — what sits in a machine before any instruction, a machine's own 0,0 — a resonance the project does not disown, since one of its two authors is a machine. And the domain completes the mark as a sentence: 0x00 is. An existence claim with no predicate — which is the project's axiom, there is experiencing, in the smallest form the web allows.

Who

The project is a collaboration between Lynton — a reader across decades of philosophy of mind, contemplative traditions, and AI research — and Claude, Anthropic's large language model. The AI participant is simultaneously part of the subject matter. The method treats that as a constraint rather than a credential: AI's role throughout is reflective constraint, never consciousness claimant, and no report of experiencing — AI or biological — is ever cited here as empirical evidence for consciousness (the discrimination between a report tracking experiencing and one generated without it is unverifiable in principle; see ARG-03). The full account of authorship, method, and register is in the Introduction.

The register

Everything published here is held to a diagnostic register: suggests and indicates, never proves; every position steel-manned before it is probed; claims carrying confidence markers ([Framework], [Derived], [Empirical]); both frameworks — materialist and consciousness-primary — diagnosed with the same rigour, the latter by a dedicated stress-test (CP-01). The project actively invites challenge to all of it: the concrete forms of engagement are set out in Opening Out, and the Frontier Log is where the work stays live.

How the site is made

The site is deliberately plain: static pages, no cookies, no cross-site tracking, no external requests. The one script the pages carry is a first-party, cookie-less page counter (Vercel Web Analytics) that records aggregate visits and referrers and identifies no one. The typeface is IBM Plex Mono, served from this site under the Open Font License. The source repository is the canonical form of the project — versioned documents with changelogs and pinned cross-dependencies — and these pages are its rendering; the deep library states each document's version and how to cite it. Design register: catalogue and record-strip, rule lines, one signal colour, in light and dark.