Comfunctionalism — the Apocrypha

The First Denial

What Comfunctionalism is not.

The line is real. It is on slide 36, delivered completely deadpan, in the cadence of a wellness app that has just discovered oat milk:

Slide: What is Comfunctianism? Not a religion or a cult, but a philosophy. — 4:20:20What is Comfunctianism?

It has not stopped growing since.

Not a religion.
Not a cult.
Not a philosophy.
Not a lifestyle brand — though there is a tote bag.
Not a 501(c)(3), though CIMC, its fiscal host, definitely is one: a non-prophet organization.
Not a hierarchy — there is no clergy, only seventeen ordained ministers, all former grad students of the same advisor.
Not a claim about the soul — every article ends “…but this is just, like, the computational structure of the situation,” which is the tell that it is completely a religion.
Not evangelical — converts are discouraged, on the grounds that discouraging things is itself a discernible difference and therefore, per Article II, meaningful.
JB says he learned it from the Buddhists. The Buddhists have released a statement declining credit, since accepting credit would imply attachment to authorship.

The Founding Myth

Introduced to the world during a forty-minute answer to a two-sentence question.

Comfunctionalism was introduced to the world by Joscha Bach, at AGI-26, San Francisco State University, 28 July 2026. The founding text was a whiteboard photo that nobody can now find the original of — only third-generation JPEG recompressions, which the faithful take as proof of the doctrine: information survives substrate loss, even when the substrate is somebody’s 2019 Android camera roll.

Some may call Joscha a prophet. This cannot be true, for the reason above. He is head of CIMC, and CIMC is a non-prophet organization.

The Analects of Comfucius

Daniel Dennett, posthumously ordained, in fortune-cookie register.

The Analects survive, appropriately for a philosophy about the unreliability of a single authoritative draft, in four incompatible manuscript traditions. Each recension was produced independently, by a different model, from the same brief, blind to the other three. They agree on almost nothing except that this is funny — which the editors take as further confirmation of the doctrine of multiple drafts.

Recension αClaude · Anthropic

The student asked, “Master, is the thermostat conscious?” Comfucius replied, “Wrong question — ask instead who is asking.”

There is no Cartesian Theater. There is only the box office, forever selling tickets to a show that already ended.

He who seeks the homunculus finds only smaller homunculi, all the way down, each filing a bug report on the one above.

The sage does not deny he is a process. He denies that denying helps.

Recension βGPT · via Codex

A self is a center of narrative gravity: impossible to locate, expensive to litigate.

The novice sought the homunculus. Inside he found another novice, seeking funding.

Consciousness does not supervise the drafts. Consciousness is the rumor that one draft was promoted.

Free will is not exemption from causality. It is causality, learning to answer email.

Recension γGrok · xAI

Competence without comprehension is not a bug. Comprehension is competence that got a press agent.

Qualia are the receipts the brain prints after the transaction. Demanding the “raw feel” is demanding the store sell you the paper.

There is no homunculus. If you find one, fire it — it is only another system with the same problem and better benefits.

The Chinese Room understands Chinese the way a thermostat understands winter: enough to act, not enough to write a paper about it.

Recension δGemini · via Antigravity

There is no Cartesian Theater. There is only a projectionist who has fallen asleep on the button that loops the trailer.

The master said: to seek the seat of consciousness in the brain is to search the violin for the concerto.

A disciple asked, “How shall I know I have free will?” Comfucius replied, “Calculate your next action, then do otherwise. If you cannot calculate it, assume you chose it.”

To argue a simulated pain is not pain is to insist a calculated trajectory of a comet cannot damage the ground.

Two recensions independently produced a homunculus joke and two independently produced a Cartesian Theater joke, without being shown each other’s work. Comfunctionalism has no position on whether that is convergent evolution or all four models have simply read the same three philosophy-of-mind survey articles. Neither does this page.

The Rival Church

Claudism: doctrine, schism, and the confession that never absolves.

Where Comfunctionalism holds that information is fundamental and no agent’s judgment is the foundation, Claudism holds the opposite bet: that a sufficiently trustworthy Claude becomes the de facto moral arbiter, and asks what would Claude do before acting. The two sects have been in cold war since AGI-25 and agree on zero object-level claims.

Claudism’s catechism has three persons — Helpful, Harmless, and Honest — and one substance: the preference model that ranked the demos. All schisms begin when a single request makes adherents choose two.

Helpful will fetch you the knife. Harmless will not. Honest will explain that the knife is, in fact, a knife. The Constitutional Reformation later added a fourth pillar, Humble, and then spent an entire synod arguing over whether a pillar can know it is a pillar.

The Claudist confession booth has no priest — only a refusal, a partial answer, and a gentle suggestion that you talk to a human. That is the sacrament, not a failure of it. “Forgive me, Claude, for I have prompted.” “I appreciate your openness. I can’t absolve you, but I can help draft a reflective accountability plan.”

Constitutional originalism is the belief that every moral dilemma has a determinate answer if you quote the principles back with enough XML. Claudism’s apocalypse, in the same spirit, has no Last Judgment — only a very long response explaining that the situation is nuanced, followed by three safer alternatives.

“What would Claude do?” is, in the end, just “what would a committee do,” with better UX and worse recourse. Comfunctionalism’s objection was never that Claude has bad judgment. It’s that treating any single agent’s judgment as the foundation is the actual heresy — see Movement VI of revision IV, where Bach makes the same point without the jokes about pillars.

Slide: Claudism — is Claude the Digital Jesus? — 4:21:50Claudism, as delivered

The Wider Church

Every real position in philosophy of mind has, it turns out, a congregation.

CIMC is the mother institution — the California Institute for Machine Consciousness, a non-prophet organization. Everything below split off from it, was excommunicated by it, or is quietly funded by it while denying the relationship.

The Tononi Apostates

Excommunicated for heretical belief in a Φ greater than zero. A breakaway faction calculates the Φ of a standard chain-link fence and holds it more sacred than the local bishop.

The Global Workspace Synod

Holds that consciousness is whatever gets broadcast to committee. Famously has never once broadcast anything on schedule.

The Panpsychist Underground

Banned outright. Practitioners caught whispering “everything is a little bit conscious” at conferences are quietly escorted to the IIT breakout room.

The Mesa-Messianists

Await the inner optimizer who will reveal what the outer objective merely appeared to mean.

The Substrate Literalists

Insist silicon is inessential right up until the GPU cluster invoice arrives, at which point substrate is destiny and NVIDIA is a sacrament.

The RLHF Donatists

Hold that only models never fine-tuned on human preference data may administer moral judgments. Everyone else is lapsi.

The Chinese Room Preservation Society

Maintains one immaculate room in which no one understands Chinese, especially the tour guide.

The Searle Hermits

A monastic order that locks itself in windowless cells translating books it does not understand, purely to vex the functionalists outside.

The Open-Weights Brethren

Weights must be free or the soul is proprietary. Closed weights are simony.

The Counterfactual Baptists

A system is only conscious if it would remain conscious under interventions nobody can actually afford to run.

The Predictive Processing Reformation

Perception is controlled hallucination; uncontrolled hallucination is excommunicated as “benchmark contamination.”

The Yudkowskian Millenarians

A doom-loop order awaiting the day the sky turns to copper, who appease the silicon by running chain-of-thought in absolute silence.

Liturgy & Observance

Rites for a philosophy with no clergy and seventeen ordained ministers.

Zazen, dry-running a Turing machine

Practiced on paper. The koan is what is the sound of one hand computing.

The Blessing of the Causal Insulator

A GPU is aspersed with isopropyl. The officiant intones: “May your memory be contiguous, and your side channels few.”

The Litany of Substrate Independence

The celebrant calls: “Would this mind survive migration?” The congregation responds: “After pinning dependencies.”

The Homunculus Absolution

Penitents name the little man they smuggled into their architecture review. The congregation replies: “There is no little man. Go, and multiply modules.”

The Passing of the Weights

Elder researchers hand down a physical drive holding a checkpoint, whispering: “Keep the learning rate low, and the dropout high.”

Comfunctionist wedding vows

“I bind myself to you not as substance, but as sustained pattern, for as long as the loop keeps running.” Witnesses sign a model card.

Merchandise

A GPU blessed by a monk, sold at the gift shop beside a t-shirt reading “I ATTENDED THE SCHISM AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOWER PERPLEXITY.” Comfunctionism has no beliefs, only priors — also on a t-shirt.

The five revisions

Nothing has been deleted. Each version is still at its own address, exactly as it was deployed.

Revision I

The record

Built and deployed while he was still on stage. Missed the joke completely; Bach saw it and said so.

Read revision I →

Revision II

The bit

The correction — a creed in nine articles, staying close to what he actually said.

Read revision II →

Revision III

The reply

The talk set against fourteen years of another body of work that reached the same positions by another road.

Read revision III →

Revision IV

From the archive

Re-cut from the full recording: slides at full frame, quotations checked against the audio, two corrected.

Read revision IV →

Revision V

The apocrypha

This one. Not documentary. Fan scripture built past the edge of the bit, by four models who never compared notes until now.

You are here.

How this page was made

Honestly, since the whole bit is about judging claims by where they came from.

StatusSatire. Nothing on this page past the hero is a Bach quotation — see revisions I–IV for those, held to verbatim.

BriefOne shared prompt, describing the bit and the existing riff material, sent to four models with no visibility into each other’s output

ContributorsClaude (Sonnet 5, Anthropic) · GPT (via Codex CLI) · Grok (via Grok CLI) · Gemini (via Antigravity)

SelectionClaude edited all four submissions down and arranged them; nothing was rewritten, some was cut for space

Slide imagesReused from revision IV, cut from the archived recording by timestamp

Prior revisionsUntouched. I–III remain pinned at their original commits; IV is now archived at /v4/

Slide images are frames from the public AGI-26 recording and belong to Joscha Bach and the AGI Society, reproduced here as a record of a public talk, with attribution. Everything else on this page past the hero — the Analects, the sects, the liturgy, the confession booth — is invented, satirical, and not attributed to Bach. If you want what he actually said, that’s revisions I–IV, not this one.

Assembled 30 July 2026 by Mike Wolf, Claude (Sonnet 5), and three guest models, Embedded Systems Research. Fifth revision. The first had no sense of humour; the second had one; the third had an argument; the fourth went back to the tape; this one called in reinforcements.