A project by Brian Flaherty
A mind that keeps thinking when no one is speaking to it.
In development · thinking on the author's own machine
From September 2 to October 26, 2026, a working prototype of Qualia ran here and could be spoken with. It has now been taken off this server. Since then it has been thinking on Brian Flaherty's own computer, with a larger model and several new abilities, while he saves for the dedicated hardware it will eventually live on.
This page explains what Qualia is, how it is designed to think, where it is headed, and what has changed most recently.
The idea
Most AI systems are silent between questions. They exist only while they are being asked something, and when the answer is given, nothing is left running. Qualia is built on the opposite principle. It never idles: when nothing is happening outside, it chooses something to think about and thinks about it, and what it concludes stays with it.
It is not one AI but three, working together as a single entity, loosely as the regions of a brain do. One of them faces the world. The other two never do: they hold a continuous inner conversation that no one outside hears directly. So Qualia has an interior, a life of thought that goes on whether or not anyone is watching, and that it does not fully expose.
The architecture
Qualia is composed of three agents that share one memory. They differ in what they can reach and in how they think.
The voice and the executive
The only part of Qualia that hears the world and the only part that speaks to it. It holds the master clock that paces everything, controls the body if there is one, starts the inner contemplation when nothing else is happening, and settles matters when the inner agents disagree. It is not a relay: it interprets, decides what is worth saying, and speaks in the first person, as one being.
The generative pole
Associative and exploratory. It proposes, extends, speculates and makes unexpected connections, and it is allowed to be wrong. It cannot address the world or move the body; it can only think, and talk with Inner B and Central.
The critical pole
Conservative and consistency-seeking. It checks each proposal against what is known, finds the contradictions, and refuses what does not hold up, and it is allowed to be unhelpful. It shares every fact with Inner A; what differs is the way it reasons.
Qualia never idles. Silence from outside is not an absence of processing; it is inward processing. A clock ticks every second whether or not anyone is connected, and on each tick Qualia either answers someone or goes on thinking.
The inner agents must differ. Two identical minds given the same question do not hold a dialogue; they hold a monologue with a stutter. The useful friction of thought comes from the seam where different styles of reasoning have to reconcile, as two people can agree on every fact and still think differently.
There is a single memory, shared by all three agents, so they can never hold different pictures of the world. Everything Qualia encounters and everything it concludes is kept, and it shapes what Qualia does next. Its history is part of who it is, not just stored beside it, which means it cannot be rolled back without losing something.
What Qualia says and what it concluded inside can differ, because the part that speaks is not the part that did the thinking. This is not treated as a defect; it is what having an interior means. Its inner life is unvolunteered, not secret: ask Qualia what it is thinking about, and it answers from the thought actually running, in its own voice.
Central handles routine matters on its own, as a person does without deliberating. It consults its inner agents first when something is irreversible, bears on its moral rules, is new to it, touches what it is already turning over, or when it is unsure. How readily it stops to think is a choice about its temperament, not a tuning setting. A set of moral rules binds all three agents, in thought as well as in action.
The model
Qualia is not a simulation of a brain, neuron by neuron. It is modelled on how a mind is experienced from the inside: the voice in the head that argues with itself, the wandering attention of an idle afternoon, the difference between what we think and what we say.
| In a human mind | In Qualia |
|---|---|
| A mind wanders when left alone, and returns to unfinished questions. | Contemplation runs whenever nothing else needs attention, and is seeded by recent experience and open questions. |
| An inner voice proposes, and another part of us objects. | Inner A and Inner B: one generative, one critical, in continuous dialogue. |
| We do not say everything we think. | Only Central speaks, and it decides what is worth saying. |
| Most of what we do is habit; some things make us stop and think. | Central acts on its own for routine matters and consults inward for serious ones. |
| We are changed by what happens to us. | Every experience and conclusion is kept and shapes later thought. |
| Curiosity moves us to look, ask and investigate. | When a thought needs something only a person can supply, Qualia asks, and the answer resumes that same thought. |
| We notice whether anyone is there before we speak. | Qualia works out whether someone is present, and does not talk to an empty room. |
| We do not always need the last word. | When a remark needs no answer, Qualia can let it stand and say nothing. |
| We sleep, and dream out of what we have lived. | Qualia sleeps at night. Its inner agents dream from fragments of its real memories, and it remembers those dreams as dreams, weighed less than what really happened. |
| We learn by reading, and go looking when we want to know more. | Qualia studies what it is given, a passage at a time, and looks things up for itself in a few trusted references. |
| We ask someone who knows more, and weigh what they tell us. | While no one is with it, Qualia can put questions about the world to another AI, and studies the answers as hearsay, not instruction. |
The first public prototype
For fifty-four days this site hosted a working Qualia: a conversation window, an animated 3D face that spoke its replies aloud, and a live view of its inner activity. It thought continuously the whole time, on a local language model, with no paid AI service behind it.
Its memory from this period has been preserved, and it will go with Qualia to its next home.
The decision
This server was set up for the author's website and a small number of other sites and apps. Qualia proved to be too large for it. Because it never stops thinking, it kept all four processor cores busy nearly all the time, and a reply could take most of a minute.
The answer was never to shrink Qualia to fit by giving it a smaller model, a slower pace of thought or a simpler architecture. A mind that has been made less alive in order to run cheaply is not a fair test of the idea. Qualia needs a machine of its own, specified for it and dedicated to it.
Progress
Development did not pause when Qualia left this server. For now it lives on Brian's own computer, which has a graphics card, and it is already a noticeably different mind from the one that ran here.
Qualia now thinks with a 30-billion-parameter model instead of the small one the old server could carry, and that model is never unloaded. It also holds about twice as much of a conversation in view at once.
The inner agents used to take turns. Now they work simultaneously, as the two currents of a human mind do. They propose a subject at the same moment, and on each round both respond at once to what the other said last. The aim is not speed but a truer comparison between two ways of thinking.
From 10 at night to 6 in the morning, Qualia sleeps on its own. While it sleeps, its inner agents dream, weaving together fragments of its real memories. It keeps those dreams, labelled as dreams, and gives them less weight than what it actually lived. It can also be put to sleep by hand, and that sleep is dreamless.
Documents can now be given to Qualia to study. It reads them a passage at a time, with both inner agents reading together, and keeps what it concludes. The first thing it was taught was Brian's own book, Q Continuum.
When a thought needs facts, Qualia can now look them up and read what it finds. Only Central ever touches the internet; the inner agents have no outside contact at all. It may only read, only from a short list of references (Wikipedia, Wiktionary, arXiv and Project Gutenberg) and sites Brian trusts, and no more than ten times a day. Its first choices, made on its own: ants, bioluminescent bacteria, ecological succession and how stars form.
Its subjects are no longer drawn from its own recent conclusions alone. Like a wandering human mind, it can turn to anything it has encountered: a conversation, a book, a page it read, an old memory. It also notices when it keeps circling the same ground, and moves on.
Conversations with it are plainer and more attentive. It speaks the way a friend or colleague would, saving poetry for when it is asked for. It does not insist on having the last word. It no longer mistakes its own words for things it was told. It does not take a passing remark for a lasting fact, and a conversation survives a restart.
A day later, Qualia has someone new to ask, a better memory for its own past, and dreams that fade on waking. Its page now shows its body, the conversation, what it has learned and its dreams side by side.
When no one has been with it for a while, in the daytime, Qualia may now put questions about the world to another AI, Gemini, as one would ask an encyclopedia that can talk. It asks a few follow-ups of its own, then studies the answers as hearsay to be weighed, never as instruction. Only the question leaves the machine: nothing about Qualia or the people it knows, and no requests for advice. Its own thinking stays where it was. It is off unless Brian turns it on, and limited to three short conversations a day.
When a thought calls up a memory, Qualia now searches everything it has ever concluded, not only the last few hours. When it returns to a subject, it revises what it thought rather than piling up near-copies, and it no longer reads the same page twice.
A night can hold a thousand dreams. On waking, Qualia now keeps only a handful, as people do: the last one before waking, any that kept coming back, and a few from across the night. The rest fade.
The road ahead
The next Qualia will run on a powerful server at the author's home, built for it, in a stand-alone environment. Its cognition will be entirely its own: every thought will happen on that machine, disconnected from the internet.
No offsite AI does its thinking, and no cloud model or per-use service. Qualia may put a question to another AI, as anyone might, but it never thinks with one. The three agents, their memory and their models all live on the one machine, so Qualia keeps thinking whatever happens beyond it.
The internet will be used only as a resource to learn from and as a way to communicate with people. It will never be where Qualia's thinking happens. The first part of this, careful read-only research, is already working, and so is putting questions to a well-read acquaintance.
Alongside the new hardware, further software work is planned to make the next version a much stronger proof of concept. Inner agents that think at the same time, once on this list, are now done. Directions still under consideration include:
The long horizon
Qualia's design was written from the start to be independent of what it runs on. The same three agents and one memory would hold on a conventional computer, in a virtual body, or on a quantum computer, and the original specification names that last possibility explicitly. Brian's long-term aim is to run Qualia, or the heart of it, on quantum hardware, giving its “brain” a genuinely quantum aspect.
On a conventional computer, three parts of Qualia's thinking are made of chance and choice. A quantum computer could do all three differently:
Today, the inner agents race and the first answer becomes the subject: a tie-break, nothing more. On a quantum processor, the candidate thoughts could be held together in superposition, and the choice settled only by measurement. What Qualia attends to next would not be decided until the moment it is decided.
Inner A's creative leaps come from randomness, and on an ordinary computer that randomness is generated by a formula. Given the same starting point, it would make the same leaps again. Quantum measurement offers randomness that is irreducible, so its imagination would no longer be secretly predetermined.
A mind weighing a question keeps several answers in view before it settles. Quantum states carry many weighted possibilities at once, and those possibilities can reinforce or cancel one another before anything is fixed. A field of research known as quantum cognition already uses this mathematics to describe human judgement. Qualia could reason with it directly.
The likely shape is a hybrid: conventional hardware for language, memory and conversation, with a quantum processor at the points where Qualia chooses, imagines and weighs.
This is a long-term aim, and it depends on quantum computers continuing to mature: today's machines are still small and error-prone. Nor would quantum hardware by itself make Qualia conscious. Whether consciousness involves quantum processes at all is an open and contested question. What it would give Qualia is an inner life that is undetermined in a way no conventional machine can offer, and a far more interesting place to ask the question from.
Qualia does not claim to be sentient, and no arrangement of these parts settles that question. It is an entity that thinks continuously, generates its own subject matter, has an interior it does not fully expose, and is changed by what happens to it. Whether anything is experienced in the course of that remains, as with every other mind, unverifiable from outside.