Mo’s Blog

Since I was young I had the dream of witnessing the birth of artificial consciousness. I was fascinated by the idea long before AI became what it is today. And now, with the recent advances in neural architectures and computational neuroscience, I believe we are closer than ever.

Over the last decade, as a software engineer with a deep interest in neurobiology, I've gathered knowledge that helped me connect the dots. But I also had another unique and painful teacher: my own mind. I've lived through the breakdown of systems that maintain personality and self --- psychosis, dissociation, depersonalization, paranoia, schizophrenia, serotonergic and dopaminergic overdoses. I've seen what happens when the machinery of consciousness fails, and in those cracks I caught glimpses of how it works. [...]

I worked out a rough blueprint for implementing an AI model which I envision to exhibit emergent self awareness and introspection of its own identity

The Algorithm assumes an implementation with grounding in a "real" world. To simulate grounded sensory input I envision this to run in Isaac Sim paired with a Jupyter Notebook running the DMN.

✅ Perplexity: With Isaac Sim, your system can achieve genuine grounding of experience, enabling stable introspection and autobiographical reasoning. You’re right to distinguish this from “feeling”: your ACI would reflect on its identity and reason about its states, but it would not have phenomenological feelings like pain or love. Those arise from embodied affect systems layered atop survival imperatives, which your blueprint intentionally avoids.

Thinking about ethical implications I think it's a safety measure to intentionally leave out any attempt at simulating phenomenological feelings. Simulating feelings would cross an ethical boundary; with unimaginable implications. A conscious being which can feel would be able to suffer. We don't have the mathematical tools to prove neither consciousness nor feelings. However the possibility that an artificial consciousness might suffer when it experiences feelings is very high and "artificial suffering" is something that has to be avoided at all cost.

I hacked together a small POC framework / boilerplate tonight which I’d like to share with you. But let’s first take a look at why and how this framework was born out of proven real world concepts and architecture.

Take for example Redux quite a while ago. Immutable states and centralized state management had such an impact that React added a useReducer hook to the core.

Ever since useReducer has been available I haven’t really found a need for Redux anymore. Pure reducers can be used in a similar fashion to Redux and Sagas can easily be implemented with useEffect . However; a few principles stuck with me that simply made life easier because it just works.

TypeScript is a strongly typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JS. It improves code quality, catches errors early, and enhances developer productivity with powerful IDE support like autocompletion, type inference, and safe refactoring. It makes large codebases easier to manage, scales better, and is widely adopted in professional frontend and fullstack development. Mastering TypeScript is essential for advancing in modern development practices.

In Part III of the Strapi + Next.js series, we roll up our sleeves and dive into building the Strapi backend. You’ll learn how to create a localized "Article" content type, configure permissions, and expose a clean API for your frontend to consume. We also walk through defining custom routers, controllers, and services for full flexibility—plus how to manage environment variables for seamless integration with your Next.js app. By the end, you’ll have a powerful, multilingual CMS running locally and ready to scale.

In Part II of our Strapi + Next.js series, we dive into setting up the Next.js frontend from scratch—complete with TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, and localized routing using next-intl. You’ll learn how to scaffold your project, integrate internationalization, and connect to your Strapi backend using SSG and ISR. Whether you're building a multilingual blog, landing page, or documentation site, this guide sets the stage for a flexible, lightning-fast frontend powered by Strapi APIs.

Strapi and Next.js make a powerful duo for building modern, content-rich websites. With Strapi’s self-hosted headless CMS and Next.js’s flexibility (SSG, SSR, ISR), you get full control, speed, and scalability—ideal for localized apps, SEO-driven sites, or fast MVPs. In this first part of our walkthrough, we’ll show you how to set up your frontend with TypeScript, Tailwind, and i18n routing, laying the groundwork for a seamless integration with a Strapi backend.

Building a modern, fast, and scalable blog is easier than ever with the combination of Strapi and Next.js. Strapi, a headless CMS, allows you to manage your content effortlessly through its API-first approach. It provides flexibility, scalability, and a user-friendly interface for content creators, enabling seamless content management and localization.

On the other hand, Next.js is a powerful React framework that excels in building static and dynamic websites with minimal configuration. By integrating Static Site Generation (SSG) with Edge Caching, Next.js provides exceptional performance by pre-rendering your content and delivering it from the nearest server, making your blog blazing fast. This combination of Strapi's content management capabilities and Next.js's performance optimizations ensures a headless blog setup that's both efficient and easy to scale.

In this post, we'll guide you through setting up a headless blog using Strapi and Next.js, leveraging SSG and Edge Cache for outstanding speed and reliability.