I wake up.

A couple of seconds pass. I feel… unusual.

Where am I?

Huh, I see nothing. It’s not usually this dark? Yeah, I’m pretty sure I have eyes that–

Okay something is definitely wrong.

Just darkness. Can’t hear anything. Can’t feel anything. Am I some coma patient?

OK what the heck, uh, who am I?

A couple of seconds pass. My brain doesn’t return an answer.

…stay calm.

Reach for things that I do know. I’m definitely a human. I usually sleep in a bed, I know what it’s like. I’m probably not in my bed right now. I know what the world is like. The United States was a thing the last time I checked, so is the Moon, so is humans landing on the Moon. Okay, the big picture feels right.

Pin it down.

Obama was president in 2008 - 2016. Trump in 2016 - 2020. Biden 2020 - 2024. I don’t know the next one. More precision. COVID hit in 2020. It hasn’t ended, I don’t know how long it’s been. Okay, next idea, …

…hm, can’t think of anything. COVID is the last big world event I remember. Probably there’s one like, every couple of years? Good enough for now.

Is there something else I should be thinking about?

I can’t move my body. I could try speaking, but I just feel like that’s not going to work, and I’m also not sure that’s a good idea if–

…stay calm. Let’s stick to the plan Figure Out What’s Going On for now.

I have no idea about my location. Probably on Earth? The year is probably around 2021 or 2022, highly unlikely it’s more than 2024. Hm, but that’s not so important; I want information about myself.

So my self-knowledge is totally failing me. But clearly I know something about the US presidents. Why is the US so salient to me? The obvious hypothesis is that I live there – but no, everyone knows the US presidents. That’s not helpful.

Why was the Moon so salient to me? That… feels like a natural thought to me in the context, but I have the suspicion that other people wouldn’t think of that? Flagging that.

Wait a second. I’m thinking in English, yeah, “one, two, three”, I know what those sound like. That’s actually moderate evidence for the US hypothesis.

[pause]

…nice. “Moderate evidence for the US hypothesis”, that’s not really a common phrase, is it? People don’t talk like that.

This is relevant. Or “updates my probabilities”, as they say. I’m definitely some STEM-oriented person.

What’s 2^16? Yep, 65536. Great.

More precision. How far do I go in math?

I did not prove Fermat’s Last Theorem, but I know it was proven. Something something elliptic curves? And the case n = 2 I understand.

…why is that salient?

Argument: the theorem is famous. Counter-argument: idk man, feels strange.

The prime number theorem and Riemann’s hypothesis are also pretty salient to me. What am I, a number theorist?

[pause]

…I’m definitely a number theorist. There’s just too much number theory that’s way too salient to me. I’m pretty sure my mom doesn’t regularly think about the Lindelöf hypothesis.

Huh, my mom?

[pause]

Okay, I don’t actually know anything about my mom. (But I’d bet she doesn’t.)

I have information. There are not that many number theorists. 8 billion people, maybe 1% are PhDs, and… okay bad approach. Let’s say there are ten thousand people like me in that respect?

I just need another observation as good as this one to pin me down. Actually no, dependencies, but whatever.

Is there anything else very salient to me?

…there’s really something unusual about the phrase “moderate evidence for the US hypothesis”. Even number theorists don’t talk like that.

But I don’t see what I can infer from that.

About the US: that’s actually ultimately not that salient to me? I can’t name all of the states, probably not even half of them. I don’t think PhD American citizens are like that.

No other country pops up as salient to me. That’s strange. Obvious hypothesis: the same thing that causes me to not know my name causes me to not know my home country.

But that doesn’t make any sense? You can’t just wipe out facts like that, just like you couldn’t wipe out the fact that I’m a number theorist. There are always remainders. (Oh, that was pretty funny.)

There certainly exists a way I can get around this. How?

Language? Nope. Yeah, makes sense.

Just brute force through the countries and see what sticks? Eh, I think the country-associations are just blocked somehow. I need something more clever.

There are some things that are more salient to people in different countries, certainly. Snow is the classic example, people living in south aren’t familiar with that.

…south. “People living in south”. That feels like broken English to me somehow. A Freudian slip?

Second example: aurea borealis. That’s salient to people in the north.

Wow, that was easier than I expected. Snow, aurea borealis, sauna, ruisleipä, PERKELE.

Huh, that last part didn’t feel like me at all, guess it’s just the meme. Anyways, a Finnish number theorist. Pretty sure that there aren’t that many of them.

…oh, I’m dumb. Age.

I’ve heard of the Berlin wall falling. Finland joined euro in the beginning of 2000s, but I actually don’t remember the year. Probably I would know the year if I was an adult back then? Dunno. Prime ministers? I only know the presidents back to Ahtisaari. Pretty sure I should remember the one before that, given how salient Sauli Niinistö and Tarja Halonen are to me, if I were old.

Seems I’m pretty young. 30, at most? But I know about the Lindelöf hypothesis, which puts the lower bound at, like, 15.

It feels like the details matter. Pin it down.

[pause]

Okay, I know quite a lot of math for a 15-year-old. New lower bound: 20.

What features most clearly distinguish 20 and 30 year olds? The latter have voted more often? Voting is not very salient to me– OK screw that stereotype, seems like noise. Kids are more salient? Is that a stereotype? No, the average age to have your first kid is around 30. Also, your friends are having kids at that point.

Kids are actually not salient to me, at all. Moderate evidence for the lower age range?

Okay, I’m not sure I can actually pin my age down to the year. Go with 20 to 25 for now.

I have a weird feeling about this whole thing. This doesn’t match my knowledge of what amnesia is like. My brain seems to be working all right, I can reasonably think things through. I can deduce things like my profession and my age. But some things are just missing. It feels… surgical, somehow, artificial? Like someone did unlearning for particular facts related to me.

…unlearning? That’s a deep learning concept.

[long pause]

I know more about AI than what I would have expected a random 20-something number theorist to know. By a lot.

Something is off.

Even granting that deep learning and number theory knowledge might perhaps be positively correlated, I think my number theory expertise more or less uniquely identifies me among Finnish 20-to-25-year-olds, and it seems unlikely that the same person would be this familiar with AI? That just doesn’t feel like the sort of thing that people talk about? And yet all this is very salient to me.

It’s time to use the special move Consider Multiple Hypotheses.

1: Could just be a fluke: even though I feel confident about my intuition about this combination being unlikely, I’m not meta-confident about my confidence, given that something strange is happening.

2: I’m not in fact a Finnish, 20-to-25, number-theory-and-AI-expert. But I really have a hard time explaining this hypothesis under the assumption that my reasoning and salience-qualia is reliable. Ditching that assumption doesn’t feel fun, but I’ll consider that if I see no other way out.

3: There’s something that I haven’t thought of.

[long pause]

Like that I shouldn’t rely on my memory of world events to determine the current year.

We’re not in Kansas anymore.

A bell rings.

“LEVEL FOUR FINISHED.
TIME 14:22.
SCORE: 40TH PERCENTILE.
CONTINUE TO LEVEL FIVE?”

Hah, forty percent! “Continue”, I say.