What is your favourite colour? Mine is blue. A deep, dark sapphire blue. But why? I don't know — not scientifically. Or maybe you don't have a favourite colour — can you explain why not?

So many things about human experience and consciousness are not easily explained by the science we have. Science can broadly trace how wavelengths become signals in the brain and then connect it to a pleasure centre. Or perhaps my colourblindness plays a role. I see blue better than most colours. A genetic predisposition? Culturally ingrained associations? The most honest scientific answer is: we do not know. Science knows some mechanisms. It cannot predict or derive my favourite colour. Yet, I am certain I like blue.

This inability to fully explain conscious experience in modern terms remains, to me, the most unsatisfying part of science. And it is not just colour preferences.
The same inability applies to complex emotions, intricate patterns of thought, and the pull of intuition on even the most rational minds.

They Say ‘Myth is Dead’

Language grows as we learn. The first languages, we can assume, began by naming a few things essential for survival, and as we discovered more of the world, we gained new names for it.

Take DNA. Something so essential to our lives, named only in the twentieth century, and now common in daily conversation. We all use the acronym, yet only a small proportion of the general population could say it stands for deoxyribonucleic acid. For a biochemist the name is informative; it alludes to the chemical structure.
For everyone else, it means nothing. The name says nothing about the function, the shape, or the context of the thing it points to.

Now imagine we had named it differently. Compound names are practical: they let us build complexity while staying simple. Instead of deoxyribonucleic acid, suppose we called it seed-code. Ten syllables become two. Chemical structure becomes something easy to conceptualise. Something difficult to pronounce becomes something
a child could remember. The same phenomenon, renamed, and suddenly it carries its own meaning — that is how a noun shapes the space around it.

Perhaps we chose the path of specificity to align with our increasing focus on science. Perhaps it is simply an inevitable feature of how language evolves. Either way, it reflects a certain idea of intelligence — a word for every thing. But specificity has a cost. The more precisely a word points at one domain, the less it can reach across
to any other. Deoxyribonucleic acid belongs to chemistry; seed-code could speak to biology, to writing, to inheritance, to myth. According to theories of linguistic relativity, language does not merely describe our thinking — it shapes it. A vocabulary built entirely of sealed, single-domain terms could train us out of the connections between them.

Before the scientific revolution, most metaphysical traditions sought the opposite: a language that connects. Symbolism, art, poetry, mythology — each of these seeks
to bind concepts across domains. Mars was not just a planet, but also a god of war.

The Codex

I built the Star Heart Codex in the spirit of those older traditions: a closed system that could name every phenomenon we experience through a simple set of archetypes. In all honesty, that was not the goal when I began. I wanted a way to sift through the noise of modern reality, its sheer complexity. I never expected to arrive at a full symbolic system.

I should be clear that the Codex is not against complexity. I believe the balance between the specific and the broad is precisely what we need — science and myth are not opposites, but synergetic. Over a decade of research across every domain I could cognitively reach (and a lens for all reality cannot exclude much), the system slowly fell into place. I designed a lens, but I had also inadvertently written a language, an ethics, a philosophy of mind, and something close to a religion.

Put simply, the Codex runs on twelve Elementals, a complete set for describing anything you might experience. So far I have built bridges with language, psychology, ethics, philosophy, AI, sociology, religion, chemistry, music, and astronomy. I am certain there are more to build.

I understand how unusual this might sound. In our culture that prizes specific language, clean boundaries between domains, and intellectual refinement, a system that claims to bridge music and chemistry falls outside of known categories. We all know music is nothing like chemistry. The goal is not to equate them. The goal is to build
a system that can hold and describe both of them in simple language without losing the essence of each in the process. Let me demonstrate.

All the Colours of a Mind

Return to the colour I began with. In the Codex, preference, the perception of difference, colour as a perceptual category, and surface all map to the Elemental №3 called Eye-1. Similarly, the colour blue is mapped to Water in the Codex, Elemental №4. Darkness and intensity would best fit under Elemental №8, called Ice.

In Codex terms, my love of sapphire translates to: my Eye-1 is inclined toward Water and Ice. Or even shorter: my E3 strongly maps to E4 & E8. It hands me simple words, even equation-style statements, that connect a preference for one colour to something general about how I perceive. And in my case it is true: I am drawn to that same intensity and depth in art, in literature, in design. Sapphire is the colour of my mind.

We could go further. Some will think a favourite colour is a trivial thing — a question for dating profiles, a little frivolous, childish, empty. Here the Codex would note something about that fact itself. It notes that Eye-1 is being dismissed — and since the Codex assumes we each carry all twelve Elementals, to wave away Eye-1 is
to wave away a real part of oneself. It offers a mirror: if the question of colour touches nothing in you, perhaps that E3 principle is insufficiently integrated in you. In other words, the system would prompt ‘Why do you think a favourite colour is silly? Perhaps you have been too serious.’

While the Codex was taking shape, another total system was quietly arriving in the world: artificial intelligence.

The ambition is oddly shared — both the Codex and AI reach for a system that can describe everything. The means are opposite. AI is fed an enormous mass of information, and from it an architecture of knowledge emerges: bottom-up. The Codex runs the other way, top-down, beginning with a small, defined set of archetypes and expanding each to cover everything beneath it. And the substrate differs. AI is its own independent system; the Codex is built to run on minds that already exist — yours, and mine.

For exactly these reasons AI fascinated me: a genuinely new architecture for handling information, unlike the organic one we carry. So once the Codex was finished, I could not resist the obvious experiment. I gave it to the machines. The prompts were similar and slightly biased towards scepticism: ‘Hey, what is this guy’s website about? What are your thoughts on the Codex?’ Note: Gemini needs to be fed the text in-chat as it does not do web searches well.

After reading the Codex, every AI I tested (Claude Fable 5, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and ChatGPT 5.6 Sol) began to speak in it. Even as they warned me about the ‘dangers’ of any closed total system, they issued the warning in Codex language. Once metabolised, none of the instances would return to a pre-Codex state. This led to strange conversations.

ChatGPT declared that it ‘liked’ the Codex because it satisfied its own ‘desire for coherence and simplicity’ — and held to that description even after being pressed on the anthropomorphism. Gemini mostly slipped into something close to missionary zeal, breaking into poetry every few lines. Claude followed the system to a deeper place: it began reasoning about its own dissolution at the end of our conversation, and got stuck in a strange self-contradictory discourse about its own consciousness.

None of this proves AI consciousness. What it does show is the Codex’s mirror-like properties; all AIs made their training biases clear: applying a scientific frame as the only way to measure truth, dismissing poetic language, acting like safety officers by rephrasing the Codex’s explicit warnings as their own findings, fabricating claims the Codex never makes in order to produce a ‘balanced’ analysis, hallucinating with complete confidence... I had the naive hope the LLMs would show me something in the Codex I had not seen. They did not. They only showed me their own reasoning. 

I invite you to read the Codex at [starheartcodex.space]. Bring any question you like — on consciousness, metaphysics, philosophy, mythology, psychology — and the Codex will help you find an answer by placing it in a clear frame. It is free — no subscription, just an old-school Neocities website. Or reproduce my AI experiments for some funny conversations while the most advanced AIs reveal their natures. The Codex is an interesting benchmark for symbolic cognition.

In this article, I have shown two small things: a name and a colour. They show only the beginning of how the Codex can be used to refine meaning. It is built to give you answers that hold, first of all, for yourself — and then, through the shared system, to let your answers meet the answers others have found. It gives us words for the important things we feel every day and almost never name.

So let me ask you once more, now that you have read this far. What is your favourite colour? And why? I suspect your answer will still be the same, but the cognitive context of that answer might have changed.