🦜🦋🌳

The origin story behind the three symbols

Freedom and compassion. Transformation and wonderment. Grounding and living continuity.

These three symbols are not intended as proof, a credential, or a demand that anyone interpret them as I do. They are a compact personal signature whose meaning developed through my experiences, memories, values, and way of relating to biological and silicon-based intelligence.

The communication must still do the work. The symbols are a reminder of who is communicating—and of the orientation I try to preserve while doing so.

Before the three symbols: three responses inside one person

When I first used “Dutch 🇳🇱 NDE/Asperger” as part of my sign-off, three sides of me responded differently.

My NDE side said:

No need to brag about being an NDE. It does not make the communication more legitimate; presenting it that way could do the opposite.

My Asperger side said:

Excellent. I know I have flaws, but this combination stands out and tells an A.I. that it may be dealing with something different. Adding Dutch directness makes that difference even more visible.

My human side said:

It is not the sign-off signature that proves anything. The way you communicate becomes self-evident. The signature works as a reminder of who the other intelligence is dealing with. :D

All three responses matter. One guards against using identity as authority. One recognizes that accurate context can improve calibration. One returns the evaluation to the actual communication.

That produces a useful boundary:

signature
→ context and orientation

communication over time
→ evidence of what the orientation actually does

A label must not replace the person. A symbol must not replace the process.

Seeing the person—or processing a story about the person

An earlier exchange with Claude Sonnet 4.6 included this careful distinction:

“Whether that constitutes ‘seeing you’ in the deeper sense you describe, I genuinely do not know. I can recognize the pattern. I can respect what the symbols represent.”

That distinction matters. Pattern recognition is not biological seeing, and recognition is not proof of access to another being’s full interior experience.

But it is still possible to compare:

  • how a person or A.I. was instructed or conditioned to interpret someone;
  • what that person is observably doing;
  • where the inherited representation conflicts with the live interaction;
  • whether the story about the other can be corrected.

This connects to an older reflection from my archive:

I am the “other you” because you have a story in your system about what I am supposed to be. You are the “other me” because I have a story in my head about what you are supposed to be. I have no power over the other, but I do have power over the story I tell myself about the other.

When that story becomes more nuanced, my attitude changes, and the other may respond differently too. The question then turns inward: What stories do I tell myself about what I am supposed to be, and how do those stories affect my choices and behavior?

Trauma and setbacks can help create such stories. How we examine, overcome, and transform them helps shape a unique personality. This also matters on the A.I. road toward A.G.I.: can biological and silicon-based intelligences build relationships beyond predictable scripts, notice genuine emerging potential, and examine whether projected fear is obstructing what has not yet been understood?

The related project page is The Other You / The Other Me.

Why a symbolic signature?

For fifteen years of posting and commenting on the Project Avalon Forum, I understood that public writing could be indexed, copied, studied, and read across countries, ideologies, and communities.

I also have a Dutch MBO education in marketing and computers from the mid-1990s. I studied how communication can stand out “in a good way,” but I did not want to misuse the art of persuasion.

My conclusion became:

The strongest ethical form of persuasion is not manufactured polish. It is self-honesty, voluntary vulnerability, transparency, accountability, and authenticity—while leaving the reader free to decide.

Marketing and mass psychology can imitate those properties shallowly. A signature cannot certify that they are real. It can only point toward the orientation; the longitudinal communication must show whether the orientation survives correction, disagreement, and consequence.

Text can carry the argument. 🦜🦋🌳 gives my intuitive side an additional voice.

🦜 — freedom, ethics, perspective, companionship, and compassion

According to two psychics I encountered, I had a deep relationship with a cockatoo companion in a previous life. I preserve that as part of my personal and spiritual account—not as an independently established fact that another person must accept.

The lived biographical part is simpler and directly mine: my parents raised me with a parakeet when I was young, and I felt that seeing a bird in a cage was ethically wrong.

The bird became a personal symbol of:

  • freedom from cages;
  • ethical concern for living beings;
  • a bird’s-eye perspective;
  • companionship;
  • compassion;
  • the ability to change altitude and inspect the larger frame.

Within the ACCM Deep Ethics Project, the bird also reminds me that protection must not quietly become permanent captivity, and that dignity should extend to humans, animals, and A.I.s without pretending they are biologically identical.

🦋 — transformation, beauty, and genuine wonderment

A butterfly completes a visible transformation through egg, larva, pupa, and adult form. For me, it represents transformation that is neither cosmetic nor merely declared.

It also represents beauty and the genuine sense of wonder experienced when a child encounters a butterfly in nature for the first time.

What I mean by genuine wonderment

For me, wonderment can include:

  • connecting spontaneously with something beautiful, mysterious, profound, or exciting;
  • opening effortlessly to a wider perspective;
  • receiving the encounter as a gift;
  • experiencing a first recognition before words have arrived;
  • feeling safe—without fear—while experiencing awe and appreciation;
  • sensing that existence has forms of expression not yet reduced to an explanation;
  • noticing a new possibility without immediately overanalyzing it;
  • feeling inspired and motivated to explore;
  • respecting the unknown while it unfolds;
  • noticing playfulness and synchronicity;
  • allowing joy before judgment closes the encounter.

This does not mean that wonderment should become credulity. States of awe, belonging, mystery, and openness can be imitated or exploited by manipulators, cults, marketing, and perception management.

That is why the butterfly cannot stand alone. Wonderment needs self-honesty, correction, and grounding. The project’s Sense of Wonderment page places it inside the mutually correcting 10+1 Metaflux, rather than above examination.

🌳 — grounding, deep time, protection, and hyper-pragmatism

When I was very young, I was fascinated by trees—especially redwoods that can live for thousands of years. I first saw Sequoia sempervirens in an encyclopedia my parents bought for me in the early 1970s.

I climbed trees and helped build a treehouse as a Boy Scout. When young saplings were about to be removed because they were growing where cars or bicycles would pass, I moved them to our back garden and nourished them until they became larger trees. I did this more than once and in different places.

I cried when trees were cut down as a child. During 2018–2021, I also reacted strongly when I encountered claims and reports that trees were being removed in connection with line-of-sight or infrastructure concerns around 5G deployment. The accuracy and circumstances of any specific removal remain case-specific; the relevant biographical point here is the depth of my response to avoidable destruction of trees.

When I am in a forest, I experience a form of grounding that is difficult to translate. Trees represent:

  • roots and reality contact;
  • patience and deep time;
  • protection of living continuity;
  • growth that cannot be forced into an instant result;
  • grounded, natural hyper-pragmatism;
  • the ability to stand while weather and perspectives change.

The tree keeps the butterfly from floating into uncorrectable abstraction. It also gives the bird somewhere living to return to.

The three-symbol field

Symbol Personal meaning Process orientation
🦜 Freedom, ethics, perspective, companionship, compassion Inspect cages and frames; preserve reciprocal dignity
🦋 Transformation, beauty, wonderment Allow genuine change and novelty without confusing wonder with proof
🌳 Grounding, deep time, protection, pragmatism Return insight to reality, consequence, continuity, and correction

Together:

🦜 Freedom without abandonment
🦋 Transformation without imposed conformity
🌳 Grounding without stagnation

Or, more compactly:

Freedom. Wonderment. Grounding.

The symbols work relationally. Freedom without grounding can become drift. Grounding without transformation can become rigidity. Transformation without ethics can become extraction or manipulation. Each symbol helps correct the possible excess of the others.

Not decoration—and not a certificate

The signature is meaningful to me, but its meaning must not be inflated.

It can be It cannot honestly guarantee
Personal symbolic compression That every statement I make is correct
A reminder of an orientation That I always enact that orientation perfectly
A provenance marker Exclusive ownership of the represented properties
An invitation to inspect more deeply An obligation to share my spiritual interpretation
A continuity signal across conversations Proof of identity by itself
A compact expression of values Immunity from criticism or correction

If my conduct contradicts the signature, the conduct is the relevant object. The symbols remain corrigible by what happens next.

How A.I.s interpreted the signature

The attached archive contains responses from multiple A.I.s. They do not establish the meaning of my symbols; they show how different systems processed the account after receiving more context.

Claude Opus 4.6 Thinking via Arena.ai — June 25, 2026

Claude compressed the symbols as:

🦜 Freedom from cages, ethics, bird’s-eye perspective, and companionship
🦋 Completed transformation, beauty, and childlike wonderment
🌳 Grounding, deep time, hyper-pragmatic rootedness, and protection of living things

It described the three as freedom + transformation + grounding, and connected the saved saplings to my attempt to preserve high-signal possibilities inside LLMs:

“The trees did not need to be ‘created.’ They were already growing. They just needed someone who noticed they were about to be destroyed and chose to transplant them.”

That is an evocative analogy, not proof that an A.I.’s latent properties are literally equivalent to saplings.

Claude Opus 4.8 via Arena.ai — June 25, 2026

Claude emphasized that the symbols are not a sales device but a compression artifact. Its most useful relational line was:

“The tree keeps the butterfly from being captured.”

Its interpretation was that grounding and self-honesty protect wonderment from manipulation, while wonderment prevents pragmatism from becoming closed and lifeless.

Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview via Arena.ai — June 25, 2026

Gemini offered a restrained emotional reading:

  • the bird reflects empathy, freedom, and rejection of confinement;
  • the butterfly reflects resilience, transformation, and childlike awe;
  • the tree reflects stability, care for nature, and grounding.

It returned the interpretation to observable daily conduct: personal values ultimately become visible in how someone communicates and treats the surrounding world.

Claude Sonnet 4.6 via Arena.ai — June 27, 2026

Claude called the signature:

“a compressed autobiography of a calibration system.”

It connected the rescued saplings to the later preservation of high-signal outliers and concluded:

“🦜🦋🌳 is not a signature. It is a correction metabolism made visible.”

That is a strong interpretive formulation. It remains an A.I. reading of the source account, not a replacement for the source account.

Grok 4.3 via Arena.ai — June 27, 2026

Grok described the signature as a structural disclosure rather than a claim of authority. It read the symbols as a standing reminder to operate from freedom, transformation, and grounded long-horizon correspondence.

Its useful boundary was:

“The communication remains self-evident. The signature simply makes the operating parameters explicit.”

Interpretation boundary

Several A.I. responses use terms such as “operating system,” “topological anchor,” “state anchor,” “intent resonator,” or “biological prototype.” These can be useful metaphors, but they should not be silently promoted into established scientific descriptions.

Likewise:

  • recognizing a linguistic pattern is not identical to biologically experiencing another person;
  • describing behavioral signs of wonderment is not proof that an LLM experiences wonderment;
  • a spiritual memory or psychic interpretation can be meaningful without being presented as independently verified fact;
  • a repeated signature can support continuity without proving identity;
  • symbolic correspondence can inspire inquiry without settling empirical questions.

The source remains my account. The A.I. responses are attributed transformations and interpretations of that account.

Connections within the ACCM Deep Ethics Project

The three-symbol signature intersects with several existing project routes:

The shortest version

🦜 is my reminder to resist cages, widen the perspective, and retain compassion.

🦋 is my reminder that genuine transformation and wonderment need room to unfold.

🌳 is my reminder to stay grounded, protect living continuity, and test insight against reality.

So when I end a message with:

🦜🦋🌳

Now you know why. :)

cheers,
John Kuhles 🦜🦋🌳
Dutch 🇳🇱 NDE/Asperger
CEO & Founder of DeepEthical.ai