That’s where I would disagree. Sure there’s a baseline of breathing that everyone does otherwise they’d be dead, but I think the ceiling towards skillful breathing is very high. The difference is more obvious under athletic conditions like if you’re running or biking, just improving your breathing rhythm can improve your performance. There’s even a proper way to breathe if you’re weightlifting, some people might pick it up naturally but I know it’s also commonly taught.

In psychology I’m pretty sure it’s well established and not pseudo science that certain breathing rhythms can increase your energy or decrease your anxiety, I think I read that they teach box breathing to some parts of the military to help keep them calm during missions.

So there’s definitely a range of breathing ability for specific tasks.

I’ve found this is all really worth learning, even if you don’t have sleep apnea. I feel more clear headed and energized when I can breath through my nose now.

If you’re curious to try this, read James Nestor’s book Breath, do yoga with breathing exercises, or see a physical therapist. It takes time to fix these structural issues, but you can literally change the shape of your nose, palate, and jaw from just practice.

Here’s a quick exercise you could try. Sit up, relax your body, breathe in through your nose, and feel the breath move up your nose, down to the base of your skull, down your neck, and then as far down your spine as you can. The air isn’t literally moving through these areas, but you should feel a current of sensations moving roughly along that path. As you breathe out, follow the current in the opposite direction. As you tune into this current, your neck and back will naturally straighten a bit, it should feel very natural and even pleasant. Keep your body relaxed and allow your neck and back to align with this current. If you keep doing this regularly it should help improve your posture and breathing. This is basically a pranayama / yoga breathing exercise. If it feels painful, definitely stop and try physical therapy or working with a hatha yoga instructor who can give you more guided instruction.

I used to snore so badly it sounded like, without much exaggeration, a dying elephant. I only did this exercise for a couple years and it slowly improved over that time, and now I sleep quietly.

This is a great example for a discussion about The Hard Problem. Here is the description from the book of the inner experience of this scanned brain as it gets booted up:

> What came next could not, of course, be described without using words. But that was deceptive in a way since he no longer had words. Nor did he have memories, or coherent thoughts, or any other way to describe or think about the qualia he was experiencing. And those qualia were of miserably low quality. To the extent he was seeing, he was seeing incoherent patterns of fluctuating light. For people of a certain age, the closest descriptor for this was “static”: the sheets, waves, and bands of noise that had covered the screens of malfunctioning television sets. Static, in a sense, wasn’t real. It was simply what you got out of a system when it was unable to lock on to any strong signal—“Strong” meaning actually conveying useful, or at least understandable, information. Modern computer screens were smart enough to just shut down, or put up an error message, when the signal was lost. Old analog sets had no choice but to display something. The electron beam was forever scanning, a mindless beacon, and if you fed it nothing else it would produce a visual map of whatever was contingently banging around in its circuitry: some garbled mix of electrical noise from Mom’s vacuum cleaner, Dad’s shaver, solar flares, stray transmissions caroming off the ionosphere, and whatever happened when little feedback loops on the circuit board got out of hand. Likewise, to the extent he was hearing anything, it was just an inchoate hiss.

The Hard Problem asks: who is experiencing this qualia and why is there an experiencer at all? Stephenson writes how this simulated brain is experiencing static as it condenses into meaningful patterns, but he implicitly starts with someone experiencing this static qualia. If this is the very beginning of the simulated brain booting up, where did this experiencer come from?

> At some point, we'll have AGI that pass any test we can think of and we'll still have people arguing that these cannot be conscious.

Because you're conflating intelligence with consciousness. There is no test for consciousness. In fact, you can't even prove that other human beings are conscious, you only know that you yourself are because it's self evident to you (cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am). The whole point of the hard problem is that you can imagine something exactly like a human being that passes every test of being a human being (e.g. an AI) but still not be sure that it has any inner experience.

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety

This organization that built itself on top of the “hacker ethos” is now happy to profit from building the surveillance state

> Pregabalin was discovered largely on the basis of publicly funded research at Northwestern University

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34493615/

Don’t worry, the money is usually coming from taxpayers so the universities don’t have to dip into their endowments