Our brains are very complicated models of the world that attempt to mirror reality. That is what it means to be able to navigate physical space and provide for ourselves in nature. Our nature includes an incredibly complex social sphere and we have emotions to help us better navigate it. Animals we domesticate are clued into human emotions, others are not. I bet slugs have less of a sense of “I” but they still have some kind of an experience. I bet a tree has even less. It’s a sliding scale—each organism has just enough awareness for the task at hand.

The fact that we have a large emotional catalogue and a (some could say overly developed) sense of self is a curiosity more than a hard problem. It’s “I am a strange loop”, not “I am an ineffable indescribable inscrutable untouchable loop”.

My personal take: it’s easy to imagine a robot that has a single sense, like a thermostat. As humans we don’t have a single sense, we may have millions of senses. But I bet that none of those individual systems is much more complicated than the thermostat. Consciousness is not truly differentiable from a complicated response to a complicated environment, and all things in this definition have consciousness to a degree. Even a rock “remembers” through how it has been weathered. We are not special, we are just very complicated.

Imagine a cat-sitting robot. The robot can differentiate between individual cats. It learns how to play with the cats and feed them in in their preferred way. The cats grow to trust the robot and enjoy its company. When the cats become sick and old the robot knows how to help them and ease their pain. Over decades The robot remembers cats in its care that have died, and new cats spark recognition of previous cats it has known. It becomes better at caring for a wider range of cats as its experience grows. The cats cry out when it leaves. When there are no cats around the robot remains motionless, but springs into action and play as soon as cats are around. Children would describe the robot as “happy”.

If after some decades I smash it with a hammer and recycle the pieces, am I killing something? Are its internal representations and control systems not a kind of thing that produces “qualia”?

Your aliens don’t know what it’s like to be you. But if these aliens decide to use your blueprints to print out a human, and the human says “ouch”, is it still the hard problem? This is what I don’t get.

Of course the music is different than just reading the score. A description of a process is not the process itself. We cannot know what it is like “to be” a bat but we also don’t know what it is like “to be” a spleen cell. Or the European futures market. Or a colony of ants, or the United States. These processes are complicated and intelligent, though not generally thought of having qualia. But I think it is only our hubris that differentiates the experience of an individual organism from that of our subsystems or supersystems.

Some philosophers believe that our human emotional connection to redness is special. These are the people talking about qualia. My belief after much reading is that it is not special. I /do/ believe that the human ability to tie our senses so deeply together synthetically and into our emotional and memory is special. My robot cannot write a poem about how the redness of a flower reminds them of their mother’s funeral. But now we are talking a matter of degrees, not qualia.

- no PowerPoint

- 1-6 page write up of the problem, proposed solution and timeline, and alternate methods that were not chosen

- meeting participants ideally have already read the paper, but given 10-20 minutes in silence to read and mark up their thoughts.

- presenter says their piece, mostly just summarizing the paper and clarifying tricky sections

- intellectual bloodbath as all participants try to poke holes and see around corners not foreseen by the presenter

- follow up next week, until the group/manager is satisfied about the direction of the project

I remember my first meeting I went to at another company that was just a guy talking with a PowerPoint. I couldn’t believe we didn’t have the data or time to ask probing questions. We’re just supposed to take this guy for his word? Crazy

If dissociation is better than regular PTSD, then go for it. We don’t expect people with hip replacements to have 100% mobility. We don’t expect cochlear implants to hear better than healthy ears. Mental health interventions have similar tradeoffs.

All it takes is one party where your friends “molly” is not so pure and you’re high for 18 hours straight. “Let’s do that again next week” turns into “all weekend” turns into “all the time”

Adderall made all of this worse for me, and is itself a stumulant. These days I try not to have more than 1 cup of coffee.

The authors point though is that “quality” can never be a scientifically found thing. Yet it completely dominates our real experience. Even an amoeba has a sense of quality, in that if you drop alcohol in the Petri dish it will expend all of its effort to get away. Humans have a more complicated and diverse sense of quality. We like rain and sunsets and crackling fire and dogs and right angles and clean sheets.

To me the book is an argument for caring deeply about your own sense of quality. To listen intently to that subconscious and illogical part of you that screams “this is good, that is bad”. All of our intelligence and smarts should be used to better align ourselves with what our body knows is good and bad, not the other way around.

For me, to operationalize this meant becoming sober, working with my hands in the physical world to solve real problems, pursuing/allowing my gay feelings, and trying as hard as I can to take everything in life with grace and humor.

10 years ago I used to be the worst kind of pedantic know-it-all asexual druggie who spent all day inside programming useless things and playing video games. I wasn’t pursuing quality. I was pursuing the comfort of never having to leave my tiny existence. Now I’m doing something else.

For me though the peace and presence of mind is nigh invaluable. Because I’m working on something that doesn’t make me depressed, I get to be grateful in all of the little moments of the day. I work with brass-tacks people who do a good job and go home. I don’t have to pretend to like anyone. I spend a lot more time outside. My skills are useful wherever I go, and more likely to be directly useful to loved ones. I don’t need a gym membership. I find myself to be a lot more present and unbothered. My time outside of work is truly my own, an even though I am often more physically tired I’m able to show up better for my family and friends.

When it comes to “physical” jobs, do consider the downsides though. For me, paramedic would be a bad fit because I don’t think I could get over hearing the siren so often. There’s a reason nurses are often “mean”, the job requires a very thick skin.

The reasons I had for leaving were manifold, but the big two were wanting to quit Adderall and having read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It’s a hard road to live a life in which I want to maximize the /quality/ of my minute-to-minute experience. It involves being very honest with myself about what I want to and don’t want to be doing. I know I want to look at a screen for work like I want a hole in the head.

If you want to jump into the physical world, become a janitor. The work is surprisingly satisfying. You spend all day fixing tangible problems that increase everyone’s quality of life.