There's a lot of ads out there right now for speech transcription so that you can more easily speak to the AI agent. Very helpful. But be gaurded and don't let that ever cross into becoming your default interactions with the AI agent. Slow down your brainstate to text aoap

yeah no I didn't mean it like that lol, sorry if that wasn't clear. my point was just that the part about "keeping my brainstate filtered down to one smallish context window at a time" can be true with multiple monitors. not necessarily that that's the case for you, just that it's possible to use multiple monitors without it necessarily being a much larger active context window

i don't really use external monitors. this isn't a recent development, it's not agent-mediated, it's been true since the beginning of my career. i often *have* external monitors, sometimes even plugged in to my macbook, but i tend to maybe put one browser window on one and then forget about it, and eventually once i shift to a new position and unplug slowly drift towards not even bothering. i know this is a wildly unpopular position as a developer and sometimes i wonder why i can't seem to make good use of them when they seem so critical for others! something about it definitely just comes from getting very used to this mode of working thru high school and college when desks and monitors were rare luxuries. another aspect might be my emacs-training, the sense of being able to feel all my context out there just a few keystrokes and buffer switches away, and not worrying so much about whether it's literally on screen to glance to. another might be how focus works for me, keeping my brainstate filtered down to one smallish context window at a time and intentionally swapping between windows rather than implicitly having a much larger visible window? but at this point i've mostly given up on changing it. i'm a laptop worker and that's okay.

It is up to us, micro to macro. Epsilon Brainstate O.0 -- O.1 HZ Tibetan monks reach brain states modern science declared impossible: gamma at 200 cycles, epsilon at zero — no breath, no heartbeat, fully aware.

Check out my new single "Artificial Calm Protocol Theta State" distributed by @DistroKid and live on Deezer! deezer.com/album/945840741 #binaural #binauralbeats #brainstate #fakeplasticheads #focus #meditation

Hmmmmmm, so: 1. We gotta be a bit more robust about what it means for a model of a thing to fully produce the properties of that thing 2. We gotta separate the hard problem itself and *why the hard problem is hard* For #1, it's not just that the model "feels like it fully and clearly identifies X with Y", nor is it that the model has been confirmed through sufficient empirical evidence to match observations of Y. Rather, it is that, mechanistically, we can articulate precisely how it is that the model and its structure interact with other physics objects to produce the properties that we observe in Y. (and then, since many models can have a good mechanistic explanation and still be wrong, we do still need to confirm that model with empirical observation; but the empirical confirmation piece is not the issue imo). Here, it starts to matter how we define the objects we are pointing at. So, for example, one way we might define water is "that thing that makes up the primary liquid of the world's oceans". This is essentially just an ostensive definition, and we can just look at what the oceans are made of, do some science, and find that it's this molecule with two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. Badabing badaboom. No mechanism required because all we did was point at an object, then investigate it's nature directly and find that it is this particular thing with so and so structure. BUT. Imagine we instead define water as: "that liquid which is clear, non-toxic, acts as a universal solvent, weighs ~1 kg at room temp, boiling point at 100C and freezing point at 0C, etc etc." Realistically, this is more what we mean when we say something is water ex ante. If, for instance, we encounter a new liquid, and we want to determine if it is water (without actually testing if it is H2O ofc), we can't use a definition like "is the liquid that makes up the oceans", because this liquid isn't from the oceans. So we have to use the known properties of water. Now, with this definition, what it means for our model of H2O to produce the properties of water (i.e., for it to explain why water *is the way it is*), is that somehow, our model of H2O can provide a mechanistic account of how properties like clearness and solventness come about. So we can ask "why is water clear?" and then with our H2O model we can say: "well, what we mean by clearness is that an object allows visible light to pass through it, and H2O is a molecule that does not absorb much light in the visible spectrum because XYZ, and so appears clear in small amounts." Thus we can explain water's properties via its nature. Playing the same game with qualia: if we define redness merely as "that thing which occurs when humans report seeing red", then maybe we can equate redness with a specific brainstate. We need no mechanistic explanation for why redness "is the way it is" because we have only defined redness ostensively. But if we define redness as "that phenomenon that has the property of redness" you can see that now we need a mechanism that explains redness as a property, rather than one that merely corresponds to redness as an object/event. And this gets to the delta between what the hard problem is vs. why the problem is hard. If there were a way to mechanistically explain *why and how* a particular brainstate produces redness--why it is that a certain set of electrical signals or waves produces a quale, and why that quale has the particular character of redness--that would, imo, constitute an answer to the hard problem. But the hard problem is hard because it seems, in principle, impossible to give an account that does this. Like, how do you get from properties of an electrical signal or neuron activation state to the character of color or pain? Any explanation would, i think, leave a gap, where you have to simply assert "XYZ property is redness" without explaining *why* it is redness or why redness "is the way it is". One big reason it seems impossible is because qualia like redness seem irreducible--the "way it is" seems impossible to specify, despite how distinctive it is. With clearness, we could say "well, what we mean by clearness is that it allows visible light to pass through it", thus translating the named property into a specific type of physical event that we can then connect to other physical events. But what do we mean by redness besides redness? idfk. The property itself seems inscrutable. What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for some quale to be red? What is it made of? How do we complete the sentence "what we mean by redness is..." in a way that isn't merely ostensive? I could say a bunch more here, ofc, but will try to avoid too many tangents. The main point here is that it's not that our brainstate model lacks the clarity of identification that our H2O model did, but that it fails to explain the relevant characteristics of the explanadum. Buuuuuut...okay one tangent for fun: which is that I do kind of agree with your claim that the hard problem doesn't matter--at least in the limit. For example, we could, in theory, solve issues related to AI consciousness by answering the easy problem alone. And there are some conceivable explanations of consciousness that would still fail to solve the hard problem and yet be so thoroughly explanatory that you kind of can't reasonably ask for more. So, okay, imagine if we discover some new quantum field--the qualia field--and we show that certain brainstates emit qualtons (and ya know, fuck it, we're playing make-believe, so let's say that they interact with the Higgs field and solve dark matter/energy while we're at it). And then we show that when we experience vision, what's happening is that a rough grid of qualtons of various frequency is being emitted in the nearby qualia field. These frequencies are shown to correspond to colors, and the grid is just what we see. And within the qualia field there are special excitations known as soultons. And they correspond to our true self/identity, and when a qualton is emitted it forms a bond with the nearest soulton, and that bond is our access to the qualia in question. Technically, TECHNICALLY, there is still a further question of "okay, but why are qualtons accompanied by experience? and why does the low frequency visual qualton have the particular redness characteristics that red has?" But like, idk man, cmon. At that point we would be able to explain so many properties of experience--e.g., why visual qualia appear to occur in a 2D plane, how the 1st person perspective arises, why it is inaccessible to others, etc. I call that solving consciousness. We're done. Pack up your bags and move on. (but we are nowhere close to such an explanation, so there are still plenty of hard-ish problems left) (also note that such an explanation would entail that qualia (technically qualtons) are ontologically distinct from brainstates, meaning that if we had evidence that demonstrated the ontological equivalence of qualia and brainstates, we could rule out such a theory. but we can't. yet.) (okay, i'm finally done. sorry.)

certainly things can be very tightly correlated or bound without literally being identically same thing. in the case of electron energy level shifts and photons we have clear theory that tells us this. i agree that, pre-discovery of the brain, there is a thing happening called experience. it is an ontological category. it is possible it is in fact something in physical reality, but very unclear what that thing is. it could have been that it turned out to be our gallbladder that we poked and prodded and found affected our conscious experience. it could technically be that *that's still true*, that we're somehow wrong about the brain! i'm not stupid as to deny that we can and in some cases must *talk about* experience as separate from brainstate. i'm not saying that brainstates are *logically* experiences in the same way planes are logically flat. as you and i both note, the imagining of separability doesn't actually make things separable. it is very possible to just not have enough information, just be confused. your final two paragraphs are where i feel strongly the argument for *hardness* falls apart. i think all you state is the easy problem. it is true that we do not have a complete detailed explanation of brainstates, of human's programs and software. but this is a fact about our understanding of the human software. you say "we can finally say that H2O produces exactly all the properties water has with sufficient observation and theory". we have *more* observation and theory of H2O than of brainstates, but so far we have *significant evidence towards* understanding them as having all the properties of experience. it is an extremely good model. in fact further understanding of brainstates tends to give us understanding and predictive power of our own experiences which we did not yet have. so saying "we do not yet have a model of brainstates that feels like it so fully and clearly, without any question, identifies it with experience as H2O and water" seems true, maybe it is less clearly identical than that. but that's the easy problem, not hard! the hard problem is specifically the assertion that we fundamentally cannot identify brainstates with experience via any correlation / empirical process. the statement that they are ontologically different things in a way that cannot be bridged, *unlike* the way H2O and water can eventually be bridged! and that assertion seems unjustified.

I think we've done this dance before, but pretty strong disagree re: dissolving qualia and reducing experience to brainstates (though i do funnily enough agree with your conclusion that LLMs don't and won't have qualia). I am very sympathetic to your position though because i think most talk about consciousness is needlessly confusing. In short: there is a difference between supervenience and equivalence. A photon emitted by an electron shifting energy levels supervenes on the nature of the atom, its valence shells, etc. -- the characteristics of the emitted photon are determined by those energy levels. But even though these objects are closely linked--even though we can tie observation of one to observation of another--the emitted photon is *not* an energy level difference of an electron. It is its own thing, with an ontologically different nature and substance. So, similarly, while it is highly likely that qualia supervene on brainstates, there is an interpretation of qualia under which a certain type of brainstate "emits" a particular quale. That quale may be fully determined by the brainstate (hence supervenience), but it is not the brainstate. It is its own thing, with an ontologically different nature and substance (or so I would claim). Two notable things here: 1. The correlation of two objects isn't sufficient to determine equivalence. Even full 1-to-1 determination is not the same as ontological equivalence. So yes we can poke the brain and induce certain qualia, but that's not quite the same as saying that brainstates *are* experience. 2. Arguably, one way we can distinguish the determination from equivalence is that these different ontological entities appear "separable". Although a change in energy levels does always emit a photon, and a particular brainstate may always emit a quale, we can "imagine" a world where they did not. Under different laws of physics or consciousness, perhaps the photon/quale are simply not emitted. Thus the deterministic relation between these entities is contingent, implying separability. Contrast this with, say, flatness. Flatness supervenes on the positions of the points of a surface (which in turn define the curvature). It is truly "inconceivable" (though i do share your hatred that word in this context) for a set of continuous points in 3d Euclidean space to exist with 2nd partials of 0 everywhere AND NOT be flat. The flatness is not merely determined by the positions of the points as an empirical, contingent fact, it is reducible to a structural property of those points as a whole. The problem ofc is that there are weird cases like the water vs. H2O example. Under different laws of physics, it is conceivable that H2O would not have the properties of water, and some other molecule (or no molecule) might instead have them. Does that mean water and H2O are separable concepts and thus distinct ontological entities? That seems absurd--we know they are literally the same thing. The difference here is that the structure of H2O, combined with our understanding of physics, fully produces the properties we identify as constitutive of water (clarity, surface tension, boiling/melting point, solvent, etc.). Once you show that H2O produces all of those properties, there is no further question "but is it water?" So then, separability doesn't imply ontological distinctness, not really. But it does imply a *gap that must be explained*, but in the case of water and H2O, we have, in fact, explained it. Whereas with qualia, we do not yet have a model of physics/consciousness that explains why the brainstates that correspond with seeing red, produce the property/experience of redness (instead of greenness, or loudness, or painfulness, or w/e). If we did, maybe we could say that redness is xyz brainstate the same way water is H2O. But doing that quite literally requires solving the hard problem of consciousness. And the hard problem is hard.

great article, i somehow feel its content is going to go above most heads active in the consciousness discourse but hopefully it's useful for the silent majority one thing relevant for myself: i have always agreed with "the experience *is* the brainstate", or rather, the...

but there is no human brainstate algorithm running on a rock, and nothing that has sane parsimonious analogies

You haven't fully solved Mary's Room, because you still think it's necessary for the person to "have" the brainstate to get the information. This is just another way of saying that there's special info (qualia) in the act of experiencing!

If the brainstate and the experience are identical, how could you learn something new from the experience that you didn't know just from *exhaustive* study of the brainstate?

Oh man. This is conjecture, not even bad conjecture either, just reaches past what it justifies. ‘Brainstate = experience’ is trying to solve the hard problem by declaring that the easy problem is actually the hard one and therefore its solved. What is biologically and physically involved in conscious experience =/= what conscious experience is. Parts to whole fallacy. ‘Smuggling in the assertion they are not identical’ is an ironic critique for a piece that repeatedly brute forces the assertion that they are identical. You keep reaching for these necessity arguments that brainstate = consciousness 1:1, but neural correlates and intervention evidence establishes brainstate involvement in consciousness, it establishes nothing about what consciousness is. The poking around internally to piece things together move is a posteriori by definition. It is fair to conjecture that brainstates precede or are causal to the experiential field, it just ca not be proven. Whatever the field of experiential consciousness in which individual experience occurs, that field is prior to any info we have on brainstates involved in it. Any given observation of a brainstate, be it yours/mine/the electrode/the neuroscientist, occurs inside consciousness. We can measure a persons brain and say ‘this fired before you reported awareness of xyz,’ but we cannot axrually see into their experience to do that matching in any precise way. First person selfhood as a construct =/= first person pov. Even an experience of self-dissolution on dmt requires a point of view that it happens to or its an incoherent. Same as seeing requires an eye to receive light. Any attempt to get to the bottom of consciousness is akin to attempting to use one’s eye to see itself, it is using the aperture of the pov to see the aperture of the pov. Of course that ends in infinite looping down and finding nothing. You conflate the construct of first person selfhood that people usually fixate on with the causally prior pov that has to be there to experience anything. Yes the selfhood construct can be dissolved, the aperture definitionally cannot tho. The self dissolution experience must appear to something or is incoherent. We agree obsessing over consciousness is unproductive given how many more interesting things there are to explore. What you actually are doing tho is focusing on the easy problem and calling it the hard one. The how of consciousness, brainstates being critically and necessarily involved and how so, is obvious and legit the easy problem. The ontological what is it stuff is different. attempting to collapse it by reducing to the physical, speculating about unprovable metaphysics, or tryna marry the two weirdly a la russellian monism all requires a leap beyond what can be proven. It is likely unanswerable. Trying to posit a settled answer that cant be proven feeds the loop youre critiquing here. Confident physicalism and metaphysics are both guilty of same issue, saying ‘its this!’ in either case when it very likely cannot be ascertained feeds the circularity. I agree we should move on, tho imo not by saying ‘its x.’ Is better to bracket the ontological question, acknowledge there be dragons there, and go ask more tractable questions about how minds and mindspaces work. Also fwiw i agree w a lot of your qualia critiques and your marys room take, people get way too lost in that stuff.

all you have done is *change the person being discussed* across the course of the three premises! somebody who knows everything about the brainstate of red has not yet actually had that brainstate ! that's all there is

this is mary's room, discussed and dissolved in the article. all that is going on here is that the literal brainstate of actually seeing red is absolutely not the brainstate containing a bunch of learned abstract information about red. simple equivocation

> the experience is the brainstate *flips table*

i think there is a big leap between > the experience is the brainstate. it identifies, one to one. and > our brains are structured in very different ways, our experiences are incomparable the former statement reads to me like it is saying, "the experience is entirely identified by the shape of the brainstate", or something like "the relationship between the brainstate and the experience is entirely lawful". stop me if this is incorrect. (i'm not sure how to word this without reifying dualism, but this is consistent with dual-aspect monism, and the first half of your post appears to be an argument in favour of monism) anyway if the same law applies universally throughout the cosmos, describing what experiences correspond to what states... then you do in fact get to derive things like universal systems of moral value?

the distinction i am drawing is between the emoji on screen (literally physically part of my phone!) and my visual experience of the blue emoji / the brainstate of observing it . i identify the second two, they are the same. the visual experience is a physical brainstate.

i feel we are going in circles friend. my experience of seeing the blue circle == brainstate of seeing the blue circle != 🔵, with the last being the actual blue emoji. there is no contradiction whatsoever here