roceasta

Whereas many of us spend our limited freedom chasing pleasurable (and unpleasurable) illusions that lead only to disorder and despair. That said, there are plenty of sane, wealthy people in the West who do important work for the sake of it, because they wish to. How do more of us become like them?

Also, despite apparently comfortable conditions, there are plenty of survival problems which remain. For example, meteor strikes, super-volcanoes, cancers, toxic ideologies/religions. Plus an unlimited number of as yet unidentified problems.

These problems are more abstract than working for a pay packet to buy food but they are nonetheless real. And they are not being sufficiently addressed! Universal Basic Income could turn out to be an important breakthrough in this regard, I think, if we also address the question I posed at the end of paragraph 2 above.

Whereas the reality of people receiving free money might be somewhat different. There's the drip, drip welfare payments of just enough money to survive without being motivated to find a job. Then there's the fallout, family break-up and chaos that occur in the wake of a lottery win. Both morally questionable.

Or perhaps there might be a settling down period of people acting irresponsibly followed by a recognition that engagement with the problems of civilisation and survival doesn't end because one has food, shelter and internet. There are novels to write, structures to design, problems to solve and of course there's science to be done. Work is more fun than 'fun'. Pick something worthy of your talents or start the slide into mental disorder and addiction.

Whatever the truth it almost goes without saying that a study alone cannot sort these issues out. Perhaps it can help. But in science experiment is insufficient there has to be theory to go with. (This is a major reason why so few studies in medicine and psychology are reproducible. I assume in sociology too.) What makes it more difficult in this case is there are moral components which can't be assessed empirically, only by conjecture and criticism.

But that is itself a theory about the problem of consciousness! So why not do both? There's no obvious short cut through the confusion, but discoveries in one field may guide questions in the other. In general I think it helps to have one's feet on the ground as well as one's head in the stars (for instance Newton ground his own lenses).

>18th-century scientists trying to make sense of heat

All that mucking about with the problems of phlogiston could have been a necessary step towards thermodynamics. Similarly, speculations about consciousness could turn out to be a necessary step towards AGI (or vice-versa).

I think of consciousness as being 'what you are paying attention to and what it is like'. One problem with this is that when you're attending sufficiently strongly to something you can't actually notice what it is like; there isn't enough bandwidth free. Yet some of the associated ideas ('qualia') may linger in working memory for a more relaxed examination afterwards. Which proves that you were paying attention and that mental work was going on. (Perhaps it also shows that trying too hard is counter-productive due to lack of integration with the rest of the mind.)

>For instance, it is the occurrence of a sense perception that triggers the metacognitive realization one is perceiving something. N, in turn, evokes X by directing attention back to it: the realization one is perceiving something naturally shifts one’s mental focus back to the original perception. So we end up with a back-and-forth cycle of evocations whereby X triggers N, which in turn evokes X, which again triggers N, and so forth.

This also seems plausible since we can't perceive a new thing accurately without a prior expectation of what it's like. This could be solved by an iterative cycle of increasing realisticness and accuracy.