Published on May 14, 2025 5:23 PM GMT
I want to spare others like me, who may be tempted to go down the path I unwittingly chose, the Pain of realizing the major fault of this path, a fault you can't realize if you are My Kind Of Mind until you reach the insights you crave.
If you dislike this then this isn't for you (go away). I'm trying to spare someone else like me an immense amount of self inflicted Pain; this isn't an argument. It can perhaps be a discussion.
Now, You:
Like ideas, but especially philosophy, and especially the topics of consciousness and existence/reality/ontology.
But you are also sufficiently engineer-brained that you can hit the pitfall described in this post. You will see what I mean as I describe it later.
You keep waffling about becoming a writer but go insane thinking about monetization.
You mostly dislike interacting with people except insofar as they are vehicles for ideas and novelty and usefulness. You are sociopathic or slightly autistic or perhaps just antisocial, but you maybe don't realize that yet.
But you are interested in saving the world because:
2) it's easy to extrapolate from your own consciousness/wellbeing to that of other creatures. (you aren't completely an unfeeling sociopath). Your sympathy for other Minds is paradoxically both deeper (ex: you care about bugs) and shallower than normal humans because while you feel Sympathy/Empathy (you think) it doesn't seem as visceral as others treat theirs, and the bulk of your actual sympathy is just from thinking about it; it is a mostly cold but obvious puzzle piece at the center of your model/identity/goal-structure: you treat other Minds well because you are one too; if wellbeing/conscious-experience can spring into Being somehow within you, it's probably in other creatures as well.
3) you have a one-track-mind; you are likely to seek out The Most Valuable Thing To Do and then try and just do it.
So your various unconscious motivations align and you (unwittingly) start the Wrong Path.
The Wrong Path is this:
You do not realize the incremental changes that will happen to your mind and personality when you follow the local gradient of interests/incentives suggested here.
You start out as just a partial sociopath who has chosen to do good. Read: has put on a false and probably plainly transparent Mask of the Good Guy (overly) Eager To Help. This may not be a conscious decision, which makes realizing you've done this later in life difficult and painful because the Good Guy doesn't want to believe he is a mask. I've come to realize that while I'm a good person, I'm not The Good Guy mask.
You drop what social connections you have, because it is easier; you have decided to Actually Do Good For Straightforward Reasons You Actually Agree With, and so even within the frame of the Good Guy Mask -> the Good Guy can be excused for dropping things that aren't The Mission.
It is not a forcing, but a letting go of stuff that legitimately doesn't interest you as much.
It feels good; you feel lighter and more focused. It doesn't feel like you are Furiously Removing Everything Else In Your Life And Mind For The Sake Of The Mission, (the obvious pattern of burnout everyone knows to avoid) -> because you aren't. It takes many years.
But you are reaching a similar failure mode, a similar-enough state no matter the path. And actually, your situation will be worse than just burnout.
This would normally be "fine" if you were a hard scientist/engineer and confident you could produce something of obvious value in the physical world, so you could skip over all this dumb social bullshit. The thinking is: if you put everything into your work and it fails, you would have failed even harder anyways if you had also tried balancing Socializing (more work) at the same time.
But Reality is allowed to keep throwing curveballs; there is similar logic but in the opposite direction:
- just as it doesn't matter if you have communication skills -> if you don't have insights to communicate if you can't communicate the insights, because they are unavoidably actually Intuitions that must literally be conveyed through literal Art, given the domain you have chosen, (and you have also let your social skills atrophy extremely) then it doesn't matter what insights you have
You will continue to think about your pet topics, because you can't help yourself, but I am telling you: you will eventually reach this meta-insight. I am saving you time.
Pivot to interpretability now, or to a hard science of any kind where you can simply show others the Machine/Thing in the external world, rather than a Machine you build in your head that can never leave there to be shown, until we have better tech.
You do not realize the thing you are trying to investigate, the answers you now seek but do not yet know, have more of the Type Signature of {the feeling of sunlight on your skin} (yes, even though you are trying to explain consciousness itself; this is what happens, you will see)
Rather than {a proof of something like 1+1=2}.
This kind of thing cannot be shared (in a scalable way), yet. The hyper-painful part is even after you think you've got The Answer, all you've done is solidified an Intuition in your head. But internally it feels like you've struck gold ("now I just have to share it!"). No, you just managed to Feel your way into a lack of confusion about your own consciousness. This is what you've set out to do, this is in fact the Type Signature of the answer, you just didn't realize it. Trying to share this thing without realizing it's full nature is a recipe for literal but thankfully temporary insanity. Not using force is also insanity inducing -> you must realize you are pushing against a stranger wall than you realize -> stop pushing -> investigate.
Mental/philosophical discovery, learning, building new ontologies, building languages, building meaning, background context, communicating --> are all tied up with each other. This is obvious when laid out like this, but you may miss it prospectively. I'm not saying the answers can't be conveyed, but you are underestimating the difficulty and overestimating the likely payoff; the likely percentage of people "getting it", no matter how crystal clear it is in your head. You must realize it took you years, with "perfect communication" happening with yourself within your own head, to reach where you are now. And: perhaps it is all delusion, as there is no external Mind that can check/correct The Full Thing In Your Head.
You can align your philosopher mind and your engineer mind enough, I think, by just going straight to interpretability. That path will also lead to these insights, just more indirectly and with more confusion. This is always the tradeoff; there is no definite answer to "how much thinking, or for how long, is too much before you should test the thinking", but if you enter into philosophical topics you must do so with open eyes; you can get truly truly lost because the feedback mechanisms suck. You will think you understand this before you start down this path. You do not; you are almost surely underestimating it.
Discuss
