Craig Constantine

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But it’s consciousness in the experience sense – what philosophers refer to as phenomenal consciousness – that I’ll be focusing on in the remainder of this Guide. This kind of consciousness serves as a fundamental part of our existence, perhaps even the most fundamental part of our existence. But despite its fundamentality, and though we are intimately aware of our own conscious experience, the notion of consciousness is a perplexing one.
~ Amy Kind, from How to think about consciousness

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The current tools so breathlessly referred to as artificial intelligence, are still only tools. They have no agency, no goals, and critically they are not consciousness. Or, so we think. “Is conscious” is exceedingly important to determine, and it turns out it’s really hard to do the less like us (think: bats, dolphins, octopus, bacteria, …) some living thing is.

Deep dive into agency

7 Days Ago

Over the last decade, I’ve watched AI challenge — and augment — humanity in astonishing ways. Every few years, a new innovation seems to raise the same questions: can we compute human intelligence? Can our labor be automated? Who owns these systems and their training data? How will this technology reshape society? Yet there is one question I rarely hear asked: how will AI change our understanding of ourselves?
~ K Allado-McDowell, from Am I Slop? Am I Agentic? Am I Earth?

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This article—from the ever-interesting halls of The Long Now Foundation—got me thinking about intelligence from a new direction: instead of a tool or collaborator for us, a new way to learn about ourselves.

On the other hand

26 Days Ago

Along the way, over years of practice, I lost faith that awareness was always curative, that resolving childhood trauma would liberate us all, that truly feeling the feelings would allow them to dissipate, in a complex feedback loop of theory and practice.
~ Niklas Serning, from I am a better therapist since I let go of therapeutic theory

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I read somewhere that what likely makes any therapy work is the effort one puts into creating the relationship with the therapist. Striving to be a better person seems to lead to—wait for it—slowly becoming a better person. To that end, I recommend deploying tools like discovery and reflection to attempt to ground your self-assessment in reality, and to give yourself a force multiplier for the incremental insights.

There’s something to it

February 20

Each night as you lay down to sleep, you embark on an extraordinary journey – not through space, but through the shifting terrain of your own consciousness. This transition, known as the sleep-onset period, is not a simple flick of a switch from wakefulness to slumber, but a gradual, nuanced shift that suspends you between two worlds. Long regarded as a mere prelude to sleep, recent studies suggest there is far more to this fascinating twilight period.
~ Célia Lacaux, from The brain’s twilight zone: when you’re neither awake nor asleep

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Back in The Interlude I wrote about an experience… pretty sure this was a prolonged dip into that state.