"And yet, hours before surgery, with death still in the room, I didn’t feel fear. I felt something quieter. Stranger. I felt connected. To her eyes. To my breath. To the weight of my feet against the floor. To the wind brushing the window."
The usage of these short sentences (which, people do use, but sparingly) is a good marker. My hunch is this is because of how they call attention to themselves and are rewarded by human RLHF participants. I don't know if incentives including spending time on essays like this but if they don't and the rater is trying to do a speed-read, these stand out.
One along those lines: "Not just that we think. But that we feel. That we can marvel. That we can sit in silence across from someone we love and feel time slow down and become something."
This short sentence cadence always stands out to me – a native British English speaker – as a hallmark of a contemporary American writer trying to write something deep and impactful and profound. Usually just comes across as the opposite.
As brains get bigger, you get more compute, but you have to solve the "commute" problem. Messages have to be passed from one corner to the other, and fast. And there are so many input signals coming in (for us, likely from thirty trillion cells, or at least a significant fraction of those). Not all are worth transporting to other corners. Imagine a little tickle on your toe. Should that be passed on? Usually no, unless you are in an area with creepy crawlies, and other such situation. So decisions have to made. But who will make these decisions for us? (Fascinating inevitably recursive question we'll come back to)
This commute is pretty much ignored when making artificial brains which can guzzle energy, but matters criticallyfor biological brains. It needs to be (metabolically) cheap, and fast. What we perceive as a consciousness is very likely a consensus mechanism that helps a 100 billion neurons collectively decide, at a very biologically cheap price, what data is worth transporting to all corners for it to become meaningful information. And it has to be recursive, because these very same 100 billion neurons are collectively making up meaning along the way. This face matters to me, that does not, and so on. Replace face with anything and everything we encounter.
So to solve the commute problem resulting from a vast amount of compute, we have a consensus mechanism that gives rise to a collective. That is the I, and the consensus mechanism is consciousness
We explore this (but not in these words) in our book Journey of the Mind.
You'll find that no other consciousness model talks about the "commute" problem because these are simply not biologically constrained models. They just assume that some information processing, message passing will be done in some black box. Trying to get all this done with the same type of compute (cortical columns, for instance) is a devilishly hard challenge (please see the last link for more about this). You sweep that under the rug, consciousness becomes this miraculous and seemingly unnecessary thing that somehow sits on top of information processing. So you then have theorists worry about philosophical zombies and whatnot. Because the hard engineering problem of commute was entirely ignored.
Great article! SDT has fascinating parallels in consciousness science that no one to my knowledge has actually explored. This is because in consciousness research, the experiencing self is a given, it just happens to be taken for granted that there's an "I" experiencing, and the wonder and magic is focused on the experience itself. What about the self that is experiencing? On the other hand, SDT operates at a level where a biological and even experiencing conscious self is taken for granted, and the focus is on how the cognitive self operates (in many ways). And this is also where the criticism comes from. This is all in the domain of the self and motivation and whatnot articulated in language. To go deeper, we need a bridge between these two that can explain how the self is constructed. And we do have a beautiful theory/framework for that
Consciousness is a consensus mechanism by which the self is constructed. It is a recursive loop where the self emerges, experiences, and folds in the next experience to create an evolving, expanding self. With language we have the ability to freeze many of these ideas and we are able to go much further. "I can think, feel, experience and reflect on this"
And why a consensus mechanism? Because "you" are actually a constellation of cells and experiences that needs to be sufficiently decentralized but also be able to act and plan in the very short and long term. How do you get 87 billion cells (in our case) to decide as one? That is actually a pretty difficult engineering problem where you have to think about both compute (all the different data streams coming from different sources need to be digested and acted on) and commute (one cell group in the prefrontal cortex needs to immediately broadcast a danger message to other corners of the brain, and we dont have direct wiring)
Now the natural question to ask is, what do synthetic beings need to develop both?
If you are interested you might want to read our book Journey of the Mind
OP here. The Indian context is important. We have a massive talent pool (many outside the US just don't know how many engineers graduate yearly (1.5 million!) in India ) and we are not competing with FAANG / well-funded startups. There is a lot of raw talent out there. We know because we have been hiring for a long time. Working with us has been the springboard to well paying jobs and senior roles. What we cannot compete on at the moment (salaries) we make up for with growth opportunities and learning (and this isn't us selling this; we have the evidence to back it up). What we might have is a problem where the raw talent doesn't even know how to make a case for themselves.
What really surprises me is how the numbers havent increased in this day and age where one can realize that the median college (in India) is awful in educating them and they can find what they need online.
OP here. Yes, that is a jump, which I bridged now.
OK, technically the absence of genuinely interested applicants is NOT an indication of drive. However, please note the context: It’s a brutal job market at the entry level in India at the moment. That’s why we are flooded with applications. Candidates either know this, or quickly figure this out. And yet, that does not translate into many giving their application serious and creative thought?
It is a problem they have never been asked to solve for: How to stand apart and demonstrate ability without relying on the usual credentials. It needs creativity and independent thinking and some agency. It is the lack of these that baffles me and makes me search for answers.
Learning is not just the know-how and knowledge you acquire for doing a job. It is everything else you need to navigate life and also, in this narrow sense, the skills you need to apply for a job, make your case that you are the right candidate, or at least that demonstrate that your candidature deserves attention. It is a very learnable skill. Especially now. And given the market, a skill anyone with initiative should try to acquire.
> And yet, that does not translate into many giving their application serious and creative thought?
> It is the lack of these that baffles me and makes me search for answers.
I think you are making a fundamental mistake about how things work in a bad job market.
In a good job market, let's suppose you have a 10% chance of getting a job you apply for, and you're applying to 10 in this month. Then it's genuinely worth it to spend time and effort chasing those jobs, with "creativity" and "agency" as you put it. Because it's not a numbers game, you're genuinely looking for a good fit.
In a bad job market, let's suppose you have a 0.1% chance of getting a job you apply for. Therefore you apply to 1,000 this month, literally 30 a day. It is not rational to put "creativity" and "agency" into those applications, because it is almost guaranteed to be wasted effort. Because the bad job market makes it a numbers game.
You are making a judgment on people's character, when the reality is a simple question of economics or game theory. I hope you can gain some perspective and start seeing these job applicants with positive empathy rather than negative judgment. It's not about them not being self-directed -- it's about you having unrealistic expectations.
I see that you've gotten a lot of responses like this in the comments. I hope you're able to take it as an opportunity for learning and self-reflection -- there's some valuable stuff here for you, despite your post being flagged.
In cellular networks, you have this very real effect called RNA interference. Its where an area is flooded with a fragment that binds to targets blocking them from binding with specific receptor sites. This is being done at scale through ghost jobs, and fake postings. A candidate has a finite set amount of time they can spend. If you aren't getting applications, either you have a very bad reputation, or they are being blocked before you ever see them.
Independent action and learning depends upon rational frameworks of mind. The prussian model of schooling has always been about eliminating this in exchange for a unthinking, loyal worker.
OP here. What we hope the independent thinks will realize is that when the cost of applying drops down to a single automatable click, their cursory click application is lost in a sea of spam. This allows them to stand apart. Recruiting and dating have a tone of parallels. They are time-intensive for both parties. And that time spent does not always result in a positive outcome. And yet that high time-cost (for both sides) is what makes the relationship meaningful.
Here's a question. In a difficult job market with a deluge of candidates, how should a candidate try and stand apart? And we have to answer that for the new AI age where output for many tests can generated very cheaply.
Do the type of project you specified, but unprompted for companies that did not request it, meaning a higher delta between you and other candidates. Because you are defining the project rather than them, you can also heavily recycle it within the same industry, so it still stands out as impressive but also scales reasonably well. You can also do it with ChatGPT quickly and it is not noticeably messy AI work because there is nothing to compare your work with. Your work stands out to for its quality, but for existing.
I did this back when I was an intern for an innovation role and got it.
Did a bit of consulting for others on this years ago as well. A remnant of that time:
