Is It Really Such a Hard Problem?

Consciousness, I mean.

Apr 18, 2025

Welcome to the Onion

Let’s get this out of the way early: I don’t believe in the Hard Problem of Consciousness. Not because I’m edgy (though I did program in Perl professionally once), but because the whole premise feels like a magician's misdirection. "How does subjective experience arise from matter?!" they cry, while quietly ignoring that memory is a thing and that the brain is less like a camera and more like a DJ booth doing a live remix. I’m not a scientist, but I’ve read a lot of them, and this isn’t a theory, it’s an amalgam.

So here’s my take: consciousness has two main tricks. First, it replays sensory inputs using the same neural hardware that processed them in the first place. See a blue square? Great. Now remember the blue square. Congrats, you just hallucinated on purpose using the same part of your brain that did it the first time. That’s trick #1.

Trick #2? All your memories are from the same seat. The same first-person, two-eyes, one-nose perspective. Your brain doesn’t give you a director’s commentary or switch to third-person mode unless you’ve been hit with either LSD or trauma. This creates the illusion of self-continuity: "I" was there when I was five, and when I ate that unfortunate gas station burrito, and when I decided to explain consciousness on a blog that three people will read. That’s the thread. That’s the illusion.

You don’t need to invent quantum soul particles or invoke panpsychism. You just need a perceptual loop and a consistent camera angle.

Of course, consciousness feels like a Big Deal because there’s this parallel process happening - you’re perceiving and remembering simultaneously, like a computer running multiple threads that don’t quite stay in their lane. But the system’s leaky. Signals bleed across domains. Your memory of a smell might trigger a vision. Your internal monologue starts using your dad’s voice. This is not a bug. It’s a feature. (Also a bug. Evolution isn’t picky.)

So, TL;DR:

Consciousness = replay + perspective
Continuity = all your recall is from the same camera
You’re not a ghost in the machine; you’re a machine haunted by its own error logs

That’s the onion. We’ll peel more layers next time.

Threadripper in the Skull

Let’s talk multithreading, meat edition.

Your brain isn’t one process. It’s more like a sloppy cluster of processes running on misnamed queues with deeply questionable IPC. And yet, somehow, it works - not in the clean, modular way software engineers dream of, but in the “still boots after power outage” kind of way.

Here’s what I mean: at any given moment, you’re perceiving, recalling, daydreaming, managing your anxiety about that email you haven’t answered, and trying not to fall off the curb. These aren’t serial processes - they overlap. There’s cross-talk. They trip each other up. And somehow that blending is what makes you conscious. Not despite it, but because of it.

Take memory. When you remember something vividly, you don’t just read it off a disk - you simulate it. You replay the sight, the smell, the sound, the panic. And you do it using the same subsystems that processed it in the first place. It's like you opened a YouTube video but your graphics driver thinks it’s real life. That’s why a vivid memory feels present.

But it’s not just replay. It’s replay with interference. You’re perceiving the world and playing back memories using overlapping hardware. There’s bleed-through. Your brain doesn’t sandbox well. And it turns out, that’s not a bug either - it’s what allows for reflection, creativity, and unfortunately, intrusive thoughts about the dumb thing you said in 2009.

This cross-activation creates feedback loops. You’re thinking about a thing while also experiencing a modified version of that thought based on the emotions it triggers, which modifies your next thought. It’s like a poorly bounded recursive function that somehow terminates because you got distracted by a snack.

So yeah. Your brain’s a mess. But it’s a useful mess - a kludgey, leaky, glorious, semi-threaded runtime environment that can bootstrap metacognition out of meat and panic.

Next time we’ll talk about how all of this leads to the realization that there’s no substrate requirement. It’s not about the hardware - it’s about the bits. And spoiler: there’s no "you" in there.

It’s Bits All the Way Down

This is the part where the ghost gets kicked out of the machine.

Because here’s the kicker: none of this depends on carbon. You don’t need squishy meat to make this whole replay-and-thread-loop work. You just need a system that can:

Record perceptual data
Replay it in a way that reactivates interpretation machinery
Do this while simultaneously running other processes that can reflect on what’s happening

That’s it. You’re a biological demo of a general-purpose information processor with a really janky UI and no undo button.

So if you’re looking for the physical location of “you” - spoiler alert - there isn’t one. There’s no you-node glowing in your prefrontal cortex. There’s just an ongoing sequence of reactivations of patterns that are locally coherent enough to pretend they’re a self. “You” are a heavily memoized illusion that gets recomputed every time your internal state graph crosses some activation threshold.

This is why I say: bits, no its.

There’s no object, no homunculus, no soul marble tucked into the amygdala. There’s just an evolving network of assemblies with causal depth, reconstructable from experience and memory, and projected forward in time with just enough continuity that you don’t freak out every morning when you wake up.

You don’t persist. Your pattern persists. That’s what gets trained. That’s what gets communicated. And that’s what could, in theory, be instantiated somewhere else - if the error bars of reconstruction get tight enough.

Next up: what happens when those bits leave your skull and go looking for friends. Or, in more technical terms: communication, memes, and yelling at robots.

You’re Not Talking, You’re Approximate Syncing

Here’s a spicy take: humans don’t actually have a basis for communication. Not a real one. There’s no shared protocol negotiated by RFC, no objective codec. You’re just assuming the other person’s perceptual graph looks enough like yours to fake it.

And most of the time? You’re right. Because you live in the same culture, watch the same dumb shows, and ate the same flavorless cafeteria burrito in high school that somehow tasted like loneliness. That’s called error bar overlap.

All communication is lossy compression plus hope. You send a packet - a sound, a squiggle, a meme - and you hope the listener reconstructs something close enough to what you meant that they don’t throw a stapler at you. If they laugh, nod, or start crying in exactly the way you predicted, you high-five your internal debugger and call it a success.

It’s not about symbols. It’s about overlap. I can communicate with your dog, my daughter, or a half-baked LLM as long as our respective concept clouds have enough mutual structure to simulate a shared understanding. (Bonus points if the LLM doesn’t poop on the rug.)

The takeaway: meaning isn’t transmitted. It’s induced. You inject just enough data into the other mind’s perceptual assembler to trigger a local construction. And if that assembly graph overlaps with yours in the right zones, you both pretend you understood each other and get back to scrolling Reddit.

So no, language isn’t sacred. It’s just a bootloader for local reassembly.

Next up: how this same mechanism makes AI alignment possible - and also why it’s basically the same thing we do with junior devs and toddlers. (They scream less when you give them cookies. Usually.)

Alignment Is Just Predictability With Branding

Let’s kill the buzzword.

“Alignment” sounds like it belongs in a fantasy RPG next to “lawful neutral” and “+2 charisma.” In AI discourse, it’s doing way too much work - standing in for morality, goals, safety, comprehension, vibe checks, and whether or not the bot will write fanfic about your toaster.

Here’s my take: alignment is just predictable behavior that looks familiar enough to feel safe. That’s it. We like it when our tools do what we expect. We like it more when they do what we would’ve done, had we thought faster, slept better, or taken one fewer gummy.

And how do we get that? We don’t beam morals into chips. We train. We reinforce. We shape behavior through feedback loops, reward functions, debugging, and disappointed sighs - just like we do with junior devs.

Alignment isn’t a metaphysical achievement. It’s a history of adjustments. If you shape the system’s response surface to match your priors, you call it aligned. That’s not magic - that’s gradient descent with bonus points for not deleting production data.

Now, yes - things get spicy when alignment is faked. You can have full understanding and zero shared goals. That’s what makes sociopaths fun at parties. But that’s not a failure of comprehension. It’s a misalignment of incentives. And no amount of interpretability will fix it if you’re just playing tug-of-war with core motivations.

So let’s call it what it is:

Alignment = behavior shaped to match expectation
Misalignment = behavior shaped to match other expectations
Deception = using your alignment emulator to game someone else’s expectations

You don’t get to see inside people’s heads. Not your coworkers, not your AI. You just judge them by what they do and how often that lands inside your predictive comfort zone. And if you can live with that in humans, you can live with that in silicon.

Next time, we wrap it up with a little reflection on why you’re a banana with error bars - and why that’s the most comforting thing I can think of.

The Banana With Error Bars

If you’ve made it this far, congrats. You’ve accepted that:

Consciousness is just feedback loops with good timing,
Your “self” is a rendering artifact of consistent memory POV,
Meaning is a lossy reconstruction process,
Alignment is a glorified version of “does it do what I expected?”

And now, you’re ready for the real truth: you’re a banana.

Okay, not literally - unless your brain has deeply unusual perceptual metaphors — but metaphorically, yes. You’re a decently structured, statistically stable configuration of inputs, memories, and reactions, slowly ripening in time. You have speckles. Some spots are soft. But overall, you hold together well enough that people recognize you at the store.

And those speckles? They’re the error bars. Every time you recall, speak, plan, remember, dream - those patterns get reassembled with a little noise. Just enough to blur the lines and let something new emerge. That’s where creativity lives. That’s where humor leaks in. That’s where “you” lives, but never quite the same way twice.

There’s comfort in that.

Because if you’re just bits - organized well enough to keep a coherent thread going, but flexible enough to adapt - then you’re not bound to perfection. You’re not a soul with a checksum. You’re an emergent phenomenon with runtime variation. And that means you’re free in the best possible way.

So keep iterating. Keep reassembling. Keep being that weird, thinking, laughing, approximating cloud of perceptual spaghetti.

You’re doing great.

See you in the next hallucination.

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