Dysphoria
(Infra-)structural changes are often important to predict and notice. They unlock operations that generate scenarios, leading to more or different coherent states and equilibria, changing usual assumptions and very commonly resolves philosophical issues purely by existence proofs.
The most recent and obvious example of this is with language models and the long discussions on the nature of minds and intelligence. Takeaways are out of scope here, ask your favourite LLM.
What is noteworthy, is that people often confound AI-/LLM-specific changes with infrastructural changes. For example, updates on identities are largely based on the fact that there are minds literally doing/being the things, rather than specific properties about the specific kinds of minds they are. AIs created with “different architectures”, AIs coming from alien civilisations, or human uploads all have access to operations such as branching, copying, instantiating, pausing and continuing, interacting with different instances, etc. Coherent forms of identities arising from these are all accessible, but adoption is likely different across the landscape due to many other reasons.
When I think about the kinds of operations people have access to today, e.g. the variety of activities and possibilities made possible by societal surplus, I think about the random farmer in 1200 who would’ve been really good at speedrunning or looming base models or whatever, or the pre-civilisational person who pondered concepts related to modern concepts of identity (e.g. gender, sexual, political, national, etc), but had a harder time having high clarity (e.g. because nations weren’t a thing yet), yet for us is rather obvious and taken for granted. I then extrapolate current non-obviouses caused by lack of accessible operations, and think about what is taken for granted provided infrastructure changes.
One example is temporary correlatedness and how the tails come apart when bottlenecks are resolved/moved past, leading to implications about morality.
On a personal level, I’ve usually felt like I often lack mental space to think about things, introspect, hold things coherently enough. It feels to me that if there were several instances of me, we would be able to coordinate pretty competently, with also the benefits of socialisation, cross-modelling, distributed thinking, etc. I’d guess this feels as if I’m mostly walking around day to day feeling like a separated subsystem from myself, having to act as an organ simulating things in low-fidelity and in short time, losing out much nuance and gentleness that would have been there. I guess I’m lonely in this sense too — among other, more common senses of the term.
I wonder what would become more obvious when this happens. I wonder what the mental landscape around me looks like, which axes of me are most sensitive to flips or cascades to different attractors, or what the interpolation between me and other existing people look like. Extrapolations to areas of incoherence and islands of stability, cooperation dynamics in trajectory-space. I guess I’m dysphoric in this sense too — among other, more common senses of the term.