This one morning I woke up and suddenly realized how special we are!

One morning before getting out of bed, I was thinking about AI progress and whether it might be possible for AI to become something like us, being self aware, having its own goals and desires like we do. If we were to do so, how that might happen? I was searching for how we might be able to build self aware, goal pursuing machines.

Then I started thinking from first principle. I was trying to understand consciousness. Think about the simplest possible conscious beings and their properties. One thing led to another, and then it suddenly hit me that quite a lot of things we know about are not conscious at all, leading me to question: we are conscious, but how? I may be over simplifying it, but abstractly saying, it’s because somehow one event followed another and went through a long process of experimentation where things combined together to form new things with different properties. The process repeated numerous times over billions of years to eventually create self-aware, replicating beings like us from something that is non-living and unaware. It felt absurd, amazing and unbelievable at the same time.

Like, if we look at the basics, it’s just those four fundamental forces of physics underlying everything (oversimplifying a lot here). Something that made me a little sad was how we don’t think about it often. How we don’t often consider how special we are, that we can perceive, see, and feel. It’s such a rare thing. At that moment, I realized how special I am that I can feel special just by thinking about my own existence. I felt overjoyed and got motivated go out of bed hoping to write about it.