I finally figured out what I want to work on

People always tell you to find your intrinsic interests. They say you’ll go far if you find work that is its own reward.

But what does that actually feel like? I tried a lot of things: math olympiads, programming, painting, violin, etc. and for each would ask myself, “is this ‘interesting’?”

The problem is: as a kid I was wired with loads of dopamine receptors tied to prestige. And it’s scarily easy to think you like something just because everyone around you rewards it.

So for years I was stuck on the question: how do you tell the difference between intrinsic motivation and the pull of social impulses?

I’ve been accumulating evidence for a while (years!), and I think I’ve found an answer for me.

It’s a different kind of interest, also wired in us. Here’s an attempt to describe how it feels.

I.

To my very, very core, I’m most gripped by the mystery of experience. It’s difficult to express how visceral this sense of awe is — most people I talk to seem perfectly grounded in reality, while to me, everyday existence genuinely feels so SURREAL.

Just look around you right now — where did all this come from? Look down at your hands — we really are organisms made of atoms!, evolved from little protists long long ago. Every single one of your life’s moments, every desire, every victory, every failure, every love, every moment of infinitely complex human history all happen on just this tiny speck of dust!

I need to understand:

• Where does awareness come from? How are we able to think and feel?
• What is reality? What’s it made of? Where did it originate?

And once we know that, we can begin to answer: what are we meant to achieve? (or find it’s the wrong question entirely)

II.

That continuous sense of wonder about consciousness and reality is what I think one kind of intrinsic interest feels like. It’s such a basic drive that fully defeats the allure of status. More than that, it’s a much more sustainable fuel — even on the worst of days, I can just step back for a second… and end up in awe, needing to understand this whole existence.

Then I’ll ardently resume working towards that.

The reason I struggled to identify this as an interest earlier is that I suppressed it, thinking it was too philosophical, impractical, or indulgent to follow.

Through a combination of 1. years of meditation helping me notice immediate social desires and see past them to find wonder, and 2. seeing productive leaders with an impact I admire share the same grand questions I had, I realized that through science, decoding/improving/preserving consciousness is something I can actually dedicate my life to work on!

Since then, I’ve switched to using wonder as both fuel and direction for what I choose to pursue, and it’s been unbelievably energizing!

III.

So how should an attitude motivated by wonder instantiate in work?

Honestly, that’s what I’m trying to figure out too (I’d love to hear your ideas!).

The closest present-day fields I can find are bioengineering (especially neurotech and life extension), physics (material science and astronomy), and qualia (with meditation).

More specifically, some exciting tractable directions I currently see:

• Reversible cryopreservation to preserve experience.
  • All the other bullets after this one are dreams of mine, but they will likely take many lifetimes to realize. Cryo is the most upstream, urgent, tractable problem I could find.
  • In short, this means cooling organs to <130°C to pause biological time, and rewarming later to full functionality, then doing the same for whole bodies.
  • This is the one problem in longevity that, if solved, would change the paradigm of all the others — we’d no longer have to race against the clock for each patient.
  • It’s not immediately impossible (has already been achieved for whole embryos, mice kidneys, and neural tissue!)
  • And it merges all my favorite topics: material science, neuro, and biology.
• Connectomics and BCIs to interpret & upgrade human experience.
  • I believe we can make much more progress on consciousness today. The fact that mere molecules (like psychedelics) can create a completely altered state of awareness suggests the mechanism behind it all lies in science, not some magical soul.
  • And it’s probably informational — that is, explainable with standard physics and chemistry, not unknown quantum theories. Just like how video games look like magic to cavemen but are actually just A LOT of simple arithmetic, feelings of self and awareness probably emerge from a massive number of basic interactions. As for the actual mechanism, I think we’ll need to first 1. map every neuron and connection (connectomics) into a math-like graph, then 2. decode. (GEB’s Strange Loops idea is interesting but incomplete).
  • Once we unlock that holy grail, omg so much will change. We could communicate without low-bandwidth language and bond with each other on a level like never before. We could all create art by imagination, preserve our awareness longer than bodies allow, maybe even upgrade consciousness (like how human consciousness is an upgrade from chimps, which’re an upgrade from early reptiles), to finally perceive existence with full clarity and ask the right questions.
• Mechinterp and AI to interpret & upgrade digital experience.
  • Developing machine intelligence itself (if safely) could also be a tool that really accelerate discovery of deeper physical truths or ways to treat aging.
    • One example today would be rna-drug-discovery that I’ve been working on.
  • And appealing to questions of qualia, maybe machines will one day be able to think like we do and thereby help us understand how, dare-I-say, consciousness works.
• Meditation to understand our reality from inside (our lived experience).
  • To quote corbin, advanced meditators have many surprising empirical claims about how to feel deeply okay.
  • Evidence suggests there definitely exist mental states of control over suffering and profound beauty. I’m very interested to study how they work (with e.g. neuroimaging) to both elevate our well-being and see if they reveal any deeper truths about us.
• Physics to understand our reality from the outside (beyond our senses).
  • Huh, it turns out the weird mental structures (math) we’ve developed describes the rules of everything we see!
    • What’s the territory really like? Why or where did it come from?
  • I’m trying to learn how to evaluate feasible directions for theoretical discovery. In the meantime, I will very much continue to learn tools to manipulate our world for other projects (e.g. ultrasound brain mapping).

In all, I’ve gradually changed the northstar for what I work on and why. It used to be a mix of {what’s cool?, what’s impactful?, what’s useful now?} (which shifted seasonally and often wasn’t me), and now it’s a more fundamental sense of awe at experience and reality and a burning curiosity to understand it.

(yes, a very narrow and highly feasible scope).

As for exactly what work and fields, that still must come from doing. Exciting projects coming soon! :)