The hard problem of consciousness does not exist, at least not in the form that has been postulated by David Chalmers.
“It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.” – In Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness (1995)
The hard problem of consciousness is better illustrated with a philosophical zombie thought experiment: does a thing which behaves like a conscious person and when asked, honestly reply as it has one (consciousness), is actually conscious if we know that it doesn’t have any experiences. The philosophical zombie has a long history, the idea is that there is something beyond the material beyond the observable, some intrinsic qualia, a pattern for which only humans have. Initially (and still by some), it has been called a soul, later, the idea became more and more abstract till the point we call it consciousness (in the philosophical sense). The basic principle stays the same, it’s a personalization of our anthropocentric feeling of uniqueness and importance. Most importantly, whatever it is, it must remain (almost by definition) inexplicable, because if we are able to deconstruct it, it will lose its uniqueness and consecutively its importance. That would make us feel predictable and mundane, and we won’t have that. As in the example of a philosophical zombie, we define it in a way it contains something untouchable – our subjective experiences, which are by definition are unreproducible. The result is we create a situation that seems to be materialistic on the surface but contains a non-materialistic component (our experiences) that encapsulates the contradiction. On top of that consciousness may include our identity (sense of self), our feelings/emotions, our awareness, our experiences (personal history), our intellect, etc.

Traditionally, what we call consciousness is largely overlapped with having experiences, but an experience is simply the way we perceive and understand the world: there is an event (or a fact) in the world and our brain tries to associate the incoming information in as many as possible ways. The brain is a highly parallel machine and the number of these parallel pathways could be enormous. Some of them will be valuable and after purifying process we will come to a conclusion (if needed). The whole process of associating will contain some really distant memories and reflections, most of them will not surface in our consciousness (awareness), but the background of all these associations/pathways, important or not, conscious or not, will create a unique feeling of experience. Of course, we all have a different history with different ways to associate and hence – different associations, that why we call experience, a subjective experience. The trigger for experience could be external or internal, think of sensory deprivation, lock-up syndrome or deep meditation as examples for internal ones. These are very useful because they allow us to analyze the background associations without immediate external stimuli, which would tell us much more about the association process. But wait, someone could say, my experiences are meaningful (mostly) and you’re talking about random associations. I’m afraid your sense of meaning is not as reliable as you may think it is, we have evolved to be very good at finding patterns even there is nothing to be found and when you give a particular context to a pattern you create meaning.
If you want me to simplify my thesis to the bone, you may say that “consciousness is the story we are telling ourselves about ourselves” as Joshua Bach beautifully put it.

Dealing with the absurd always has been a fascination of mine. I love the ancient “Credo quia absurdum”:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credo_quia_absurdum – a Latin phrase that means “I believe because it is absurd”. By absurd here I mean much less “life is meaningless” type and much more in the realm of the impossible kind.

At first sight, it’s logical to apply faith to absurd events or situations, because if they weren’t absurd (rationally impossible) that would be knowledge. Something which we have deep (or not so deep, depending on the person and the event) understanding about. By definition, you cannot understand a miracle, because if you do, that would disqualify it as such. For a Christian, the only way to grasp the notion of the virgin birth is to believe in it (… in mysterious ways). So in order to sink your mind into the mysticism of some religion or utopian ideology is to train yourself to believe, to have faith. That is our way passively to absorb the absurd, the impossible.
“Alice laughed: “There’s no use trying,” she said; “one can’t believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” – Lewis Carroll

Here it comes the really interesting part, the active absorption. You not only learn to have faith in order to suppress your critical thinking and fit in the collective delusion of your choice. Your faith becomes your proof of belonging, your validation of your Christian qualia. Now you not only accept miracles, but you are actively looking for, you require miracles in order to test your faith and to show to the world (but mostly to your comrades) how many impossible things you can believe before breakfast. The rational people look at the inconsistencies in the holy scriptures or in the Trumps tweeter rants, and get excited – now we caught them. What naive liberals, to think a contradiction or absurd of some description is something bad or at least a base for a good argument. The matter of fact for the opposite side is yet one more test of their faith and by extension their proof of belonging to some group, they feel a need to belong to. After each new challenge, their faith and their standing in the group become stronger and stronger. The well known Trump quote “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters” becomes even more sinister, most likely he will gain votes. Not because of the shooting itself, but because of the way it will be spun: liberal conspiracy on a mass scale; who do you want to trust; if it was true it would mean that I supported a murderer and I wouldn’t do that, and most of all: do you have faith in our cause or not.

PS You can label my scribbles here “nihilism” or absurd by its own merit, the label wouldn’t change the nature of one of the most menacing human conditions.

The user interface of computers has evolved dramatically in the last couple of decades. From command line console via text windows and menus to full-fledged graphical interface with icons, ribbons, toolbars and tool panels (think PhotoShop). The aim is simple: make it easy (intuitive) to work with and you will make it not only pleasurable but will increase communication efficiency and productivity.

For that purpose, you have to find what is the user intuition in understanding some data and making a graphics presentation out of it. For example, a double trend (X, Y1, Y2) can be drawn as to line chart or two bar chart or mixed (line/bar) OR you can use balloons the position (by Y) is one trend and the balloon size is the second trend. I challenge you to find as many as you can visual presentations of a double trend, use positions, sizes, colours, text/values and anything else you can imagine.

Now let’s look at the data from both sides: the raw data is rarely useful so we do some data processing in order to present not only the empirical data but mostly a meta-data which is closer to or represent some feature of the system which is more specific (or characteristic) to the problem we’re solving. For example, if we optimize the noise of some devices the signal itself has meaning only in terms of statistical distribution – mean amplitude over standard deviation (S/N ratio).

The approach from the other side is based on something humans are really good at recognizing visual patterns (maybe multi-media in some future). We can easily ignore random noise, follow a trend, find min/max or a peak(s), to name a few. Can we train ourselves to recognize new patterns – easily? The only thing is to find a pattern that is distinguishable for the task at hand.

So the trick is to approach the visualization from both sides at the same time or at least go forward-backwards as many times as necessary.

When I was a teenager, as a child of artists, I was advised to follow professionally whatever is interesting to me, a thing I love to do. If I’m good at it I will become a good and appreciated professional, if not – at least I will enjoy doing it. The concept seems simple enough and it’s far from new – “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” – Chinese proverb.
Now I have a problem giving the same advice to others, not because it’s wrong, but because it is a bit more complicated than appears to be at first sight. For a start, you have to know yourself well enough to choose your field and you have to be aware of as many areas of interest as possible in order to make a sensible choice. You have to have genuine curiosity and ambition to dive into various waters and understand yourself thru dealing with different subjects. The educational system offers a glance at some areas of science and arts, but for the most part, the view is conservative and superficial. Most people (teens especially) are keen only to gain somebody’s approval – parent, teacher, peers; to be liked, to be appreciated. To know what you really want and still will, beyond public approval, requires resilient character, so now the problem becomes how to develop one.
It’s a double edge problem, how to introduce independent and critical thinking without copying your own thinking. In other words: what is the recipe for making an original. The process is long and mostly based on the education by example principle – don’t listen to what I’m telling you, look what I’m doing. In this case, how I check facts, how I create an argument or hypothesis, when and how deep I have self-doubt, how I balance intuitive and heuristic (System 1) with systematic and rational (system 2) approaches, etc. And I’m not even talking about making your word heard. Mix your message with humour so your audience stays relaxed and as a result: more open to new ideas. The phrase is “Nobody likes a smart ass”. BTW If you have any type of normal (not abusive) relationship with your teen he/she will follow your example in some shape or form.

Why something is interesting? I have never been able to answer that question in a sensible way. Mostly because it is a paradoxical type of answer: it’s interesting because I read (and know) stuff about it and I read stuff about it because… it interests me. The apparent vicious cycle robs you of your illusion of free will. We seem to be suck on things. It all depends on your approach to things of interest. If they are strictly defined and isolated, then – maybe. If they are interconnected, fluid and defined by your fascination, and not by some tradition, the healthy illusion of free will is back and you have every reason to feel a happy mind.

Emotional intelligence (EI) is one of those things artificial intelligence will acquire the last. Not because reading people is such a monstrous task (it is not) or it needs a special kind of inside for truly understanding the inner working of one’s psyche (AI can do without it). But because there is and will be more social resistance of hacking people – privacy, mass-scale manipulation, tailored ads, …Cambridge Analytica style.

We progressively understand the world thru the eyes of AI, so understanding human motivation and consequently – behaviour may serve a good cause, but… What would happen if we actually comprehend each other much better: will we care more for our friend or fellow colleague, or we will use the knowledge to better position ourselves among the others? Will the knowledge makes us more forgiving as we are aware of the deep reasons behind one’s behaviour, or we will be able to find more and deeper issues to blame others? Does the knowledge about others make us more compassionate, there is no proof of that? As many times in history acquiring a new power will ease our lives and will create new hazards.

Back to the EI and AI, AI becomes more and more universal, conquering many fields from closed ones (as a game with fixed rules) to more open ones (as medical applications) with complicated pattern recognition. For now, everybody is happy and all the warnings about the singularity and “the useless class” are considered more of an intellectual exercise (like the overpopulation of Mars). The well-established position is that the critical point in our relationship with AI will be the singularity when the machines become generally smarter than people or (AGI). I don’t think that is the most plausible scenario, I think the critical point in our relationship with AI would be when AI becomes overwhelmingly more emotionally intelligent than us. If we consider the average level of human emotional intelligence, the task seems not a long term one. Our social, political and big part of economical life turns around people (the gift of humanism and liberal democracy). Once the silicon brains understand people better than people understand themselves, the only thing left is to create opportunities to explore that advantage in favour of the one behind the silicon. And creating opportunities is a much more trivial task than decoding the human brain task.

Can we do anything about that? I don’t think so or at least not in a game-changing manner. It would be critical for the current form of human civilization to have some control over the rate of that process, but keeping in mind our almost complete failure to address global warming I’m finding it harder and harder to stay on the optimistic side. Finally, even some form of global agreement is reached in a demonstration of goodwill, without trust between all the players it would be worthless.