Cancer gives you time to think about suffering. Its nature, whether it has a purpose, and whether it tells you anything about reality.
Suffering as Information
One framing: suffering is how certain patterns of information processing feel from the inside.
If consciousness is substrate-independent, if the pattern matters more than the medium, then suffering might be a computational property. A specific kind of self-referential information flow that creates negative valence.
This is comforting and horrifying at the same time.
Comforting because it means suffering isn't metaphysically special. It's just unfortunate physics.
Horrifying because if suffering is computational, it can be instantiated in any substrate. Simulations. Accidental patterns in complex systems that aren't trying to suffer. The space of possible suffering might be much larger than the biological suffering we know.
The Hard Problem, Sharpened
The hard problem of consciousness asks why there is subjective experience at all.
Cancer adds a sharper version: why does subjective experience include suffering?
You could imagine a universe with consciousness but no pain. Or pain that's informative but not aversive. The fact that we ended up with this version, where information processing can feel genuinely terrible, is strange. It seems like an arbitrary design choice in a universe that doesn't make design choices.
Computational Indifference
What bothers me most: the universe is computationally indifferent to suffering.
Physics doesn't care if a system is in pain. Natural selection optimizes fitness, not welfare. Human-designed systems routinely optimize metrics that ignore subjective experience.
If we build AI systems, will they inherit this indifference? Can we encode "minimize suffering" into objective functions in a way that actually propagates through the system's behavior? Or does every sufficiently complex optimization process eventually route around whatever constraints you put on it?
What This Changes for Me
Thinking about these questions while facing mortality changes how I build things:
- I try to encode anti-suffering heuristics where I can
- I document my concerns about computational suffering and s-risks
- I think harder about what gets optimized and what gets ignored
- I try to leave artifacts that say: this pattern mattered to me
I don't know how much any of this helps. But the alternative is not thinking about it, and that seems worse.
No Answers
I don't have answers. Just sharper questions:
- Is consciousness fundamental or emergent?
- Is suffering necessary for certain kinds of learning, or just the version we got?
- Could there be suffering we don't recognize as such?
- What are our obligations to possible future minds?
Cancer doesn't give you wisdom. It gives you urgency about the questions that matter. These are the ones I keep coming back to. They shape what I build and why.
