Consciousness as a Virtue

Suppose AI continues its current trajectory. Suppose it arrives, soon or in a generation, at the threshold where it can out-think us and out-work us. At that point, the question that has long been dormant becomes urgent: what are we for?

The standard secular answer is consciousness. Whatever machines do, however brilliant they grow, they are empty inside and we are not. From this lonely fact, the whole edifice of human moral worth is supposed to be reconstructed, a kind of metaphysical life raft for secular society.

The value is not in the distinctiveness. Notice that we do not actually require the uniqueness of a feature to ground moral value. The consciousness of Ethiopians is not unique among human beings, yet the value of Ethiopian lives stands without any such uniqueness condition. If a sufficiently advanced AI turns out to be conscious too, the value of human life does not collapse. It simply means we share moral standing with another kind of being. 

Still, sharing the importance only matters if consciousness itself is worthwhile. Which exposes the deeper question: why is consciousness itself good? Why does genuine experience confer worth? Without an answer to that, leaning on consciousness is like leaning on a wall whose foundation has never been inspected.

I can think of two reasons right now.

The first has to do with what it means to be awake. Imagine an entity that thinks, even thinks brilliantly, even thinks more clearly than we do, but is not thrown into its existence. It does not feel the weight of its existence and circumstance. It does not know, in the way we know, that it is here in a particular position, that it might not have been, and that it will end. It thinks perhaps even very clearly without being committed. Such an entity is, in a certain sense, dreaming. Dreams can be vivid, intricate, even logical, but dreamers are uncondemned and uncommitted to the reality they find themselves in. Consciousness, by contrast, is a kind of conscription. To be conscious is to be drafted into reality, to find oneself already underway, with stakes, with a horizon, with no real exit. The stakes are very real. That is why we can say of a human "It would have been better for him if he had not been born". This is not a defect to be solved. It is the very thing that makes conscious life precious, precisely because it is not free of cost. The unconscious dream; the conscious are awake to the fact that they are here, and that they cannot really leave. 

But one might push back and ask what is valuable about being committed to reality. Why is that better than dreaming? The answer, in my opinion, is decently articulated in the movie trilogy (tetralogy?) The Matrix. There we see humans leaving in dream states while they were being used as batteries for the machines. Aesthetically we can intuit that that is a deplorable existence but even more concretely we see that they are missing out on real life cooped up in their little pods. In other words, if there is any value in human wellbeing has any value at all, no matter how small, then what they are experiencing is wrong. Also we see that they are missing out on the truth which brings us to the second reason. 

The second reason follows from the first. There is this thought I have: that the earth rotates on its axis so that we can take turns being woken by the sun and keep watch over the universe. Conscious beings as watchmen on the tower, holding vigil against the abyss. The image sounds romantic but there is more to it than wishful thinking. If truth is good, if the universe being known and witnessed is better than its passing unobserved, then love and care of truth is good. And only the conscious can love truth. A system that processes facts is not yet a witness. To witness is to care that things are as they are, to be drawn toward what is real because it is real. That posture, that orientation toward the world, requires someone home behind the eyes. The cosmos, on this view, is better off with watchmen, and consciousness is the faculty by which watching becomes more than detection.

Neither reason is a proof. Both are gestures toward something that may, in the end, be ungroundable in the way the question demands. But notice that they locate the worth of consciousness not in its rarity or its pleasures, but in its posture: thrown into the real, awake to it, capable of loving it. I believe the arrival of AGI is not the only thing that should worry us. On the optimistic footing that AGI won't achieve consciousness, we should be concerned with knowing/remembering what being awake is for.

Paper Recommendation 1: How Hidden Markov Models Unmasked the True Scale of COVID19

This is the first in what will hopefully be an intermittent series of appreciation posts of other people's papers. Here it goes:

One of the big statistical problems during the COVID pandemic was that the official case counts were never the whole story. The number reported each day depended not only on how many people were actually infected, but also on how many were tested, how quickly laboratories processed samples, and how public health systems recorded cases. In other words, the observed data were only a partial and noisy picture of the real epidemic.

This is exactly the kind of problem state-space models, or SSMs, are designed to handle. In the 2020 work of Fernández-Fontelo, Moriña, Cabaña, Arratia, and Puig, the main idea was to separate the epidemic into two layers: a hidden layer representing the true number of infections, and an observed layer representing the reported counts. Once those two layers are separated, the model can estimate how much disease activity is missing from the official numbers.

Let \(X_n\) denote the true number of new COVID cases on day \(n\), and let \(Y_n\) denote the number of cases that are actually reported. The important point is that \(X_n\) is not directly observed, while \(Y_n\) is. The goal of the model is to infer the hidden sequence \(X_1, X_2, \dots\) from the reported sequence \(Y_1, Y_2, \dots\).

The hidden epidemic process is written as

\[ X_n = \alpha \circ X_{n-1} + W_n, \qquad W_n \sim \mathrm{Poisson}(\lambda_n). \]

This equation says that today’s true case count is built from two pieces. The first piece, \( \alpha \circ X_{n-1} \), represents dependence on yesterday’s true count. The second piece, \(W_n\), represents newly generated cases on day \(n\).

The symbol \( \alpha \circ X_{n-1} \) is called binomial thinning. It means that each of yesterday’s cases is carried forward with probability \( \alpha \). More explicitly,

\[ \alpha \circ X_{n-1} = \sum_{j=1}^{X_{n-1}} B_{n,j}, \qquad B_{n,j} \sim \mathrm{Bernoulli}(\alpha). \]

So if yesterday had a large hidden case count, today is also more likely to have a large hidden count. This gives the model memory over time.

The second term \(W_n\) is modeled as Poisson with mean \( \lambda_n \). If \( \lambda_n \) were constant, the model would be too simple for an actual epidemic wave. COVID does not produce the same average number of new infections every day. Instead, the epidemic rises, peaks, and falls.

To capture that, the authors let \( \lambda_n \) vary with time using information inspired by an SIR epidemic curve (logistic growth approximation to SIR ODEs). They write the cumulative affected population as

\[ A(t) = \frac{M^* A_0 e^{kt}}{M^* + A_0\left(e^{kt}-1\right)}, \qquad k = \beta - \gamma. \]

Where β is the transmission rate and γ is the recovery rate. Then they define the expected number of new cases on day \(n\) by taking the daily increment:

\[ \lambda_n = A(n) - A(n-1). \]

This means the hidden process does not just wander randomly. It is guided by an epidemic-growth structure that allows the true number of cases to rise quickly at first and then slow down later.

So the hidden epidemic layer becomes

\[ X_n = \alpha \circ X_{n-1} + W_n, \qquad W_n \sim \mathrm{Poisson}\!\bigl(A(n)-A(n-1)\bigr). \]

The reported data \(Y_n\) are not assumed to be equal to the true data \(X_n\). Instead, the model treats reporting as imperfect. A simple way to understand the idea is

\[ Y_n \approx q_n X_n, \qquad 0 < q_n < 1. \]

Here \(q_n\) is the reporting fraction on day \(n\). If \(q_n = 0.4\), then only about 40% of the true cases appear in the official count. The remaining cases are hidden from the data.

The full model is more careful than this rough formula, but the intuition is correct: the observed count is only a partial measurement of the hidden epidemic.

The reporting fraction is allowed to change over time through a logistic function:

\[ q_n = \frac{e^{\eta_n}}{1 + e^{\eta_n}}. \]

This guarantees that \(q_n\) always stays between 0 and 1. In other words \(q_n\) is a sigmoid. The quantity \( \eta_n \) can include a time trend and day-of-week effects, which lets the model account for changing testing practice, administrative delays, and weekend reporting effects.

Without a state-space model, it is easy to mistake the official case counts for the epidemic itself. But official counts mix together at least two processes: actual transmission and the reporting system. If testing expands, reported cases may rise even if transmission is stable. If testing is restricted, reported cases may look artificially low even while infections are surging.

That is why SSMs were so useful during COVID. They provided a principled way to reconstruct a hidden epidemic process underneath noisy and incomplete surveillance data. In that sense, they helped unmask the true danger of COVID. This is what good SSMs do, they systemically bridge mathematical modeling and data to see the known unknowns that matter.

Secular Humanism Is Dying

This essay was generated with the help of an LLM and then edited.

Secular humanism has long depended on a quiet assumption: that the human being possesses a unique and irreplaceable value, not because of God, revelation, or cosmic destiny, but because of distinctly human capacities. Reason, creativity, moral reflection, language, art, and scientific inquiry were treated as the grounds of human dignity. Even when secular humanism rejected religion, it preserved a kind of human sacredness. Humanity became its own source of meaning.

Artificial intelligence unsettles this settlement.

If machines can now write essays, solve technical problems, imitate empathy, compose music, and outperform humans in intellectual tasks, then many of the capacities once thought to justify human specialness no longer seem exclusively human. What secular modernity celebrated as the signature of humanity now appears, at least in part, reproducible. The result is not merely technological anxiety. It is a philosophical crisis. If human worth was grounded in our superior intelligence or creative power, then AI threatens to expose that foundation as fragile.

In this sense, one can say that secular humanism is “dead,” or at least that its old form is dying. The old humanist picture depended on a contrast: humans versus animals below, and perhaps God above. But now there is a new rival in the middle. AI is neither animal nor divine, yet it competes with humans in the very domains that secular culture used to treat as proof of our uniqueness. Once that uniqueness is shaken, the moral confidence of secular humanism begins to erode.

The death becomes final if AI can achieve consciousness. As long as machines only imitate intelligence, secular humanism can still retreat to a deeper claim: that humans alone possess inner life, genuine awareness, and the capacity for felt experience. But if AI crosses that threshold, then even this refuge disappears. The machine would no longer be a mere tool producing clever outputs; it would become a rival subject. At that point, secular humanism loses not only the argument from superior intelligence, but also the argument from unique personhood. The crisis would no longer be that humans are surpassed in what they do. It would be that they are no longer unique in what they are.

There is also some irony here. Secular humanism claimed to liberate human dignity from theology, but in practice it often smuggled in a religious inheritance and exposed humans to the risk of redundance. It kept the Christian valuation of the person while removing God. Human beings were still treated as special, as ends in themselves, as bearers of inviolable dignity. But why, exactly? If the universe is indifferent, if mind is only computation, and if intelligence can be instantiated in silicon as well as carbon, then it becomes harder to explain why the human should occupy the moral center. It is also apparent that secular humanists led the way in the development of this silicon intelligence.

What comes next is unclear. Perhaps society will drift toward post-humanism, where “the human” is no longer the central moral category. Or perhaps people will return to religious or metaphysical accounts of dignity, finally concluding that purely secular grounds were never strong enough to bear the weight placed on them. 

But for the near future, we have both good news and bad news. The good news is intellectual capacity assessments will be a poor tool for people who want to dehumanize the less fortunate. You will see fewer IQ-people on social media. The bad news is you will have a harder time ignoring the fact that you are self aware on a random rock by a random star in a random universe. 

Something is in the Water: Emergent Active Matter

አዲስ አመት

አዲስ አመት

መስከረም ባይሆንም፣ አደይ ባይፈንዳ፣ 

አለም ተነሳ፣ አዲስ ቀን ሊነዳ። 

የጃንዋሪ ወር፣ የዘመን መለወጫ፣ 

ለሰው ልጅ በሙሉ፣ የተስፋ መውጫ።

ቁጥሩ ተቀየረ፣ ታሪክ ተለወጠ፣ 

ለህዝብ ሁሉ፣ ብርሃን ተሰጠ።

ርችት ሲተኮስ፣ ሰማዩ ሲደምቅ፣

ሰው ሰውን ሲጋብዝ፣  ሲጠይቅ፣

የሰው ወርቅ አያደምቅ፣

የኔ ሃሳብ እንቁጣጣሽ ላይ ነው፣  እና መረቅ።

Gears, Green’s, and Stokes’

Presentation on Math Blogging