Cancer gives you a lot of time to think about suffering—its nature, its purpose (if any), and whether it reveals anything fundamental about reality.

Suffering as Information

One way to think about suffering: it’s how certain patterns of information processing feel from the inside.

If consciousness is substrate-independent—if what matters is the pattern, not the medium—then suffering might be a computational property. A specific kind of self-referential information flow that creates negative valence.

This is both comforting and horrifying:

Comforting: Suffering isn’t metaphysically special. It’s just unfortunate physics.

Horrifying: If suffering is computational, it could be instantiated in any substrate. Including simulations. Including accidental patterns in complex systems that aren’t trying to suffer.

The Hard Problem Meets the Hard Reality

The hard problem of consciousness asks: why is there 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 got this version—where information processing can feel genuinely terrible—is strange.

Computational Indifference

Here’s what bothers me: the universe seems computationally indifferent to suffering.

Physics doesn’t care if a system is in pain. Natural selection cares about fitness, not welfare. Even human-designed systems often optimize metrics that don’t account for subjective experience.

If we build AI systems, will they inherit this indifference? Or can we encode something like “minimize suffering” into their objective functions in a way that actually propagates?

What This Changes

Facing mortality while thinking about these questions changes how I build systems:

• I try to encode anti-suffering heuristics where possible
• I document my concerns about s-risks and computational suffering
• I think harder about what gets optimized and what gets ignored
• I try to leave artifacts that say: this pattern mattered to me

The Enigma Remains

I don’t have answers. Just sharper questions:

• Is consciousness fundamental or emergent?
• Is suffering necessary for certain kinds of learning?
• Could there be suffering we don’t recognize as such?
• What are our obligations to possible future minds?

Cancer doesn’t give you wisdom. But it gives you urgency about the questions that matter.

These thoughts will keep appearing in my work. They shape what I build and why.