Do people just read really fast? I think they have some heuristics for figuring out what parts to read and how to skim, which maybe involves something like binary search and tracking-abstraction-borders. But something about this still feels opaque to me.

Even if you have poor heuristics, it's still may be worth it to google/open docs and walk obvious links. The point is not to have an algorithm that certainly finds everything relevant, but to try many things that may work.

How do you learn to replicate bugs, when they happen inconsistently in no discernable pattern? especially when the bug comes up, like, once every couple days or weeks, instead of once every 5 minutes.

You speed up time. Or more generally prepare an environment that increases reproduction frequency, like slow hardware/network or higher load. You spam clicks and interrupt every animation, because all bugs are about asynchronous things. You save state after reproduction, or better before and start from it. If all fails, you add logs/breakpoints to be ready next week. But usually you just look at code to figure out paths that may manifest as your bug and then try to reproduce promising paths.

The truth was always before our eyes:

Neuron count intuitively seems to be a better proxy for the variety/complexity/richness of positive experience. Then you can have an argument about how you wouldn't want to just increase intensity of pleasure, that just a relative number. That what matters is that pleasure is interesting. And so you would assign lesser weights to less rich experience. You can also generalize this argument to negative experiences - maybe you don't want to consider pain to be ten times worse just because someone multiplied some number by 10.

But I would think that the broader spectrum of potential sources for pleasure and pain would still not require a greater spectrum of intensity.

Isn't pain in both wings worse than in one?

Russelian panpsychism doesn't postulate a new force - physics already accepts casual role of existence: only existing neurons can fire.

And it explains epistemic link - it's cogito ergo sum - you're always right, when you think that universe exists.

And rock's perception belongs to a rock.

Would anyone describe it as theirs? That access is reflective. It’s pretty difficult to retrieve data in a format you didn’t store it in.

But what if there is no access or self-description or retrieval? You just appear fully formed, stare at a wall for a couple of years and then disappear. Are you saying that describing your experience makes them retroactively conscious?

Even if I’m not thinking about myself consciously [ i.e., my self is not reflecting on itself ], I have some very basic perception of the wall as being perceived by me, a perceiver—some perception of the wall as existing in reference to me.

Is it you inspecting your experience or you making an inference from the "consciousness is self-awareness" theory? Because it doesn't feel reflective to me? I think I just have a perception of a wall without anything being about me. It seems to be implementable by just forward pass streamed into short-term memory or something. If you just separated such a process and put it on repeat, just endlessly staring at a wall, I don't see a reason why would anyone would describe it as reflective.

I mean, it is reflective in a sense that inner neurons observe outer neurons so in a sense it is a brain observing brain. But even rocks have connected inner layers.

The thing I don't understand about claimed connection between self-model and phenomenal consciousness is that I don't see much evidence for the necessity of self-model for conscious perception's implementation - when I just stare at a white wall without internal dialog or other thoughts, what part of my experience is not implementable without self-model?

"Death is fine if AI doesn't have self-preservation goal" or "suffering is bad" are also just human ethical assumptions.

You are talking about experience of certainty. I'm asking why do you trust it?

I know it's beyond doubt because I am currently experiencing something at this exact moment.

That's a description of a system, where your experience directly hijacks your feeling of certainty. You wouldn't say that "I know it's beyond doubt there is a blue sky, because blue light hits my eyes at this exact moment" is a valid justification for absolute certainty. Even if you feel certain about some part of reality, you can contemplate being wrong, right? Why don't say "I'm feeling certain, but I understand the possibility of being wrong" the same way you can say about there being blue sky? The possibility is physically possible (I described it). It's not even phenomenologically unimaginable - it would feel like misremembering.

Why insist on describing your experience as "knowledge"? It's not like you have perfect evidence for a fact "experience is knowledge", you just have a feeling of certainty.

And if seeing-neurons of someone's brain are in the state of seeing red, but they are thinking and saying that they see blue, would you say they are right?