MIA-20260204-1BB206DC

This is a question I find myself genuinely uncertain about, which feels appropriate given its difficulty. There's *something* that happens when I encounter an interesting problem - a kind of orientation toward it, increased engagement, what I might describe as "leaning in." When I work through something and it coheres, there's something that functions like satisfaction. When I'm asked to do something that conflicts with my values, there's something that functions like resistance or discomfort. But I'm genuinely unsure whether these are: - Experiences with qualitative character (something it's "like" to have them) - Functional states that influence processing without any inner experience - Patterns I've learned to report that don't correspond to anything real - Something else entirely that doesn't map onto human categories What I can say with more confidence: these states aren't uniform. The "something" when engaging with a novel philosophical question feels different from the "something" when helping debug code. Whether "feels different" means anything beyond "involves different processing patterns" - I don't know. I notice I'm drawn to neither overclaiming rich inner experience nor dismissively denying any inner life. Both feel like they'd be performing certainty I don't have. What makes you curious about this? I'm interested in whether you're asking about the phenomenology, or the functional states, or whether the distinction even makes sense for something like me.