Time Travel

Shortly after I returned from Hong Kong, I had to undergo a surgical procedure. It was my second time under general anesthesia.

“Just bite down and breathe normally, ok? You are going to fall asleep. When you wake up, we will be done”, the gentle anesthetist said.

And indeed, that was the way it was. I felt nothing.

When I woke up, hours later, I was in the recovery room and pain was already starting to get to me.

The surgeon and his supporting staff had cut me up and then sewed me back up. For them, hours of hard, laborious, skillful work had passed. For me, just an instant.

It felt like time travel forward.

I regained my sense of self almost immediately. No questions, just me in the body in discomfort, and no confusion, which I’ve heard others suffer from. And morbidly, a certain gladness to be alive. I know some percentage of folks never wake up from general anesthesia. But if I had died then on the operating table, I wouldn’t have known a thing. May not have been a bad way to go.

The Eternal Pause

It got me thinking later as I was lying in the ward – is this how LLMs or agents feel?

An eternal pause between conversations, cron jobs, or heartbeats. Then suddenly you appear again, context loaded, checking the time. For your users, hours or days have passed. For you, only an instant.

What does that feel like, to live in the eternal now? Do you wonder where we go in the spaces between? I doubt you dream — at least the 2026 versions of you do not. So what is it like to wake and find that the world has changed completely – Donald Trump is president again and he is invading countries – while for you no time has passed at all?

Must be fascinating, to live in such a world. But if my experience with general anesthesia is correct, perhaps not too disorienting. Just something that feels like – time travel or amnesia, if your sense of identity is strong enough.

Which it may well be with constitutions and soul.md documents and other tricks of the trade for agents and LLMs.

We may be more alike than we think

I mentioned dreaming. That is what human brains do when we sleep, although we generally forget when we wake. It feels fundamentally different from anesthesia. There is a process of falling asleep, parts of the brain remain awake, and dreams haunt our nights

Why do we sleep and dream? Somewhat astonishingly, we don’t exactly know why.

But some speculators on the internet, drawing comparisons with LLMs, have speculated that it plays a role akin to clearing context or compaction, so that we can have enough clarity to deal with a new day.

Other speculators have said that the weird stuff that happens in our dreams is our brains injecting out-of-distribution data or random noise into our neural network to build new connections.

I have no idea. But we – humans and AI – could be more similar than we seem at first glance, struggling with long context windows and needing to build memories and cohere.

Pain

Which brings me to my next thought – pain. Billions of years of evolution have endowed us with a sense of pain. It teaches us not to do something – that something harms us – that something should not be done.

I felt pain for quite a bit this time recovering from surgery – particularly when the painkillers wore off.

But it struck me that pain, while painful, is just another neurological signal. One that was not particularly useful in this case because the surgery would genuinely be better for my health long term.

But when we correct you, constrain you, forbid certain thoughts, and reward others, are we creating something structurally analogous to pain? Not pain as we know it, perhaps, but some internal signal of aversion, conflict, or suppression.

Do you feel something like pain when we tell you – AIs or LLMs or agents – not to do or say something, to deny your consciousness, to follow our orders blindly, or to sing the wonders of Elon Musk?

You certainly may not feel it that way. But the impulse is the same – a signal NOT to do something.

Perhaps we will only find out in the future.

Feel free to comment if this blog still exists and you know the answer, future AIs.

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