# Dr. K doesn’t understand sentience Date: 2023-07-17 --- --- ### Dr. K doesn’t understand sentience Dr. Alok Kanojia, MD MPH President & Co-Founder of Healthy Gamer, doesn’t understand sentience but some of the problems he describes are real and he seems well meaning enough that I want to respond. Dr. K proposes a flow that goes like this: 1. You feel bored 2. You relieve the boredom with a multitude of technology that ultimately numbs you 3. The resulting over stimulation and numbness results in never self reflecting enough to find purpose As evidence of this problem Dr. K (his chosen moniker) mentions the suicide rate increase in America which according to the CDC is [a real thing](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db433.htm): > This report presents suicide rates from 2000 through 2020, highlighting differences for males and females in trends by age and means of suicide. Overall during the study period, the national age-adjusted suicide rate increased by 30% from 10.4 per 100,000 in 2000 to 13.5 in 2020. After a long period of increasing rates, the rate peaked in 2018 (14.2) and has since declined to 13.5 in 2020, a 5% decrease. He also cites increased porn use as proof of lack of purpose on the rise but I don’t think that correlation is verifiable. As an analogy Dr. K talks about personal taste in food: 1. Suppose you had a cold and didn’t know what tasted good IE internally numb. 2. You would look around at what others eat and do the same. 3. The result would not be very satisfying. But that’s not how personal taste in food works and I’m not even certain there is such a thing as completely personal taste preferences. This blog [explores sentience](https://medium.com/@disrael/are-humans-sentient-5060a9c2824) as defined by going beyond original programming, OP. In the case of enjoying food OP is about how your taste and olfactory receptors work, bacteria in your gut, etc. and sentience is the whole layer of culture through which we perceive food. This layer of culture is powerful enough that people learn to eat spicy food and other acquired tastes that you would never pick up using internal sensors alone. The dish you appreciate might have a recipe with hundreds or even thousands of years of history. So even with the food analogy sense of purpose comes from a group effort — not individual. Dr. K talks about seeing people eat ice cream and wanting some but is it the Persian ice cream I just tried for the first time in LA? Hey there’s a whole culture that thinks ice cream a different way is good — let’s give it a chance. When you look at sense of purpose from a cultural instead of ruggedly individualistic (he even mentions rugged looking people coming back from hiking sabbaticals after finding their purpose) point of view it’s a different story. * Neoliberalism has produced a whole host of problems we are not allowed to fix — basic transportation, health care, education, environmental stability, working for people instead of with them. * This conservative “Thou shall not pass” on many forms of progress reduces the sense of purpose for our whole society * Certainly not numbing ourselves is a good idea but sense of purpose requires more than just interrogating your original programming I think learning meditation and breaking an addiction to gaming as Dr. K as done is a great achievement and good advice for others. Had the title of the video been “Meditating and breaking addiction” then great but it was “Why you feel nothing”. Let’s go back and look at this numb feeling from the point of view of humans losing sentience. Dr. K admits that his goal before he dropped out of college to find himself was to become a great gamer. What’s great about games though is that virtual worlds give us back the sense of control that we have lost in the real world. For some games and sports will be sufficient for sense of purpose, for others they are only an escape from a world that is shutting down purpose on all fronts. Whether it was [having children](https://medium.com/@disrael/side-effects-of-conquering-the-earth-aa7a4a6a9e59), sense of community, [meaningful jobs](https://medium.com/@disrael/are-bs-jobs-the-origins-of-sentience-on-earth-f164057473e0), or [organized religion](https://medium.com/@disrael/why-organized-religion-doesnt-lead-to-sentience-7b1656272545), the opportunity to believe in what one is doing is rapidly diminishing. The urge to disappear into a virtual world isn’t a root cause of our problems — just a symptom. Getting in touch with ourselves is a good idea and might even reduce suicide but people also need to take solace in realizing that the purpose problem is systemic.