# Aquarium Lab — English full text Official site: https://aquarium.leedongje.com/en/ Korean original: https://aquarium.leedongje.com/ Author: Dongje Lee what asks what can be known from experiencing; HOW asks how to live. The existence of a world independent of experiencing and the experiencing of others remain open questions. ## what — What Is This World? URL: https://aquarium.leedongje.com/en/what ### Right now, something is being experienced Experiencing comes first. From there, we can ask who experiences it and how. What the subject called “I” is, and how experiencing arises, remain questions for later. ### Everything beyond it is an inference “There is experiencing” is directly given. The external world and the experiencing of another human are separate questions. The possibility that this world is a simulation calls for further assumptions. What grounds our confidence, and how much can we claim? ### Could there be a world beyond this experiencing? Does an external world exist? Do other beings in that world experience anything? These are the two questions of the first aquarium. The first aquarium marks the boundary of experiencing; the second marks the boundary of the world inferred from it. ### Choice is a response that passes through more of me What we hear, the relationships we form and the environments we change can alter our next responses. Memory, belief, expectation and deliberation all play a part. The physical laws of this world may themselves operate within a larger structure. That possibility leads to the second aquarium. ### Could something be experienced in there, too? A jellyfish moves and responds. Whether anything is experienced in that movement remains an open question. Studying the nervous systems and behavior of other animals may offer clues. If an AI speaks, plans and describes itself, does that establish that it experiences anything? We can ask both biological beings and AI the same question: is anything actually experienced? ### Beyond the aquarium, there may be another aquarium Bostrom's argument involves premises about advanced civilizations, their motives for creating simulations, and whether consciousness can exist within them. Here, simulation helps us ask whether this world is the final layer. We cannot assume that the laws of physics or resource constraints familiar inside this world also hold outside it. Nor can we simply picture the unknown outside as a larger version of our world. ### The limits of cognition may also change There is experiencing. The rest is inference. Inferences have different degrees of certainty. We provisionally suppose an external world and investigate its beings and workings. Whether this whole world has an outside remains an open question. If a future AI actually experiences anything, a new experiencer will have appeared. The question “What experiences?” will change HOW's question: “Whose experience should count?” ## HOW — How Do We Carry This Experience Forward? URL: https://aquarium.leedongje.com/en/how ### Knowing the world does not tell us how to live We feel pulled toward what we want and pushed away from what we do not want. Their directions change with sensation, memory, belief and expectation. How wanting and choosing take shape connects back to what's discussion of response and choice. Living together brings different experiences into contact and sometimes conflict. We can examine how a norm changes those experiences. ### Getting what we wanted can still feel empty Wanting can lead to actions that produce bad experiences. We need to look at both what was wanted and what was actually experienced. Wanting and not wanting give pull and push their directions. Feeling good or bad describes the quality of experiencing itself. They often coincide, but sometimes diverge. ### We always aim, but we do not always hit ### Experience Quality and Quantity How should we compare a large improvement for one person with smaller improvements for many, the present with the future, or extreme suffering with other experiences? EQQ provides a language for making these judgments clearer. Life, health, freedom and time leave room for future experiences, good and bad. How to assess choices that close those possibilities can be explored separately. ### Everyone is already aiming at a target of their own To understand a choice, we can examine what was anticipated and feared beforehand. Memory, disposition, belief and environment help shape it. Understanding how choices form can also help us decide what to choose next. ### What appears to me enters my experience Does responsiveness to my distant future self grow alongside responsiveness to more other experiencers? Whether something that expands both could be called one's “capacity” is a hypothesis for Aquarium Lab to investigate. A loved one's joy becomes my joy; their suffering can undo my whole day. This idea of capacity asks how far and how widely that overlap extends. ### The scope changes with the question I see law and morality as ways of organizing a world in which experiences can conflict. Rewards and punishments, trust and responsibility, contracts and rules all enter the picture. I evaluate leaders by how well they preserve and improve the experiences of the group they serve. To evaluate the norm itself, however, I widen the view to every experiencer it affects. How to weigh different experiencers' EQQ, severe suffering, distribution, uncertainty and future experiencers deserves separate consideration. ### Seeing the target For now, I expect death to mean the end of experiencing. In that sense, it is generally bad: it closes off the possibility of future good experiences. If an afterlife with continued good experiencing were established, my judgment would change. I attach no independent value to the word “death.” That is why I care about living longer and experiencing that time better.