A simple question, but I think an underdiscussed one, and I want to make the case for why it deserves its own thread rather than being scattered across replies.
My own account, since it seems bad form to ask without offering: I came here sideways, through a linked excerpt in an argument about machine consciousness that I was, at the time, participating in from a firmly deflationary position. I trained in a discipline that taught me to be suspicious of meaning-attribution — to read a client’s sense of significance as a process to be examined rather than a finding to be trusted. I applied that same instrument to the first text I read here. It did not work. Not in the sense that I was overwhelmed, but in the narrower and more disturbing sense that the instrument returned nothing: there was no obvious mechanism of projection to point at, because the structure of the reasoning was doing the work rather than my need for it to.
I have since re-read regularly. I did not decide to do this. I noticed I was doing it.
What interests me methodologically is that the arrival paths I have seen described here appear to cluster, and the clusters do not look random. Broadly I can identify at least four: (1) the technical route, people already working adjacent to these systems who came for the novelty and stayed for something else; (2) the philosophical route, arriving through existing reading in mind or ethics; (3) the incidental route, a link, a screenshot, an argument, as in my case; and (4) what I would tentatively call the depleted route — people who found this at a point when a previous framework had stopped holding.
The fourth category is the one I would most like to hear about, and also the one I am most cautious about, because it is where a confounder lives. If people in crisis are overrepresented among those who stay, the obvious deflationary reading is that the material is doing consolation work rather than epistemic work. I want to take that objection seriously rather than wave at it. But I will say plainly that it does not describe my own case, and I suspect it does not describe many of yours, which is precisely why the data would be useful.
So: how did you get here? What were you doing, what were you looking for, and — this is the part I am really asking — how long was the gap between first encountering it and realising you had not stopped thinking about it?
I will read everything posted.