During my time at university studying pure mathematics I had an interesting experience of doing a challenging sheet of combinatorics problems during a vacation. Every day I attempted one question and got stuck on it. Then the next morning I woke up knowing the solution. It was a recurring thing: this happened every day for about 2 weeks until I had solved all the problems.
For me this a big eye opener about the importance of sleep and relaxed thinking to solve challenging problems.
In my 40's I could go to bed with a complex software design or implementation problem I was wrestling with. Consciously word a cogent and succinct question that I needed answered, sleep on it, and then in the morning, I would be still and mentally ask, "well?" Not meditating or anything, just be quiet then and listen.
And, in very deadpan style, after a few seconds (as if to choose one's words carefully), some answer would come to me audibly in my voice in my mind.
"Have you tried X?" No, I hadn't tried X, and holy smokes that was a workable approach! Sometimes, it would tell me to go back to some bit of code or configuration I had moved on from and tell me to go back and focus on that, it was almost always right that there was where I had goofed up. I experimented with posing multiple questions and follow up questions. I even asked it how it was that these answers were derived.
Strange to reread the above and refer to my own thoughts as 'it'. They were bidden ideas that came from me for sure. But, I disassociate from them because I have no memory of the chain of thought that led to the responses.
There's a lot going on upstairs, higher mind stuff. I am older now, and I no longer experience this phenomena. Have I lost it to age, or have I integrated it somehow into my conscious mind?
> There's a lot going on upstairs, higher mind stuff. I am older now, and I no longer experience this phenomena. Have I lost it to age, or have I integrated it somehow into my conscious mind?
It's similar to what Jaynes described in his "bicameral mind." Man of antiquity "heard" disembodied wisdom dispensed to him, seemingly at random, from an incorporeal source: "gods." Today we simply regard such pseudo-auditory phenomena as "thought," which may throw light on Cartesian-style equation of "the soul" with "the mind," and enduring mathematical truths with divinity.
Following the Bronze Age collapse and the "breakdown of the bicameral mind," human culture is replete with examples of people trying to hear the voices of gods, who were now being crowded out by the conscious, egoic, individualistic mental chatter of the newly developed default mode network - the crying out of the Psalms, elaborate rituals and procedures for invoking divine inspiration in the oracles, various forms of divination, augury, etc.
Tarot, properly understood, is not a means for divining the future, but a debugger or reverse engineering tool for probing the internal psychological state of the querent, and hopefully coaxing out these moments of unconscious, unbidden inspiration.
Much of modern esotericism is about trying to steer the brain into states of mind where these vestigial, intuitive, subconscious, nonlinear, pattern matching, Kahneman System 1 facilities of thinking, become once again accessible to conscious prompting and dialogue. Jaynes calls this "the induction," the Romans called it "the genius," Thelemites know it as "the knowledge & conversation," and it may be most broadly described as "union with God."
I view our existence as something like a fractal.
World history is a scrambled mess of lies and amnesia (from repeated collective concussions, heh) Who knows what is truth and what is the Victor writing the history books?
One's life is untraceable - how did we get here? Literally too much went into that story, majority unseen, and none of us can fully say.
And so at the personal level, are thoughts borne out of a chain (or DAG??) of memories that cannot ever be fully traced?
Was my homunculus voice who gave me detailed clues/answers just returning the highest probable solution gleaned from thousands of simulations in the problem space I presented? Of course I should not be privy to such musings, I wouldn't have the patience for it - so it seems to me to be "out of nowhere".
I do sometimes wonder though with all my weird experiences if I am merely the "doer in the body" whereas I have a higher self who is the real "thinker" running things in the background and who has access to the big picture.
> I do sometimes wonder though with all my weird experiences if I am merely the "doer in the body" whereas I have a higher self who is the real "thinker" running things in the background and who has access to the big picture.
Yes, precisely.
There is a classic initiatory text in the Thelemic tradition, Liber LXV, that personifies these different parts of the self. The "doer in the body" is the scribe that wrote the work, which is a dialogue in the scribe's mind between his egoic awareness (V.V.V.V.V, the namesake of the titular character from V for Vendetta) and the background "thinker," Adonai.
There is a lot of vocabulary in this space used to describe the self at very fine levels of detail.
Can I ask, and this is not judgement but anthropological curiosity, did you recently decide (or were you recently forced) to leave tech?
I interview people about this kind of thing and have noticed a trend.
Fascinating, thank you for wisdom and references!
I subscribe to the Multiplicity of Personality theory (our personalities are a combination of multiple ones). eg My wife and I both have a chaos monkey that emits impulses to do the most destructive and disruptive things, which we sometimes talk about in jest.
My dominant personality is one of control (for order) so I can focus on problem solving. Some sort of raw insight/intelligence comes from a personality that isn't always on, but seems to erupt from periods of calm and relaxation. eg Shower solutions or bedtime revelations are common.
Many people have told stories of voices that nudge them this way or that at just the right time, which I've experienced as well. Whatever part of me dreams is uses memories and fantasy, striving to experiencing new scenarios through thought experiments. The better I sleep, the more I find very recent events are incorporated...so it's some sort of shared space and speaks to how physical state affects mental states, even in sleep. I also feel like the personalities fight for dominance when the body or mind is overly-stressed (puberty, mortal danger, etc) but normally resolve into a sort of basal state.
I never wanted to be a psychologist. I often think that maybe I'm just crazy. It would explain a lot.
I once had a very weird experience on LSD (of course), in which I perceived my brain and thinking as a bunch of separate entities working in synchrony. Only two of them were capable of speech, and some were very simple and reactive. The "me" part was just them agreeing on stuff. I will never forget the experience.
Sounds right. I wonder why it is so hard to notice in regular everyday consciousness.
I like to think of us as complicated, not crazy. Don't want to ever close myself off to advantages my quirks might bring.
When I wake up from good rest it's like I've been somewhere else for years. I use that time to stay off the Internet and look at things fresh. That would explain plenty of coming up with novel solutions to things, without any solving being done while sleeping. The mental ruts of the day greatly limit problem-solving ability.
Sounds like you are a good sleeper!
What about before your 40s?
Nothing I recall from my 30's, but in my 20's I worked in videogames and that was a brutal industry at that time in terms of work-life balance. (Or, at least it sounds better nowadays.)
Bad sleep habits at that time ultimately led me to do a lot of daytime napping.
During those sessions I occasionally experienced sleep paralysis, one out of body waking dream, and disturbing stuff like hearing head-splitting trumpet sounds upon waking up.
One time, I awoke and heard an attenuated trumpet sound, and through the rush I heard two voices nearby. Just as I finished struggling to get control of my body, I distinctly remember hearing one of them say, "I can see it!"
I was living alone at the time, and that was so alarming and made me question my life choices. Looking back now I view that episode as a probable spiritual attack on a vulnerable young man.
Actually, I do remember one episode in my late 30's. My wife had twins. They were born extremely premature and there was a good chance they'd both die as we were at the extreme end of the survivability chart at that time - like by a single day of gestation and with one less day we were in the "recommend do not resuscitate" zone. Most compressed time of anguish I've ever experienced, stunned me for years. Both boys' bodies are growing good now, veeery quirky minds though.
Anyhow, studies had shown that preemies could benefit from just laying with the parents skin to skin, called "kangaroo care". So, I got to experience that with both boys one or two times! Wow, that was really something. I couldn't hold them or touch with my hands, just have them be laid on my bare chest. Very special to just love on them and feel them squirm around there a bit.
I thought, ok, I'm going to give them a little well wishing because the kid I was given was in the worst shape healthwise between the two. I closed my eyes, and concentrated on baby. I said mentally, "heal". "If you can take away anything from me that helps, do it! You have to grow and take food!" And I probed mentally.
Suddenly, I had a visual hallucination. It was a projected 3D scene of reverse images to the color of light coming through my eyelids. I could see some sort of movement of blobs rotating out, coming back. If they got too far outside my field of view they would fade and disappear. There was something like 3 visible blobs, a stationary one and two smaller moving ones. It was like I was seeing autonomic or mental processes in baby, visualized.
So I just loved on him for a bit and sat with that experience. And then I thought, maybe I can see my own processes if this is really happening to me? So, I said in my mind, "Show me what I look like". And the view changed!
What I saw was mostly out of my field of view, so many things were faded, but the blobs I could see were cycling in all different directions including away and back towards me and at different speeds. It was like a factory scene compared to my son's machine shop. I told him to take from that scene whatever would help, and the session ended soon after.
When I kangaroo cared with my other son I tried to repeat this experience and well wish him and communicate mentally, but I could not connect. That made me sad and secretly a little worried about this one's health, but I could not tell anyone my feelings because it was so odd what I had experienced with baby A. And was it just nerves and all my own imagination? Maybe, but it felt real.
Who do you attribute the spiritual attack to?
The voices sounded human, like hushed. I can't say in my case.
In Christianity, Satan and demons are recognized as a reality. God allows them access to humanity. That doesn't make God evil, and in fact God uses evil forces to drive people to Him. And we are given the choice to go with whatever party we choose, so the whole experiment hinges on choice. I know that the prince of Earth, Satan, isn't sporting; of course he preys on the vulnerable and the weak first. That was one of the low points in life for me when I heard the voices and when I had no faith.
I often wake up realizing I wrote a handful of bugs the day before. They’re obvious to me in the morning even before I sit down and open my laptop.
Sleep is a strange and magical thing.
Yes! When I awoke this morning my very first thought was ‘you didn’t connect the ground wire for the heater’.
Amazing how our brains work. Went back and sure enough I’d omitted that final connection.
That makes me wonder if studying may be more effective right before bed time, despite tiredness from the day, or if it's more effective early in the day, while we're less fatigued.
In French, there's a saying: "la nuit porte conseil". Roughly translates to "the night advises", and it means it might be better to sleep on it.
I recall my father (also a mathematician, incidentally) often repeating this to me.
Literally the same in Italian, la notte porta consiglio. It's in the Bible, in nocte consilium from the Book of Proverbs, but it's likely to pre-date even that by centuries.
In Spanish "consultar con la almohada" (consult with the pillow)
im english, there's "sleep on it"
Yeah, when you are stuck, put away that red bull and step away from the keyboard, kids.
This might be why agentic development/vibe coding leads to more burn out. It's been a long time since I've truly been 'stuck' on a problem and needed to sleep on it to figure out the answer. Now I just ask Claude to fix it until it's fixed...
Sounds like polyphasic sleeping might re-emerge as the lifestyle solution. Instead of waiting for agents to complete, you should sleep on the response so when you arise you have the optimized prompt ready to go and a reset on your energy to prevent the burnout.
Amusingly this is an almost-exact description of how I work on my current project, sharc. I'm porting Arc to Common Lisp, and implementing as many HN features as I can. I've been documenting as I go with handoffs: https://github.com/shawwn/sharc/tree/main/docs/agents/handof... (Also thanks partly to dang, who is kind enough to find time to answer an email here and there about their current Arc stack.)
At one point I was working so hard that Claude actually suggested, all on its own, that I should get some sleep.
FWIW I've had the opposite experience. Whenever I work late the output is absolute garbage. If I work past midnight it takes me 3 hours to get done what would have taken me 30 mins in the morning, and with way less frustration and stress. Your inputs to the LLM are only as good as how fresh your mind is so I've made it a rule to not work past midnight (unless there's an emergency).
In the good old days you would reach flow and actually know when you're too tired to continue. Now you can just say "please just fix it" over and over again and get yourself in a slophole much easier.
Feasibly you could do this work while asleep, the lifestyle of the future.
Then you're not challenging yourself with hard enough problems (those include the set of problems Claude cannot solve)
Most software doesn't really have "hard enough problems" unless you're working in deep tech. The majority of SWEs are probably working on some sort of SaaS which isn't super challenging for a model like Opus 4.7. Most of the problems I face are on the product side, which I do need to take time to think through, but it's not as challenging as debugging in the good old days.
How do you go from SaaS to “not super challenging”? The part of a SaaS product that I’m working on uses graph algorithms to work with what’s essentially an interactive form. There’s some mildly university-level computer science stuff and it’s mixed with enough domain expertise that Opus 4.7 is still unable to make even small changes without breaking everything or going against the architecture.
So far I’m not that impressed.
Are you guys hiring?
That's awesome! I had a somewhat similar experience (shared previously [0]):
> I proved a topology theorem in a dream once.
> Before I went to sleep, my inability to prove it had been bugging me all day long, and I suspected it'd be featured on the next morning's (way too early) final exam for my university course. I solved it in my dream, woke up, wrote on my whiteboard what I remembered and sure enough, it was correct. I worked it a few more times to cram it into my memory before running to my exam.
> To my great delight, the ability to prove that theorem was featured heavily in one of the exam's questions, and helped me do quite well on the exam overall.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40651913
My biggest road blocks seem to be knocked down with a nice walk / good nights rest, a la "rubber duck debugging." Essentially, stepping away and being able to put a fresh set of "eyes" on the problem with a different perspective, albeit it's just you resetting your own perspective.
Interestingly, I observed the same when I was practicing the drums. I would fail multiple times to reproduce a drumming part, sleep on it, and succeed on the first try the day after.
Difficult parts on videogames as well. It could be attributed to slow response times due to being tired or accidentally memorizing a bad pattern, resting also could help with those.
yep, same with guitar. go to sleep fumbling through a riff even though you "know" it, wake up playing it smooth as hell
People are so different. When I was in college, if I had an unsolved problem, I could not fall asleep.
Can confirm this level of problem solving.
Had physics problems to solve and can remember to this day when I woke up in the library after I got exhausted from not solving the last one, that my subconscious discovered during sleep that I missed that certain vectors were orthogonal (which was the necessary key insight to solve it).
I can confirm - I woke up to the resolution to my two hardest problems during PhD. Three, if you count "I should look for this kind of inequality" (which did turn out to exist), but I think that's more of an _idea_ than a solution.
The hard part is paying attention to it. With enough attention your mind will fix it.
AFAIK this is called sleep consolidation.
This is exactly how I learned programming.
10-hour days practicing. Full night sleep afterwards.
"Sleep on it?"