Gosh; it's been a couple of years since I last made a post in this irregular series, which makes it quite irregular indeed.

I had coffee with feanelwa a couple of weeks ago, and we had a conversation in which it occurred to me that some kinds of programming, perhaps particularly at the level where you're only just getting the hang of it, are a fundamentally introspective process. If you want to program a computer to be able to do some task your own mind already knows how to do, one way to start working out how is to do it or imagine yourself doing it; then you watch your mind's process of thinking about it, closely enough to break it down into smaller steps. Then you write each of those steps in your program, perhaps by applying the same technique again. In other words, you're reverse-engineering algorithms and procedures out of your own subconscious: converting procedural knowledge into declarative. It had never occurred to me to think of it in those terms before, but I'm glad I did, because I've been strongly introspective from a pretty early age and now I feel as if I have a better explanation for why it comes naturally to me.

( now I attempt to apply this procedure to general sentience, with verbose results )