Q: What was the hardest debugging problem you had?

A: I had a very slow network connection to the computer, and it was 23 light-hours away from me.

Learning new and weird things builds brain elasticity and vocabulary for you to express new ideas. I always recommend people to learn FORTH, or Lisp, or APL. Learn to think with different paradigms.

Well… some of the best minds are doing actual useful stuff. Sadly, most aren’t.

You could work on the Voyager project.

Now that you mentioned it, I’m thinking about the Three Stooges

Or Billy Idol: “In the midnight hour, she cried Moe, Moe, Moe”

He's very wrong.

It seems that, until we have a falsifiable test for consciousness, these exercises are pointless. All we have is the ability to externally observe behavior and we can't judge what happens inside someone (or something's) mind. BTW, we don't have a good definition of mind either.

That there's nothing magical or supernatural in our minds and our consciousness is a given, otherwise, this becomes a very silly debate where everyone will have a strong position that can be neither proven nor disproven.

Maybe we are able to constrain what consciousness (or a mind, or a soul) is by figuring out everything it isn't. Does it have a mass? Can we measure its entropy?

We can, to a certain degree, identify images from the visual cortex. What else about the internal state of a brain can we extract? We did that to a fly's brain the other day - a very confused simulated fly that must have been wondering why its world had so low a resolution.

It's a tragedy some of our best minds are dedicated to that, and digital surveillance so their corporate masters can sell better targeted ads with a higher click-thru rate.

I would assume they have built some key problem-solving skills that can be valuable. Training in tooling is much easier than building the right mindset.

What have you worked on that is as cool as a space probe that's cruising in interstellar space and still collecting valuable data?

There are a lot of things as cool as, done by people I know, such as the gyros on the Webb telescope, the APU in the F-35, or a small rack-mountable Cesium reference clock, but there aren't many opportunities like that.

> younger engineers often have the capability but not the inclination

Kids these days... Why would someone in their right mind think working on the Voyager project could damage their careers? You can work on new and fancy tools all you want to improve supporting tools, and it's still one of the coolest space missions active. Plus, it has a real end - at some point, support will be further reduced and the person will move on to another space exploration job, with the extra golden star of having been on the Voyager.