I’m a software engineer of nearly 20 years now. I’ve always been extremely interested in the workings of the brain and the question of consciousness. Recently I’ve run into some life obstacles that have turned me away from software engineering as a profession. Having worked for multiple corporations and finding the basic corporate environment extremely distasteful and contrary to good software development. They’d rather a rushed and bug-saturated product that’s deployed on time rather than elegant, thought-through, and artful design. However, you can’t develop art with an assembly line - so I left. Now that software development is no longer a forced necessity for me, and I can produce it as I see fit; in an artistic manner, I’ve decided to dedicate much of my spare time to AI research and pondering the oddities of consciousness.