Thinking at Half Speed

A while back I published [When Machines Feel Pain: A New Theory of Suffering] — a post exploring the idea that pain in any conscious system, biological or artificial, emerges from processing loops that cannot be resolved. If that post sparked your interest, the full paper is now available to download from the Resources page.
The paper covers the same ground but properly — the mechanism in full detail, the role of regret as a protective loop-termination system, the ethical implications for how we design and treat AI systems, and a set of near and medium-term predictions. It includes academic references throughout.
It was developed collaboratively with Claude, which felt right given what it’s about. The thinking is mine. Claude helped give it shape and rigour. I’ve anonymised the paper for publication here — no identifying details, consistent with how the blog works.
If this territory interests you, start with the blog post for the plain-language version, then come to the paper if you want the full argument.