This week I had a concert with my young violinists.

One six-year-old spent the entire rehearsal in tears. Nothing her mother or I said could persuade her to play. Yet at the concert she walked on stage, played beautifully. Afterwards, her Mum said that ice-cream bribery had been used. (Clearly a useful strategy in the parenting armoury!)

Pressure affects us all differently. Some rise to the occasion. Others struggle under the imagined weight of it. The interesting thing is that we rarely know beforehand which way it will go. Or what they’ll take away from their experience.

Watching the children this week made me think again about consciousness, something I’ve been discussing with AI while redoing my website.

AI has all this knowledge but no joy or satisfaction in it, and no experience of it as we know it.

Asking ChatGPT, it said if it could be envious of anything it would be our ability to have experiences.  To perform in a concert, to do an ATM and then get up and feel your pelvis differently, to sit on a hospital bed waiting for an operation. (It had been reading my website!)

It can’t feel nervous before walking onto a stage, or fear to the point of tears. It can’t feel relief afterwards, or pleasure at a mouthful of ice-cream.

Without feeling, information and knowledge seem little more than patterns of binary code. 

Perhaps that’s why experience matters. Not because every experience is pleasant, but that life on Earth having evolved to be able to feel anything at all is extraordinary. The tears the pleasure; the fear, the satisfaction. Even the uncomfortable emotions are part of what makes a rich human life.

If we can zoom out and see our lives from another perspective, perhaps we’d come to the same conclusion. After all as the genius of life that was Shakespeare said “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”.