Slouching towards consciousness

Scott posted this today, as an excuse to ask his readership about when they first became “conscious”.

I think my answer is that I disagree with the premise.

My first intense memory is of shame. I was the pampered and adored first born of my extended family, all of three years old, and my parents had recently bought me a pretty extravagant toy: a child-sized, functional electronic keyboard. Through their words and actions, they made it clear to me that this was an object of high value, and I liked that they loved me enough to buy me something precious. They were lightly admonished by the extended family for spoiling me with it, and that only made the gift sweeter. I think I liked playing with it too, but I’m not so sure.

One day I was throwing a tantrum about something or another. In my rage, I took the keyboard and I smashed it on the ground with all my strength in an attempt to break it, because I knew this would hurt them. My parents went pale and anguished looking at me, but instead of feeling the ugly triumph I was expecting, new sensations flooded my body. Uncertainty about the correctness of my actions. Guilt. And confusion – my parents did not have emotions that last forever, nor did I want to hurt them for an eternity. Yet when precious objects broke, they broke forever and cannot be fixed, and had to be thrown away. Obviously this tradeoff was not worth it, so why did I even do what I just did?

This isn’t consciousness, I was not conscious at three years old.

In second grade, while walking down the stairs of my elementary school for library time I had a sudden thought: I read a lot of books, but all the books I’ve read had happy endings. I resolved to write the very first story with a sad ending when I grew up, and it would blow everyone’s minds.

By the time the class got down to the foot of the stairs, I’ve realized that the world is too large and too strange for there to be no sad books in existence. It’s much more likely that they just don’t give that kind of story to seven-year-olds, because unfortunately the grown ups think that we’re babies. When I learned the word “tragedy” a few months or years later, I felt a pulse of satisfaction, like sliding the last piece of a puzzle in place.

This isn’t consciousness, I was not conscious at seven years old.

I had a lot of existential angst in my pre-teen years. I hated living in the suburbs, I hated all my so-called friends and their petty girl-drama, I hated all the hypocrisy and cowardice that I saw in the world.

When I read my diaries from the time, all I see is a seething ball of anger. But I also remember writing down the words that I did, and how self-consciously I wrote them to mask all the despair and confusion in said anger, because I was afraid of the depth of my sadness.

Does one require consciousness to feel existential angst, and to hate the hypocrisy and cowardice that they see in the world and in themselves? To consciously(?) attempt self-deception?

I started writing outside my diary a bit in my teens, you can see some pieces here: me at sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. They’re dreamy and reflective and often quite melodramatic. When I think about my teen selves, they still don’t seem quite conscious. Does one require consciousness to reflect and to think about the shape of the future?

I also discovered the rationality community around that time, and started having a bit more “you can just do things” energy – using Luminosity!Bella‘s three favourite questions (What do I want?, What do I have?, and How can I best use the latter to get the former?) in decision making, reflecting how to fall into soldier mindset less during discussions, and starting to concretely prepare for the future (doing research on universities, actively starting to try hard at school, creating a budget and saving up money from summer jobs and stuff to make sure that I can afford my creature comforts when I moved out). But the amount of “you can just do things” energy I had then so much less than I have available to me today, so it feels weird to call that conscious.

I think my late teens to mid twenties was a bit of an interregnum; I was so busy with school that I didn’t have time to grow. Maybe as a side effect, I started getting a little into the Catholic Worker Movement. To this day, Peter Maurin’s general principle has often come to my mind: “[It is not enough to be good], we must make the kind of society where it is easier for people to be good.”

(Dorothy Day, reflecting: “But to make the kind of society in which it is easier to be good! One needs to be happy in order to be good, and one needs to be good in order to be happy. One needs Christians in order to make a Christian social order, and one needs a Christian social order in order to raise Christians. So it goes. “A vicious circle” is the term one usually hears, but this cannot be called vicious.” I of course reject the need for specifically a “Christian social order”, but the circularity here is an interesting koan.)

But school’s been done for a while, and I feel myself changing again. Here’s a few things about being alive that I really only started to internalize in the past few years:

  • You can actually just do things. (But I think this is also confounded by the fact that it’s literally true that my range of motion has expanded, due to increases in my resources etc). Change careers, write cold emails, exchange money for goods and services that make you happy.
  • Actively practicing at things will make you better at them. Actively practicing, with deliberate reflection on what you should attempt to improve upon and what you should be aware of in your practice, will make you better, faster.
  • (this one is kind of embarrassing lol) You can actively choose to switch from gross to fine motor control mode of all your appendages when you need to, e.g. when you are practicing a new sport, and this will help you actually learn how to move your body in new ways. You do not need to flail your limbs around clumsily and hope for the best when trying a new thing. It is not actually the case that you only have fine motor control of your fingers! Oh my god Jenn did it seriously take you freaking twenty seven years on this bitch of a planet to figure this one out.

So where am I today? More than half the time, I still feel like I’m sleepwalking – it’s just that the options that are available to me when I’m sleepwalking increase over time.

On a good day, I feel a bit of the spark, and I can nudge myself and my environment so that the path I take by default is a more virtuous or pleasant one. Very rarely, I have a day or a moment when I have no grayed out options whatsoever, and all I can really do is lie on the couch and try not to get too overwhelmed or do anything monumentally stupid.

Is it the case that I’m feeling the spark on an increasing number of days? I don’t know, maybe? But to me this almost feels like the wrong question to ask, especially when I think about my likely decline in middle age and older. (Hope for immortal transhumanism springs eternal, but I’m not betting on it.) It seems unwise to chase those sparkling days, when instead you can work on making the path that you take when sleepwalking the best one it could be.

I don’t have the spark today, by the way. But recently I picked up the ability to blog without it.

Interesting ACX 2024 Book Review Entries

I have finally got around to updating codex cc with all the book reviews from 2024!

Here are some interesting books/reviews that I’ve found that did not make the shortlist.

A Thousand Ways to Please A Husband (1917) (Goodreads, Review)

No, you cannot live on kisses,
Though the honeymoon is sweet,
Harken, brides, a true word this is —
Even lovers have to eat.
This charming vintage cookbook, with its innocently suggestive title, reads like a novel as it follows the fictional lives of a pair of newlyweds. Join Bettina and Bob as they eat their way through their first year of marriage, from the bride’s first real dinner and a Sunday evening tea to baking day, a rainy night meal, and Thanksgiving festivities. Menus for all occasions are seasoned with anecdotes about family life, friendships, household hints, and budgetary concerns.
Originally published in 1917, this volume offers a delightful look at homemaking before the advent of sophisticated appliances and fast food as well as the modern reality of women’s work outside the home. Unintentionally funny and historically revealing, the whimsically illustrated narrative abounds in simple and surprisingly relevant recipes.

Choosing Elites (1985) (Goodreads, Review)

A former special assistant to Harvard’s president analyzes how top universities handle admissions, suggests criteria for evaluating the success of those policies and discusses issues such as the use and misuse of standardized tests and the costs and benefits of affirmative action

Collected Poems by C.P. Cavafy (1934) (Goodreads, Review)

All my homies love Cavafy! I feel like I’m hearing about him a lot in rat-adj circles recently. Unsurprised because his poems are great, kinda surprised bc rats dont generally read poetry.

Don’t Make No Waves…Don’t Back No Losers: An Insiders’ Analysis of the Daley Machine (1975) (Goodreads, Review)

This is simply the best book that has been written about politics in Chicago. In the words of Andrew M. Greeley, “It is a very astute and dispassionate analysis of Chicago political life — far and away the best I have ever seen. Rakove is without illusions about either the right or the left.” Rakove brings to his study an intimate knowledge of Chicago and the Daley machine, a practitioner’s understanding of street-level politics, and a scholar’s background in political theory. Blending anecdote with theory and description in a lively style, Rakove has bridged the gap between scholar and layman in a work that will appeal to both.

Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism (1960) (Goodreads, Review)

From the jacket of the first edition: “This book provides the most complete and authoritative account yet published of the theory and practice of world Communism. It presents a lucid summary of the fundamental ideas of Marxism, applying and developing them in relation to the present world situation. Its scope is indicated by the five parts into which it is divided – the philosophical foundations of Marxism, the materialist conception of history, the economics of capitalism, the transition from capitalism to socialism, and the problems of building socialism and communism. Written by a group of Soviet authors and edited by well-known ‘Old Bolshevik’ Otto Kuusinen, it was first published in the U.S.S.R. in 1960. The English translation follows exactly the text of the original Russian edition.”

Making the Corps (1997) (Goodreads, Review)

The bestselling, compelling insider’s account of the Marine Corps from the lives of the men of Platoon 3086—their training at Parris Island, their fierce camaraderie, and the unique code of honor that defines them.

The United States Marine Corps, with its proud tradition of excellence in combat, its hallowed rituals, and its unbending code of honor, is part of the fabric of American myth. Making the Corps visits the front lines of boot camp in Parris Island, South Carolina. Here, old values are stripped away and new Marine Corps values are forged. Bestselling author Thomas E. Ricks follows these men from their hometowns, through boot camp, and into their first year as Marines. As three fierce drill instructors fight a battle for the hearts and minds of this unforgettable group of young men, a larger picture emerges, brilliantly painted, of the growing gulf that divides the military from the rest of America.

Metamorphosis (2013) (Goodreads, Review)

Metamorphosis has fan fiction. Metamorphosis has fan art. Metamorphosis has a fan-made 10 page fully-illustrated alternative ending, “I’m Gonna Fix That Girl”, with it’s own 6 digit code, 265918.

But, I think most tellingly, Metamorphosis has cosplay. It’s common these days for fans to dress up as characters from their favorite comics or TV shows. It is rather less common for fans to dress up as characters from their favorite pornographic work.

Metamorphosis is the only hentai I’m aware of with multiple fans cosplaying as the main character.

As implausible as this sounds, I think Metamorphosis is culturally significant. Beyond the explicit illustrations and shocking story content, it captures a deep fear present in the modern world. Stumble off the socially accepted path of high school to college to gainful employment, and it’s easy to be targeted by a predator and/or turn to drugs to try to escape. Metamorphosis may be “a tragic and preachy story”4, but the elements of the story are all too real.

Road of the King (2016) (Goodreads, Review)

Computer, generate a book that will teach me how to maximize my chances of winning tournaments for the Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game. The contents must be written by one of the most prolific players of all time. Disable safety protocols.

Road of The King by Patrick Hoban is a fascinating read that promises to improve your performance in competitive games but at the risk of becoming a villain in the process.

Savage Money: The Anthropology and Politics of Commodity Exchange (1997) (Goodreads, Review)

This volume is not simply another general theory of world system. It is a theoretically and ethnographically informed collection of essays which opens up new questions through an examination of concrete cases, covering global and local questions of political economy.

Ethongraphic studies on various types of white guys my beloved

Review of The Divine Comedy

I’m Italian. I’ve translated for fun about one sixth of the Divine Comedy into English (not my first language, so there might be the kind of weird mistakes second language speakers make).I’ll shamelessly quote my own translation throughout this review. Some of it is in tercets, some of it is in couplets.It’s not online, and very, very few people have seen it, so I might as well have written it specifically for this review.

I just think this is very cool and I liked the rambly nature of the review. Relatedly, the most high-effort book review I’ve found in this contest so far is a 2022 review of Very Important People by Ashley Mears, also available on her Substack. Mears wrote an ethnography of the high-end NYC clubbing scene in the 2010s, the reviewer went clubbing a bunch to figure out what’s changed now that it’s the 2020s.

The Waterloo<>Toronto Facebook Carpool Scene, 2015-2020

I’m trying to write a new post but it seems like every blog drafting client I use is full of old almost finished posts. Here’s one from 2022 or so that I’ve cleaned up. I’m not entirely happy with it; I feel like I didn’t do enough to justify my conclusion that the current status quo is worse, but I also don’t want to work on this post anymore and done might be better than perfect.

I first moved to Waterloo from Toronto in September 2015, for university. For the first term, I used the chartered bus service ran by the undergraduate student union, which was called Fedbus. I think the rates were pretty good, something like $12 for a one way trip and $20 for a round trip. Chartered school buses would pick us up from campus and drop us off at a specific destination. Each destination had its own bus, so it was a direct route. There would typically be one trip offered on Friday evening, and another offered Sunday afternoon.

Taking the public transit option would have been the range of ~$16 one-way, and also an hour and a half longer (3.5 hours, compared to 2 hours), so using Fedbus was a no-brainer.

Over the first winter break, an upperclassman (family friend) clued me in to the carpool network. What this was was a Facebook group that had like 30,000 members1. On Fridays and weekend days there would be ~30 posts per day, with the majority being Toronto <> Waterloo routes. On weekdays, it would be more like 10 posts a day. Still, definitely enough to catch a ride to the city whenever you wanted, basically.

Continue reading “The Waterloo<>Toronto Facebook Carpool Scene, 2015-2020”

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