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.
