hi welcome im ashley these are some public journal entries
(feel free to visit my homepage but just a warning that it's a huge pic of my face)
November 19th, 2022
I keep thinking about this idea that our bodies learn to be conscious only where we need it. There's a little experiment that demonstrates this idea. I find it fascinating, even though I know how it goes every time: I take a sip of water and I try to track its progress down my throat.
I make guesses, like ‘Oh, it’s falling through here’ or ‘It must be in my stomach by now!’ and every time, there comes a point where I realize that I simply can’t tell where it is or how fast it’s going. No matter how hard I try to focus my attention or imagine the work of smooth muscles or gravity, my ability to feel the water basically disappears after I swallow.
I guess I don’t have enough nerves lining those insides, which is kinda a bummer (though I might be the only weirdo who feels this way). Ah… it makes sense, since it’s not like I need any fine-grained sensing down there in order to survive. As Mikey Dickerson says in his essay Elegy for Complex Systems, “evolution does not produce the optimum solution; it produces a solution just good enough to get by”.
The first thing this makes me think of is habits — how habit formation is the process of making consciousness unnecessary.
The second thing I'm thinking of is my journey into undergrad Computer Science over the past 3 years. I started by learning Python. In Intro CS, we were taught its many pre-built functions, which were like black-boxes with how their inner workings were hidden from us. When building my own systems, I learned to apply strategies like encapsulation and information hiding, to hide the details from myself.
Now when I interact with computers as a user, I’m struck how much of their magic comes from how cleanly they are able to abstract the “how” away from their users. It was only until recently that I had any sense whatsoever how dizzyingly tall the tower of abstractions I relied on had been, and how tricky and elaborate the journey downwards could get.
Third, I’m also thinking about the unreasonable effectiveness of ... what’s the word for it? Economic interdependence? The function of trust, or division of labor, or something... like, POV: you're a consumer — you get to go to the grocery store & buy fruit that’s only there because someone else worried about the store experience and logistics and packing and someone else did the physical labor of growing that fruit and perhaps even harvesting it, and so on…
Sometimes I just get a little dazzled, imagining the amount of consciousness spent on eliminating the need for me to be conscious: all that infrastructure designed to help me forget the fact that a person picked these berries.
Recently, a really concrete example of the effects of hidden and abstracted labor has been coming up in the dining halls of my school, Pomona College. There’s an implicit culture / routine with how students talk about dining hall food and how they engage with the workers that make it: it’s customary for people to complain about the quality and (in)authenticity of the food, as the menus rotate through dishes from different cuisines across the world. Of course, it’s also the norm to not interact with the workers beyond a cursory greeting and a quick “Thank you!” The social logic of this universe simply does not support it.
A few months ago I got involved with the Claremont Student Worker Alliance after hearing about Pomona dining hall workers' frustrations with their recent contract negotiations. Workers here make a $18.60 minimum hourly wage, and Pomona had refused their demands for a $9 raise, offering them a $1.40 raise each year for 4 years instead. As their union began gearing up to strike for a livable wage, I joined other CSWA members in clipboarding outside dining halls, phonebanking, and organizing other students to show up at the picket line.
And it’s been quite striking to see this tension between this school’s stated ideals, the liberal and egalitarian values of its community, and the way it also depends on the continued invisibility and devaluation of the workers whose labor keeps this campus operational. Most students did support the union's demands for higher wage, but the everyday culture remained the same. I suspect that dining hall food was such an easy target for criticism and mockery because people didn’t consider the labor behind it to be meaningful, and because they never had to consciously keep in mind the people whose days are devoted to making and serving it.
Anyway, it’s like an elastic band, the way my desire (imperative?) to be more conscious is always in tension with what seems like a biological tendency towards efficiency. In some cases, I can will it to stretch & accommodate more than what I strictly need, but it always wants to snap back to the bare minimum. I haven’t fully fleshed out this thought yet, but I think this (!!) is where it becomes interesting to think about automation & consider what happens when advances in technology push large groups of people up one floor in an already-top-heavy tower of abstractions. What happens when technology redefines the minimum amount of consciousness needed to complete a task or to satisfy some desire? How does it affect the safety of complex systems? How do the effects ripple across society?
September 1st, 2019
I’m sitting in the window seat, 8A. Just boarded. My carry on luggage was a struggle to lift, but I managed by bringing it up to the seat rest, pausing, then bringing it up to the headrest, and then using my legs to shoot the thing upward into the overhead bins. A Japanese man whose choice of clothing (solid dark red shirt, unremarkable pants, and dapper hat) I was staring at earlier in the gate helped me push it in. His kid is wearing a ninja turtles t-shirt and just seconds before had tried to say ”hi” to the pilot(s?). Very adorable.
We’re sitting still on the runway or something. That’s when I see the reflection of another plane taking off, in the uneven glass panes of a building. The plane warps and wiggles towards the upper edge of the sky. And then it’s gone. In that moment I think to myself, that has to be the goofiest thing I have ever seen.