Author: jpm

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Thinking Meat

Peter Watts is a man after my own heart on the ideas of consciousness and volition:

What I’d really like to see would be a stimulus which shut down consciousness but left the cognitive and reactive circuits intact: a scenario in which the patient continued to repeat “house” while the current flowed, until— still unconscious— she processed and accommodated a new request to start saying “yoga” instead. I’d like to see her wake up when the current stopped, look around, and ask in a puzzled voice, “Why am I saying yoga? I thought I was saying house.” Now that would tell us something.

What, you don’t think that’s realistic? You think consciousness and volition go hand in hand, that the body can’t parse the house-to-yoga transition without some little guy behind the eyes to make sense of it all?

I’ve got one word for you: sleepwalkers.

Myself, I operate under the working hypothesis that consciousness is an emergent illusion that happens to keep the meat suit from freaking out long enough for the genitalia to do their thing. I have no scientific basis for this, mind you, I just see no evidence otherwise.

If you think that’s perky and fun, get me drunk sometime and ask me about free will. (Hint: It exists, after a fashion, but it doesn’t matter.)

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The Internet’s Stupidest Idea So Far This Month

A friend made a good point about that potato salad Kickstarter this morning:

While I find the potato salad kickstarter funny. There are so many better things to do with your cash. Women’s rights. Trans rights. Etc. But go ahead. A joke deserves it more.

I couldn’t agree more.

I’ve been kicking around the idea of a “Charity Club” for a while now. The idea is simple: Each month, a group of similar-minded people pool their charitable donations to make a real difference for one charity. We would have a minimum amount you donate, say $5, and each month you agree to donate your pledged amount to the charity or organization the group selected. You can donate more than $5, of course.

I haven’t fleshed out the details yet, but something like this has been in my mind for a long time. Similar schemes exist in politics and electoral contests, but I’m more interested in the groups doing day-to-day work to make other people’s lives more livable.

I’m also interested in finding small, low-budget charities that could really use the boost. Think about it: together, each month, we could inject enough money into a charity to make a noticeable difference.

Perhaps there will be a nomination process, and members will vote on the month’s charity from a slate of options.

Perhaps we’ll eventually incorporate and do our own payment processing to make our money go further.

Perhaps this will fizzle out after a month. Who knows.

I know one thing: I’m in for at least $5 each month. Who’s with me? Message or email (my first name at jpmiller.com) if you’re interested and I’ll be in touch as this idea develops. If there’s enough interest, I’ll move forward with it.

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The people you are working for have problems

On the latest episode of the Let’s Make Mistakes podcast, hosts Jessie Char and Mike Monteiro talk about interacting with clients. One of their exchanges could easily be about practicing law:

31:30 Jessie: There’s this thing that happens to people who have done, maybe, enough client work to get annoyed in this way, but not enough to know that it is going to be the problem for the rest of your career. Which is that once you have so many clients you kind of get used to knowing exactly their tics and what they should and shouldn’t be doing and it’s really easy to forget that some of the clients that you work with may be doing this for the first time.

Mike: Most of them!

Jessie: And they don’t have that context of all this baggage that you’ve build up over emailing at an odd time.

Mike: Client empathy takes so long to build up, and the more you do this job the more you realize that this stuff is going to happen over and over and over and you have to realize that, for you, this is Tuesday, because this is the job that you chose to take on. You solve problems for people. That means the people you are working for have problems. That means they’re stressed out.

I see people at their worst, at the lowest points in their lives. I lose sight of that at my own peril.