Aging – Auxiliary Memory

How Aware or Conscious Was I At 5 Years Old?

by James Wallace Harris, 6/8/26

In the first chapter of Michael Pollan’s new book, A World Appears, he makes a good case that consciousness evolved alongside biology, probably beginning in cells. For most of history, humans separated themselves from the animal world by claiming we had a soul, a divine spark, that animals lacked. Scientific studies of the mind are showing that’s not true.

Pollan found scientists who showed that plants could form and retain memories, anticipate, decide, and act on their goals. Their tiny bit of consciousness is nothing like ours, but it shows that consciousness is on a spectrum. There are profound implications if consciousness coevolved with biology, from the virus to the human brain. Research into consciousness and artificial intelligence is revealing a flood of new insights.

If life itself represents a spectrum of conscious development, I’m also assuming that any individual animal also shows a spectrum of conscious development over its lifetime.

I’m saying who I was at five is far different from who I am at seventy-four. The difference won’t be as big as between me and my cat, Ozzy, but I believe it’s huge. I’m not sure, but in some ways, five-year-old Ozzy might have been more aware than 5-year-old Jimmy. If we were both abandoned in the woods, Ozzy would have far better survival awareness.

I also believe my awareness/consciousness evolved significantly from 5 years 0 months to 5 years 12 months. I started the 1st grade when I was 5 years and 8 months old. School accelerated the evolution of my conscious mind.

I only have fleeting memories of life before turning five. I can remember only a few interactions with people. I have a few memories from Kindergarten. I had no knowledge of numbers, words, or letters. I had extremely limited spatial and temporal awareness.

I did what I was told, but I would have preferred to play on my own. I loved my toy truck, a little metal front-loader. I loved to climb trees. I loved TV, but we’re talking Captain Kangaroo and Kukla, Fran and Ollie. I had no idea what books and magazines were. I had no idea where I lived.

I’m not sure I had any particular self-awareness. Looking back, I think I was mostly unconscious of reality. If a stranger had walked up to me and pointed a gun at my head, I don’t think I would have been frightened or even known what a gun was. If my parents had left me alone in the house, I’m not sure I could have gotten my own food. I knew my father, mother, sister, and grandmother, but I was indifferent or clueless about everyone else. I don’t remember my Kindergarten teacher or any of my classmates.

My friend Linda has told many stories about her childhood, and she was far more aware than I was at the same ages. Girls mature sooner, but I think Linda was even exceptional for being a girl.

My point is, everyone evolves differently. The question is, how broad is the range of consciousness in humans? We know the range of intelligence is great, but what about awareness of reality? How many people are closer to a collie dog than to Einstein?

Nor is consciousness one thing. Elon Musk might be at the height of money-making consciousness, but fairly low at empathy for people.

Looking back at Jimmy at 5, I feel he was essentially unconscious compared to Jim at 74. I also sense that there are countless areas where I’m essentially unconscious at 74 compared to others at any age.

We say humans have five senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. Well, what lets me feel my heartbeat? What sense organ lets me feel cold? What sense organ lets me discern the passing of time? What sense organ does my wife have that lets her remember melodies that I lack?

How many levels of awareness are humans capable of achieving? How many aspects of reality can we discern? Science fiction, mysticism, spiritualists, and users of psychedelic drugs claim there are many levels of higher consciousness we could attain if we tried. Most sound like fantasies, but what if some are possible?

Over the centuries, there have been stories about supermen. Often, they have psychic abilities and other superpowers. Just consider Greek myths and Marvel Comics.

What are some truly possible higher states of consciousness? Compared to Jimmy at 5, I have a higher consciousness. What levels could I have achieved if I had known they existed and I had tried to attain them?

Artificial intelligence is a big topic right now. Computer scientists want to create AIs that are smarter than people. But what other things might AI become aware of that we can’t perceive?

We only perceive in a limited range of the electromagnetic spectrum. AIs could be built to perceive far more of the whole spectrum. What if they discover things we never could with our senses and even scientific instruments? Will we believe them?

If I could travel back in time to talk to Jimmy at 5, could I make him understand anything about being Jim at 74? I doubt it. He could not even conceive the concepts of time travel, aging, or growth.

In recent months, I’ve been contemplating the evolution of my own consciousness. I think that evolution accelerated between 5 and 12. But then it exploded around 13. Most conceptual expansions peaked in my twenties. And most of my conceptual abilities have been declining since then. However, I feel my ability to generalize is still growing. That might be wisdom, or it might be a delusion.

The more I study my own mind and read books by scientists who study minds in general, the more I’m convinced that our consciousness coevolved with physics, chemistry, and biology. Thus, when my physical body dissolves with entropy, so will my mind.

There are even some scientists who still hold out that part of our awareness is metaphysical, and it will survive physical existence. Those scientists say artificial intelligence will never have that metaphysical spark they call the soul. I wonder something different.

What if the total gestalt of body, mind, awareness, sentience, and consciousness can be called our soul? But what if that soul is mortal? That collectively, all life on Earth has a kind of soul. too, but also mortal. Obviously, all life is evolving. But how much can we evolve as individuals?

Life and evolution are anti-entropic. Death is entropy. Is there a metaphysical existence that is not entropic?

JWH

Am I Too Old To Start A Second Brain?

by James Wallace Harris, 12/8/25

For years now, I’ve been reading about people who create a second brain to record what they want to remember. Most of these second brain systems use software, but not all. Many base their ideas on the Zettelkasten system, which was originally stored on note cards.

Over the years, I’ve tried different methods and software applications. I’m currently learning Obsidian. I’ve used note cards, notebooks, Google Docs, Evernote, OneNote, InstaPaper, Recall, and others. I love reading – taking information in – but I don’t like taking notes.

The trouble is, information goes through my brain like a sieve. When I want to tell someone about what I’ve learned, or think I’ve learned, I can’t cite my source, or, for that matter, clearly state what I think I know. And I seldom think about how I’ve come to believe what I believe.

I’m currently reading False by Joe Pierre, MD, about how we all live with delusions. This book makes me want to rededicate myself to creating a second brain for two reasons. First, I want to take precise notes on this book because it offers dozens of insights about how we deceive ourselves, and about how other people are deceived and are deceiving. Second, the book inspires me to start tracking what I think I learn every day and study where that knowledge comes from.

One of the main ways we fool ourselves is with confirmation bias. Pierre says:

In real estate, it’s said that the most important guide to follow when buying a house and trying to understand home values is “location, location, location.” If I were asked about the most important guide to understand the psychology of believing strongly in things that aren’t true, I would similarly answer, “confirmation bias, confirmation bias, confirmation bias.”

Pierre explains how the Internet, Google, AIs, Social Media, and various algorithms reinforce our natural tendency toward confirmation bias.

Pierre claims there are almost 200 defined cognitive biases. Wikipedia has a nice listing of them. Wikipedia also has an equally nice, long list of fallacies. Look at those two lists; they are what Pierre is describing in his book.

Between these two lists, there are hundreds of ways we fool ourselves. They are part of our psychology. They explain how we interact with people and reality. However, everything is magnified by polarized politics, the Internet, Social Media, and now AI.

I’d like to create a second brain that would help me become aware of my own biases and fallacies. It would have been more useful if I had started this project when I was young. And I may be too old to overcome a lifetime of delusional thinking.

I do change the way I think sometimes. For example, most of my life, I’ve believed that it was important for humanity to go to Mars. Like Elon Musk, I thought it vital that we create a backup home for our species. I no longer believe either.

Why would I even think about Mars in the first place? I got those beliefs from reading dozens of nonfiction and fictional books about Mars. Why have I changed my mind? Because I have read dozens of articles that debunk those beliefs. In other words, my ideas came from other people.

I would like to create a second brain that tracks how my beliefs develop and change. Could maintaining a second brain help reveal my biases and thinking fallacies? I don’t know, but it might.

Doing the same thing and expecting different results is a common fallacy. Most of my friends are depressed and cynical about current events. Humanity seems to be in an immense Groundhog Day loop of history. Doesn’t it seem like liberals have always wanted to escape this loop, and conservatives wanted to embrace it?

If we have innate mental systems that are consistently faulty, how do we reprogram ourselves? I know my life has been one of repeatable behaviors. Like Phil Conners, I’m looking for a way out of the loop.

Stoicism seems to be the answer in old age. Is it delusional to think enlightenment might be possible?

JWH

Can Rereading THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ Help Me Remember What It Was Like to Be Ten Years Old?

by James Wallace Harris, 12/5/25

While watching Wicked, I struggled to recall the excitement I felt when I first read the Oz books at age 10 back in the summer of 1962. I wanted to know whether the fantasy world Wicked created matched the one L. Frank Baum created in his fourteen Oz novels.

The barrier to making this comparison is memory. Memories are highly unreliable. Plus, we overwrite our memories every time we recall them, so am I really remembering 1962, or just the last time I thought about reading the Oz books as a kid?

Like most of my brain excavations, I have to rely on logic and deduction instead. I also look for corroborating evidence. I spent many days on this problem, and here are my results.

The Oz books were the first novels I discovered on my own. For various reasons, I concluded this was the summer between the 5th and 6th grades. My family lived on base at Homestead Air Force Base, and I found the Oz books in the children’s wing of the base library. They were old and worn.

The first novel I remember is Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, which my mother read to me in the third grade. I started using libraries in the fourth grade, but read nonfiction books about airplanes, space travel, cars, and animals.

I remember roaming up and down the fiction section at the base library and discovering the Oz books. I had no idea who L. Frank Baum was, nor did I have any idea when they were written. I didn’t know about copyright pages or genres. I saw “Oz” on the spines and connected those books to the 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz, which I had seen on television every year since the 1950s.

I did not know the word fantasy. I doubt I understood the concept of fiction. In other words, these books were an exciting discovery. To compound that excitement, they were all set in the same fictional universe. They were my Harry Potter books. L. Frank Baum had tremendous world-building skills.

Analytically, I know that at ten, I didn’t know much about the world. My vocabulary was limited. And I was unaware of most concepts and abstractions. My previous beliefs in fantasy – Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy had caused me great embarrassment in first grade when a girl called me a baby for mentioning them. I was five, she was six.

In other words, I knew Oz did not exist, even though Baum created so many wonderful details to make it believable. I remember wanting Oz to exist, but I knew it didn’t. I don’t think I grasped the idea of fantasy at that time. All I knew was that the books created an artificial reality in my mind that was mesmerizing.

Watching Wicked and then rereading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz this week let me compare the two versions of Oz, but I couldn’t compare my initial reactions. Wicked is quite colorful, creative, and contains many elements of the original stories, but it no longer worked on me as the Oz books had in 1962. And that’s to be expected, since I’m 74, long past the age for fairytales.

My quest changed. I now wanted to know how my ten-year-old self saw the world. Rereading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz gave me very few clues.

My contemplations led me to some ideas, though. I have damn few memories of life before age five. I have zillions of memories dating from age five to twelve. I started thinking about them, and a revelation came to me.

Before age five, I theorize our minds are like LLMs (large language models). Those AIs can take in information and react to it, but they are unaware of the world. After five, but before puberty, we develop some self-awareness, but it’s very limiting. It isn’t until around twelve or thirteen that we start thinking for ourselves.

Here’s my main bit of evidence. As a child, my mother told me about God and took my sister and me to Sunday School and church. I just accepted what I was told. But when I was twelve, I started thinking about what they were telling me about religion. I didn’t buy it. I considered myself an atheist by 1964, when I was thirteen, maybe fourteen.

In my thirties, when I was working in a library, I came across an article that said that some librarians in the 1950s felt the Oz books gave children unrealistic expectations about life, and pulled the books from their shelves.

When I read that, I knew it had been true for me. The Oz books led me to science fiction, a genre that also inspired unrealistic expectations regarding the future that have proven to be unrealistic.

Here’s the thing: I was being told two fantasies at age ten. The first was from The Bible, and the second from the Oz books. Looking back, I see that my young self began to reject religion at age ten because I preferred the stories from L. Frank Baum. I wasn’t aware that I was comparing two fantasies; I just preferred one over the other.

Then I discovered science fiction. Concurrently, I was also discovering science. That gave me the illusion that science fiction was reality-based. When I consciously rejected religion, I thought I was choosing science. However, in recent decades, I’ve realized I had substituted science-fictional fantasies for religious fantasies.

I realize now that the Oz books had the power of Bible stories on me at age ten. The reason why so many people are true believers as adults is that they were programmed as children. Wicked doesn’t have that kind of power over me today. I can’t remember what that power felt like, but I do remember that for a few weeks in 1962, the ideas in the Oz books set my mind on fire. Rereading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz did not reignite that fire because I’m no longer a believer in anything.

I’ve often wondered if I hadn’t been lied to about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy, and thus had not experienced humiliation at discovering they were lies, and if I also hadn’t discovered Oz books, would I have accepted the Bible stories as truth as a kid and believed them now?

JWH

Homeschooling Myself in My Seventies: A Spiritual Journey for an Atheist

by James Wallace Harris, 10/21/25

I recently read “The Techno Optimist’s Guide to Futureproofing Your Child” by Benjamin Wallace. The article was subtitled: “AI doomers and bloomers are girding themselves for what’s coming — starting with their kids.”

I don’t have a kid, but I do have me. The gist of the article is exploring new ways to teach kids. Many parents believe that a good college education is no longer the path to success in life. They fear AI will put everyone out of work, that climate change will disrupt society, and that the rapid progress is making everything unstable.

These parents ask: How can I prepare my kids for an uncertain future?

I ask: How can we all prepare for an uncertain future?

Generally, education is seen as preparation for a career. I’m retired. I don’t plan to work in the future. Sooner or later, I’m going to die. That’s another kind of uncertain future. This sense of affinity made this article relevant to me.

The article begins with a profile of Julia and Jeff Wise, who have three children. Wallace called Julia and Jeff “Effective Altruists.” I had to go look that up. To quote Wikipedia:

Affective altruism (EA) is a 21st-century philosophical and social movement that advocates impartially calculating benefits and prioritizing causes to provide the greatest good. It is motivated by “using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis”. People who pursue the goals of effective altruism, who are sometimes called effective altruists, follow a variety of approaches proposed by the movement, such as donating to selected charities and choosing careers with the aim of maximizing positive impact. The movement gained popularity outside academia, spurring the creation of research centers, advisory organizations, and charities, which collectively have donated several hundred million dollars.

Wallace quotes the Wise’s as saying, “We and some other parents we know have been thinking, Okay, it looks like there may be big changes in the next decade or two. What does that look like for how we prepare our children for the world?” They worry that their kids could die in disasters before they grow old, or find themselves in a post-scarcity utopia of abundance and not need a job.

Parents can’t decide; should their kids attend Harvard, train to be HVAC technicians, or become survivalists?

I could die any time now, since I’m approaching the statistical average age for death, or I could live another twenty or thirty years if I’m an outlier. That’s a big unknown. I could die with my mind intact or not know who I am. If society collapses, my retirement arrangements will fall apart.

What inspired me most about this article was the Alpha School, which sounded like a super-duper version of the Montessori school.

Founded in 2014 as a tiny K–8 private school in Austin, the Alpha School has opened 15 additional campuses, from Scottsdale to San Francisco, on the strength of a tantalizing pitch. Using its AI-driven digital platform, Alpha asserts students learn “2.6” times faster on average than in regular schools while doing only two hours of schoolwork per day. The school has named this platform, which knits together proprietary and third-party apps, “TimeBack.” With those newly liberated hours, students focus on learning the life skills that Alpha’s co-founder MacKenzie Price believes standardized education neglects — things like entrepreneurship and developing “a growth mind-set.” At the flagship campus, a second-grader, in order to ascend to third, must complete a checklist that includes running five kilometers in 35 minutes or less; delivering a two-minute TED-style talk with “zero filler words, 120–170 [wpm] pace, and 90% confidence,” as judged by an AI speech coach named Yoodli; and calling “a peer’s parent” to “independently plan and schedule a playdate.” At Alpha’s middle school, projects have included starting and running an Airbnb and sailing a boat from Florida to the Bahamas.

Basically, the Alpha School teaches kids to be independent learners. The teachers don’t teach; instead, they guide students to study independently.

The article covers theories about educating the young. We tend to think youth is the time of education. I feel like I’m learning more at the end of life than at the beginning. We also think of education in terms of goals. Shouldn’t education be a continual transformation? And we seldom think of learning in old age other than as a hobby.

How can I create my own pedagogy? And for what am I studying? I remember fifty years ago reading Be Here Now by Harvard LSD researcher Richard Alpert, writing as Ram Dass. He claimed that old age was the time to go on a spiritual journey to prepare for death. I’m a life-long atheist. I don’t believe in what most religions teach. But Ram Dass might be right; it might be time to go on a spiritual quest.

I don’t feel the need to study anything specific. First of all, my mind can’t retain information anymore. I love learning, but I have accepted that I forget almost as quickly as I discover. That doesn’t bother me. Like they say, it’s the journey that counts.

However, I don’t forget everything. I seem to lose the facts and details, but somehow, I retain a tiny bit of a new perspective.

My new method of educating myself is to subscribe to printed magazines. I’ve stopped trusting the internet and television. And I’m not too keen on podcasts either.

What I read helps me let go of lifelong beliefs. I’m learning that people live by delusions.

Our minds are corrupted by words. Strangely, the antidote for words is more words. To dissolve decades of thoughts that crust our minds like barnacles requires constant reading.

Our trouble, starting in childhood, is that we embrace beliefs that we never let go of. Most people are programmed by beliefs acquired early in life that they spend the rest of their lives defending.

Home schooling in my seventies is all about unlearning. But it’s not about forgetting. This isn’t intellectual Alzheimer’s. It’s about clarity.

When you watch the news and see reports about bad things happening, ask yourself: Is this because someone believed something wrong? If you are troubled by anything, consider letting go of something you believe true. See if that reduces your anxiety.

For example, much of what I believed in came from reading science fiction. Many billionaires are pursuing goals based on reading science fiction. But I’ve come to see that many desired science fiction futures are no more realistic than what religions have promised.

JWH

Reading at 13 vs. 73

By James Wallace Harris, 10/19/25

At thirteen, I read books entirely differently than I do now at seventy-three. I think everyone does, but it’s not apparent why. Our memory gives us the illusion that we’ve always been the same person. But if we think about it, there is plenty of evidence that we couldn’t have been.

I’ve been thinking about the difference between my younger reading self and my older reading self while writing a review of The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov for my other blog. Every so often, I reread a book I read as a teenager. For some books, it’s a nostalgic return to a familiar, comfortable place. For most books, it’s just vague recollections.

My first realization from trying to reconstruct my reading mind at age 13 was to remember that I read very fast. I consumed books like potato chips. Reading was like casually watching TV. Words just flowed past my eyes, and I didn’t always pay attention to every word. I just read to find out what happened.

I have a fond memory of reading The Foundation Trilogy, but a limited one. I liked the idea of a galactic empire in decline. However, the only chapter I can remember is the first one, “The Psychohistorians.” It wasn’t until decades later that I learned that the trilogy was a fix-up novel based on nine stories running from short stories to novellas.

Thinking about it now, I realize that most of the ideas in the book didn’t mean much to me at 13. I had not studied or read about the Roman Empire, Asimov’s inspiration. Actually, I probably didn’t know what an empire was either. Nor did I understand all the references to nobility, aristocracy, and politics.

As a teenager, I mostly read science fiction books. I did read some popular science books too. My awareness of the world and my vocabulary were limited. However, I didn’t know that. And I wasn’t the kind of person who looked up words I didn’t know. What’s weird is that I was a kind of know-it-all.

One way to judge my teenage brilliance was that my favorite TV show at the time was Gilligan’s Island. When I catch that show today, I can only assume I was brain-dead back then.

I’ve tried to reread The Foundation Trilogy twice now. The first time was in 2015, and now in 2025. In both cases, I could only finish the first book of the trilogy. I loved the first story, but with each additional story, I detested them more.

At first, I thought that Asimov’s most famous books were just bad. But I’ve known people smarter than me, and just as old, who say they still loved the Foundation series. One woman in our reading group said the Foundation stories were a great comfort to reread. And I recently heard that twenty million copies of the series have been sold.

Not only was my current reading self different from my younger reading self, but I’m out of step with millions of readers. This got me thinking about the different modes of reading.

I think the most basic mode is just to let fiction flow over you. You read whatever pleases you. And you don’t think about why.

Then, as we age, we become more judgmental. We learn more about life and reading. We develop a process of natural selection by rejecting what we don’t like. We don’t think much about why we don’t like what we don’t like. We just evolve into a reading machine that knows what it likes.

Two other reading modes are: English teachers or literary critics. These are very critical modes, and often they take the fun out of reading. I think as I’ve gotten older, my reading habits have taken on a bit of these two modes. While in them, it’s all too easy to shoot Asimov down.

However, I’ve discovered another mode recently when I read “Foundation” for the fourth time. “Foundation” was the first story published in the series in 1942. While reading this story yet again, I kept admiring Asimov for where he succeeded and not where he failed.

In my rereadings, I’ve always come to the series wanting to love it. And I’ve always been disappointed by how much I didn’t. But with this reading, I worked to think like Asimov. What was he trying to do, and how did he go about doing it?

I’m in the process of documenting this for my other blog, Classics of Science Fiction. I’m writing this now because the other post is going to take a long while to complete.

I never would have put this much effort into reading a story when I was a teen. Or any time before I was 73.

One reason I dislike this story in recent years is my skepticism. I don’t believe humans will ever travel to the stars, much less form a galactic empire. Another reading mode I’m trying to develop is to read with the mind of a person from when the story was first published.

Trying to read like Asimov thought and how science fiction fans felt in 1942 is difficult. I’m reminded of Samuel R. Delany’s concepts of simplex, complex, and multiplex that he described in his story Empire Star. I started out as a simplex reader and eventually evolved into a complex one. Now I’m moving into a multiplex reader.

Multiplex thinking often involves holding contradictory viewpoints. I really dislike the Foundation stories. But if I work at it and look at them in just the right way, I can like them too. It’s hard. It’s a Sisyphean struggle learning to admire something that triggers so many annoyances, but I’m working on it.

JWH