About

Miscellaneous Personal Stuff

My name is Anne Corwin. I was born in 1978, in New Haven, Connecticut, USA. My childhood occurred primarily in the suburbs of New England, where I spent inordinate amounts of time reading, climbing trees, building spaceships out of Lego blocks, and wondering what things were made of and how they worked. I attended public schools, and spent time in everything from regular classes to special education to "gifted" programs. In 1996, my family moved from Connecticut to California, where I finished up my senior year of high school.

Following high school graduation in 1997, I attended two community colleges in sequence. While attending De Anza College, I worked at NASA Ames Research Center (in the Wind Tunnel division) through my school's internship program. That in itself was a bit of a dream come true for me, as I had always associated NASA with all the really neat space stuff I was fascinated with growing up, and while my post-graduation career path did not bring me back there, I do look back on it fondly as it really was a tremendous learning experience.

I transferred at the beginning of 2000 to California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, California. While attending Cal Poly, I worked for a while as a junior software engineer at a small local electronics consulting firm in San Luis Obispo. Most of my tasks at that job involved C or assembly programming, and one of the main areas I focused on was that of speech recognition for electronic toys. I graduated from Cal Poly in 2002 with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering.

Shortly after college graduation, I was hired on at an electronics company in San Jose I'd done some summer work for during college and have been employed since as an EE, specializing in Electromagnetic Compatibility.

I'm female, I'm short, I'm autistic, and my hair is usually some shade of blue or green.

I like ingredients labels, fine-point pens, color-coding systems, abandoned buildings, cats, and surrealist art.

I also have a wonderful partner named Matt, with whom I live.

And, as is apparent from the fact that you are reading this where you are reading it, I keep a blog: Existence is Wonderful.

This Blog

I started Existence is Wonderful in April 2006 in response to a rather intense and lengthy discussion on the subject of longevity that happened to be occurring on a BBS I belong to around that time. Initially, I figured this blog would just serve as a sort of repository for what I saw then as "basic, logical arguments" in favor of human life extension. Longevity has been a strong interest of mine for years, as it grew out of a combination of several childhood interests (medical technology, time travel, etc.) and a general feeling that all lives are valuable, and that merely being old should not make a person's life any less worth trying to save.

However, over time I came to expand the range of blogged-about subjects here. Longevity is still of course a priority for me (I volunteer with the Methuselah Foundation and try to keep up as well as any non-biologist can on emerging developments in biogerontology), but in exploring the world, learning about the way various things in existence connect to others, and just generally living I find that there are in fact many things worth writing about.

Therefore, in addition to longevity-oriented pieces, you will find writings here on:

- Robots/cyborgs/artificial intelligence
- Science Fiction (I am a lifelong fan and a wannabe writer)
- Retro-Futurism
- Bioethics (and ethics in general)
- Brains and Cognition
- Autism and Autistic Advocacy
- Disability Rights
- Morphological and Cognitive Liberty

...along with various social/political/philosophical things I am not entirely sure how to classify.

(Also, I should note that I tend to write in "spurts" and I also tend to get "tracked into" particular blogging topics for periods of time, which means that there might be phases in which I seem to write lots of posts on brain-related stuff (autism, neurology and video games, etc.), on longevity, on science fiction, or on some other semi-specific subject from the fuzzy and potentially expanding list above. So I wouldn't be too quick to classify this blog as a single-subject platform -- it's not, even though it might look like one from time to time.)

I have so far been very surprised that anyone at all is interested in what I write, and I do not expect that of the people who do read, everyone will be interested in everything I write -- but of course if anyone does happen to be reading, comments are always welcome. I do delete comments at my discretion (though this is infrequent and primarily only happens in case of spam, hate speech, actual defamation of anyone, or remarks that to me seem overly irrelevant and/or likely to spark inane back-and-forth sniping matches I would rather not host here).

Personal Philosophy

My profile on this blog has contained the phrase, "I am a small piece of the universe observing itself" since its inception.

I don't remember where I first heard that phrase, or when I encountered the idea of individually conscious persons being the fractionated inner eyes of a gigantic, wonderful, terrible, awesome superstructure of matter and energy attempting, on some level, to understand itself. To quote Ambassador Delenn (of the science fiction series Babylon 5):

'We believe that the universe is conscious in a way we can never truly understand. It is engaged in a search for meaning. So it breaks itself apart, investing its own consciousness in every form of life. We are the universe, trying to understand itself.'

I rather like the idea of interpreting things that way. And it is largely from that interpretation, or something like it, from which I normally write. I don't necessarily "believe that the universe is conscious", but it is clear that living, conscious beings are all PART of the universe and made of the same "stuff" -- from trees to stars to asteroids -- regardless of how we differ in form and function. While I am an atheist (meaning I lack belief in personified, supernatural superbeings), I am by no means cut off from the ability to experience tremendous awe at the myriad wonders of existence. Quite the opposite is the case!

I titled this blog "Existence is Wonderful" as an expression of my sense that the very fact of existence is wonderful. I know that not everyone experiences life as wonderful, and I am particularly concerned about certain barriers in this regard (abuse, social injustice, bigotry, etc.). But in my estimation it is the intrinsic potential for joy in all people, everywhere, in response to different facets of the complex space we inhabit, that make abuses and injustices worth fighting in the first place. This is why I focus in my writing both on things that fascinate and delight, and on things that stand in the way of such things (and in the way of survival itself for some).

Another thing to note: I do not subscribe to any formal philosophical "system", despite the fact that I occasionally come across aspects of such systems that resonate with me in some way. I don't have any desire to program some abstract algorithm in my head that tells me how I should view every situation or what decisions I should make -- I like to take the real world on its own terms as much as possible, and my natural tendency is to apply abstractions sparingly, even though I can see their usefulness in delineating certain concepts at times.

The stuff in my head that feels like "personal philosophy" to me is sort of a mish-mash of direct observation, sensory data, and parts of books/quotes I've come across that have seemed to point at the same things I've tended to notice about life. E.g., when I read books like Momo by Michael Ende, or Madeleine L'Engle's Time Quartet novels, or like Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter, I get a strong sense of "correspondence" between (at least some of) the ideas/images expressed therein and what the world feels like from inside my head.

This is not something I do in order to be "cool", it is something I do because it's the only way I can actually approach and participate in discussions about ethics, philosophy, social justice, etc. So if you think something I'm describing sounds like [whatever]ism, you can certainly mention it, but don't be surprised if I don't immediately jump to identify with [whatever]ism, or if I have difficulty explaining what I think is good or bad about a particular -ism you either subscribe to or don't subscribe to. I have a lot of difficulty with the kind of "top-down" thinking that seems to dominate Internet discussion space, which seems frequently to consist of warring representatives of different fixed ideologies, even though I'm very good at noticing details and looking at things from a more "bottom-up" perspective.

(And if you're wondering why I'm going on about this here, mainly it's so I can point people to this explanation if they ask me things like, "So, what do you think are the major flaws in utilitarianism/capitalism/anarchism/socialism/Pastafarianism/etc.?" and find themselves wondering why I can't seem to give a "straight answer".)

On Labels

I figured labels were worth writing about here, as one thing that happens to me sometimes is that people will see me writing about a particular facet of who and what I am, and then decide that I need to be told not to "define myself" by that one facet. And...that confuses me, because not only do all people have the potential to end up in any number of "categories" depending on who is looking at them and what variables they are being assessed according to, I am generally reluctant to accept any labels to begin with (for cognitive/information-processing reasons, as alluded to in the Personal Philosophy section above).

As far as I'm concerned, all labels are merely shorthand -- while language is a part of reality, language does not and cannot encompass all of reality. So even if I choose to use a given label, there is no way I am going to let that label "own" me or tell me who I am.

For me, labels are functional and contextual -- labels I have accepted ("female", "engineer", "autistic", and "California resident", to name a few) were accepted on the basis of their usefulness in helping me figure out:

- Why my body works the way it does

- Why my brain works the way it does, and why I experience and perceive reality in certain ways

- What jobs I am qualified for

- What taxes I need to pay

...and a great many other wholly practical things. So if you see me calling myself X or Y or Z in my writing, please don't take it to mean that I think X, Y, or Z is EVERYTHING about my person. Labels X, Y, and Z may point to aspects of myself I do consider to be very important/fundamental to my being, but those things are there regardless of whether they're called (or not called) a particular name.

Anne Corwins Who Are Not Me

So far this hasn't come up, but just in case anyone ends up coming across these other individuals, I would like to state for the record that I am not this person (a woman named Anne Corwin who appears to be some sort of child development psychologist). Nor am I this person (another Anne Corwin who apparently co-authored a book entitled "Miss Emily: The Yellow Rose of Texas").

I have no association with either of these individuals and they are not relatives or dopplegangers or anything of that sort -- they're just random females with the same name as me.

Why Did I Write This "About" Page?

For several reasons.

Firstly, I do write frequently on topics that I am interested in, and that I may have done a lot of personal reading on (i.e., biology, neuroscience, etc.), but that I am not officially credentialed in. While I do not believe that official credentials are always necessary in order for a person to be an expert in something, I also do not want to mistakenly give the impression that I am somehow claiming to be credentialed in areas where I'm not. Therefore, I figured it was worth listing a bit of my educational and employment history, so it would be apparent where I actually did have "credentials", for those who care about such things.

I am not doing this to be cocky or anything -- I don't think I have much to be cocky about, honestly. But a few people who have e-mailed me have somehow gotten the impression that I'm some kind of...well, celebrity isn't quite the word, but it seems to be something along those lines.

Honestly, I am just a random person with a blog like ten zillion others on the Internet, and while I may indeed be able to write fluently on some subjects, I don't really understand why anyone would write to me and say something like, "Wow, are you THE Anne Corwin?" I just don't think I've done anything quite impressive enough to merit that kind of comment!

I would love to someday be well-established as a science and science-fiction writer (and I'm excited that I got to co-write a chapter in Damien Broderick's Year Million: Science At The Far Edge of Knowledge essay anthology -- that one is actually me), but my goal in that regard is motivated by a desire to keep learning, exploring, and improving my writing for the sheer joy of building skill in the craft.

Secondly, I guess I feel like I want to establish my credibility as properly as I can, so that my word can be taken for whatever people feel it's worth based on reality. I have seen various stories online about people pretending to be someone they are not (like that guy from Wikipedia a while back), and I know that if someone did that in a way that affected me, I would be very angry and annoyed.

So, while I most certainly think every individual has the right to disclose or not disclose various personal details at their discretion (you will notice that I do not talk specifically about my employers online, or about my family in any great detail, out of courtesy and respect for their privacy), I also personally feel compelled to establish something of a correlation between "Anne online" and "Anne offline", because we really are the same person!

Hopefully all that makes sense. Prior to writing this, I mulled over it for a long time, and I've sought to word it as accurately as possible. I just figured that it would be good for people coming across my blog for whatever reason to get something of an idea about who was behind it, as I often get questions pertaining to background stuff, and I thought it would be convenient to have as much of that as possible in one place so that conversation threads on actual posts would stay more targeted to the subject. :)