Ok, I’m going to put some effort into building a bridge here, even without further detail about where things are going wrong for you. It’ll mostly be shots in the dark, so I will probably miss. But I expect this is a pretty common response, so I’ll give it a try anyway.
I’ll start by focusing on, “What does this particular essay contain besides ‘I pay attention and notice things’?”
According to me, this essay is not about “I pay attention and notice things”. This essay is about “I pay attention to *particular* things, I employ *particular strategies* for deciding what to pay attention to, and I make very careful guesses about *what* I will notice so that I am able to pay attention to the right things at the right times.”
I rather doubt that was anywhere near sufficient to build a bridge between this essay and wherever you are, let alone between you and all the rest of my naturalism writings, so in my next (probably much more sprawling) comment I will try to dig into some of the implicit stuff underneath my summary. (However I would love to hear whether this comment on its own was at all helpful to you, in case I’m wrong.)
I will now try to communicate an implicit conjecture in this essay that I think of as “Conservation of Attention”. This may possibly speak more directly to @spxtr, who suggested that our internal models of cognition may be dramatically different. I apologize that I will probably do this in a rather round-about way; “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.”
Conservation of Attention states (roughly) that attention can be redistributed, but not increased.
I think that this very short, rough statement of the conjecture is technically false, in the following way: Brains and bodies share resources, and it is indeed possible to increase or decrease the overall resources available to the entire system, or to shift resources between cognitive and physiological processes. For example, I expect that attention really does decrease overall during starvation, and increase overall during recovery from starvation (or perhaps even during recover from moderately low blood sugar). According to my understanding of what’s up with caffeine, as adenosine builds up over the course of the day, it decreases the possible *expenditure* of resources by the body and mind, regardless of what resources are physically available; so a shot of caffeine (which binds to and thereby incapacitates the adenosine receptors) may increase attention overall by widening the valve of ATP expenditure (or something along those lines). I also expect that sufficiently intense exercise tends to reduce the availability of cognitive resources, as those resources are redistributed to the muscular and cardiovascular systems. So in fact, attention can be increased or decreased globally by the activities of the rest of the body.
(There is also something going on with certain drugs, such as mescaline especially but IME also high doses of THC, that looks on the surface a lot like “increasing overall attention”, perhaps by a caffeine-like reduction-of-restrictive-mechanisms that is far more precisely targeted to whatever cognitive processes I’m pointing toward when I say “attention”. But my model of psychoactive drugs feels to me even more shaky than my model of metabolism, and anyway I’m pretty sure my observations are also consistent with a model where attention is merely redistributed in unusual ways during drug trips.)
The truer version of my conjecture runs more like this:
1) Every human contains a control system that is constantly governing the expenditure of resources on attention;
2) the reference point of the attention expenditure control system is an output of larger control systems that ensure overall economy of resource expenditure in a mind and body; and
3) the economics of cognitive resources are determined by the structure of the mind/body system, and perhaps also by the patterns of environmental stimuli a human encounters.
4) Therefore, it is at least extremely difficult and perhaps impossible to globally increase a human’s attention in the long term without dramatically changing their overall life circumstances.
5) However, temporary reallocation of attention is clearly possible, and can be accomplished deliberately and therefore strategically.
Why do I lay out this model here?
Because I do not think that any part of what I do in naturalism involves “paying more attention” than anyone else, including my past self. I think it is generally quite ridiculous to “try to pay more attention, in general”. I won’t go so far as to say that I’m certain it can’t be done, but I think that it at minimum requires an enormous lifestyle change that is probably not a good idea for most people most of the time.
(Indeed, I think this is a common failure mode among people who “get into mindfulness”. They mistake the reallocation of attention for an increase in attention, and thereby fail to take deliberate, strategic control of their attention. They reallocate in ways that may tend to reduce stress, but there is so much more to be gained from the deliberate development of novel patterns of attention allocation over time.)
Similarly, I do not “notice more things [in general]” (although it may be the case that I more frequently devote more attention to the things that I notice). According to my model, “noticing” is the rapid reallocation of attention. A person “notices” something when they suddenly start paying much more attention to it than they were paying moments before.
According to my tentative working model of ADHD, ADHDers really do “notice more things”: their attention reallocates more frequently and more rapidly. Autistics, by contrast, tend to reallocate more of our attention, on average, when reallocation occurs. (I have sometimes been accused of “trying to make everyone autistic”, and that would perhaps be an accurate assessment if I were suggesting that people “pay more attention” or “notice things more”. But I’m not suggesting that! I am suggesting much more strategicreallocation of attention.)
So in these terms, “Locating Fulcrum Experiences” is a method of preparing yourself to rapidly reallocate a large amount of attention away from its default state and toward a carefully chosen set of stimuli in precisely the moments when you are a tiny little bit aware that the set of stimuli is present.
Which (further implicit conjecture) is not necessarily easy or straightforward! (Perhaps this is where we disagree?) And thus I have written an essay explaining how to do it.
This essay is about “I pay attention to *particular* things, I employ *particular strategies* for deciding what to pay attention to, and I make very careful guesses about *what* I will notice so that I am able to pay attention to the right things at the right times.”
Right, I got that. Hence the fulcrum metaphor. I would really like to be able to figure out these particular things and learn these particular strategies, though mostly in a research application, where there seem to be unnoticed gems hiding in plain sight.
I suspect my experience is somewhat similar to shminux’s.
I simply can’t follow these posts, and the experience of reading them feels odd, and even off-putting at times (in an uncanny valley sort of way). At the same time, I can see that a number of people in the comments are saying that they find great value in them.
My first guess as to why I had trouble with them was that there are basically no concrete examples given, but now I don’t think that’s the reason. Personally, I get a strong sense of “I must be making some sort of typical mind fallacy” here. Something about our world views, or internal models of cognition, or something along those lines must be dramatically different. It’s hard to communicate just how difficult it is for me to make sense of these posts without being rude.
Thanks for the interesting read, and I love the watercolors.
I… wish I could find a particular phrase. It’s like I am trying to find that fulcrum (lever?) that would shift my perspective in a way you describe so that I finally get what you are talking about, but it keeps escaping me the moment I zoom in on anything in particular.
Just to check, when you say “this and previous posts”, do you mean all the stuff in Intro To Naturalism as well, or are you trying to make sense of just the posts so far published in Nuts and Bolts on their own?
I went through both, and tried to see what I am missing here, since I remember then your earlier writeups on noticing resonated with me back then. Sadly… I have made no progress.
Am I the only one who earnestly tried to make sense of this and previous posts and couldn’t, beyond the obvious “I pay attention and notice things”?
Ok, I’m going to put some effort into building a bridge here, even without further detail about where things are going wrong for you. It’ll mostly be shots in the dark, so I will probably miss. But I expect this is a pretty common response, so I’ll give it a try anyway.
I’ll start by focusing on, “What does this particular essay contain besides ‘I pay attention and notice things’?”
According to me, this essay is not about “I pay attention and notice things”. This essay is about “I pay attention to *particular* things, I employ *particular strategies* for deciding what to pay attention to, and I make very careful guesses about *what* I will notice so that I am able to pay attention to the right things at the right times.”
I rather doubt that was anywhere near sufficient to build a bridge between this essay and wherever you are, let alone between you and all the rest of my naturalism writings, so in my next (probably much more sprawling) comment I will try to dig into some of the implicit stuff underneath my summary. (However I would love to hear whether this comment on its own was at all helpful to you, in case I’m wrong.)
I will now try to communicate an implicit conjecture in this essay that I think of as “Conservation of Attention”. This may possibly speak more directly to @spxtr, who suggested that our internal models of cognition may be dramatically different. I apologize that I will probably do this in a rather round-about way; “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.”
Conservation of Attention states (roughly) that attention can be redistributed, but not increased.
I think that this very short, rough statement of the conjecture is technically false, in the following way: Brains and bodies share resources, and it is indeed possible to increase or decrease the overall resources available to the entire system, or to shift resources between cognitive and physiological processes. For example, I expect that attention really does decrease overall during starvation, and increase overall during recovery from starvation (or perhaps even during recover from moderately low blood sugar). According to my understanding of what’s up with caffeine, as adenosine builds up over the course of the day, it decreases the possible *expenditure* of resources by the body and mind, regardless of what resources are physically available; so a shot of caffeine (which binds to and thereby incapacitates the adenosine receptors) may increase attention overall by widening the valve of ATP expenditure (or something along those lines). I also expect that sufficiently intense exercise tends to reduce the availability of cognitive resources, as those resources are redistributed to the muscular and cardiovascular systems. So in fact, attention can be increased or decreased globally by the activities of the rest of the body.
(There is also something going on with certain drugs, such as mescaline especially but IME also high doses of THC, that looks on the surface a lot like “increasing overall attention”, perhaps by a caffeine-like reduction-of-restrictive-mechanisms that is far more precisely targeted to whatever cognitive processes I’m pointing toward when I say “attention”. But my model of psychoactive drugs feels to me even more shaky than my model of metabolism, and anyway I’m pretty sure my observations are also consistent with a model where attention is merely redistributed in unusual ways during drug trips.)
The truer version of my conjecture runs more like this:
1) Every human contains a control system that is constantly governing the expenditure of resources on attention;
2) the reference point of the attention expenditure control system is an output of larger control systems that ensure overall economy of resource expenditure in a mind and body; and
3) the economics of cognitive resources are determined by the structure of the mind/body system, and perhaps also by the patterns of environmental stimuli a human encounters.
4) Therefore, it is at least extremely difficult and perhaps impossible to globally increase a human’s attention in the long term without dramatically changing their overall life circumstances.
5) However, temporary reallocation of attention is clearly possible, and can be accomplished deliberately and therefore strategically.
Why do I lay out this model here?
Because I do not think that any part of what I do in naturalism involves “paying more attention” than anyone else, including my past self. I think it is generally quite ridiculous to “try to pay more attention, in general”. I won’t go so far as to say that I’m certain it can’t be done, but I think that it at minimum requires an enormous lifestyle change that is probably not a good idea for most people most of the time.
(Indeed, I think this is a common failure mode among people who “get into mindfulness”. They mistake the reallocation of attention for an increase in attention, and thereby fail to take deliberate, strategic control of their attention. They reallocate in ways that may tend to reduce stress, but there is so much more to be gained from the deliberate development of novel patterns of attention allocation over time.)
Similarly, I do not “notice more things [in general]” (although it may be the case that I more frequently devote more attention to the things that I notice). According to my model, “noticing” is the rapid reallocation of attention. A person “notices” something when they suddenly start paying much more attention to it than they were paying moments before.
According to my tentative working model of ADHD, ADHDers really do “notice more things”: their attention reallocates more frequently and more rapidly. Autistics, by contrast, tend to reallocate more of our attention, on average, when reallocation occurs. (I have sometimes been accused of “trying to make everyone autistic”, and that would perhaps be an accurate assessment if I were suggesting that people “pay more attention” or “notice things more”. But I’m not suggesting that! I am suggesting much more strategic reallocation of attention.)
So in these terms, “Locating Fulcrum Experiences” is a method of preparing yourself to rapidly reallocate a large amount of attention away from its default state and toward a carefully chosen set of stimuli in precisely the moments when you are a tiny little bit aware that the set of stimuli is present.
Which (further implicit conjecture) is not necessarily easy or straightforward! (Perhaps this is where we disagree?) And thus I have written an essay explaining how to do it.
Right, I got that. Hence the fulcrum metaphor. I would really like to be able to figure out these particular things and learn these particular strategies, though mostly in a research application, where there seem to be unnoticed gems hiding in plain sight.
Almost certainly not.
Could you perhaps highlight a particular phrase that baffles you?
I suspect my experience is somewhat similar to shminux’s.
I simply can’t follow these posts, and the experience of reading them feels odd, and even off-putting at times (in an uncanny valley sort of way). At the same time, I can see that a number of people in the comments are saying that they find great value in them.
My first guess as to why I had trouble with them was that there are basically no concrete examples given, but now I don’t think that’s the reason. Personally, I get a strong sense of “I must be making some sort of typical mind fallacy” here. Something about our world views, or internal models of cognition, or something along those lines must be dramatically different. It’s hard to communicate just how difficult it is for me to make sense of these posts without being rude.
Thanks for the interesting read, and I love the watercolors.
I… wish I could find a particular phrase. It’s like I am trying to find that fulcrum (lever?) that would shift my perspective in a way you describe so that I finally get what you are talking about, but it keeps escaping me the moment I zoom in on anything in particular.
Just to check, when you say “this and previous posts”, do you mean all the stuff in Intro To Naturalism as well, or are you trying to make sense of just the posts so far published in Nuts and Bolts on their own?
I went through both, and tried to see what I am missing here, since I remember then your earlier writeups on noticing resonated with me back then. Sadly… I have made no progress.