One of my continuing thoughts is the issue of analyzing people en masse, the way Asimov imagined history could be calculated using the equivalent of gas laws, and the relative unpredictability of individuals. Or, you could say an issue of free will. Even without invoking nonlinear dynamics it seems to me odd that we can learn so much about how people operate by exploring the basest of mental-biological operations while acknowledging that we yet seem capable of moving... if not beyond them, at least in a pattern that is not easily predicted by them.
In fact, there is that element of... how to put it... unpredictability in the behavior of interesting people. Maybe that's a tautology, that what makes them interesting is their unpredictability, but I don't think so. It seems to me a byproduct of something deeper, and I have some inkling that it is attention.
Most of our lives are lived on automatic. I say this without scorn but simple observation, for given the limited resources of our brain it must be. The myriad of behaviors and activities we must engage in, from handling objects to constructing sentences to the ordering of actions, are best handled by subroutines. No need to distract us. Yet I think there is the seduction of convenience here, that we not only delegate these routine matters but almost all matters. It is as though we are riding a bicycle and are not just content to automatically keep our balance but allow our reflexive responses to divots in the road also determine the greater course. With ease of action comes habit. Or perhaps we were never paying attention in the first place.
One of the recurring themes in meditation is attention. It can either be focusing it on a single object or flexibly allowing it to move across all experience without hindrance, but it still comes back to refining this skill. I'm reminded of how in Bones of the Master, the monk Tsung Tsai says (jokes, really, because he is delightful) that attention is his superpower. There is something in this, something that allows for a life that is more than reaction. It is like it allows for proper action, but what proper action consists of is something of a wisdom-mystery to me still.
Attention, of our mental faculties, seems most linked to consciousness. If you aren't paying attention you don't seem to be conscious of something, even if in fact you find out you knew it later. How you can know something but not be conscious of it seems like a paradox, but highlights to me that, again, most of the mind seems to work perfectly fine without our awareness of it. It is blind sight writ large in our lives, where we mistake our ability to observe the outcome and make sense of it to be the same as initiating it.
I circle around the issue, but it comes back to this feeling that attention somehow seems to be supra-added to our experience, something that curiously is not necessary or sufficient for our functioning yet when brought to bear can elevate it. That's what makes people most interesting, what makes them unpredictable because they are more than an 80-billion-neuron patellar reflex, is that somehow their attention is turned on. Turned on themselves, turned on the world, and turned crucially on the border between the two. When this happens they can behave in ways that are not available to the same system lacking such an infusion.
I wonder if there is any evolutionary benefit to this. I recall reading that even flies have attention, but that can be accounted for by the "limited processing" theory mentioned above. Why would paring down information create more possibilities? It makes me fear that there may be some semantic confusion involved, such as either a false identification of two things or a weak connection between a very basic and highly derived version of the same phenomenon. It's as though attention in humans is being fed into a super-system, the general form of learning meta-cognition that is so fashionable nowadays in education. And then, at that point, the whole system can be shaped in a way which is beneficial.
We still don't know what consciousness is nor have we made a single advance that would differentiate the hypothesis that the brain creates consciousness from the one that the brain merely receives consciousness like a radio. If the latter, I wonder if it is not absurd to postulate as others have that there is such a thing as a consciousness field that our neurological systems have tapped into, to great evolutionary benefit. The greater the complexity of the system the "more" consciousness can capture, but also the greater that consciousness can have an effect; more levers at its disposal, if you will. Clearly I don't know and this is speculation, but at times it seems to suggest to me a coherent framework in which to view all this.
Thank you for your attention.
