STUDYING THE MOMENT

July 28th, 2020

As you read or listen to this sentence, your attention is focused, ideally captured, and molded by the shape of meaning and cadence created by this string of words.  So much of your experience is pushed out of the way in order to do this.  When you stop reading or listening, your senses will open up and you’ll take in a much larger slice of what’s going on.  Perhaps someone will start blaring some music and interrupt this focus.  Our attention is grabbed, and so we try to refocus over and over.

If attention is the thing we are trying to guide to a specific end, then what exactly is paying attention to this process?

Does attention have the capacity to pay attention to itself?  It may take a bit of practice, often accomplished through meditation, but it does seem possible to consciously attempt this recursive look.  The results, of course, are left for the person attempting this high-wire trick to examine.  The fruits of this simple exercise seem to unlock unexpected avenues that lace across the way we experience time.

Might sound a bit froo-froo, a bit woo.  But wandering in this area, and investigating the moment in such a way begins yield possible solutions to a question like:

How do we ensure that life doesn’t pass us by while we’re busy doing other things?

This is, of course, a famous quote rearranged into a question of caution and preparation.  It can be shocking how quickly time passes by, even disturbing, and perhaps tragic.  And these possible reactions to the past are exactly the reason why it’s so important to investigate that intangible, finicky, slippery opportunity that always seems to arrive and leave at once - it’s the reason to study the moment.

Memory tries to capture it.  

Accomplishment attempts to demarcate it.  

Pleasure can seem to honor it and waste it at the same time.

We engage in all of these different practices and techniques and facets of human life in an attempt to somehow do something to the moment.  Often we are trying to transform the moment into a peak state, as when the bow is finally tied on the accomplishment or when the glass of wine is raised, or when we finally breath a sigh of relief before the view at the top of the mountain.  It’s as if the best moment is captured by the word ‘finally’.  But no sooner is it said than the moment that seems to express that feeling has fled and we are left with the beginning of a new chase.

Meditation, and the practice of investigating the nature of attention itself, is in some sense, an exercise done by putting all that chase and those peaks states, all that pleasure and strenuous endurance - putting all that aside for a bit of time in order to experience the moment as it is in as naked a form as possible.  

What one comes to realize after some time, is that the experience of this pared down moment begins -or can begin- to trickle into the rest of life.  The strenuous endurance seems less stressful, because the stress itself can be separated from the task at hand and be manipulated by a flexible and powerful attention.  When the alarms are all blaring in the cockpit of the mind, most of us are rightfully overwhelmed.  A well exercised attention gains the ability to silence the alarms and address the underlying causes with calmness and peace, almost as though the right decision becomes a passive reaction to the needs of the moment.

The true needs of the moment can often be counter-intuitive, especially if our intuition has been trained in a life that has lacked this mindful practice, and so grows the need to study the moment.

CREATE SPACE

July 27th, 2020

We are so busy.  The underlying reason why is excellent:  nothing gets done otherwise, and we have a lot of work to do.  The question of course arises as to whether or not the work we are doing is actually getting good things done.  Enormous strains of society consist of fairly useless work - i.e. Bullshit Jobs.  But all this busyness is itself a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, a vicious cycle that reinforces itself in order to grow.

Not doing anything, is a pretty nervous statement to utter, especially in productive circles.  Of course there’s cause for relaxing, unwinding, and enjoying life a little, but this is often just another way to fill the time.  And this is really at the core of much busyness - to fill time. The logic of busyness in this way, if we apply it to money sounds like this: well the point of money is that it can buy things, so I should spend every last penny I have, because that’s the whole point..

That’s exactly how time is regarded across much of modern western culture.  But it is a resource far more precious than money.  It is money that spends itself no matter what.  Our only involvement is that we get a say in what that dwindling resource gets fed into.  The mortality-fuelled anxiety behind this task creates a situation that seems fairly understandable: do as much as you can with your time because it’ll run out!

Unfortunately or fortunately, a counter-intuitive approach yields benefits that are simply not achieved through a mind chock-full of busyness.  Creating space in time in order to do nothing refreshes the perspective.  Now to be clear, this doesn’t mean getting around to that book on the night table, or finally pressing a hand to that crafty project.  Those are just other things to stay busy with.  What’s meant here is doing nothing, actually nothing.  What many productivity die-hards would call wasting time.

Here’s a personal example:  Tinkered Thinking is on the verge of releasing a beautiful, illustrated book.  The book, along with the brand new online store that will be a part of Tinkered Thinking have been effectively complete for a couple weeks.  The reason it hasn’t been launched has to do with a particular business credit card that has met delay after delay due to an amount of ineptitude on the part of a bank that is so astonishing it’s become a form of entertainment.

This created an interesting and unexpected space.  There are a number of other projects on the chopping block to get started on, but the perpetual tease of this Credit Card which was dragged out by “accident” created a space where there wasn’t too much to do.  As a result the new GPT-3 technology from OpenAI found it’s way into my attention with no searching on my behalf.  There was time to play around with it and waste time musing over the implications of the technology.  Naturally a few episodes arose from it.  But the time available created a space that allowed for a few key insights.  If the card had showed up a week earlier, then the book would have been launched by now.  But instead, due to the whimsical and unfettered allowance of curiosity, Tinkered Thinking is now in the final stages of developing an app with this new technology that will undergo security review with OpenAI and ideally be available for all quite soon.  Now the retrospective question arises:  if that credit card had shown up earlier, would The Tinkered Question app exist?

Perhaps the bank should be thanked for their ineptitude: they inadvertently created space for the mind to truly wander in directions that have proved quite…productive. 

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: CHAINED ATTENTION

July 26th, 2020

Lucilius gazed at the worn skin beneath the hot iron rings shackled round his wrists.  The skin was bruised and crusted with blood.   His hands were curled beyond, pressing a wider shape on the outer rim of each shackle, pushing each up and off from the centre of each pained part of his wrists.  He breathed a light sigh, and closed his eyes, feeling the weight of his chest slowly drop.  He took in the of the colosseum again, the stagnant taste, in the gated wings, now sweet to the one who could feel such simple pleasure.

He was to be put in the arena, with what he had no notion.  Some terrible fate, he supposed, awaited him.  He’d been living now for so many strange years, and despite the youth he could still taste in the air, it didn’t strike him as much of a bother that these moments might be his last.  They were moments like any other - to be missed and lost in thought, of to be settled to see what those moments had.  Dust filled air.  The taught sheets of old light pulled out from the cracks in the wooden gate.  The nervous smell of sweat among the other men worrying about nearing moments beyond the door, the hot iron round his wrists.  No matter his fortune, the moment was much the same as any other.  His eyes meandered shut and once again he was among coarse sheets, hot with different sweat.  Light fingers grazing his brow as he felt himself nearly gripped by sleep.  His eyes opened then to the touch and met softer eyes, a face so calm in its beauty, as though fascinated by the common lines of his own face.  Hoe long ago those tender moments had been.  And now, here he was at the end of such a common twist of fate.  But such was the ways of states, conquered and subsumed, enslaved by those foreign men who braved their own borders, pushing them ever farther into others.

He heard common screams and cheers.  The commotion of the arena was not new to Lucilius, though now it was odd to hear it from that machine’s own bowels as he waited to be fed into the heart of its purpose, its mission of violence.

Finally, the sheets of light began to tilt and the door to the arena was pulled wide.  He, along with all the other chained slaves were hustled out into sand pit, where pools of blood caked spots of ground with new and simple mud.  

They were all still shackled and it was to be a common slaughter, the cheapest of thrills during that day, and when the executor, mounted upon his horse started towards them to cut them down, there then rang out a rare horn, and the charging blade held up.

There was commotion among the crowd in a language Lucilius did not know.  A solitary voice called out in announcement, further words Lucilius was blind to.  He merely stood in the sand pit among others, waiting.

But the blade never came, and Lucilius along with the other gang of slaves was rounded up, and with an enraged owner screaming at a government official, they were marched off across an immense distance, the lot of them being rotated in wagons while others walked in order to speed the process.

It was months before Lucilius and the others glimpsed the ramparts of the capital in the distance.  And there within the immense city they were herded before the capital building aside hundreds of thousands of other people: slaves, commoners, visitors, of all kinds.  Ferried into the bowels of the empire, Lucilius supposed, to be fed into a thicker need of thrill.   And then this new arena towered stories above any Lucilius had ever seen, and again, he found himself sitting in the rank wings, waiting for death.  Each of the men before him was lead one after another into the wide baked pit of sand where it seemed to Lucilius, each perished, until it was his own turn.  A guard unlocked the iron rings that Lucilius had grown so accustomed to and as he walked out onto the sand he held up his wrists to watch what he could only feel: the delight among this worn part of his body, lifted by being lighter without the weight of iron.  He smiled, as it seemed he walked out to his death.

There, on all sides, were more people than Lucilius had ever seen.  Whatever it was they screamed, Lucilius knew none of these foreign tongues, but the sound, the swelling of yells, the dip between it’s surges - he knew the words they probably used, but even here, in this terrible place, Lucilius could only but wonder what else might be musing in the stands - what other person might share a thought with him.

And then the mounted warrior jostled his horse into position yards before Lucilius.  When the crowd finally reached its crescendo, the warrior charged at Lucilius, but he did not move, but simply watched the sweating horse, blindly charge his way.  

He felt his arm light up with pain, and to it he looked to see deep coloured blood streaming down the length of his arm.  The mounted warrior had sliced his shoulder open.  And before all that pain blistering through his mind Lucilius wondered at the strangeness of the strike.  It was unusual custom in this new capital, he figured, to be slowly torn down with nicks and simple cuts instead of the gore he knew the crowd wanted.  

The mounted warrior rounded and returning upon Lucilius, he opened up the side of his leg.  Lucilius felt that side of his body crumple, the stance now inoperable from the new wound.  From his rest on the folded leg, he looked at the new wound, the hot sand caking dark beneath him.  Surely the next blow would be the end of this strange execution, he wondered and look up to find the warrior bearing down upon him.  The horse slowed, and the warrior swung over his leg and fell to a stance upon the sand.  He walked up till he stood above Lucilius, and there he raised his sword.

Lucilius looked up at the man, squinting, and as he took in the sight, he couldn’t help but yawn.  The air filling him seemed the most delicious thing he’d ever had, and in those dwindling moments, Lucilius felt the smile of his mind, grateful for that last moment before the sword: how lovely it was to close out such a long life while still in the present.

But as the raised blade was unhooked form that position, a whistle sang out from somewhere high in the stands.  Lucilius was grabbed and pulled up by other men and after he was dragged off the sandy arena, he was patched and bandaged and left to rest in a cell.

The next day, upon waking, he was pulled from the cell and confined to a carriage that bumped along the cobbled streets and when he was pulled forth again, he was before the grand palace.  He was lead up the hundreds of tiers and there left before the grand entrance, already open and wide.  

A courtier was there, waiting and after the guards left Lucilius, he beckoned him to follow.  He was lead into the splendid hall of marble and was told in his own language to sit before a spread of meats and grapes with clean water and wine also left before him.  But Lucilius took none of it, gazing upon the fine craftsmanship of stone all around him.  The courtier seemed to have a constant stream of attendants added to a line, waiting to his attention, and with each he attended to the scroll they held while he waited with Lucilius.

And finally, the emperor emerged.  The courtier raised himself to attention, but Lucilius remained seated, entranced by the fine work of the emperor’s clothes.  The guards to either side of the emperor moved to haul Lucilius to his feet, but the emperor waved them off, and then the man decked in splendour spoke to Lucilius, the language ever new and unknown to Lucilius.  At length he went on, until he nodded and then left.

Lucilius looked to the courtier.

“You will need to learn the emperor’s language,” the courtier said.

“For what reason, why am I hear?” Lucilius asked.

The courtier looked displeased.  He glanced up from the scroll he held and exchanged it for the next in line.

“The emperor has decided that you shall be his spiritual advisor.”

“But why?” Lucilius asked.

The courtier looked back at him briefly before resuming his study of the scroll.  “Of thousands of men, you were the only one who did not cower before blade and death.  The emperor has been searching for you, and now you will teach the emperor to be like you, to find peace with his fear.”

COUNTERING INTUITION

July 25th, 2020

Should you always trust your gut feeling?  This feeling is trusted and queried beyond most all other sources of insight, commonly interpreted as though it were a kind of portal and connection to a deeper logic of the universe.  What’s the reason for this all-encompassing trust?  Do we prize this oracle because it’s never or rarely lead us astray?  How does the answer to that question truly surface if we’re honest with ourselves?  Is it possible that our intuition has been a terrible guide plenty of times, but we still heed its direction merely because of the way it presents?  It’s the antithesis of human operation to do something you don’t feel like, and at the same time, the widespread attempt to figure out how to hack our individual systems and do things we don’t feel like doing but know we should is universally acknowledged as the key to individual progress.

This might be too broad of a description for something as hallowed as intuition.  The protests are easy to imagine: the desire to stay on the couch and let the next episode autoplay isn’t intuition.  The feeling we get in our gut is something that only occurs during special circumstances: when faced with a choice, a fork of fate, framed by an aura of suspense where the possibilities of life burn, waiting in the wings, standing attention for the cue to grip the universe and haul it in a new direction.

Perhaps it’s a counter-intuitive mistake when we fail to realize that the universe is getting hauled in a particular direction when we lazily let Netflix force-feed our next half hour of existence.  It feels normal, it feels like nothing special.  Intuition need not be used here, I’m just passing a little time.  Where’s the harm in that?

As a point of definition, it’s always a circumspect exercise to examine what’s going on under the hood with the actual word.  Intuition, from late middle English conveys “insight and spiritual perception,” originally with a theological connection.  This derives from Late Latin intuitio, “a looking at, consideration” from the Proto-Indo-European root en- meaning simple “in” fused with -tueri meaning ‘to look at, watch over”, the same root that gives rise to the word tutor.

This is a comforting root.  It evokes the sense that some sort of higher power is looking out for us.  It’s easy to see how archetypes like guardian angels and gods can pop out of this concept and vice versa.  Everything is so much easier when you have guidance, like when a tutor is leading you through a lesson, or when a parent shepherds you safely through the world while you figure things out, or when Netflix gives you every signal that it’s safe to just stay where you are and relax, I got you, I know just what you want, and it’s going to start playing in 5, 4, 3, 2. . . 

Intuition seems as though it’s a system of understanding and judgement that we slowly create as we move through experience.  It’s a time-saving system composed of heuristics that we trust to take in all the information we have and generate a good or bad feeling about the choices at hand.

But the experience of a feeling is tricky.  Nothing is more persuasive and convincing than a feeling that pervades your entire sense of experience.  In some sense we become intoxicated with the current feeling.  When we are enraged with some circumstance, ideas about what to do and how to act pop into our mind and they seem satisfied, or at least justified.  But often in retrospect, these choices seem terrible, whether they were acted upon or not.  But then again, people don’t associate the intuitive choice while angry with Intuition with a capital ‘I’.  We differentiate them, which seems like a gross oversight on closer examination.  What feels intuitive in a circumstances (like being very angry) doesn’t seem like a good choice later, but in such a case the context has radically changed.  So,

is intuition context dependant? 

A better way to approach and pin intuition is with the counter-intuitive example.  What does it mean when something is counter-intuitive?  It’s when something operates in a way that isn’t in line with our intuition or common sense.  So how do we come to understand it?  If something doesn’t make sense, but it works, is it a matter of failed intuition or understanding?  And furthermore, can our intuition improve?  And if so, how exactly does it improve, and most importantly, how are we aware of a weakness in intuition and the congruent need to update or improve that intuition?

Simply:  how do we detect the counter-intuitive?

Luckily, we have this handy, albeit exhausting ability to thoughtfully consider things in a way that puts emotion on a back-burner.  The easiest way to detect the counter-intuitive is to simply make the intuitive choice and thoughtfully note when the consequences of that choice don’t roll out in line with the original intuition.  Left to it’s own devices, our feelings are likely to lead us down the same hallway of mistakes over and over.  We see this in the lives of friends and family all the time: making the same bad choice over and over, as though they expect that some magic instance of time will finally procure the result they expect.  Could it be as simple as bad intuition?  And the inability to realize that the remedy to a repeated mistake requires a counter-intuitive path?

Yes.  After repeated mistakes, we’re bound to keep the broken record going if we don’t thoughtfully examine all areas of the loop in order to find the break.  But after such conscientious effort - once we understand, we’ve built an intuition, and when circumstances blossom once again to reveal the key colors of that understanding, we gain the ability to respond differently because we feel differently when we see those colors.

Detecting counter-intuitive circumstances ahead of time is perhaps impossible.  We might only really learn through mistakes.  It’s possible to pinpoint the reasons for failure, but it’s impossible to pinpoint the reasons for success: failure is in the details, success is the entire circumstance.

This is also why we are predisposed to the negative: success emerges as we tend to failure in detail.

It’s counter-intuitive but by ignoring the worst we risk perpetuating it.  But instead of emotional reaction, the sort of attention required is slow, thoughtful and full of effort.  The intuitive response to the worst is of course, to simply react as we feel in the moment.

Countering-intuition by honestly recognizing it’s fallibility and honestly examining it’s mistakes is the only way we improve it.  And in order to do that we have to acknowledge the counter-intuitive fact that intuition can misguide us.

PRESENTATIONAL REQUIREMENTS

July 24th, 2020

Levels of understanding are normally bound to attention investment.  Our likelihood of gaining a new level of understanding on a given topic goes up if we focus more attention on that topic.  Seems fairly straight forward: Experts invest more and more attention to achieve mastery of terms of a particular field and the inner workings of those terms.  But compare this to the rare insight, the revolutionary new perspective that is by no means guaranteed to anyone.

What is the nature of correlation between a rare new insight and levels of understanding of a particular field?  Each person understands a subject in their own way, and we generally accept that these understandings can be roughly imagined as levels, hence the levels of difficulty generally attributed to the educational system.  A master’s degree is a level of understanding generally regarded as ‘higher’ than what a student explores in an undergrad.  So do levels of understanding in a given field have any correlation to that rare field-changing insight?

Approach the question from a completely different tangent:  Does a homeless individual suffering from mental illness ever strike upon insight that could substantially help humanity?

The answer seems as though it’s probably ‘no’.

But.  How can we verify this?  Such ‘disabled’ individuals often lack the presentational requirements for such ideas.  Even if such an individual can get ahold of a keyboard, can the notion be successfully worded with an understanding of other people’s context that’s rich enough to create a bridge over which the new idea can be injected into our context?  If someone tells you the answer to all your problems, but does so in Japanese, and you don’t know Japanese, how useful are those ‘answers’?  Furthermore, imagine that instead of Japanese, it’s a language that no one else knows and no one has ever heard of.

The possibility of our understanding expanding beyond its own context remains cloistered within it’s own context.

So we arrive at a different question: how does the context of a particular level of understanding expand in order to achieve a new level of understanding in a new context?

The process of learning does seem to be demarcated with swift and dramatic jumps in our level of understanding.  We squint and scratch our heads, confused with a new concept that is beyond what we currently know, and then like seeming magic, after enough head banging, boom, suddenly it seems to make sense.  We test that understanding, we get a predictable answer, and it’s verified:  we understand on a new level.

The transmission of understanding between people clearly has requirements.  One of the most obvious requirements is language.  It’s always an adorable sight when people who have utterly no knowledge of each other’s language are trying to help and get help, as with, asking for directions in a foreign country.  The game becomes an unpracticed exercise in charades.  

Of course, language isn’t necessarily a requirement.  It’s not difficult for someone who doesn’t speak your language to teach you a specific dance.  There the requirement is vision, and one of movement, and the amount of information that is ricocheted back and forth by simple eye contact and head nodding can be quite amazing.  It’s like a game of Marco Polo but administered through ‘yeses’ and ‘noes’: encouragement and discouragement - perhaps the most fundamental form of evolution.

Now let’s apply these musings to conversation:

How does someone achieve the ability to understand what you are saying?

Does the success of your message depend more on your ability to articulate your idea or your understanding of the listener’s perspective?

Do we speak in a way that builds bridges between our own perspective and the perspective of another?  Or do we speak in a way that merely reinforces our own context?

A useful concept at this point is the echo-chamber.  Most of us just talk and talk as though a thorough description of our perspective is somehow going to invade and conquer the opinions and ideas of other perspectives.  But our context often just becomes self-reinforcing when it doesn’t have access to other contexts.  Access to those other contexts is also key to convincing someone to see something from a different point of view.  

If you want to give someone a new perspective, wouldn’t it be helpful to understand what their current perspective is?  

Would we not be better equipped to get someone to see something differently if we first asked some questions to get an understanding of what’s going on in their mind?

We might even get lucky.  If our ability to form questions is well practiced, we might be able to form questions that simultaneously achieve two ends:  We become acquainted with the mind of the other person, and their consideration of our question also casts a new light on their own understanding.

The presentational requirements for ideas, perspectives, opinions, are quite substantial.  And with much of human dialogue, we are simply steamrolling these requirements in a vain attempt to convince  by brute force.

Unfortunately, this strategy often just backfires.  By ignoring the presentational requirements, we build echo chambers, we weld doors of perspective shut, we lower the blinds, and we become ignorant to the art of building bridges.