Ran Prieur

October 9.

2019-10-09T21:10:24Z

October 9. Two comments on unknown knowns. From Voidgenesis on the subreddit:

This made me recall personal experiences of learning to play piano. My conscious awareness was mostly located in my dominant right hand. As I became more skilled and the left hand got involved it was as if someone else was controlling it much of the time. That in turn reminded me of all the neurobiology research showing that the mind is not a coherent construction, but composed of many different modules competing for access to the central self aware part (or frantic confabulator depending on your perspective). If attention is a neurological illusion then it tints the whole original conceptual framework.

And from Matt over email:

Perhaps the reason no one challenged your claim that attention can home in on something without us knowing it, is that people intuitively grasp how attention is more cloud-like than laser-like.

We can be thinking about an anxiety-inducing project at work, have a song stuck in our head, briefly be annoyed at another person on the train, and have a memory surface all within the space of seconds. It's easy to fail to realize that a part of our mind began replaying a song it heard from someone's smartphone before we boarded the train. We may suddenly wonder why we're thinking about so-and-so from college only to trace the memory to the fact that we've been replaying a song internally. We may or may not know why the song entered our thoughts at all.

If there's any activity that can be said to cause the most suffering, I'd say it's this: thinking about something without clearly knowing that you're thinking about it or knowing the negative effects that's having on your body.

October 7.

2019-10-07T19:50:30Z

October 7. A few more thoughts on attention. First, I was surprised that no one challenged me on category 2, "where your attention is, and you don't know it." How is that even possible? Isn't that the definition of attention, that whatever your attention is on, you know it? Maybe it's like "Yeah, when I'm focusing on that thing, I'm aware of it, but I didn't notice I was focusing on it that much."

I'm also thinking about the metaphor of fish not being aware of water. When I first heard that, it seemed profound. Since then, in some circles, it's become a cliche, and the usual interpretation is that the aware-of-water are better than the unaware-of-water. But notice, the best known presentation of the metaphor is probably by David Foster Wallace, who killed himself.

Taking it literally, an actual fish would have no reason to be aware of water, and becoming aware of water would add an unhelpful cognitive burden. Taking another shot at what I wrote last week: maybe the recent surge in depression and anxiety is caused by the cultural trend of assuming that more awareness is always better, and now we're struggling with conscious awareness of too many things that are better handled subconsciously -- or even mishandled.

October 4.

2019-10-04T16:20:45Z

October 4. First, some loose ends from this week's posts. From Monday, two links on fame. Homo Narrativus and the Trouble with Fame argues "that fame has much less to do with intrinsic quality than we believe it does, and much more to do with the characteristics of the people among whom fame spreads." And The Myth of Commoditized Excellence is about how movements start with good ideas, but to grow beyond a certain level of popularity, they have to be polished down to bullshit.

And Mark writes, "Your Oct 2 post is probably the best you've ever written." That's interesting, because almost all my other posts have been written straight to a computer screen, sober, and my Oct 2 post was written longhand on two puffs of good weed. Unfortunately, cannabis only buffs my creativity for a couple days after a break, and then the high becomes less illuminating and more numbing, until I take another break. Of course everyone's brain is different, but I wonder how many everyday stoners, or non-users, would benefit from a schedule of 1-3 days on and 2-5 days off.

For the weekend I just want to recommend a film. I saw it back in 1995 when it came out, and this week I rewatched it. If you like the story "The Yellow Wallpaper", and if you've ever made it through a Tarkovsky film, check out Todd Haynes' Safe. It's long and slow, with a similar story updated to 1980's California: an affluent housewife (Julianne Moore) gets a mystery illness, but instead of going into a creepy bedroom, she goes to a new age retreat center.

The ending is carefully ambiguous, and we never get a clear answer about what's wrong with her or whether she'll recover. And the atmosphere is a lot like a horror movie, except that every character is trying to be nice, and the horrifying thing is the alienation of modern life.

October 2.

2019-10-02T14:00:37Z

October 2. Continuing on the subject of attention, this subreddit thread has helped clarify my thinking, and now I can define four categories: 1) where your attention is, and you know it; 2) where your attention is, and you don't know it; 3) where your attention is not, but you know it could go there; 4) where your attention is not, and you don't know it can go there.

This is a lot like Donald Rumsfeld's speech about knowns and unknowns. He was talking in the context of war, and information technology has put us in the biggest attention war of all time. We are fighting for four things: to see, to not see, to be seen, and to not be seen. Turn the TV to the game, mute that ad, look at my tweet, and don't track me Google.

There's a lot to be said about being seen and not being seen, but I want to focus on seeing and not seeing -- especially not seeing. This is the age of raising awareness, and it's gone so far that we're overwhelmed. Our ancestors could have not imagined how many demands we have on our attention, or how hard it is to choose among them.

I think this is why some people are pushing back against mindfulness. The last thing we want is even more shit we're supposed to be paying attention to. But the way I see it, the mind is like a web browser, and mindfulness is like changing your preferences. It's difficult, but it's an investment: by giving some attention to your own filter, you can learn to filter more stuff out, and free up some attention for whatever you decide is important.