Thursday, July 16, 2015
Attent-ions 2
I'm tired of reading and writing the same old assumptions leading to the same old conclusions.
This article by Thomas Wells is truly FRESH. It starts from the same notion that I was playing with here. ATTENTION is a deeply important form of energy, not just a reference to an aspect of behavior.
In my engineerish formulation,
Intuitively or childishly, it seems that there's something special about birds and mammals. Possibly all vertebrates, maybe a few top-grade invertebrates like cephalopods. Beyond those bounds it feels less likely. Well then, what distinguishes those inner-circle animals from the others? If awareness is the essential quality, what's the measurable manifestation? Getting engineerish as usual: If awareness is the pressure, what's the flow? If awareness is the static field, what's the current? I'd pick ATTENTION or FOCUS. We 'smarties' (birds, mammals, cuttlefish) are capable of PAYING attention to an INTERESTING object, and we are equally capable of RECEIVING attention. There's the flow.In Wells's economoid formulation,
Expensively trained human attention is the fuel of twenty-first century capitalism. We are allowing a single industry to slash and burn vast amounts of this productive resource in search of a quick buck. The advertising industry consists of the buying and selling of your attention between third parties without your consent. That means that the cost of producing the good - access to your attention - doesn't reflect its full social cost.Wells is a deep-dyed satan, using she for all pronouns and frequently referring to the Goldman genocidal hypercrime of "global warming" as an automatic obvious fact, but even a satan can hit a good point occasionally. Electric flow was considered a substance before the physical movement of ions was understood. Attention is clearly a substance in the same way, and we're awaiting the observation of physical attent-ions. Sidenote: After encountering these clips about turtles, I have to broaden my earlier category of 'birds and mammals' to all vertebrates for sure! ¶ 6:25 AM
