Non-snide vs snide
A typically snide article by the usual "skeptics" who are actually steadfast defenders of Current Fashion.

Do you believe that people’s eyes emit an invisible beam of force?

According to a rather fun paper in PNAS, you probably do, on some level, believe that. The paper is called Implicit model of other people’s visual attention as an invisible, force-carrying beam projecting from the eyes.

To show that people unconsciously believe in eye-beams, psychologists Arvid Guterstam et al. had 157 MTurk volunteers perform a computer task in which they had to judge the angle at which paper tubes would lose balance and tip over. At one side of the screen, a man was shown staring at the tube.

The key result was that volunteers rated the tube more likely to tip over if it was tilted in the direction away from the man gazing at it – as if the man’s eyes were pushing the tube away. The effect was small etc

Aside from the stupid** pointless computer-based "experiment", it's clear that most people do innately believe in the power of attention. And not only people. Other vertebrates also share the same belief. Eye contact is understood, used, and perceived immediately and solidly among all sorts of species with all sorts of facial arrangements.

I speculated on this a few years ago, in a more open-minded way....


= = = = = START REPRINT:

Warning: The following is a loooooooooong stretch applied to an initially dubious analogy. At the moment the stretch looks reasonable to me, and seems to yield some interesting questions. No answers yet. (Your stretchiness may vary.)

Starting question: Where do you draw the line on awareness and consciousness? There's absolutely no reason to assume that humans are alone, but how far does the boundary extend? All animals? Plants? Bacteria? Rocks?

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.

I know when a cat or crow has his eye on me, and the cat or crow knows when I have my eye on him.

Those verbs are trying to tell us something. Paying and receiving attention. Making and consuming attention.

Consuming? Yes. Humans and social mammals unquestionably consume attention, and it can be more nutritious and necessary than food.

Attention behaves like flowing charge. We can be positively or negatively attent-ionized. We can have an excess or deficiency of attent-ions, or we can be neutral after a discharge.



Comfortable nestmates are constantly bathed in a mutual field of attent-ions, like the plates of a capacitor or the primary and secondary of a transformer.

We can certainly tell when our attent-ions are being consumed by the receiver, but how? An electric source can tell when its electrons are being used, by comparing absorbed and reflected power. Can we sense absorption when we send out an attentive charge?


Artistic sidenote: Those bubbly attent-ions exuding from the mutual charge sphere around Happystar and Danbo are serendipitous, not intentional. They're just GIF artifacts, somehow arising from the random points of the grass. The grass itself is not changing from frame to frame in the original renders.


= = = = = END REPRINT.

** Later thought on the experiment: The picture of a man on one side doesn't prove that the subjects were thinking about "eye-force". They could have been empathetically imagining what the man wants to do. He should push the tube away from him to remove the instability. Pulling a tippy object toward you is not a safe or normal way of restoring equilibrium.

Labels: Grand Blueprint

  ¶ 12:04 AM