This is a response-post to Mind Organization Insight on Iteration. David writes about the mental mechanism commonly called “attention” or ” focus” or “thinking about”. This is a subject I care a lot about, as it seems to be the keystone of human intelligence. This post is very much a direct response to the other, and will not be diving into my theories except to answer David’s musings. Nevertheless, I find this sort of thing fascinating enough that I thought I’d share it here, rather than simply leave an uber-comment on Iteration.

Before going into specifics, I’d like to mention that while I think attention is the keystone of the mind, I do not think it’s worth spending a majority of time thinking about. Monica Anderson has made the point before that while the human mind is both intuitive and logical, the logical portion is a tiny sliver sitting on an enormous intuitive foundation. I can make a similar claim (and perhaps Monica has made such a claim before, I don’t know) that while the mind has components that could be classified as “deliberate” or “automatic”, the automatic portions vastly outweigh the deliberate ones. (Note: I’m a determinist. “Deliberate” should not be read as non-mechanistic.) Both of these statements emphasize something I like to call the Introspective Fallacy, which is the error where we feel as though we know how our minds work because we’re conscious. (Dennet has a wonderful TED talk into to this fallacy.) And from our conscious perspective it’s damn near all deliberate and logical (more on this later). So, even though this is important stuff, I think that understanding vision, pattern recognition, muscle memory, and generative systems (imagination) overall need more… attention.

But really, what I think we need are big-pictures of the mind. And attention is an easy place to start, as it’s subjectively prominent.

Read More »