I too enjoyed the article, EEE, though I sometimes think that authors could make it a little more easy to digest. I guess they have to impress their editors, and we all of course need to pay the bills.
Attention is a funny and oftentimes elusive thing. Remember, back in junior high how a cute girl could endlessly distract you from whatever was on the blackboard? And today, when I watch Youtube on the big television, I'm just sucked (often happily and helplessly) into that rabbit hole of videos that the algorithm has selected for me. They really do know us better than we know ourselves. I think I read that 70% of the Youtube videos that we watch were selected in this way.
Sam Harris has said on many occasions that we don't know the next thing that we will think, it just emerges from somewhere into our consciousness, until the next thing pops up. It really is a mysterious process how one thought flows into another one, and another, and another. Okay, try this, think about Gilligan's Island, for a minute, where do your thoughts go?Why did they do that? It's not like you had a choice in the matter, or did you?
Articles like this make me think about how our species lived for 99.9 % of our existence. I've read that we've been around for perhaps 250,000 years. For the vast majority of it, we were probably trying to avoid being eaten while we searched for our next meal. Surely we had attention, but it was probably restricted to survival, and occasionally, to the ladies in the group. Where could we find water, edible food, and animals to eat? What we were forced to observe was the changing of the weather, and its implications, the terrain, and the seasons. We'd better keep an eye that that fire doesn't go out. It's an endlessly fascinating topic, until something else comes along and steals my attention, like the pressing question, " Ginger or Mary Ann"? And we all know it's Mary Ann, right? But suddenly, Reg is thinking, hmmm, Mrs. Howell, she'll survive Thurston, she'll inherit it all, and surely she can't go on forever, and then it's all for Reg!
Peter T.
