Mastery Part 3
The Battle for your Attention
No-one who really has knowledge fails to practice it. Knowledge without practice should be interpreted as lack of knowledge. — Wang Yangming
Read Part One and Two here:
In my last post I asked the question of why it is that we increasingly prefer virtual simulacra of creative activities to the real thing, and noted that, while one reason is surely that the non-virtual versions require more effort, more intentionality, and more connection with others — all tricky conditions to create in our busy lives — these reasons are downstream of a more profound and less obvious epistemological issue:
Why are we taking on this passive role with regard to our creative interactions with the world? It is a complex question. I think one reason is that the default assumptions about the world that Enlightenment Rationalism has given us — for instance that our minds don’t go beyond our heads, that perception is merely representations by the mind on our interior ‘screen’, that our bodies are just vessels for our minds, which are non-spatial — all combine to weave a matrix around us which reinforces this passivity.
It was while reading Matthew Crawford’s book The World Beyond Your Head, that I saw a full articulation of this diagnosis.
In an interlude that he calls ‘A Brief History of Freedom’, Crawford traces the birth of a new account of how we apprehend the world, beginning in the Eighteenth century with Immanuel Kant, John Locke, and the birth of Liberalism.
The Kantian epistemological framework posits a disembodied will that floats “free of all natural necessities”, where to be rational is not “to be situated in the world”. To become an autonomous self one must be
“free to satisfy one’s preferences. Preferences themselves are beyond rational scrutiny; they express the authentic core of a self whose freedom is realized when there are no encumbrances to its preference-satisfying behavior”.
The upshot of this Kantian “fantasy of autonomy” is that we paradoxically lose agency, and become pliable to the architects of choice, succumbing to a fragility that can’t “tolerate conflict and frustration”. Thus we become vulnerable to those who manufacture a simulacra of reality to comfort us and “save us from a direct confrontation with the world”.
John Locke develops the political and epistemological connotations of this freedom from authority. Crawford summarises:
We are enjoined to be free from authority — both the kind that is nakedly coercive and the kind that operates through claims to knowledge. If we are to get free of the latter, we cannot rely on the testimony of others.
The positive idea that emerges, by subtraction, is that freedom amounts to radical self-responsibility. This is both a political principle and an epistemic one.
We achieve this, ultimately, by relocating the standards for truth from outside to inside ourselves. Reality is not self-revealing; we can know it only by constructing representations of it.
Attention is thus demoted. Attention is the faculty through which we encounter the world directly. If such an encounter isn’t possible, then attention has no official role to play.
As Crawford says, ‘Quite simply, the experience of attending to something isn’t easily made sense of within the Enlightenment picture. To see our way through our current predicament, we need a good account of how attention works.’
This question was what I set myself to work on. How to construct a good model of how attention actually works? I have drawn on the sketch Crawford lays out as well as writers like Chesterton and Tolkien (themselves drawing on the Thomistic tradition) to create an extended analogy that might help us towards a better understanding of how attention works.
So, my summary of Crawford’s account goes something like: the modern understanding of attention is a ‘thin’ model: humans have complete freedom and autonomy to attend to whatever they desire, and all attention is of the same type. A more robust ‘thick’ model would be: not all attention is the same, and our ability to direct our attention in different ways is tied up with the practices and habits that we cultivate, which includes the types of tools or technology by which our attention is mediated to and from the world beyond our heads.
I then developed a metaphor based on flowing water to understand the different ways of attending to things. In this metaphor, water stands for some of the key qualities of attention, including its responsiveness to the vessels or channels it is held in or travels along, as well as its ability to be in different states; calm and limpid, flowing and powerful, or chaotic and dynamic. The point is that, like water, attention is radically shaped by its container, and thus its situatedness is a key aspect of its quality. There is no such thing as an autonomous self which floats free of the world and the context of its embodiment.
In each of the three parts of this extended metaphor, I want you to imagine attention as water bubbling up from a spring, and what is done with the water from that point as the way we cultivate attention in healthy ways, or not cultivate it, and leave it to the caprices of the attention farmers to exploit.
1. Pools
By spending appropriate effort, time and energy, we can catch the water in pools. We dig out deep impressions, or fashion vessels to do this. That is, by using effort and discipline in the direction of depth, we catch water; it pools and becomes calm and clear, enabling it to reflect the sky.
The kind of effort I have in mind here is really any effort of the intellect. By this I’m not implying that you have to be smart to direct your attention in this way, but you do have to be able to have the discipline to shut out distractions and focus on something. This requires an effort of the mind to pay sustained attention to something, usually a book or some reading, perhaps prayer or contemplation too. Lots of Cal Newport’s work is about developing this kind of attention — what he calls ‘cultivating a deep life’. Newport thinks we can use this kind of attention to cultivate deep thinking and reflection on the best way for us to live: what he calls ‘lifestyle-centric planning’, and it can also be the basis of self-reflection and insight into your own character and motivations.
Tools for pools
So how do we practically go about creating the opportunities for depth that enable what I will call ‘contemplative attention’ — pools in our metaphor?
Obviously, this type of attention is the least open to quick, easy hacks. The whole point of intellectual effort is that it requires discipline and effort. But there are some basics that anyone who even wants a bit more of this should be doing, which include reading books, writing, and deep thinking, something I will talk about in a future post.
2. Streams
Here, instead of deep but bounded impressions designed to contain the water and allow it to become calm and thus reflect the sky, there is the necessity to use the energy and power of flowing water for practical tasks, to build or create things. This time the water must be channelled along streambeds or canals to harness its energy and flow. With this, the effort doesn’t go into making deep vertical impressions, because depth and clarity are not the primary goals. Instead, horizontal channels are created, because the primary goal is creative power, and for that you need energy.
Embodied Cognition is a growing research program in cognitive science that emphasizes the formative role the environment plays in the development of cognitive processes. Within this theoretical framework, we can understand the kind of attention I’m talking about here as a skilled use of ‘affordances’ in the environment — cognitive ‘hooks’ by which a complex interplay between self and world is enacted.
“The way in which we are embodied not only constrains the way we can interact in the world, but our particular form of embodiment also partly determines the way the world appears to us.” IEP - embodied cognition
Think about the way a blacksmith uses his tools. His attention is not contained in a point of space inside his head, it stretches out through the end of the hammer, enabling him to feel the metal through the hammer, to know when and how hard and in what way to strike it.
We would say that when the blacksmith, or any craftsman, is engaged in skilled work, they are operating in a ‘flow’ state. In his 1990 book Flow – The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihaly Cziksentmihalyi describes this:
Contrary to what we usually believe, moments like these, the best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times—although such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen.
And here is where we contrast a true flow state (the stream in our analogy) with a false flow state (the final water metaphor - the fountain).
3. Fountains
As should be fairly clear from the analogy, the last model is intended to show how the quality of our experience can be negatively affected by the dissipation of our attention, rather than by its constructive use.
As Csikszentmihalyi says:
Because attention determines what will or will not appear in consciousness, and because it is also required to make any other mental events—such as remembering, thinking, feeling, and making decisions—happen there, it is useful to think of it as psychic energy. Attention is like energy in that without it no work can be done, and in doing work it is dissipated. We create ourselves by how we invest this energy. Memories, thoughts, and feelings are all shaped by how we use it. And it is an energy under our control, to do with as we please; hence, attention is our most important tool in the task of improving the quality of experience.
In a fountain, water comes up and gets distributed across a wide shallow area, in a turbulent and chaotic fashion. The energy of the water is dissipated as it is pushed up into the air, and it falls down and swirls away. Although it is aesthetically pleasing, ultimately the qualities of the water are only harnessed in shallow ways, providing a surface kind of amusement, which is not durable.
This is the way I think about attention which is unfocused, diverted into smartphone-addiction, or obsessive use of social media or entertainment media. No work has been done in the real world to create or look for affordances and practice the kinds of skills that lead to optimal experiences. Instead, the consumer is happy to passively allow a stream of video or images to pass across their consciousness, ultimately unsatisfying, but oddly addictive. This is the false flow state.
In part four, we’ll examine in a bit more detail the idea of the flow state.