Aside on mindfulness
which may contradict other things i've been saying. you know.
In this present iteration of revival & eclipse, Psychology’s failure to establish itself except as cult & lore, does allow for the momentary prevalence of topics. “Attention” is, so to speak, trending. And, i am glad to note, it is sometimes being bandied about in conjunction with what is now being called “diffuse(d) thinking” (i learned as “ditension”).
“Mindfulness” went from being a technical term in American Buddhism to a self-help buzzword, almost without receiving the benefit of definition along the way. (I suppose that facilitates being paid to show someone else what it means.) As it was used, however, it encompasses everything from attention to ditention; everything, in short, except thinking-in-words.
I believe it was a contribution of Heidegger’s, that thinking with an aim in mind, creates its specific flavor of focus (although anyone who has searched for an object believing it to be one color when it’s actually another color, will have learned as much.) This goes back, doubtless, to humanity’s days of hunting/gathering; & we still do it, if only to select from a menu or shelf of interchangeables.
A word of Patañjali’s, translated “discriminative discernment”, viveka, preoccupied me for ages, as it was posited with powers far in excess of the learning curve. In context, i think, it means that the more you meditate, the less resistance you will have to the incidence of insights; therefore, extrapolating, there is a level (or grade of meditation-progress) that is solid insight.
On the other hand, if you consider that ego-chatter is noise that covers our basic animal-awareness (closer to ditention than attention, except for recognizable dangers/temptations/typical turnings) with less-or-more distraction from what’s immediately around us, you can wipe it clean--for a moment or several moments--& arrive at something similar, just not (maybe) in a form that you can carry away souvenirs of.
I have not entirely divested myself of Jungian Typology (Myers-Briggs variety), such that i can easily imagine (& sporadically observe) attentiveness functioning differently, the more the other person is different from me. That is to say, perceptions which to me are just texture, might be obviously articulated to a person of the “sensing” variety, just as “intuitions” for me are so various i could spend an hour (& have, to my interlocutors’ dismay) unfolding the nuances of. (Equally--which i needn’t delve into, right this moment: the noticing experienced by myself at age five, is not the same noticing as by myself at sixty-eight. Or for that matter, five o’clock this morning vs 12:30 PM.)
It’s not enough just to look. Even, to look without forming an opinion.
Oh, it might be, if your object is to escape from opining. Opining, i think, the part of “intelligence” that a LLM may be pretty good at simulating. It won’t have access to the phenomena--but then, the ego-driven perceiver doesn’t, either.
“Ego” requiring, about now, more definition than either its Freudian origin or its pop-cultural prevalence (where it overlaps with “selfishness” to a degree distressing to those of us who value having useable words), i will say it has these properties: it names a set of gestures (belonging to the body) as “mine”, & it hides a set of compulsions (including preferences, memory, & triggers) under the rubric of “unquestionable assumptions”. (Some of them more diggable than others!)
Not one of these things but is sometimes labelled “consciousness”.