Monday, November 22, 2004

ATTN: a theory about attention

For some reason, order seems to be a vital ingredient in wellbeing. Everything being in the right place is a state that i would call
SATORI or enlightment.
Satori i think means you've climbed a mountain, and now you're on top of it, enjoying the view that you longed for. But at the same time reaching the top is reaching a state of inertia Where would you go from here?

I'm in a group that uses the THOUGHTSTORM technique to find answers to these and other questions. The question this time was: "why do we make life so difficult for ourselves?" and the corecept was : "I can't do otherwise". In order to live, i.e. contrary to staying inert, I the Ego, need to reach satori until i get there, and then i need to get on, away from satori.

I have a theory of an order beyond what i can see, or even feel. DAVID BOHM is one of the people who have worked out such a theory. I think of myself as a cell in an organism. I don't know what the use of living of this organism is. It is beyond my scope. But i do believe that there is a place, which i call my destiny, that is reserved for me - it is my rightfull place. When i was born, i was dropped somewhere near by or far from this destiny; i don't know. The salmon wouldn't know where the origin of the river is, but it starts to swim at some point in its life.

Life is about movement. The earth orbits around the sun, I orbit around my destiny. I call this movement attention. The thing is, my destiny is no absolute place, it is a relative place. Relative to other people. Therefore, in order to reach my destiny, i need to DIALOGUE with other people; with my neighbours. And as much as i need them to find my destiny, they need me to find theirs.

I live, therefore i move. Even when i think i don't move, i orbit around my destiny. My idea of not moving is an idea created by perspective - i look at my destiny, and i measure the distance between me and my destiny. If the distance doesn't change, i may believe that i'm not moving. But my movement is the orbit, the circle around my destiny. Attention is like gravity, other people are like other planets, or comets, or sometimes black holes. They change my orbit, and i change theirs.

I believe inside me there is a measuring device capable of measuring the distance between me and my destiny. This is what i call my intuition. It relates to other people, so in fact it is not really "inside" me, and it is also not "outside" me. My conscious mind can sometimes capture what my intuition measures. For instance, if the amount of synchronicity in my life increases, then apparently i move towards my destiny. If I feel that I need less effort to live my life, then it comes into my mind that i'm moving towards my destiny. It also works the other way around. If i try to do something and it costs me a lot of enery, if it won't go the way i would like it to go, then apparently i drift away from my destiny.

So what is attention? Attention is the movement, the energy, the language that people use to find their place in this organism. The place is relatively known, but not absolute. We're in the system / the organism / the order, so we cannot have a look on the system itself and at the same time be conscious of the fact that we are part of it. This i think is a property of the human brain that we cannot view two perspectives (part and whole) at the same time.

We can however feel that we in fact are the organism; this i call awareness.

- November 2004
(still puzzling...)

Saturday, November 20, 2004

ATTN: attention in science

I talked to Eric Postma, he's a professor in artificial intelligence at Maastricht University here in Holland. I have translated his email to the best of my knowledge. Here it is.


Dear Ronald,

Thank you for your message. I find your questions regarding attention very inspiring. I distinguish in your questions three categories:

(1) questions regarding the mechanism of attention
(2} questions regarding the interhuman and emotional aspects of attention
(3) questions regarding the "esoteric" aspects of attention

As you will understand i am definitely interested in questions of category (1). There is a great deal of knowledge about the mechanisms of attention, but (like i said) that doesn't mean that one knows what attention is. I think it is because questions of category (2) have not been investigated enough. Cognitive neuroscience have (until now) mostly aimed at the individual aspects of attention. One the one hand because of the [tijdgeest] (sign of the times ?; literally = time spirit) and on the other hand because of practical restrictions (it is more difficult to do attention experiments with multiple persons). So it won't surprise you that I consider the questions of category (2) scientifically extremely defying.

Remains the questions of category (3). These questions may (and must) be posed, but as yet there are no indications for a mysterious force non-describable from the current scientific framework. In other words, a scientist can not (yet) "handle" it. To philosophise about it can and must be done. Surely scientific progress is partly based upon "crazy" or "esoteric" ideas. You could make a comparison to the (previously) esoteric subject "awareness". Recently past away DNA investigator (and Nobel prize winner) Frances Crick undertook serious attempts to explain awareness in terms of (individual) brain processes. He failed doing so, but he did manage to place the subject on the research agenda. The central questions are "what is awareness" and "where is it located?" Like attention, awareness exists by the [gratie] (virtue? literally = grace) of "other people". The solution should in my opinion be searched for in questions of category (2).

I hope this gives you an image of my opinion regarding attention and the questions thereabout.

Best regards,
Eric Postma

PoD: the rock concert example



What i'm about to say is PoD from the past - it's what i've come up with so far. I hope with this thread to interact, or "seduce people". I believe in dialogue - multiple people creating what neither one could on her/his own.

Now, for the concept of PoD, it is streaming. This means you don't pay in advance, nor do you get a refund. You can never borrow this type of "money", nor can you have it in your pocket; all of this because it is streaming.

I'll try to visualize the concept of streaming. The way I see it, you negotiate about the price in everlasting dialogue, i.e. you negotiate about the price each and every millisecond. Also, each time the price has been settled, you make this one transaction. Mind you, "one" indicates there's a beginning and an end to it, but really the duration of both negotiation and delivery is a split-second thing. Under a microscope you would probably see that negotiation takes place during delivery, because the concept of time and place would no longer hold under such circumstances. After the split-second the whole process starts again. Ofcourse this is not what you would see on a human-conscious level. On a conscious level, you would see that the stream goes as long as the both of you want it to go; it stops as soon as either one closes the channel.

To further visualize: think of attention as the "money". Where do you keep your attention if you don't spend it? Where will you borrow attention if you are short of it? What happens to your attention stream when you listen to someone talking to you and all of a sudden something else "draws" your attention? At first, it may look like one stream of attention, directed to the person and later on to this new object. But when this person calls your name, you will realize that you are still with this person. Ergo, suddenly there are two streams.

Please let me know if this makes any sense. I find it hard to express the very essence of it - yes the same with attention. Imagine a horizontal timeline, from past to present to future. The Tao moment of "now" is not on this timeline, it's a sideway (left and/or right turn) from the present. PoD is the transaction on this vertical dimension.

Best regards,
Ron

Friday, November 19, 2004

TDC: yesterday's meeting

The Dutch Connection is a club with Ecademy. Eleven people came to Amsterdam to discuss the status with respect to innovation here in the Netherlands.

I had a wonderful night last night. A big compliment for the host, Colby, for asking each individual "why are you here?" and not settle until the person would fully agree with his or her own answer. In my case, I didn't really know what brought me to Amsterdam, it's quite a distance: 145 km from Borne at the other end of the A1 highway. I just felt I needed to go there.

Anyway, what I really liked about the people was their attitude. Frequently I meet people who want to be right. They want other people to explicitly confirm that they are right. Only then they are able to listen.

In this gathering however, the attitude was one of opportunity scouting, rather than judgement. I believe there was a common sense among this group of unique individuals. The credo from Indonesia "unity in diversity" holds here. Each person brought something to the team that was complementary to what the others would bring.

"Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

PoD : about infrastructure

I came up with attention as a product, because the infrastructure for attention is already there. Once I found this solution to what seemed to be a problem, it occurred to me that it reveals possibilities beyond the original scope. I think the Internet could also be an adequate infrastructure. What is needed though is some kind of algerithm, heuristic or compression, because otherwise I believe a huge amount of data will need to stream from the mobile device or person through the infrastructure and vice versa.

One example: in a theatre having 500 seats, each spectator is a source of a PoD stream. Also, the owner of the theatre, maybe the people in the bank, and definitely the performers are sources of PoD streams as well. Now let's suppose I'm one of the spectators. In the ultimate situation, my sense of how I like or dislike the performance decides upon the value that i wish to pay for. So there's one stream of price/performance ratio going from me to the performers - they will stop the performance immediately if my price offer does not meet their price demand. But there are 500 people in the audience, so they might want to pay me to shut up - in other words to compensate for the price difference - because they would like the performance to continue. And since my evalutation is on a per second basis, this means huge amount of calculations in quite an interactive mode. All these data need to be combined somewhere, somehow. I hope you see the point of it.

Wednesday, November 17, 2004

PoD: a quantum theory of Economics

My long term goal is to initiate the creation of a new form of economic transaction, which i called Pay on Demand (hereafter : PoD). A few years ago, I talked to the manager of a large bank here in Holland, who was responsible for the new business development. He thought the idea was great, but in his opinion no single company could provide the infrastructure required to implement PoD.

I never gave up though, and in further exploring the PoD concept, i developed this idea of a first implementation of PoD, which is attention as a product. The quest for what attention really is - there's another thread here at the club where you can join in. In the thread presented here, I would like to invite you all in on the further exploration of PoD concepts. I hope that the findinds in this thread will lead to a better understanding of attention and vice versa.

The very essence of PoD lies in the granularity of transactions going towards infinity. PoD is not based upon trading in terms of give and receive atomic entities. PoD is based upon streams of zero-second transactions that in accumulated masses of zillions per second look like a traditional (=batchwise) transaction. In this way, PoD is the analogue (or rather: dialogue) way of doing business.

Monday, November 15, 2004

ATTN: Bart

I would like to share yesterday's experience I had with Bart.

Bart is the youngest son of my sister. He is about 20 years of age. When he was born, something happened to him. Shortage of oxygen, something like that. Anyway, there is a deep bond between the two of us. My sister thinks that our characters are much the same, and so do I. This bond is what I wanted to talk about, for i feel that it has something to do with attention, the subject of this thread.

Yesterday I met Bart. He's always glad to see me and so am I. Everytime we meet, he will tell me his latest experience over and over again. I sat next to him. Our conversation went like this

Hey Ronald
-- Bart has a big smile on his face
Yeah what's up?
-- I look at him. There's something big he wants to share with me. I bend forward, don't wanna miss a thing.
I was at a party earlier today. And you know what? My friend Edwin was there too !!!.
-- And then he shows me this big smile
-- I can feel this fantastic experience he had when he saw his friend Edwin.

I used to be listening to what he had to say, trying to understand his words. Who is Edwin? Edwin is my friend. Do I know Edwin? By that time Bart would smile and say nothing. And then I would realise it's impossible for him to answer this question - he really wouldn't know. But yesterday was different.

That's great news Bart!
-- I can feel his great joy. We both smile in happiness.

Then I get distracted. Someone else says something to me. I reply. Then i get back to Bart. And he repeats.

You know what? Edwin was there too !
-- Again this big smile, his face full of joy

Somehow i think i miss the point. Why does he repeat this?
I notice how he is fully aware that (part of) my attention is away from him and back inside myself.
Bart waits patiently until my attention is back with him.

-- and again he repeats
Hey Ronald, my friend Edwin was there too, you know!

Now i'm really touched. Is this possible? Could there be another world than the world of language, of understanding words? A world in which i'm the disabled, the foreigner? A world in which Bart is the native speaker? Is this the world of attention?


This feeling is getting to me. It's like i'm standing on the border of two worlds, one on the inside and one on the outside. This is the first time I realize in depth howmuch the culture around me has influenced my thougths, my very being. Now that i write this, i feel a deep emotion coming out from the inside. Yes, there is another world. I begin to see.

Ron

Sunday, November 14, 2004

ATTN: The Authentic Self by Andrew Cohen WIE Magazine

The Authentic Self that Andrew Cohen talks about is what i mean by attention. I was deeply touched by the transcript.

Best regards,
Ron

ATTN: Can it be done?

If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint,'
then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.

- Vincent Van Gogh


Martin Buber is one of the people who has shown it is possible to describe the impossible. I believe he's a painter with words.

What i would like to do is connect what we know to what we do. Krishnamurti said some beautiful things like "the mind will make you believe that love and action are two separated things, but really they cannot be separated". I think there are many ways in which attention as a product could indeed "heal" people. My purpose is less stretching than to heal people.

In Gestalt the proverb goes "the whole is earlier and more than the sum of parts". I think the same goes for attention. I don't know what is good for each individual. But i feel that we, the rich people in the world, the ones with the internet and all, have earned our material wealth at the cost of the immaterial attention. I think attention is a political issue; i think the people should put it on the agenda so the politicians can discuss the issue. Note how they cannot discuss a nonexistent issue. I think political work does not include making attention an issue. That is something we, the people, should do. It is only when attention has become a political issue, politicians can do their work.

The issue, as far as i can see it, is this: that the "short of attention" diseases that strike our western world may be revealed, out of their taboos, much the same way as the hunger and polluted water diseases in some african countries are revealed on television. I say we show this disease on television.

But first I would find out what attention is. In the sense of project management, one cannot come up with a problem without a proper solution attached. In creative thinking, a solution is another word for redefining the problem. My quest is about redefinition - about what attention really is.

Best regards,
Ron

Saturday, November 13, 2004

ATTN: What is attention?

The question is "what is attention?" . i put down to words some examples of what i mean by attention. but since i feel i do not have found the very heart of it, i could not give you a clear definition - hence my question of what attention is.

In Western psychology, attention means selective perception. Focus, if you will, all the way from the sensory input to cortex elaboration, and all stages in between (filtering etc). This is not - or rather, only part of - what i mean by attention.

If i were to describe attention, it would be the activity that occurs inside me, in a place i call my intuition. This place is part of me and at the same time is not a part of me. The way i see it, my intuition is a meeting point where i meet other people. Call it empathy, telepathy or whatever. I can not feel my intuition, but i can feel the activity going on in there. The activity, which i call attention, is a feeling that is sometimes inside my head: in the back of my head when i am sucked into the past, into memories and thoughts; or in my forehead when i focus. Sometimes it is all around me, inside and outside, like when i walk in a forest and listen to the conversation of the birds; it's a kind of awareness. And when i meet other people, i can feel how my attention sometimes gets diffuse, less dense, mingling with the other person's attention.

If you ask me why i chase for a definition, i do not know. But i feel there is an instrument inside my body that can pass the borders of time and space, like in a 5th dimension. My brain cannot understand - at least one of the reasons is that it is limited by the dimensions that Kant talked about. Also, brain functions in a serial way - i cannot understand with my brain that past, present and future are here at the same time, simply because it cannot look in multiple directions concurrently. With attention, i can feel all directions of space and time. Yet i cannot do something simple like predicting the future, or create any future that i want. It is not because these things are not there (have a look at quantum theory, or the book The Field by Lynn McTaggart, for some examples) but because my intuition is still blocked, filtered if you will, by a lot of beliefs that i still carry around. My ultimate goal is to clean up all resistance and get to a state of superconductance. I think attention is a basic food for each person, and in essence it is also what people are made of.

I don't know if this helps or makes things more difficult. Anyway, in his book "Attention and presence" Gerard Bodifée wrote - and i translate from Flemish so beware :-)
"God is a creator, not by being at the start of all, but by being their destiny. At the start there is only an amorph, unknowable emptiness. Destiny is a completion; it is the fullness of attention and of an existence without imperfectnesses. In the attention paying human being this destiny makes itself knowable and gives even more direction to the continuing creation. Every conscious realisation eliminates something from the randomness that remains in the still immature cosmos".

Best regards,
Ron

Thursday, November 11, 2004

ATTN: attention as punishment in court

Attention could be used in court. Let us say we have a victim (V) of a crime committed by a criminal (C). Picture this: the situation is that the Criminal has done something wrong to the Victim. Now the Victim is hurt and (s)he wants revenge. Criminal should be punished. But what should the punishment be? We'll examine an extreme case, where the Criminal has killed the Victim's child.

What if the judge condemns Criminal to pay attention to Victim? What if he orders Victim to decide upon the time when the punishment is fullfilled? In a verdict like this, the Victim is the director of the Criminal's punishment. It appears that the roles of Criminal and Victim are reverted.

The situation arises where the Victim can not be satisfied; even the death of the Criminal will not bring back Victim's child. In an effort to avoid the experience of deep loss, Victim will refuse the Criminal's attention and call for revenge. In his/her eyes, the Criminal is no longer a human being; there is only the desire to share the pain: "I want you to feel what I feel". But then a strange thing happens. Criminal will ask the judge to be relieved of his punishment because (s)he can not deliver; Victim refuses to accept the attention and therefore the Criminal should no longer be bound to the punishment.

At first, this imaginary situation may look like a Kafka scene. In family constellations however, the rightful place of the facilitator is next to the Criminal, because the Criminal is often the weakest person in the system. I once heard a story about a tribe. If one of the tribe members became ill, the tribe would say "not this person is ill, but the whole tribe is ill and it becomes visible through this one person". Reality is often the exact opposite of what morale wants us to believe.

Back to the situation. The punishment will work in such a way that Victim needs to accept Criminal's attention. If not, Criminal can not deliver and will ask the judge to be set free. Victim and Criminal are tied up to one another; not only does the act of the Criminal have great consequences in the Victim's life, it is also up to Victim to call it even. The influence on each other's life shows a deep bond between the two. Victim can only accept Criminal's attention if (s)he is able to see Criminal as a human being. It is only then that Victim can step out of this deadly embrace and start the harsh task of facing the loss of his/her child. The Criminal's attention, at that point, is desperately needed. When time has come, Victim will realize that enough attention has been paid, and Criminal is set free to accept his/her own part of the karma. I would think that by that time, Victim should be able to help the Criminal likewise.

Mind you, this resembles the situation in South Africa when apartheid was no more and Mandela had to prevent civil war. I trust you all know what happened back then.

Best regards,
Ron

Wednesday, November 10, 2004

ATTN: What is attention?

I dedicate this year (and probably most of next year) to the question of what attention is. I'm working on a white paper but i feel i haven't gotten into the very core of it. I believe that attention is the "power of mankind". With that i mean that when it comes down to the question "to act or not to act", the need for attention is what essentially makes all the difference. It occurred to me that the only way to find out about attention is to use attention itself. I think that is what the ancient buddhists meant by their proverb "attention is attention".

So I would like you to share your thoughts and experiences on the subject of attention.


Example: one proverb says "emotions, at the very core, always deal with the matter of life and death". You may have noticed that negative emotions (towards death) can take up a lot of attention. Some people i've met are capable of feeling attention flooding to the back of their head, where the amygdala is seated. (Amygdala is the center of freeze, fight or flight). This attention drain cannot continue endlessly. So the attention balance is headed towards bancrupcy. You need to increase either your own attention or get it from elsewhere. It's like an economy, but this time attention plays the money part. So how to increase solvability on your attention balance? How to stay alive?

If you want to add attention from others, there are two way that i know of. You either blame someone else, or you share your emotions with them. When you blame someone else, it is like attracting high risk venture capital. You won't go bancrupt but it wont do your solvability (aka self-esteem) any good.

On the other hand: sharing your emotions calls for an additional personal investment. Note that you already ran low on attention so this is not an easy decision to make. The risk is that the other person responds different from what you were hoping / expecting for. Then you are really in trouble. You may even need to slow down (burn-out: living on a minimum of attention). Now, if all goes well, the other person responds / connects / understands / has compassion. Then, some kind of accelerator is working. While the both of you feel that you hardly invest any attention, the outcome is that both have more attention than before. This is what creation is all about.

I hope my example is not too confusing - like i said i still haven't found the very core of attention. I hope some of you will join me on my quest, and share with me / us from what you've learned in life.

Thank you for your attention.
Best regards, Ron.

ATTN: What is attention?

As you may have read in my profile, i dedicate this year (and probably most of next year) to the question of what attention is. I'm working on a white paper but i feel i haven't gotten into the very core of it. I believe that attention is the "power of mankind". With that i mean that when it comes down to the question "to act or not to act", the need for attention is what essentially makes all the difference. It occurred to me that the only way to find out about attention is to use attention itself. I think that is what the ancient buddhists meant by their proverb "attention is attention".

So I would like you to share your thoughts and experiences on the subject of attention.


Example: one proverb says "emotions, at the very core, always deal with the matter of life and death". You may have noticed that negative emotions (towards death) can take up a lot of attention. Some people i've met are capable of feeling attention flooding to the back of their head, where the amygdala is seated. (Amygdala is the center of freeze, fight or flight). This attention drain cannot continue endlessly. So the attention balance is headed towards bancrupcy. You need to increase either your own attention or get it from elsewhere. It's like an economy, but this time attention plays the money part. So how to increase solvability on your attention balance? How to stay alive?

If you want to add attention from others, there are two way that i know of. You either blame someone else, or you share your emotions with them. When you blame someone else, it is like attracting high risk venture capital. You won't go bancrupt but it wont do your solvability (aka self-esteem) any good.

On the other hand: sharing your emotions calls for an additional personal investment. Note that you already ran low on attention so this is not an easy decision to make. The risk is that the other person responds different from what you were hoping / expecting for. Then you are really in trouble. You may even need to slow down (burn-out: living on a minimum of attention). Now, if all goes well, the other person responds / connects / understands / has compassion. Then, some kind of accelerator is working. While the both of you feel that you hardly invest any attention, the outcome is that both have more attention than before. This is what creation is all about.

I hope my example is not too confusing - like i said i still haven't found the very core of attention. I hope some of you will join me on my quest, and share with me / us from what you've learned in life.

Thank you for your attention.
Best regards, Ron.

Sunday, November 07, 2004

PG: Simplicity leads to fuzzy logic

The quest for simplicity reminds me of the law of two, aka the law of apparently opposites. This law states that every movement has its opposite movement. If one is foreground, then the other is background.

A friend once told me his view, that a team could never exceed twelve persons. What about a company having 100,000 employees? Let's suppose complexity arises from mergers (companies, production chains etc). The opposite movement would then be movement from complexity to simplicity, and from bigger (mergers) to smaller (chunks). These movements are foreground movement, one can observe how reorganizations are in effect operations to simplify the scope of a CEO to this twelve person border.

The background movement however is that by the law of two, simplicity inevitably calls for complexity. Meaning that these big chunks are living organisms that interact. Management should therefore acknowledge the movement from a mechanical view (time-related thinking, cause-and-effect models) to a more organic approach (space-related thinking, quantum-type models).

Fuzzy logic has to do with relativity (more less / better worse). It is used in situations when by the time you know the exact outcome its too late to intervent, because meanwhile things have changed again. Managers that want to know what's inside the black box belong to a different world. A shift is needed.