Episode 276: Attention Please

[00:00:00] Very bad wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist Dave Pizarro,

[00:00:05] having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics.

[00:00:09] Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say,

[00:00:13] and knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:00:17] We're all college. There's no such thing as college New Year. I know you hate to talk about politics, but we need to discuss the removal of the head of a renowned university for political reasons, for reasons that have nothing to do with the mission of higher education.

[00:01:40] The missionary of higher education.

[00:01:43] So tell me, are you on board of the cooking shows making kung-pao cow. So that channel is on YouTube and I looked it up. It's not the only thing I looked up, but I looked that up. One of the things you looked up.

[00:03:01] One of the things you looked up.

[00:03:02] One of the things you looked up.

[00:03:03] One of the things for research.

[00:03:04] When we research topics for the show, we don't fuck around. University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, you know, like there, that's just weird right there, you know, if you're going to be the chancellor of that university. So like you put all of that in a bowl and you got yourself a, you got yourself a stew going. But like seriously, the, the statement that they released, announcing that he was fired,

[00:05:25] person had this secret life doing this, although apparently they use their names, at least for the cooking show, but maybe not, but only fans porn site.

[00:05:29] I don't know how it worked.

[00:05:30] Yes.

[00:05:31] One of the things that I was reading referred to it as sort of an open secret, or like

[00:05:36] hidden in plain sight, where they clearly weren't doing a lot to hide it.

[00:05:40] And they only started the YouTube cooking channel a few weeks ago.

[00:05:44] Maybe that's what alerted people to it. think from the perspective of, I don't know, you know, students complaining, I could see why somebody would might say like it creeps me out that my well, he's, but he wasn't teaching, right? Like he was just being a, I guess he's going to a faculty job, but yeah, I don't know. Would you think automatically that somebody would get fired if they found out that like

[00:07:01] there's no policy he's violating?

[00:07:03] Yeah, I think you're right. I do question his judgment because you got to know that people are not going to be happy

[00:08:21] about this.

[00:08:22] And so either you're just going to commit to I feel like that's almost part of the job. And maybe that's, you know, the final issue with this.

[00:09:40] You know what he should have had?

[00:09:41] He should have just done a podcast on porn because no one would ever do anything.

[00:09:46] That's how we. All right. When we come back, we're going to lead with support us in more tangible ways because I have some announcements to make about Patreon. If you join us at the $1 and up per episode, $2 a month, you get ad-free episodes plus

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[00:16:06] plays, built in his psychology and it turns out maybe in his metaphysics as well, because of its connection to the will.

[00:16:08] I think he views attention, the sort of deployment of our senses perception as sort of like

[00:16:16] a critical source of shaping behavior and just shaping psychology in general.

[00:16:22] And I do want to get to talking about attention, and especially focused or selective attention. And so it's very interesting to see it broken down with a lot of precision. And in that same William James Way,

[00:17:40] he's gonna quote these 19th century psychologists

[00:17:45] at great length, and memory, sort of all in one kind of unit as sort of the building blocks of cognition, because really nothing gets off the ground without attention. And reading this, I was like, dude, like a lot of the things that James says here,

[00:19:03] I just thought were insights that came way later. Like it's, everyone knows what attention is. I love that. It's the taking possession by the mind in clear and vivid form of one out of what seems

[00:20:21] several simultaneously possible objects or trains of says. Without selective interest, he says experiences and utter chaos. What do you think about that? I guess it's true in one sense, right? It's interesting. You mentioned Buddhism, and one of the things

[00:21:40] I want to talk to you about is what, as you said,

[00:21:43] what the goal of some of those meditative practices He thought that behavior naturally followed from a thought. So if you think walk to James, that's your brain is gonna tell your body to walk. So it's not that you have to think walk and then do something else. It's that when you think walk, you would normally walk if you weren't inhibiting. So there is a direct connection from just thinking the thought to behavior.

[00:23:01] And so for James, being able to choose or focus

[00:23:05] on a particular thought doesn't just shape your mental life. can try to use some kind of metacognition to get themselves to stay focused on the thing that is the stimulus that is definitely not the most attractive. Totally. And yeah, it reminds me of the dogs and up. Yeah. And that's what he says, such an empiricist writer as Mr. Spencer regards the creature as absolutely passive clay upon which experience rains down. The clay will be impressed more deeply, most deeply where the drops fall thickest and so the final shape of the mind is molded. Given time enough, all sentient things

[00:25:40] ought at this rate to end by assuming

[00:25:42] an identical mental constitution for experience,

[00:25:45] the soul-shaper is a constant fact I think the clear belief is that two organisms with the exact same experiences ought to have the exact same psychology, the exact same behavior. And yeah, James is both saying with his Vatican example, he's both saying there are things that humans attend to that dogs wouldn't. So there's something actively going on in a human mind that's different.

[00:27:02] And he's saying, the other thing's what I was trying to get at. And later on, when he talks about, he's famous for his discussion of the stream of thought. He does say, if something explicit, I believe it's in this chapter where he says, even just holding a thought in your attention for an extra second can like shape the rest of your life.

[00:28:20] Right.

[00:28:22] He really does, like experience just isn't enough to account.

[00:28:26] It's interesting, because I can't say it, his student, Titchner, who studied with him in Germany, came to Cornell and basically brought experimental psychology to the US. Fucking Germans. And we have a big, sexy painting of Titchner in the middle of our department. It's not quite the

[00:29:40] only fans level sexiness.

[00:30:45] because some of the things that he says in this section is it just seems to depend on what you call one thing or two things. And so when you chunk things together, when you lump them together,

[00:30:52] they become one thing that you're attending to, like a grouping of three marbles. You can call that

[00:30:57] one grouping. No, but what about like doing three marbles? What about doing like a multiplication

[00:31:02] problem and writing poetry at the same time or something like that? That's also what he talks and passed and when you do that, and I was one of these people, I counted the right number of times the basketball was passed and then they gave it to me, I was like, yeah, I'm smart. And then they said, but did you see the gorilla? And then you go back and then you realize that during all of that, a gorilla comes out, beats its chest like a man in a gorilla,

[00:32:23] like 2001 style gorilla, beats his chest and like, these kinds of things that we can do. Psychology and magicians. And yeah. And magicians, that's right. So that's called Inattentional Blindness, that guerrilla experiment. And it's funny to bring it up because I was just today reading a thread by Eric Holle, the guy who had the dream theory we talked about. He has a sub stack, very sharp guy.

[00:33:41] And he was talking about how now with the guerrilla experiment,

[00:33:45] 60% of people say they see the guerrilla,

[00:33:47] whereas like in the original ones, screen that a certain generation and maybe even us, you know, just because we've been inundated with screens so much way more because this was like 15 years ago than back then, that we are better at that specific kind of thing. You know, there's probably other ways to more easily demonstrate change blindness and stuff

[00:35:02] like that now than there used to be. and voluntary attention, one being just simply the one that requires effort. I mean, this is a distinction we use to this day. Some things just pop out at you, and some things you have to really pay attention to. There are certain things that will happen in the environment which will capture your attention, and that's in a passive sense. We're just prepared for that.

[00:36:21] And some things that really require direct engagement. of voluntary as you being, as you counting, the effortless passive is all of a sudden you're thinking about the guy at University of Wisconsin. Should you start an early fans? Like, another one to do a cooking show. Yeah, another.

[00:37:41] And then he has this derived versus immediate cool. Yeah. Exactly, yeah, totally.

[00:39:02] And you know, in that section, when he's going over all of those

[00:39:05] vuent experiments and other experiments on attention, it's nothing you would be intrinsically interested in doing, obviously. It's just been given to you as a goal, and so you're dedicating your attentional resources. So is this another claim as to how much of experience is constructed? Because especially if you we're more excited by immediate stimuli because we have no background to try to sort it all out, categorize it, figure out what we are interested in and what we're not, what we should put in this box of not really focusing on and what we should actually focus on.

[00:41:42] As we grow older though, we become more derived. is to reclaim that like childlike just appreciation of the things in themselves, just not what they tell you about something else or what you're gonna do later or what you need to do, but just the marvel of the things in and of themselves. And it's true that on the one hand,

[00:43:01] the teacher must overcome this,

[00:43:03] but on the other hand,

[00:43:04] that we should also at the exclusion of some of the most pressing stimuli, including severe pain and stuff. Right, totally.

[00:44:21] And he says that, so he refers to this,

[00:44:26] I guess he borrows this phrase, Doubtless says, I remember classes in which instruction being uninteresting and disciplined, relaxed, a buzzing murmur was always to be heard, which invariably stopped for as long a time as an anecdote lasted. How could the boys, since they seemed to hear nothing, notice when the anecdote began? Doubtless, most of them always heard something of the teacher's talk, but most of it had no connection with their previous knowledge and occupations and therefore the separate words.

[00:45:41] No sooner entered their consciousness than they fell out of it again.

[00:45:43] I feel like this is like the classic philosopher who will just get, who will just like be giving a lecture head, even if I can't interact with the rest of the outside world, I want to be alive so I can do math in my head. It's like an idea. Exactly. Yeah. That ability. But getting there. But even if that's true, I think he still thinks it's only about the same exact thought. Let's say I'm trying to do a proof in my head. Like the thoughts are changing, right? But I guess then that'll count as moving attention to a different object. Back to the, yeah, yeah.

[00:51:00] Okay.

[00:51:01] I see.

[00:51:02] Yeah.

[00:51:03] Did you catch the,

[00:51:04] speaking to me directly about fear of death?

[00:51:08] No. rating papers. You know, like death, I will focus on death before, well before, like that will be the thing that distracts me from grading. I'll be like, yeah, you know, I guess I'll have to die at some point. Then I won't have to grade. Let me think about my funeral. Never existing dead. Yeah.

[00:52:21] Back to the genius thing.

[00:52:22] Do you think this idea, he says, it's driven by whatever their interests and their wide variety of categories. So, he seems to paint the picture of somebody who has acquired, say, a whole bunch of concepts and can relate a bunch of things to each other.

[00:53:41] And so once that person, that genius, has all of that equipment, that conceptual machinery, where later in life when they have this condition, they can give themselves a little break because their genius allows them to keep this kind of sustained attention for a 45, 50 minute lecture. Right. She says in the Genius, these form a concatenated series

[00:55:00] suggesting each other mutually by some rational law.

[00:55:03] Therefore, we call the attention sustained

[00:55:05] in the topic of meditation for hours quote unquote,

[00:55:07] the same. because he says, all forms of attentive effort would be exercised at once by one whom we might suppose at a dinner party, resolutely, to listen to a neighbor giving him insipid and unwelcome advice in a low voice, whilst all around the guests were loudly laughing and talking about

[00:56:22] exciting and interesting things. So just the idea of being right? That like making this part of your mental faculties and practicing that and teaching kids to do that, like these are all things that will make you better. You think that? Like I didn't totally pick that up from this. I think he thinks we all do it to one extent or another with various different things.

[00:57:41] There's no escaping doing that to some degree,

[00:57:44] but I guess you're right,

[00:57:45] the genius discussion makes it seem like are like pre-discussion, you're talking about the mechanisms of attention and you say a narrowing of consciousness and is limited in scope, you say this is prescient, giving people tending to view attention as constrained by taken in by the senses somehow is going to be in your mind and so you know you go to hypnosis and you can remember things that you didn't. But if you never attended to it, it's never going to get in, it's never going to get in there and it turns out that there's just not a whole lot we can focus

[01:00:21] on at any given time. So classic example of me is that he's citing a bunch of other people who were talking about this in the 18th, whatever. It was a thriving cycle. They're not like worried about the replication for crisis and fraud and peeking.

[01:01:41] They're just, so there's this quote where he says,

[01:01:45] in short, the only thing which we commonly see or predators or whatever. And that since we come with those categories or whatever, we attend to those things. But the rest, what I thought in my mind is my own experience of, if I'm on a hike, I see trees. Yeah, I just see trees. If you asked me, like, what did you see? I would say trees. I saw trees. Like, I don't see pines and oaks and whatever.

[01:03:02] You know, I don't, I just, it never makes it into my mind

[01:03:06] that there are all of these differences

[01:03:08] in all these trees. on like our previous experience and how we're trained and what kinds of things that we attend to and what kinds of things we don't. I just glanced through this Jesse Prince article or chapter on William James and attention and he says this anticipates the predictive coding theory or it's

[01:04:22] the predictive coding theory where our previous you think? So that's a good question. And I, that quote that you put in there about the only things

[01:05:40] which we commonly see are those which we pre forest with like, yeah, or a boreist or whatever it is, and they point out, hey, look at the difference between these two leaps. So that's why it struck me as a pretty strong claim. But in general, though, like that meshes with just, you know, like over 12 years of

[01:08:20] this podcast, our discussions of things,. And I think like for the only way for that to be true is if what you're saying is right, that we are processing it, even if we don't have the words to describe it or even the concepts to fully understand it in our own heads.

[01:10:44] whether there are works of art that evoke some kind of emotion, even if you don't know why. And we had a discussion about music being that way.

[01:10:47] And I fully believe that there is music that evokes emotion in me that I don't know why,

[01:10:52] but that I might be able to learn why if I learned a bit more about the structure of music.

[01:10:59] And yeah, there's a discussion to be had because we've touched on it so much,

[01:11:05] but just of the role of the movie. Yeah. So I have a theory that expertise makes you enjoy good things more, but it actually makes you enjoy most things less.

[01:12:22] That's interesting.

[01:12:24] So like, before you appreciate the visual filmmaking and the sound and all of that, just the aesthetics of making a movie, you can get past some of that stuff and just appreciate what he's doing with the camera and with sound and editing. So, like, it's a trade.

[01:13:40] But I know what you mean, that for the most part,

[01:13:43] the more you're exposed on the guy next to you at the party while everyone else is having a good time and this guy is talking about, you know, why people won't publish him anymore or something like that. And so one is that it's just another effect,

[01:15:03] like the effort, although it feels like something

[01:15:06] that you have to continuously do, decide between them, it's just going to be metaphysics and ethics. And though he favors the causal theory, he says it's for ethical and metaphysical reasons and not for scientific reasons. And the only kind of quasi-science reason to choose the effect theory is Occam's razor. But he says that's a good rule of method, but

[01:16:24] it's not a law of nature. Yeah, you never use the word epiphenomenal, but he says it might just be an accompaniment, more or less superfluous. Yeah, but you were nodding, did you also think like, oh, I thought, yeah, he builds such a strong case. It's almost like he wants to let yourself believe this,

[01:17:43] because then when he talks of the mechanical theory that it may be one so he must grant to us that

[01:19:01] it may be not and clearly, like you said,

[01:20:24] like, I don't know if it's Aristot is both like a proponent of that maybe later in life and maybe it was like this born-again Kind of thing, but I don't think so like I've kind of feel like it's all

[01:21:41] Hangs together in some way maybe not of psychology and that he just had this little bit in there that he just insisted on that this was without this, like, it just wouldn't be the same. And I feel like, at least in my recollection of that chapter on mysticism, like Augustinian kind of form of Christianity. It's not that people weren't worried about like, and was stuff related to this. You're right though, this could be Sapolsky at certain, like, 99% of it could be Sapolsky, but probably like a, I don't know, a different version of them. I'm not going to say are you? I'm a very bad man I'm a very good man Good man

[01:27:05] They think they lost and with no more brains than you asked