MANAGING YOUR SELF
Attention
The screen saver on both my home computer and my workplace computer reads as follows: "You learn something every day if you pay attention", a quote from Ray LeBlond. For many aspects of their existence however, it appears that for most people this is too high a price to pay! This disposition is as prevalent among the young as it is amongst the elderly. We have found in our work with both secondary school students and university students that the majority would prefer to get by with memorizing information rather than working to build conceptual understanding (Novak, 1998).
This combination of rote learning and mental ruts is how historian James Welles defines stupidity, the learned corruption of learning (Welles, 1986). In practice, stupidity consists of learning one particular response to each type of situation encountered and then operating on "automatic pilot" henceforth. The antidote is a change in attitude: you have to want to pay attention, to learn from experience, to apply what you know to improve your life. It's amazing!
Intention
Many practitioners in Cognitive Science (both physiological and psychological branches) eschew the notion of intentionality as a mythological hold-over from folk wisdom. This is probably the most benighted perspective in the current study of human cognition, equivalent to behaviourism in the early part of the 20th century. Those who justify this stand by explaining that they can't see intentionality should be reminded that they can't see gravity or entropy either, just their results. Hypothetical constructs, like intentionality or gravity, are indispensable parts of any and every science. As physicist Albert Einstein said, "What we see depends upon what we believe." The Torah contains the same idea from 2,500 years ago: We see things not as they are, but as we are.
Intentionality is a combination of the concept and the commitment to do something. The claim of some Cognitive Scientists is that we "really" are not capable of deciding or choosing anything - that it's all programmed into the synapses and reflexes that underlie our behaviour. This claim conflates levels of analysis - of course the synapses and reflexes are the platform for our actions. But even if intentionality were just an "illusion" it is the psychological space in which we operate. Whatever the physiology of the process, we make decisions, make choices, make plans, and take actions. In so far as this describes what we do, regardless of the underlying support system, we are exercising intentionality. It's what the functioning psychological process is about.
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