it
is
quite
distinct
from
communication.
On a similar negative line, if you spend the majority of time agreeing or disagreeing with another person’s statements, then you are also not communicating. Agreement and disagreement serve a purpose, but that purpose has little to do with the goal of communication. If Wendy says that ‘I like apples’, and you agree that ‘I like apples, too’, then it is still possible that you have said the same things for wildly disparate reasons, that both of you are controlled by evil demons, or that each of you understands liking and apples in different ways and do not really agree upon anything at all. With regard to communication, expressing agreement does not confirm successful communication, but is rather a methodological technique that opens up the beginning of communication. We can see this most clearly when agreement is contrasted with disagreement. Those who ostentatiously disagree rarely begin communicating at all. As well, those who try to communicate with the purpose of reaching agreement often fail to communicate, for they are too focused upon disagreement at the start. If reaching agreement is taken to be the goal of communication, then the involved parties will almost surely not be able to communicate.
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1.3 Introduction to intentional directedness We began discussing communication with the hope of clarifying what it means to take oneself as a self-object for receiving communication. With regard to spoken language, we have suspected that there is more to communication than focusing attention upon the words that are spoken by another, for I can clearly focus upon words without engaging in communication. I can even focus upon another’s words, then reply with words of my own with consideration of the words that were spoken to me, but this still is not communication. People in the midst of pas-sionate argument often perceive the words that are spoken—they can even take turns speaking—but the words bounce off each other without leading to communication. To communicate, I must assume that another directs something at me, but more than just assumption, I must become something that can receive communication. Although I can assume that someone is talking to me, unless I open myself up to communication, communication will not be taking place. On our understanding, opening oneself to communication and taking oneself to be a receptive self-object are roughly equivalent.
Becoming a receptive self-object and focusing attention upon oneself are not equivalent. In focusing attention upon myself, I am both the source and object of attention. As a receptive self-object I am also an object, but rather than an object of my attention, I am an object of communication where the directedness of communication flows from a source that is not me to the receptive self-object. Whereas the attentional field is composed of objects that are directed away from me, there is also a field in which sources are directed to me. Sources constitute this field just as attentional objects constitute the attentional field, and the values of the field at each source represent the magnitude of field. To make the difference concrete, from now on we will differentiate the at-tentional field of objects from the in-tentional field of sources. The ‘at’ of at-tention corresponds to pointing at objects while the ‘in’ of in-tention corresponds to the inward pointing of sources.
Our understanding of in-tentional should not be confused with the philosophical concept of intentionality. Intentionality is said to be the property of mental states that they are directed upon objects or about something. At first sight, the philosophical definition of intentionality appears similar to our usage of at-tentional; both are at least concerned with directedness at objects, however, the similarity does not go much beyond. We use at-tentional to describe an attentional field that is 26
metaphorically analogous to a dynamic physical field composed of objects as described above. The attentional field is a natural phenomenon in part under our direct control and measured in degree. Philosophical intentionality is a logical property of so-called mental phenomena or states. For example, if I have a belief, that belief must be about something; if I have fear, I must have a fear of something. Beliefs and fears are said to be mental phenomena, and it is said that it makes little to sense to say, for instance, that ‘I have a fear’ without having an object of that fear—like a fear of clowns.
The philosopher accustomed to intentionality may claim that our use of attention is a special case of intentionality in that at-tention is directed at objects. Firstly, it is difficult to see how our description of the attentional field is a special case of a logical property of mental phenomena since we have not acknowledged the category mental, and since the logical property alone does not entail the completeness of our description.
Nor are the objects of attention the objects of intentionality. The fear-of-clowns, taken as a whole, and simply clowns or a clown can all be objects of at-tention. The objects of philosophical intentionality always occur within mental states like fear and belief. Distinguishing between mental and physical states is unnecessary within attention, while this is the defining characteristic and puzzle of intentionality. More, intentionality is closely connected with the problem of the mind’s ability to represent the world, while attention has, thus far, little to do with representation or minds.
An in-tentional field is even further removed from the philosopher’s intentionality. Sources in the in-tentional field are always directed toward a receptive self-object—there is only one thing that is pointed-to within intention. The sources within the intentional field are often a sub-set of the objects within the attentional field, but this is not always the case. Something may be an intentional source but not be an object of the attentional field, as we will discuss later. An example of an attentional object that is often an intentional source is another person, although every person within the attentional field is not automatically an intentional source.
Everyday communication requires both attentional directedness at an object and intentional directedness into the self-object, but we have yet to say what intentional directedness is. We have begun by assuming that the intentional field is composed of sources, and that each source within this field is directed to the self-object. We will discuss the nature of intentional sources later on; for now, we are concerned with the 27
understanding of intentional directedness, knowing that a full understanding will not be possible until we clarify the nature of a source.
We have already discussed how directing language at the self-object and understanding meaning are not jointly sufficient to establish communication, and that communication requires an openness to a cascade of reasons without judgment, agreement, or disagreement. In the language of the intentional field, openness means that the self-object is receptive to the source. Intentional directedness cannot exist without this receptivity, but we also assume that the self-object may manifest particular receptivity without a source present to fulfill that receptivity. Metaphorically, intentional receptivity is a measure of the natural efficiency or ease in which an entity becomes a source for the self-object. Some entities will perturb or influence the self-object with ease, while others will have no influence. Once an entity becomes a source for the self-object, we say that intentional directedness is established between the source and self-object.
When discussing the attentional field we questioned whether the field values were binary or multiple-valued, and if it made sense to speak of the magnitude of attentional directedness at an object. The same question arises for the intentional field—once intentional directedness of a source is established, can we talk about the magnitude of that directedness? Are all intentional sources related to the self-object with the same intentional strength? We have already assumed that the receptivity associated with different sources can vary in magnitude, but receptivity is distinct from intentional directedness. Nonetheless, we might assume that magnitudes of receptivity covary with magnitudes of directedness.
In everyday language, the concept of influence is perhaps closest to intentional directedness. If we consider people as sources, we notice that different people have varying degrees of influence upon us—not in the sense of control or in getting us to agree with them—but in how they shape our understanding of the world. To be influential, the other person need not be trying to get you to believe anything in particular or to manipulate your actions for a specific goal; in simply communicating, some people change how we are, and in ways that are often mutually unexpected. A newborn infant, for instance, can be highly influential but presumably lacks the ability to purposefully manipulate anyone. While influence is not intentional directedness, just as focus is not attentional directedness, these more common concepts are related to directedness and suggest magnitudes of degree.
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It will be helpful to continually contrast the attentional and intentional fields to gain a fuller understanding of both. Recall that attention is associated with the force by which one is drawn to an object, mediated by what we have metaphorically called the attentional rest mass of an object. Some objects attract us more than others. An object distorts the attentional field in the sense of the force analogy, but the attentional field values do not represent forces of attraction. The attentional field values represent the intensity of directedness at an object, or similarly, the directed distance between oneself and an object. One can be strongly pulled toward an object—like pain—yet not have attention strongly directed at that pain, and one can have attention strongly directed at an object—like dust— that barely pulls one at all. Forces mediated by the attentional rest masses of objects change the degree of directedness without completely determining the precise value of directedness, which is dependent upon other factors. For example, the effort expended to turn away from a highly attractive object demonstrates that other factors are involved in attention. Here, turning away from an attractive object of attention can be understood as a force that operates in addition to the forces generated by the masses of other objects. The presence of a degree of directedness is distinct from the forces of attraction typically associated with attention and distinct from the concept of force in general.
The dual of attentional rest mass within the intentional field is receptivity. Whereas attentional rest mass is grasped through the gravita-tional metaphor, intentional receptivity may be associated with other physical analogies such as atomic valence, electromagnetic permeability or permittivity, and fluid dynamical receptivity. A self-guided understanding of these analogies would be helpful before proceeding further.
We have assumed that the self-object has varying degrees of receptivity for different entities, and that receptivity is ‘measured’ by the efficiency by which an entity becomes a source for the self-object. This language suggests that the self-object may couple to an entity, the entity thus becoming a source, but only if the self-object is appropriately receptive.
Receptivity is in some sense an absence that draws in intentional directedness, whereas attentional mass is a presence that draws in attentional directedness. Receptivity is associated with the self-object, while attentional mass is associated with the attentional object. With effort, as in purposeful attention, I can open up or let through a degree of intentional directedness from a source, even if my natural receptivity to that source is low. Some sources are naturally disagreeable to me, but this does not completely prevent intentional directedness.
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The magnitude of the intentional field upon the self-object is not wholly determined by the receptivity of the source. Just as some objects strongly draw our attention yet need not be attended to, some sources we are highly receptive to yet need not open our intention. For example, my wife as a source is associated with a large receptivity but my intentional field value associated with her may be small during angry argument. In angry argument we may exchange words, but neither of us feels that the other is listening, even though each of us perceives the meaning of the spoken words. In anger I may not be open to intention—the intentional field value at her as a source is small or zero—despite the large intentional receptivity of my wife. Of course, with repeated and continuous argument, one might learn to associate a small receptivity with a particular source, even if that source receptivity was large at an earlier time. Like attentional rest mass, the strength of a source’s intentional receptivity can change with learning or experience.
When I am purposefully directing attention to an object with a low attentional rest mass, that direction takes sustained effort, and the attentional value tends to quickly decrease once purposeful selection ceases.
Intentional directedness differs. Once intentional directedness begins or opens, it tends to self perpetuate and does not require sustained effort to be maintained. Although it does require effort to initiate directedness if the natural receptivity to the source is low, once initiated or increased, the intentional directedness carries on. That is not to say it cannot be interrupted or closed. Certainly this may occur, but the tendency is persistence. Whereas the attentional rest mass of an object is often slow to change, dependent upon learning, experience, and time—with the not-able exception of trauma—the receptivity of a source grows with the intentional directedness of the source, thereby perpetuating that directedness.
Intentional directedness, once changed to a particular value, tends to persist at that value whereas attentional directedness fluctuates quite rapidly, dependent upon the other objects in the attentional field and other factors. Both intentional and attentional fields possess stability and instability, although stability characterizes intention and instability attention. Attentional directedness requires the concept of attentional rest mass to give constancy to the attentional field, or else attention would be in constant flux. Intentional directedness is intrinsically stable or self-perpetuating, largely mediated by the receptivity of the self-object. Attentional directedness can be interpreted as the directed distance from oneself to attentional objects, while intentional directedness as the 30
directed distance from sources to the self-object. An intentional source, once made close to the self-object, tends to maintain that distance, but an attentional object, once brought close to the I, will typical move away unless the object’s attentional rest mass is large or sustained effort keeps it in place.
The degree of receptivity tends to follow the degree of intentional directedness of the source. Because of this, it is difficult to speak of the natural receptivity of a source. We may more appropriately call it the initial receptivity, or initial compatibility of the source at first meeting it.
Initial receptivity influences our initial intentional directedness to a source, but once we forcefully change directedness, the receptivity tends to follow that change so that the degree of intentional directedness is maintained through time. A problem remains in that our distinction between receptivity and intentional directedness is not completely clear, especially since we have argued that they covary together.
It is likely that individuals vary with regard to total intentional capacity, just as we have varying degrees of attentional capacity. As a societal and statistical generalization, women are typically associated with more intentional capacity than men—under the guise of empathy and the ability to listen—while men are associated with more attentional capacity than women. This generalization has anatomical correlates: the female genitalia, like receptivity, are characterized by absence and the male genitalia, like mass, by presence. Attentional capacity has traditionally been valued above intentional capacity, so much so that the intentional field has been largely ignored, and similarly, men have been traditionally valued above women.
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1.4 Receptivity and compatibility
The present state of the attentional field is strongly coupled to present sensory perception because sensory objects compose much of the attentional field, so much so that many believe that only sensory objects may be attended to, although this is hardly the case. I was right then focusing upon the concept of perception itself more so than any sensory experience in the moment, even though sensory experience was part of my attentional field. In contrast, the intentional field of sources is rather independent of present sensory perception. We each, in a sense, carry around a relatively static intentional field wherever and whenever we go. This follows from the intrinsic stability of the intentional field, and from our observation that most, but not all, sensory perceptions have little effect upon intentional directedness. For instance, my intentional directedness of a particular person does not typically change when that person leaves the room, or when I turn my head to look the other direction, or when I close my eyes. Sources that are associated with large values of intention maintain those values despite changes in sensory perception.
We have some understanding of what it means for an object to be outside of attention, or to not be a part of the attentional field. As above, a knock-at-the-door was not a part of the attentional field at one time, and then became a focus of attention as part of the field. What does it mean for a source to be outside of the intentional field? Without understanding what a source is, it will be difficult to go further with this question.
The example of an intentional source that we have turned to for guidance in understanding the intentional field is another person.
People are often intentional sources, and we may be able to clarify what aspects of people allow them to be sources, with the goal of better comprehending the nature of a source itself. At the same time, we should also consider the characteristics of the intentional field to help constrain what an intentional source must be.
A prominent feature of intentional sources is that they may exist outside of attention. This property of existing outside of attention is most commonly associated with material objects. I assume, for instance, that my hair, as material, exists whether or not it is a part of my attentional field. Although people may be considered material objects, the materiality of a person is not proximately associated with the potential of a person to be an intentional source. Many things may be material, but 32
we do not immediately consider all material objects as sources of intention. We are not typically receptive or open to everyday material objects, rather, material objects are foci of attention, especially within current scientific endeavors. Nor can materiality explain why intentional directedness is relatively independent of the geometric space-time. If an intentional source depended upon materiality, we would expect other material objects and geometric space-time relations to influence intentional directedness, but I may be separated from a person over a great material distance and in different material contexts without an appreciable change in the intentional directedness of that person as a source.
Other entities that may exist outside of attention, but are not necessarily material, include memories, theories, beliefs , concepts, ideas, values, good and evil, knowledge, truths, essence, substance, form, number, possibility, spirit, soul, anxiety, desire, fear, emotions in general, God, and others. We have no immediate way to determine which combination, if any of these, constitute intentional sources. The extra-attentional nature of sources does not narrow down the field any further. To help us proceed, we need recall that the self-object must be receptive to the source for a source to be a source; any object for which the self-object is completely unreceptive cannot belong to the intentional field.
What determines if the self-object is receptive to another object so that it may become a source? In some sense, the self-object must be compatible with an object in order to be receptive to that object, but I have just replaced the word receptive with the word compatible and presented that as an explanation when it is nothing of the sort. Nonetheless, compatibility suggests something distinct from receptivity and may be helpful, but I have to say, if I am to be helpful, what it is for a self-object to be compatible with another object.
My initial thought is to look to a physical analogy for guidance. A pen, for instance, is compatible with the conditions within the room I am in. The same pen, if instantly transported to the corona of our sun, would quickly disintegrate. The pen, while compatible with the conditions near me, is not compatible with the conditions that exist within the corona of the sun. Compatibility in this sense means that conditions external to the object contribute to the continued persistence of that object, where the persistence of the object can be understood as the persistence or stability of the physical interactions that maintain the object.
For the example above, it would be more common to speak of causes and how the heat energy of the sun causes molecular bonds to disassociate, and that the heat energy within my room is insufficient to 33
‘overcome’ the strength of molecular bonds. Rather than physical compatibility and incompatibility, we often speak of sufficient or insufficient forces and energies of destruction. The latter language places the positive aspect upon destruction, while the former locates positivity upon sustenance. For one who is accustomed to thinking in terms of causes, compatibility is nothing more than the absence of sufficient forces of destruction. As such, compatibility is empty and without power. But it need not be this way. We can imagine a world of positive compatibility where compatibility is the presence of mutual forces of sustenance that underlie the existence of every object around us. The total absence of compatibility would be complete homogeneity, void, nothing, or pure beginning or end.
The common focus upon causes allows us to nearly ignore the very conditions that grant human life. We all know that without mechanical assistance humans cannot exist in extreme cold or heat. A physiologist will be able to partially explain what happens to the human body during hyper and hypothermia, and how these changes lead to the death of the organism. What the physiologist does not study is how everyday, comfortable temperatures contribute to the persistence of the human organism. They will allude to the ‘right’ temperatures for particular chemical reactions and stable molecules, but always lurking in the background are the physiologist’s counterfactuals that give the right temperature meaning. If the temperatures were counterfactually different, the reactions would occur at slower or faster rates and proteins would fold differently, leading to such and such undesirable outcomes. Since comfortable temperatures do not cause those undesirable outcomes, they must grant us life. But we have explained nothing positive about everyday temperatures. Attributing causal negative outcomes to particular conditions, and then trivially noting that other conditions are not associated with those negative outcomes, avoids assigning any positive attribute to everyday temperatures other than an absence of bad, counterfactual outcomes.
Condition X creates because Y destroys and X is not Y. This is the extent to which causal logic is used to explain generative, everyday conditions.
Everyday conditions cause the pen be what it is, just as extreme temperatures of the sun cause it to be not, but this sort of thinking has not been taught in scientific education. Everyday conditions are taken for granted and given no appreciable role in the persistence of the pen, and it is enough to study the molecular makeup of the pen in an imagin-ary isolation, an isolation that is completely mysterious and nonphysical because it assumes that nothing need exist outside the pen for the pen to 34
exist. External conditions only become relevant when they are no longer compatible with the pen, when they destroy the molecular bonding of the pen.
There is something missing from the common scientific speak when we try to talk about a pen itself, and more specifically, about a proton or electron as an isolated object. These too are caused or created or sustained by external conditions, and talking about particles without referencing these conditions is a convenient shortcut that allows one to envision a building-block world where everything is composed of particles without the details of how particles continue to be. To say that fundamental interactions keep particles together is not enough because those interactions persist in some conditions and not others. Cosmologists attempt to answer these questions, imagining a universal origin of unified forces and particles at high temperature. As geometric space expanded, the motional energy of original particles decreased, leading to symmetry breakage, phase transition, and particle freeze out. We are led to believe that a decrease in the motional energy of previous particles causes new particles to persist. The magnitude of heat energy sets the boundary conditions for what sorts of entities may be.
We are not suggesting that material particles require an external God or mind or society for their existence, but that these particles must be dependent upon other natural features of our universe, things that are external to the particle object. Imagine an empty box. Place a marble within that box and then remove the marble. The marble and its properties are largely invariant with respect to being inside or outside the box.
Now consider a proton within our universe. Take that proton outside of our universe (or multiverse), or move it to a different universe. This is surely an impossible task, or at least a nonsensical one. We cannot move a proton outside the universe because we cannot move anything outside of the universe by definition—because an outside does not exist. And if the universe has no outside, then it has no inside either. Protons are not within the universe like the marble is within the box. Protons are parts-of or bound-to our universe, and this parthood differs substantially from the parthood of a mechanical mechanism. A gear may compose a clock, yet that gear can always be removed from the clock. The proton cannot be removed from the universe like the gear from a clock. Protons may only be transformed into something else or perhaps annihilated into nothingness.
It was Einstein who saw the necessary covariation between stress-energy and space-time. Matter and space are intimately coupled such 35
that each is dependent upon the other, and although Einstein’s equations are only structural boundaries on how space and matter may simultaneously be, they open us to the idea that matter and space continuously sustain each other. This is why the fundamental theory of everything cannot consist of original objects within space-time—original objects will be neither matter-energy nor space but a hybrid that births the two. So physicists have postulated quantum spin networks, while others have speculated that everything is information, although these suggestions, at present, amount to little more than neopythagorean mathematical fictions.
These material analogies have taken us off-track our goal in understanding compatibility as it pertains to intentional sources. We feel that the material analogy is inadequate because the material conception of compatibility is largely negative, grounded against a language of destructive causes or incompatibility, and because material thinking presumes that it makes sense to talk about fundamental particles (or interactions) in isolation without considering the external conditions that contribute to sustaining those particles. Against this negative view of material compatibility, the compatibility between a self-object and intentional source means that the self-object contributes to sustaining the source, and that a source cannot be understood as an isolated object independent of external factors for its persistence.
We must also conclude that the self-object is not an object in-itself, but something that is sustained by other things. The self-object persists for multiple reasons, and we do not completely neglect the material. The self-object can withstand destructive forces; it can maintain its shape when stretched and can dissipate energetic modes without giving up its present form. The self-object persists also through adaptation, by choosing to become different in form so as to become compatible with outside objects that would otherwise strain the self-object. It will necessarily change, but by accepting change, persists through a continuous, natural transformation rather than through abrupt trauma. The self-object also persists by becoming mutually dependent upon other objects, where the mutual dependency is non-dissipative and often generative.
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1.5 Unknown sources of intentional directedness We have until this point missed an aspect of the intentional field that has a dual within the attentional field. Attention is associated with the capacity of selection, where selection is often understood as a purposeful choice of object, or