Attention & Lensing
The Weight of Experience
The universe, the totality of reality, is big. In fact, it’s the biggest thing. We can’t hold its majesty in our minds. Language enables us to carve the universe into parts and organize them into a simulation or voodoo doll that we call “the mind”, a map that we use to navigate the world.
And we focus on some things and not others, according to whether we expect it to be interest-bearing or valuable to our organisms and genes. By tensing our minds and focusing our attention on something, we densify our simulation of it. Our neural-network pertaining to it grows thicker, and like a wild garden, varieties appear in the ensuing biodiversity of names.
This densification is a mark left by the universe upon the fractal mirror of our minds. It is a weight added and also an impression left. This weight has a gravitational force associated with it, like how everything looks like a nail when you have a hammer. It warps the geometry of our mind-maps, causing the object to look bigger.
The impression left by experience is a lossy mapping that can be partially reversed. Indeed this is why we have it in the first place. The lossiness is how we generalize from past experiences to new ones. And the reversibility means that by listening to someone’s speech or reading their words, one can infer something about what experiences that person has had.
Does someone have many words for different types of snow? They perhaps have spent a lot of time in a cold region. Does this other person use unusually precise words to describe color? Perhaps they are an artist or designer. Why did this person not use a more common word for a legal situation? Perhaps they have some profession in law.
These are simple examples, but the principle may be reused at higher abstraction levels. Why did the conversation not follow the typical flow? Perhaps the person has some hidden agenda. Why did this person assume this or that? Perhaps because they were auto-completing based on past experiences…
The French phrase “tout le monde” originally meant “the Parisian aristocracy” despite being literally translated as “all the world”. Like the self absorbed and doomed French bourgeoisie, set of experiences may become so dense as to collapse into a black hole, an echo chamber where only the past is visible, every message is a permutation of existing knowledge, and the many stars in the sky are merely the same light lensed around invisible obstacles, the scar tissue of natural selection, the wounds of Christ.
For this reason, some prefer to remain in the beginner-mind-present, gazing into Indra's net, that eternal holographic lattice of crystalline reflections in which all reflects All.
Sat Chit Ananda