Always-On Conversations
When something clicks an old thread is revived to be updated and completed. The detective surface of the mind connected it to something that was left open. Or that connection questioned closed threads, forcing a reopening.
So it seems to me that if attention can’t be unallocated then it must be always on. Sometimes it seems that attention is not directed at anything. But not being actively conscious does not mean your system isn’t absorbing information passively. You’re either conscious of what your system is giving attention to or you’re not. Passive attention is a different kind of attention, but it still encodes information. That information is collected and organized for later use.
The continuity of attention makes me suspect there is also a kind of thinking that is continuous. The kind you do without trying to. But it doesn’t seem to me that it is continuous on a single thread. In fact I think it is rather fragmented.
Let’s start from the story that we tell ourselves. That narrative contains the historical and logical arc of our beliefs, values based on which our actions are derived. Narratives encode causal structure, temporal order, and value hierarchies This is the structure on which information is attached, ready to be recalled and analyzed. Eventually as it gets internalized, you don’t really see the dialogue anymore, but its effect are still tangible. I thought hard and wondered if this structure is generalized.
It is through these conversations that we build our relationship with ourselves, our past and future, as well as with topics and friends. It’s where we keep count of things, argue, constantly negotiate. In fact about friends. I often find myself thinking implicitly what friends would think about this thing that I’m thinking. Then I would ask to them in my mind, because my mental model is detailed enough that I can simulate answers they would plausibly say. In fact I find sometimes I continue these conversations like people do for in parasocial relationships. I talk to the ghost of them in my mind.
I found this expands to mentors. When I need advice for a decision I ask them, write the problem out, answer like they would for a few times, find my solution, and eventually realize I don’t need to actually bother them most of the time. Some of them are just parasocial relationships.
In fact this made me wonder about the utility of talking to friends. If I can derive most of their answers on my own, what sense does it make to talk to them? I think the answers they may give are much more predictable than the questions they may pose. The goal is to make implicit knowledge explicit. So my modus operandi is now to ask myself and answer like they all would until I reach the edges of my knowledge. Which happens when there is recycle of knowledge. Then it is time to actually talk to them for some novelty injection.
For some time I was very intellectually rigorous, reading many hours, studying many hours every day, talking to few people for a short amount of time. so most of the time i was doing rigorous thinking, which comes out as a clear explicit dialogue. When I changed my social habits and learned to be in the less observant-rigorous state required to socialize easily with most people I noticed my thinking outside of rigorous study became sloppier allowed more ambiguities.
It was small pieces of a conversation, but it was mostly implicit. I ask a question, find an answer, go off on some tangent, ask another question, get disinterested. Overtime I noticed my knowledge became less crisp. This makes me suspect that knowledge maintenance and growth depends on the quality of these always on conversations.
But still living in the world brings back conversations in a fragmented manner. Some stimuli opened up a conversation, it gets resolved, goes on, etc... As different stimuli came up different threads get opened. But does not only happen in conversations with friends and idols. It also happens in learning.
What happens to me is I’m thinking hard about a theorem, when I go away for a while and come back i get some insights. It comes out like a conversation. I was trying to figure something out so I was talking with myself about the possible ways I could approach the problem. And while executing those approaches as I understand things and tweak my approach I tell myself, because of that premise and this logical argument the conclusion follows, this new evidence points to this, etc... It is like playing tennis, going back and forth.
Note that sometimes the conversations are implicit, they work under the hood so you don’t notice them. But they are still doing their job. Making them explicit I found makes it easier to see the gaps in knowledge and understanding.
It feels to me like that logical arguments and knowledge get attached to a heavily structured narrative. This makes it easy to build on to, because you just need to conversate and debate the differnet threads contained in the narrative. This makes it easy to remember because stories are a very high bandwidth compressed signal that contains the priors to all other signals. I noticed that thinking and learning are a kind of continuous dialogue that is the platform of narrative, which contain knowledge and identity.
In learning theory people talk about building the trunk first and attaching the leaves later. I always wondered what the trunk looked like. Now I think I do. It is a narrative. It is where the abstract objects that ideas are get attached. Narrative is a series of connected place holders for them. It is where they can be fed and grow. The narrative is a compression of the mental model.
For something to start a new narrative you need to work hard. most threads we encounter get attached to the working memory narrative, the default mode network. Then they get forgotten. To build something new you need to work really hard.
By working hard I mean putting all your mental faculties on one problem for as long as you can, then move on to something ele once you stall. It has to get under your skin. for it to work you must truly ask yourself the questions. Then you must be observant and open to receive the answers. The conversation you cultivated will submerge. Once you encounter the right stimulus it will reemerge with an answer.
The trick is to keep things open. Or rather strategically unfinished. That is how you employ your subconscious to think what you want to think.
In fact that is the proof that we do not have direct access to all our cognitive faculties. This makes us vulnerable to externally imposed narratives. In fact I noticed in my mind a lot of unexamined ideas and desires and narratives. I usually don’t remember how they got there, but this received "wisdom" is often untested and repeated out of habit.
A good habit to have is to distrust the old narratives in our head that we did not create. They need to be investigated with a certain kind of fastidiousness about truth. It is useful to have some resistance to being told what to think by old conversations. But it is hard to see them. In fact once the narrative is internalized we only see its effects. To see it we must see the emotions. Which I think are a super compressed abstracted parrotting of the logical narrative. By feeling it you may be able to derive them.
So the mind is not a collection of thoughts with an always on laser that is diffused randomly. It is a collection of narratives and they contain the guide as to where to point attention next. it is this network that keeps a lot of conversations open at the same time, running in the background. As we go through life we encounter things that continue all conversations. An answer to a friend, A solution to a problem, An idea.