To Be or Not to Be in Focus…

Estudia: Okay, Phi, your last dialog suggests another question. If sensations are automatic, and perceptions are outside our control, then how can our thoughts or actions be free? After all, what is left to us beside this conceptualizing business you said you’d talk about later?

Philo: Good point. By its nature, we do have these automatic processes of our consciousness, but we are not moved to action outside of our control. At least not in terms of free thoughts or actions. Touch a burning hot stove and you will move automatically without thought, but that’s not what you mean. You are asking about your volition, your ability to make conscious choices and decisions and determine your intentions. Thoughts or actions like you’re talking about are “free” if the decision involves a choice between at least two possibilities. The outcome depends on your decision and it could have been something else if you had made a different decision. That’s free will at work.

Estudia: Okay, I choice to study philosophy, at least talk with you about it, and I spend time with you and learn hopefully. I don’t have to do that. I could choice to watch TV or go bike riding. That certainly seems free and no one is going to convince me my choice was determined.

Philo: They aren’t. The sensational and perceptual levels of awareness are automatic and you don’t have a choice there. No volition, but on the conceptual level, the story is different. Your basic choice is whether you are going to use your mind on the conceptual level. You have a choice to think or not to think.

Estudia: When I’m awake I get the feeling you are right. Sometimes I just don’t feel like facing the chores that need doing, or thinking about anything, and I don’t turn on my mind. I meditate or watch a dumb TV program.

Philo: And perhaps suffer the consequences when reality presents itself with your next test. You are talking about the primary choice that is required for volition. You have to focus your mind on something first before you can make any choices. To focus or not is the primary choice and makes all other conceptual processes possible. You have an autonomic system that controls your heart, lungs, stomach and other bodily functions but not your mind’s conceptual ability. Lots of things in the subconscious mind are automatic, like feeling an emotion, but even they are subject to change via introspection. The mind is very complex but to use it you first must focus.

Estudia: Hummmm... So the primary volitional choice is not to sense things, or even perceive them, but to choose to focus on something.

Philo: Exactly, sort of. The choice is that you must chose to focus your consciousness. You don’t have to. You can listen to me with your mind in an unfocused state and with lots of thoughts and imagines flashing into your awareness. You’re in a fog, so to speak, you’re listening, but you’re not “hearing” what I’m saying. I could be hypnotizing you for all you know and you’d remember what was said in your subconscious but, could not for the life of you, remember consciously what we discussed. You can’t understand anything like this. You have to focus, which means you have to be alert mentally with a purpose of wanting to understand.

Estudia: Then focus is like setting a goal? I have to direct my consciousness to grasp fully what is going on “out there” in reality.

Philo: Right. You would be in focus if you have committed yourself to obtaining complete awareness of reality. You don’t have to be in full focus all the time but the more you exercise focus the better off you will be. You can choose to just listen on the perimeter and catch a thought now an then while reading a book and seeing the words and understanding there meaning but not grasping there true impact, while getting a massage that feels wonderful but which you don’t fully relish. There are lots of levels of focus.

Estudia: Kind of reminds me of how I struggle to grasp your thoughts about the nature of reality and consciousness sometimes. Maybe the reason I’m having it not stick in my mind is that I’m not fully in focus.

Philo: Maybe. It’s not easy being in full focus, but if you are striving to grasp clearly what we’ve been saying you have chosen to focus and you will understand, at least up to your ability, as opposed to someone content with just a vague idea of what we’ve been discussing. You’ll be far better off for your effort.

Estudia: If I don’t understand something, does that mean you aren’t focusing?

Philo: No, you don’t have to be all knowing. Omniscience is not the meaning of focus or full awareness. You only have your past knowledge to build upon and you have all the thinking skills of your mind to work with, but they may not be enough to understand some aspect of reality at that time. But if you have made the attempt with all means available to you, you have been in focus. If you got drunk and didn’t think clearly, you certainly couldn’t say you were in focus. Drunks and many people in general do not choose to focus so their minds are not active or goal directed. Reality is just a blur for them and often they suffer the consequences. Wandering out of their traffic lane, having an affair with a meaningless whore, buying an inferior product because it is too much trouble to focus on the merits of all available.

Estudia: So I have to always be in full focus?

Philo: No, you can enjoy moments of relaxation like sunning at the beach with you’re mind wandering, but when the surf is suddenly sucked out to sea and a strange feeling that a tsunami is coming, you’d best change your level of focus fast and get moving.

Estudia: What if I’m just evading something I don’t want to think about, so I decide not to focus on it?

Philo: If you are aware that you need to think about something and make a decision, but refuse to raise your level of focus, then you are evading. If you do this often enough, it becomes a habit. Like the guy who knows he needs to go find work, but goes to the bar instead. Or the student who needs to prepare for the next test, but decides to go to a concert and enjoy the music and drugs. This type of habit of not focusing will create anxiety and life will become more threatening. When you evade you elevate a feeling over the truth. The drunk wants to feel the pleasure of non-effort and becomes anxious about not having a job. The student and his music fail the course and his anxiety increases.

Estudia: What about if you know you have a pain and avoid thinking about it or getting it checked by a doctor? Is that not similar?

Philo: You would be evading thinking about a problem which could become life threatening. You want to believe that your problem will go away. You wish for it to go away. The drunk, the student, the patient all elevate a wish above what is.

Estudia: So it is wrong to choose to be out of focus and it is wrong to choose to evade specific situations, right?

Philo: To evade you have to make a choice. To be out of focus doesn’t necessarily require a choice on your part. The passive drifting thought process is not immoral. It is wrong to choice to not focus when you need to, this is evasion and it is immoral. Objectivism holds that evasion is the primary vice because all other vices are based on the evasion of some aspect of reality.

Estudia: Wow, that’s powerful. Let me think about that for a while. CU, later.

Perceiving the Given…

Estudia: Phi, I’ve got another question, but this one's about our consciousness.

Philo: Good, I hope I can answer it. What is it?

Estudia: There are stimuli, like light, sound and pressure that we experience when our senses detect them. So these sensations are first in terms of what we experience about reality. Shouldn’t we be trying to determine things about what is, quote, out there... unquote? I mean trying to determine facts about entities or things from the sensations themselves?

Philo: Some philosophers tried to do that, but their efforts were a waste of time because nothing can be inferred from random sensations. Think about what it must be like to be a new born. That is the kind of consciousness that only experiences sensations. Simple one-celled organisms react to sensations but that’s it. Babies and other more complex organisms are conscious alright, but they are at the first stage of consciousness which is the stage of sensation. My gosh, even plants, respond to sensations! Do you think that these types of consciousness can perceive objects or form concepts?

Estudia: No, I guess not.

Philo: You bet. Infants see things, but it takes them time and a lot of mental integration to begin to understand what they are experiencing. You see a coin sitting there, but you don’t just, quote, see, unquote, it. No, you have seen that shape and in your mind you know all kinds of related sensory properties of that coin. You know it is pretty smooth, but not perfectly flat. You know it is cool if you put it in on your cheek; hard if you bite on it; makes a clinking sound if you bang it on the table; can be used to buy things; clatters when dropped on the floor, can flip in the air, what it looks like on the other side, and on and on. This is the difference between perception and sensation. It’s big; it takes a lot of computational power, and is what makes your consciousness so powerful.

Estudia: Hummmm... So you are saying that I can’t experience the world directly with sensations.

Philo: Exactly, sort of. You become aware of entities, like the coin, but nothing more, just like the infant. But now you directly experience that coin on the perceptual level of consciousness. We are given the perceptual level by the nature of our consciousness and we are using that now to infer what it must have been like as a new-born. A world of sensations only is a world of chaos and confusion, but we automatically integrate the sensations and are presented with perceptual facts. From these percepts we constructed a vocabulary of conceptual words. When I say to you coin, or you think, coin, you are using a word to represent the concept of coin. Not that particular coin, but all coins and coin-like shapes and uses and on and on. But that is a level of consciousness over and above the quote, direct experience, unquote, of that particular coin. Now, at you stage of development, all the sensations of that coin are integrated automatically by your brain into a percept. That’s a given and so we can’t philosophically try to get under this perceptual level to understand anything about reality on the sensational level.

Estudia: Wait a minute. You’re not saying we can’t know anything about that coin other than what we perceive. That it’s a coin and that’s it?

Philo: No, no, no... I didn’t mean to imply that what we perceive is the metaphysical primacy of entities. The nature of things is not the question of philosophy but of science. Scientists know all kinds of additional things about that coin and may some day know the ultimate ingredients of the matter that composes it. I’m trying to get you to understand that your understanding of that coin as a coin is a primary on the epistemological level. Remember I said that epistemology is a branch of philosophy that studies means of knowledge. What we know, and how we know it.

Estudia: I guess if sensations are integrated into percepts automatically, then there is nothing we can say about that process — at least in ways about how to do it. Hmmmm.... that makes sense then. What we know and how we know it obviously depends on the way our consciousness works, and because the perceptual level exists, we work with it.

Philo: That’s right. But on the subject of conceptual thinking, the integration of percepts into higher more complex ideas called concepts we can and do get into the meat of epistemology and maybe you’ll have some questions about how we do that.

Estudia: Okay, but let me see if I understand. In our development, the sensation stage is first, followed by the perceptual stage, and finally we reach the conceptual stage. But philosophically, particularly epistemologically, the first stage is the perceptual stage. So our perceptual knowledge must be used to prove everything we know. In fact, our percepts are given; so we don’t have to require that we know things on the sensation level. We don’t have to be skeptics and say that we can’t know things directly via our senses; so we are out of touch with reality. In fact we are very in touch. Our sensations make us aware and our given perceptions allow us to be more fully aware and even better allow us to further integrate our awareness to yet higher levels of conception.

Philo: Bravo. Couldn’t have said it better myself. Go, be aware, perceive and conceive... I mean conceptualize.