Comment on What is "attention", really?

jbrains@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

• dope@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  You can direct attention at thoughts though. And sights, sounds, etc.

  It’s like sights, sounds, thoughts, smells etc are things in a dark room. And attention is a flashlight. And you shine the flashlight upon things.

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  • jbrains@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Why “though”? We usually reserve that word when we’re about to introduce a counterexample or some other means of contradicting a claim.

    But thoughts are also particular things, so clearly one can direct their thoughts to particular thoughts. And even to the act of thinking in particular about thoughts, because that is a thing one can think about.

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    • dope@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Because you described attention as “directing your thoughts towards something”.

      But thought is one of the things you can direct attention at.

      So I would put thought in the class of “things that I can direct my attention at”, with no necessary tie to attention.

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      • jbrains@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        In what way does your second paragraph contradict your first? They seem independent of each other to me. The two together mean that a thought is something that we can attend to, and I believe that’s true in part because I have experienced it.

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