The distinction you are describing may be very important and salient to you, but it does not necessarily even exist for someone else. At one extreme, someone who is always effectively asleep (by comparison to the other extreme) and barely aware of their own existence, permanently on automatic pilot, senses things without being aware of themselves sensing things, because they are hardly aware of themselves at all. At the other, someone who is always aware of their own existence, whose own presence is as ineluctable to them as their awareness of the sun when out of doors on a bright sunny day: for such a person, to be aware is always to be aware of themselves. At either of those extremes, the distinction you are drawing does not exist. In the first case, because the person is never aware of themselves; in the second, because they always are.
The distinction always exists. The quotation is never its referent. Whether they can be collapsed into one concept without loss is another question—and the answer to that question is still “No”.
The answer could only be yes in the second extreme, and that second extreme doesn’t exist.
I’ll illustrate with an analogy.
”Has eyes open” is a different concept than “can see”. Regardless of how well they correlate, we can test the former by looking at a person and seeing that they have eyes which aren’t blocked by eyelids. We can test the latter by presenting things in their visual field and watching for a response that proves recognition. These are different tests, because we’re testing for different things.
The first extreme is akin to a blind person who has eyes but no eyelids. The distinction between these concepts is maximally important in explaining this guy, because that answer to “Has eyes open?” and “Can see?” are always different. Regardless of whether people with such extreme lack of self awareness exist, they don’t do anything to demonstrate a case where the distinction is unnecessary.
In the second extreme, you have someone whose eyes always work so asking the two questions always yields the same answer. In this case, you could indeed collapse the two concepts into one bucket because there’s never any split cases… except for the fact that no one has physics defying eyes that see without light.
Similarly, there’s far too much subconscious processing to be aware of every single bit of it, simultaneously, always. Are you aware of your breathing? Of the sensation of your butt in your seat? The sensation of your tongue in your mouth? Probably now, sure, but not before I asked. You had better things to do. And you most likely aren’t aware of your state of vasoconstriction/vasodilation even now that I point it out—though you could be, and sometimes this awareness becomes important.
The best you can aspire to is to become aware of the things that need awareness, as they need awareness. So that you can say “Okay, yeah, I’m aware of my breathing. What about it?”. Or so that you notice when you stop breathing for bad reasons, for example, so that you can correct your own behavior before you pass out doing squats or something—and even that is shooting for a goal you will never ever reach.
The thing is, when you look at the people who best approximate this ideal, they’re by definition the ones that are very skilled in self awareness. These are most definitely not the people who aren’t aware of the distinction between when they notice a thing and when they’ve noticed that they’ve noticed a thing. These are the people who saw the difference, saw how important that difference is in practice, and actively put in the work to make the distinction less obvious.
“Different minds may operate differently” is definitely true in a sense, but the distinction I’m drawing is fundamental, and the minds that are the least aware of it are those for whom it is most important—because there’s fruit there, and you can’t start picking it until you see it. “I’m just so skilled in self awareness that I literally have never noticed myself making this mistake—and have never noticed all the other people making it either” is a self disproving statement.
The perception and the perception of the perception are always different things. But to return to the situation at hand, I find it difficult to imagine responding to subtle clues by asking for the other person’s phone number, without being aware that “here I am, responding to what I think are probably clues by considering possible responses”, and also going on to higher levels of the ladder, like considering whether my perception of these supposed clues is correct, how i know what I think I know, deciding whether if clues these be I wish to build something on them (depending on the person, maybe I’d rather put them off than draw them on), deciding how long to maintain plausible deniability that there is anything going on here and when to break cover, and so on. The searchlight of attention, of noticing, sweeps over all of these, in less time than it takes to read this paragraph.
Yes, if you’re considering asking for a phone number based on what seem like unreliable clues, you’ve likely noticed that you’re considering asking for a phone number based on what seem like unreliable clues. That’s something where you’re quite likely to be wrong in a way that stings, so you’re likely to notice what you’re doing and rethink things.
When the cashier smiles at you 1% more than usual, you probably don’t stop and wonder whether it’s a sign or not. You won’t think anything of it because it’s well within the noise—but you might smile 1% more in return without noticing that you do. She might smile an additional 1% the next time, and you might respond in kind. Before you know it people might be saying “Get a room, you two!”.
Even if she then asks you out—or you ask her out—it was the subtle iterated things that built the mutual attraction and recognition of attraction that enabled the question to be asked and received well. In that same situation, if you would have responded to that first 1% extra smile with “WILL YOU DATE ME”, she probably would have said no because she probably didn’t actually like you yet.
If you do ask her out, and she says “Yes”, do you credit the fact that you explicitly asked, or the fact that she smiled that little bit more? Or the fact that you smiled back that little bit more and played into the game?
Yes, there are obviously many instances where men feel like their only chance is a leap of faith, and men tend to notice when they’re contemplating it. In absence of opportunity to iterate, they might even be right.
At the same time, much of the work—especially when done well—is in responding to things too subtle to be overthinking like that, and iterating until the leap takes much less faith. I’m not taking any hard stance of when you should take a leap of faith or not, but I am pointing out that with enough iteration, the gap can be closed to the point where no one ever has to ask anyone anything.
When the cashier smiles at you 1% more than usual, you probably don’t stop and wonder whether it’s a sign or not. You won’t think anything of it because it’s well within the noise—but you might smile 1% more in return without noticing that you do. She might smile an additional 1% the next time, and you might respond in kind. Before you know it people might be saying “Get a room, you two!”.
I do not believe that any such frog-boiling has ever happened to me.
“Frog boiling” is standing in for “responding skillfully to women expressing subtle interest, and managing to turn it into clear cut interest so that asking her out is no longer a leap of faith”… right?
Am I reading this correctly that you’re patting yourself on the back for successfully avoiding this experience? Is accidentally intentionally getting women too obviously interested in them the problem that you think most men have in dating?
Don’t get me wrong, I know that’s a real problem that can be had. It just seems like a weird flex, since most men would be more interested in knowing how to cultivate those experiences intentionally than how to avoid them. The latter is fairly self evident.
“Frog boiling” is standing in for “responding skillfully to women expressing subtle interest, and managing to turn it into clear cut interest so that asking her out is no longer a leap of faith”… right?
No, I read your vignette as describing a process of things snowballing all on their own, rather than by any such skilful response on either side. Hence my sceptical reply to it.
Am I reading this correctly that you’re patting yourself on the back
No.
Is accidentally intentionally getting women too obviously interested in them the problem that you think most men have in dating?
No, I read your vignette as describing a process of things snowballing all on their own, rather than by any such skilful response on either side. Hence my sceptical reply to it.
This is a very strange read, for two reasons.
First, “happens on its own” is a bizarre way to frame things that are entirely composed of human behavior. If a ball is placed on an incline, it will roll down hill on its own with no further human input. If a woman smiles at you, nothing happens unless you do something. If you’re smiling and talking to a woman, it seems really strange to say “Yeah, but I am not the one doing it. It’s happening on its own!”. I obviously see the temptation to define away that which you’re not aware of as “not really me” so that you can say “I am fully self aware of everything I do” and mumble the “I don’t take responsibility for anything my body does on its own” part, but at some point when this linguistic trick is sufficiently exposed, you’d think you’d say “Shit. I guess ‘self awareness’ isn’t that great if we define the term so as to not include awareness of what’s driving my actual behavior’”. And it seems obvious enough for that, by now? I apologize if I’m misestimating what’s obvious.
Second, I would have thought “Forming mutually fulfilling relationships by navigating ambiguous social cues” was just obviously something that took actual social skills. Like, you can’t do it if you’re raised by wolves—or otherwise failing to accurately track and appropriately respond to thing after thing after thing in the ways needed to coordinate a relationship with another human. If nothing else, I would have thought “guys who feel frustrated with their perceived inability to read women’s cues” would be obviously suffering from a lack of specific social skills relative to the guys who find themselves effortlessly interpreting and eliciting those signals with the cute girl at the checkout counter—at least, if we’re holding constant other factors like good looks. What even is your model here? That human interaction is fake, and really once you account for height/looks/etc the outcome is predetermined regardless of what the people do or say, so long as someone asks the question?
No.
Speaking of awareness, are you aware of how it comes off this way?
No, that strikes me as so far fetched a scenario as to only occur in the fiction of another era.
Then I guess we’re on the same page that “I’ve never been frog boiled like that” isn’t a demonstration of high self awareness? I’m not sure what purpose you had in sharing that if not to use it as an example of the rewards from your deliberate work on attention.
I’m having a bit of trouble reading you. I was originally reading you as “Not understanding what I was saying, but interested to learn if it turns out I’m pointing at something real”, so I tried to explain more clearly. Your last comment struck me much more of a “I already AM skilled at this, thank you very much” sort of “I don’t have anything to learn from you, I’m just trying to point out where you’re wrong”, so I poked some fun at it. But you seem to be disclaiming that now.
Can you help me understand where you’re coming from? Specifically, to what extent are you convinced that you’re succeeding in self awareness and don’t have anything big to learn here, and to what extent are you trying to grasp what I’m conveying because you can sense that there might be something big hiding beneath your conceptual floorboards? I’m fairly generous with my time if it’s the latter, but if it’s the former then I’m happy to just agree to disagree.
FWIW though, that “accidentally intentionally attracting women” problem does happen.
No, I read your vignette as describing a process of things snowballing all on their own, rather than by any such skilful response on either side. Hence my sceptical reply to it.
This is a very strange read, for two reasons.
The story began (emphasis added) (ETA: more emphasis added):
When the cashier smiles at you 1% more than usual, you probably don’t stop and wonder whether it’s a sign or not. You won’t think anything of it because it’s well within the noise—but you might smile 1% more in return without noticing that you do.
And I took that to be the pattern of the subsequent mutual 1%-ing, neither of the participants noticing what they are doing until you envisage some outside witness waking them up:
Before you know it people might be saying “Get a room, you two!”.
Of course there are skills. But they all begin with noticing.
I am claiming no particular social skills for myself, only perhaps a general skill of noticing.
I was more or less with you for most of this comment, but it seems to me that you go astray in the end, in two ways.
First:
The thing is, when you look at the people who best approximate this ideal, they’re by definition the ones that are very skilled in self awareness.
This doesn’t work at all. Now, if we remove the words “by definition”, then we’d be left with an empirical claim, which could be true or false (I think it’s false, but more on that later), which is fine. But “by definition”? No, absolutely not.
The reason it’s wrong is that you’re equivocating between two concepts: someone who (as @Richard_Kennaway put it) “is always aware of their own existence, whose own presence is as ineluctable to them as their awareness of the sun when out of doors on a bright sunny day: for such a person, to be aware is always to be aware of themselves”, and someone who is “very skilled in self awareness”. You could claim that those are, empirically, the same thing! But they are not the same thing by definition. One is defined in one way, and the other is defined in another way. To claim that these two concepts have the same referent is an empirical claim.
Second:
“Different minds may operate differently” is definitely true in a sense, but the distinction I’m drawing is fundamental, and the minds that are the least aware of it are those for whom it is* most* important—because there’s fruit there, and you can’t start picking it until you see it. “I’m just so skilled in self awareness that I literally have never noticed myself making this mistake—and have never noticed all the other people making it either” is a self disproving statement.
Perhaps it is, but that’s because it is a mischaracterization of the concept described in the grandparent comment. Instead we can imagine a person saying: “I have never made this mistake myself (so naturally I have never noticed myself making this mistake, there having never been anything to notice in that regard); unsurprisingly, it thus also never occurred to me that other people might make such a mistake”.
Such a statement may be true or false, and we may draw various conclusions about its author in either case; but “self-disproving” it certainly is not.
For my part, while I won’t claim to embody the ultimate extreme on the spectrum described in the grandparent, I’m certainly quite a bit closer to the latter end of it than to the former end. Likewise, I have read, and participated in, enough conversations like this one to be aware that other people’s mind work differently; but I certainly find it strange. And yet, am I “skilled in self awareness”? You could claim that, or conversely disclaim it, but either way it seems to me to be more like a wrong question than anything else. As far as I can tell, there is no distinction between noticing a thing and noticing when I’ve noticed a thing. (Unless you mean something banal like “thinking about the fact that I’ve noticed a thing”? But that is not “noticing”, of course; one may notice all sorts of things, and then proceed to not think about them.)
I don’t see your response to my other comment as responsive to my questions so I’m bailing there. I’ll likely bail here soon too, but you’ve managed to draw me back in and get me curious.
First:
No, it’s actually by definition. I see why you say that, you’re misreading what I’m saying, whatever. Not worth hashing out.
Second:
I’m genuinely confused. Are you aware of the ways in which your restatement is still completely absurd? Doesn’t matter I guess. Whatever.
As far as I can tell, there is no distinction between noticing a thing and noticing when I’ve noticed a thing. (Unless you mean something banal
This is the part that’s interesting to me. I have a response I want to try out, and I’m curious to find out how you’re going to respond.
One possibility is that you’re going to ignore what I actually say, and try to dismiss it with “But in the context of women sending signals..”/”But that much is already obvious to me, so I’m pretending it doesn’t exist”. That is, you might use the fact that you don’t yet see how to make sense of the entire previous conversation based on these initial steps as an excuse to stop following the steps which are all making sense and (in fact, if not apparent to you) leading towards a resolution. If you do this, I will have no choice but to curse you as a rat bastard, and note that you can’t be trusted to notice and stick to a path that is leading somewhere :P
Another option is that you’ll say something like “I understand what you’re saying. I don’t see how it connects”, or “Now everything makes sense, why didn’t you say it clearly like this in the first place you dummy?”, and I would consider anywhere on that spectrum to be a success.
The last option is that you follow along and still don’t see a difference between the two… which… I can’t imagine how it could happen. But I sense that it might happen anyway, so I’m curious to find out if it does. If this happens, it won’t have been a successful explanation but it’ll still have been a successful exploration and that’s enough for me.
Anyway..
What does it mean to “notice” something? How would you test that? Let’s pick “a basketball” for the thing.
1. A blind guy (Bill) on a moonless night walks by a basketball, wanting to play basketball. He keeps walking, doesn’t pick up the basketball, thinks “Shucks, if only I could find a basketball I could shoot some hoops!”. There was never any mental representation of the basketball, as evidenced by the fact that he didn’t pick it up. If the basketball were to interact with his senses in a way that led to a mental representation of “basketball”, we somehow know that he would have. This is not noticing the basketball.
2. A sighted person (Bob) walks by the same basketball the next day, picks it up, and starts shooting some hoops. Unlike in the situation with the first guy, the basketball interacted with his sensory organs and brain in such a way that led to the mental representation of “basketball”, which he acted on the way he acts with basketballs. This is noticing the basketball.
Noticing a basketball is forming an accurate mental representation of the basketball. This mental representation is not the basketball. The map is not the territory, the quotation is not the referent. They’re fundamentally different things, no matter how good you are at recognizing basketballs.
Noticing that you’ve noticed the basketball is noticing this mental representation—which again is not the basketball. Noticing that you’ve noticed the basketball is when you form a mental representation of the fact that you’ve formed a mental representation of the basketball. This representation of your mental construct is as different from the mental construct it represents as the your mental construct of a basketball is different from the basketball it represents. They’re fundamentally different things, regardless of how good you are at recognizing when you’ve noticed a thing.
The test for whether someone has noticed the basketball is whether, when they have something to do with a basketball, they do that thing with the basketball. You know they notice the basketball when they pick it up and shoot some hoops.
The test for whether someone has noticed that they noticed the basketball is whether, when they have something to do with their mental representation of the basketball, they do that thing with the mental representation of the basketball. Okay, so what might this look like?
Say Bob leaves the basketball on the court and on his way home runs into a kid who asks if Bob has seen his basketball. To answer this, Bob doesn’t have to look for a basketball, he has to look for a mental representation of a basketball. He’s not being asked “is there a basketball right in front of you”. He’s being asked “Is there a mental representation of a basketball in your memory?”. This is an easy one, so Bob will probably say “Yeah, I left it in the court”, but it’s important to notice that Bob doesn’t say yes because he found a basketball in that moment—he says yes because he found his mental representation of that basketball in memory. Bob didn’t just shoot hoops, Bob noticed that he had been shooting hoops.
But what if Bob wasn’t interested in shooting hoops? Then when he notices the basketball, what’s there to do with that representation? Perhaps walk around it so as to not step on it and fall. Is this a noteworthy event? Maybe, maybe not. So when the kid asks “Have you seen my basketball?” he might say “Yeah, I had to step around it”. But especially if Bob were preoccupied he might not have taken note of his obstacle avoidance, might fail to find in his memory a mental representation of this object he did indeed represent at the time, and say—incorrectly—“No, I didn’t notice it”. The fact that he stepped around the basketball is proof that he noticed it. The fact that he said “I didn’t notice it”, doesn’t negate the fact that he noticed it, it shows that he didn’t notice that he noticed the basketball. This is reminiscent of the famous hypnosis experiment where people were hypnotized and told that a chair placed in their path was invisible. The people instructed to fool the researchers into believing they had been hypnotized all walked into the chair, as one would. The people who were genuinely hypnotized walked around the chair, and when asked why they took the path they did, showed that they had no idea why they did what they did. They had noticed the chair, and not that they had noticed it.
If you pick up the basketball, and tell the kid you left it on the court, you’ve shown that you’ve both noticed the basketball and also the fact that you noticed the basketball.
If you walk around the basketball, and tell the kid you haven’t seen it, you’ve shown that you’ve noticed the basketball but not the fact that you’ve noticed the basketball.
If you walk right past the basketball wishing you had one to play with, you’ve shown that you didn’t notice the basketball—and so you can’t have noticed that you noticed
The weird part about this is that it can be hard to imagine not noticing. It’s hard to miss a big orange ball on black asphalt, so it’s hard to imagine there being a basketball there and not noticing it. It can seem like the distinction between the ball being there and noticing the ball being there isn’t worth tracking because you’ll never fail to notice it—except in the obvious cases like if it’s a moonless night and you’re blind but that doesn’t count, right?
But what happens the moment you try to find something that isn’t so easy to find? Animals don’t cease to exist when their camouflage works. Waldo doesn’t draw himself onto the page the moment you notice him. When you start looking for things that are harder to find, and find them, then it gets a lot more obvious that there are many many many things in that external reality which you have not yet found and represented. Way too many to ever represent them all, in fact. So yes, you might not miss the basketball, but you haven’t noticed everything that is there.
Similarly, if the only time you’re looking at your own mental representations, they’re metaphorically big and bright orange against a black background, it’s going to be hard to imagine not noticing them—except for the things that are “unconscious” and therefore “impossible to notice” but you can insist that those “don’t count” either. And similarly, once you start looking for representations that are hard to find, and start finding them where you hadn’t seen them immediately, it gets a lot more obvious that there’s a lot of things represented in your mind which you haven’t yet noticed. And that there’s simply too much external reality represented in your head for you to represent all of the object level representations you have.
Noticing the basketball and noticing that you have noticed the basketball are fundamentally different things, because basketballs and noticing basketballs are fundamentally different things. The person who can’t grasp the idea of external reality they can’t represent didn’t get there by too perfectly mapping the entire outside world for there ever to be a difference to notice. They got there by failing to ever look closely enough to notice all the things they’ve failed to represent, and the magnitude of what lies beneath their perception. The same applies to anyone who thinks they see everything their mind is representing and responding to.
Again, this doesn’t explain how it becomes important in dating contexts, or in general. I’m simply starting with the fact that they are indeed different—“walking into a chair” vs “confabulating why you’ve walked a weird path” different—and that “I’m so good at it that the two always go together” demonstrates an inability to bring the two together, not success at it.
Noticing a basketball is forming an accurate mental representation of the basketball. This mental representation is not the basketball. The map is not the territory, the quotation is not the referent. They’re fundamentally different things, no matter how good you are at recognizing basketballs.
Yes, of course.
Noticing that you’ve noticed the basketball is noticing this mental representation—which again is not the basketball. Noticing that you’ve noticed the basketball is when you form a mental representation of the fact that you’ve formed a mental representation of the basketball. This representation of your mental construct is as different from the mental construct it represents as the your mental construct of a basketball is different from the basketball it represents. They’re fundamentally different things, regardless of how good you are at recognizing when you’ve noticed a thing.
On the contrary: these are not fundamentally different things, but rather, the same kind of thing—namely, they are both mental representations. (We might say that they are different instances, but not different classes.) And it is entirely possible that they simply co-occur basically always, as @Richard_Kennawaydescribes.
But especially if Bob were preoccupied he might not have taken note of his obstacle avoidance, might fail to find in his memory a mental representation of this object he did indeed represent at the time, and say—incorrectly—“No, I didn’t notice it”. The fact that he stepped around the basketball is proof that he noticed it. The fact that he said “I didn’t notice it”, doesn’t negate the fact that he noticed it, it shows that he didn’t notice that he noticed the basketball.
On the contrary again: what you are describing here is simply Bob not having noticed the basketball, and then truthfully reporting this fact.
(Note that this is different from the scenario where Bob is not preoccupied, notices the basketball, steps around, but then forgets that this happened; and, when later asked, falsely reports that he did not notice the basketball. In other words, these are what Dennett colorfully described in Consciousness Explained as the “Stalinesque” and “Orwellian” scenarios, respectively.)
This is reminiscent of the famous hypnosis experiment where people were hypnotized and told that a chair placed in their path was invisible. The people instructed to fool the researchers into believing they had been hypnotized all walked into the chair, as one would. The people who were genuinely hypnotized walked around the chair, and when asked why they took the path they did, showed that they had no idea why they did what they did. They had noticed the chair, and not that they had noticed it.
Here you are again describing these people not having noticed the chair.
If you pick up the basketball, and tell the kid you left it on the court, you’ve shown that you’ve both noticed the basketball and also the fact that you noticed the basketball.
If you walk around the basketball, and tell the kid you haven’t seen it, you’ve shown that you’ve noticed the basketball but not the fact that you’ve noticed the basketball.
If you walk right past the basketball wishing you had one to play with, you’ve shown that you didn’t notice the basketball—and so you can’t have noticed that you noticed
And if you walk around the basketball, wishing you had one to play with, you’ve shown that…?
The weird part about this is that it can be hard to imagine not noticing. It’s hard to miss a big orange ball on black asphalt, so it’s hard to imagine there being a basketball there and not noticing it. It can seem like the distinction between the ball being there and noticing the ball being there isn’t worth tracking because you’ll never fail to notice it—except in the obvious cases like if it’s a moonless night and you’re blind but that doesn’t count, right?
I have not had this experience (of it being hard to imagine this distinction); it has always been clear to me that it’s important and worth tracking. But of course I am aware that some people do think thus.
Similarly, if the only time you’re looking at your own mental representations, they’re metaphorically big and bright orange against a black background, it’s going to be hard to imagine not noticing them—except for the things that are “unconscious” and therefore “impossible to notice” but you can insist that those “don’t count” either.
Sure. Have you ever noticed individual hydrogen atoms? No? Well, why doesn’t that serve as an example of a thing that you didn’t notice? Because you can’t notice them, of course. (Unless you have one of them fancy quantum microscopes, anyway.)
And similarly, once you start looking for representations that are hard to find, and start finding them where you hadn’t seen them immediately, it gets a lot more obvious that there’s* a lot* of things represented in your mind which you haven’t yet noticed. And that there’s simply too much external reality represented in your head for you to represent all of the object level representations you have.
There are plenty of “low-level” representations in our brains (and auxiliary organs) which are inaccessible to conscious awareness. These are of a different kind than mental representations as we ordinarily think of them. For example, take color vision: would you say that we “notice” the individual lightness values of the three color channels formed by signals from the three types of cone cells in our retina? I think that it would be very silly to say that yes, we notice this information, but we do not notice that we notice it, etc. No, we are simply unaware of it, because our visual cortex begins to combine and transform the color channel information long before it gets anywhere near the processes that we could reasonably describe as constituting any “noticing” of anything whatsoever.
Noticing the basketball and noticing that you have noticed the basketball are fundamentally different things, because basketballs and noticing basketballs are fundamentally different things.
Consequent does not follow from antecedent. A mental representation is the same kind of thing as another mental representation.
(Computer science analogy: NSString is a different kind of thing from NSString*. But NSString* and NSString** are the same kind of thing, and so is NSString***, NSSTring****, etc.)
(Of course, you need to know about NSString** to understand the pattern, otherwise you might think that there are two kinds of things: objects, and pointers to objects. It’s once you go to that second level of indirection that you realize that actually, there are two kinds of things: objects, and pointers to [objects, and pointers to [objects, and pointers to [objects, and …]]]… or, in other words, there are two kinds of things: objects, and pointers to things. Thus also with mental representations: to establish the recursion, you must have mental representations of mental representations… at which point you realize that there are two kinds of things: stuff out there in reality, and mental representations of things.)
The same applies to anyone who thinks they see everything their mind is representing and responding to.
“Blindsight, but for social cues” is the grand revelation that all of this has been leading up to…?
>>This representation of your mental construct is as different from the mental construct it represents as the your mental construct of a basketball is different from the basketball it represents. They’re fundamentally different things, regardless of how good you are at recognizing when you’ve noticed a thing.
>On the contrary: these are not fundamentally different things, but rather, the same kind of thing—namely, they are both mental representations. (We might say that they are different instances, but not different classes.)
“No, your car and my car aren’t different things! The fact that yours is an actual car and mine is a cardboard cutout shaped to represent one is irrelevant because they’re both physical objects so they’re the same kind of thing! Which is all that really matters, since distinctions don’t exist as long as similarities do, and they can be used interchangeably! Don’t mind if I swap you, like for like...”
Okay, I see how you manage to not get it. This is really blatant. I guess I’m just going to have to curse you as a rat bastard and remember what standards you hold for yourself.
Different minds may operate quite differently.
The distinction you are describing may be very important and salient to you, but it does not necessarily even exist for someone else. At one extreme, someone who is always effectively asleep (by comparison to the other extreme) and barely aware of their own existence, permanently on automatic pilot, senses things without being aware of themselves sensing things, because they are hardly aware of themselves at all. At the other, someone who is always aware of their own existence, whose own presence is as ineluctable to them as their awareness of the sun when out of doors on a bright sunny day: for such a person, to be aware is always to be aware of themselves. At either of those extremes, the distinction you are drawing does not exist. In the first case, because the person is never aware of themselves; in the second, because they always are.
The distinction always exists. The quotation is never its referent. Whether they can be collapsed into one concept without loss is another question—and the answer to that question is still “No”.
The answer could only be yes in the second extreme, and that second extreme doesn’t exist.
I’ll illustrate with an analogy.
”Has eyes open” is a different concept than “can see”. Regardless of how well they correlate, we can test the former by looking at a person and seeing that they have eyes which aren’t blocked by eyelids. We can test the latter by presenting things in their visual field and watching for a response that proves recognition. These are different tests, because we’re testing for different things.
The first extreme is akin to a blind person who has eyes but no eyelids. The distinction between these concepts is maximally important in explaining this guy, because that answer to “Has eyes open?” and “Can see?” are always different. Regardless of whether people with such extreme lack of self awareness exist, they don’t do anything to demonstrate a case where the distinction is unnecessary.
In the second extreme, you have someone whose eyes always work so asking the two questions always yields the same answer. In this case, you could indeed collapse the two concepts into one bucket because there’s never any split cases… except for the fact that no one has physics defying eyes that see without light.
Similarly, there’s far too much subconscious processing to be aware of every single bit of it, simultaneously, always. Are you aware of your breathing? Of the sensation of your butt in your seat? The sensation of your tongue in your mouth? Probably now, sure, but not before I asked. You had better things to do. And you most likely aren’t aware of your state of vasoconstriction/vasodilation even now that I point it out—though you could be, and sometimes this awareness becomes important.
The best you can aspire to is to become aware of the things that need awareness, as they need awareness. So that you can say “Okay, yeah, I’m aware of my breathing. What about it?”. Or so that you notice when you stop breathing for bad reasons, for example, so that you can correct your own behavior before you pass out doing squats or something—and even that is shooting for a goal you will never ever reach.
The thing is, when you look at the people who best approximate this ideal, they’re by definition the ones that are very skilled in self awareness. These are most definitely not the people who aren’t aware of the distinction between when they notice a thing and when they’ve noticed that they’ve noticed a thing. These are the people who saw the difference, saw how important that difference is in practice, and actively put in the work to make the distinction less obvious.
“Different minds may operate differently” is definitely true in a sense, but the distinction I’m drawing is fundamental, and the minds that are the least aware of it are those for whom it is most important—because there’s fruit there, and you can’t start picking it until you see it. “I’m just so skilled in self awareness that I literally have never noticed myself making this mistake—and have never noticed all the other people making it either” is a self disproving statement.
The perception and the perception of the perception are always different things. But to return to the situation at hand, I find it difficult to imagine responding to subtle clues by asking for the other person’s phone number, without being aware that “here I am, responding to what I think are probably clues by considering possible responses”, and also going on to higher levels of the ladder, like considering whether my perception of these supposed clues is correct, how i know what I think I know, deciding whether if clues these be I wish to build something on them (depending on the person, maybe I’d rather put them off than draw them on), deciding how long to maintain plausible deniability that there is anything going on here and when to break cover, and so on. The searchlight of attention, of noticing, sweeps over all of these, in less time than it takes to read this paragraph.
At least, that is how it is for me.
That all sounds right to me.
Yes, if you’re considering asking for a phone number based on what seem like unreliable clues, you’ve likely noticed that you’re considering asking for a phone number based on what seem like unreliable clues. That’s something where you’re quite likely to be wrong in a way that stings, so you’re likely to notice what you’re doing and rethink things.
When the cashier smiles at you 1% more than usual, you probably don’t stop and wonder whether it’s a sign or not. You won’t think anything of it because it’s well within the noise—but you might smile 1% more in return without noticing that you do. She might smile an additional 1% the next time, and you might respond in kind. Before you know it people might be saying “Get a room, you two!”.
Even if she then asks you out—or you ask her out—it was the subtle iterated things that built the mutual attraction and recognition of attraction that enabled the question to be asked and received well. In that same situation, if you would have responded to that first 1% extra smile with “WILL YOU DATE ME”, she probably would have said no because she probably didn’t actually like you yet.
If you do ask her out, and she says “Yes”, do you credit the fact that you explicitly asked, or the fact that she smiled that little bit more? Or the fact that you smiled back that little bit more and played into the game?
Yes, there are obviously many instances where men feel like their only chance is a leap of faith, and men tend to notice when they’re contemplating it. In absence of opportunity to iterate, they might even be right.
At the same time, much of the work—especially when done well—is in responding to things too subtle to be overthinking like that, and iterating until the leap takes much less faith. I’m not taking any hard stance of when you should take a leap of faith or not, but I am pointing out that with enough iteration, the gap can be closed to the point where no one ever has to ask anyone anything.
I do not believe that any such frog-boiling has ever happened to me.
It is said that humans who are not paying attention are not general intelligences. I try to cultivate the virtue of attention.
Nor to me. I can’t map the described scenario to anything in my experience.
“Frog boiling” is standing in for “responding skillfully to women expressing subtle interest, and managing to turn it into clear cut interest so that asking her out is no longer a leap of faith”… right?
Am I reading this correctly that you’re patting yourself on the back for successfully avoiding this experience? Is accidentally intentionally getting women too obviously interested in them the problem that you think most men have in dating?
Don’t get me wrong, I know that’s a real problem that can be had. It just seems like a weird flex, since most men would be more interested in knowing how to cultivate those experiences intentionally than how to avoid them. The latter is fairly self evident.
No, I read your vignette as describing a process of things snowballing all on their own, rather than by any such skilful response on either side. Hence my sceptical reply to it.
No.
No, that strikes me as so far fetched a scenario as to only occur in the fiction of another era.
This is a very strange read, for two reasons.
First, “happens on its own” is a bizarre way to frame things that are entirely composed of human behavior. If a ball is placed on an incline, it will roll down hill on its own with no further human input. If a woman smiles at you, nothing happens unless you do something. If you’re smiling and talking to a woman, it seems really strange to say “Yeah, but I am not the one doing it. It’s happening on its own!”. I obviously see the temptation to define away that which you’re not aware of as “not really me” so that you can say “I am fully self aware of everything I do” and mumble the “I don’t take responsibility for anything my body does on its own” part, but at some point when this linguistic trick is sufficiently exposed, you’d think you’d say “Shit. I guess ‘self awareness’ isn’t that great if we define the term so as to not include awareness of what’s driving my actual behavior’”. And it seems obvious enough for that, by now? I apologize if I’m misestimating what’s obvious.
Second, I would have thought “Forming mutually fulfilling relationships by navigating ambiguous social cues” was just obviously something that took actual social skills. Like, you can’t do it if you’re raised by wolves—or otherwise failing to accurately track and appropriately respond to thing after thing after thing in the ways needed to coordinate a relationship with another human. If nothing else, I would have thought “guys who feel frustrated with their perceived inability to read women’s cues” would be obviously suffering from a lack of specific social skills relative to the guys who find themselves effortlessly interpreting and eliciting those signals with the cute girl at the checkout counter—at least, if we’re holding constant other factors like good looks. What even is your model here? That human interaction is fake, and really once you account for height/looks/etc the outcome is predetermined regardless of what the people do or say, so long as someone asks the question?
Speaking of awareness, are you aware of how it comes off this way?
Then I guess we’re on the same page that “I’ve never been frog boiled like that” isn’t a demonstration of high self awareness? I’m not sure what purpose you had in sharing that if not to use it as an example of the rewards from your deliberate work on attention.
I’m having a bit of trouble reading you. I was originally reading you as “Not understanding what I was saying, but interested to learn if it turns out I’m pointing at something real”, so I tried to explain more clearly. Your last comment struck me much more of a “I already AM skilled at this, thank you very much” sort of “I don’t have anything to learn from you, I’m just trying to point out where you’re wrong”, so I poked some fun at it. But you seem to be disclaiming that now.
Can you help me understand where you’re coming from? Specifically, to what extent are you convinced that you’re succeeding in self awareness and don’t have anything big to learn here, and to what extent are you trying to grasp what I’m conveying because you can sense that there might be something big hiding beneath your conceptual floorboards? I’m fairly generous with my time if it’s the latter, but if it’s the former then I’m happy to just agree to disagree.
FWIW though, that “accidentally intentionally attracting women” problem does happen.
The story began (emphasis added) (ETA: more emphasis added):
And I took that to be the pattern of the subsequent mutual 1%-ing, neither of the participants noticing what they are doing until you envisage some outside witness waking them up:
Of course there are skills. But they all begin with noticing.
I am claiming no particular social skills for myself, only perhaps a general skill of noticing.
I was more or less with you for most of this comment, but it seems to me that you go astray in the end, in two ways.
First:
This doesn’t work at all. Now, if we remove the words “by definition”, then we’d be left with an empirical claim, which could be true or false (I think it’s false, but more on that later), which is fine. But “by definition”? No, absolutely not.
The reason it’s wrong is that you’re equivocating between two concepts: someone who (as @Richard_Kennaway put it) “is always aware of their own existence, whose own presence is as ineluctable to them as their awareness of the sun when out of doors on a bright sunny day: for such a person, to be aware is always to be aware of themselves”, and someone who is “very skilled in self awareness”. You could claim that those are, empirically, the same thing! But they are not the same thing by definition. One is defined in one way, and the other is defined in another way. To claim that these two concepts have the same referent is an empirical claim.
Second:
Perhaps it is, but that’s because it is a mischaracterization of the concept described in the grandparent comment. Instead we can imagine a person saying: “I have never made this mistake myself (so naturally I have never noticed myself making this mistake, there having never been anything to notice in that regard); unsurprisingly, it thus also never occurred to me that other people might make such a mistake”.
Such a statement may be true or false, and we may draw various conclusions about its author in either case; but “self-disproving” it certainly is not.
For my part, while I won’t claim to embody the ultimate extreme on the spectrum described in the grandparent, I’m certainly quite a bit closer to the latter end of it than to the former end. Likewise, I have read, and participated in, enough conversations like this one to be aware that other people’s mind work differently; but I certainly find it strange. And yet, am I “skilled in self awareness”? You could claim that, or conversely disclaim it, but either way it seems to me to be more like a wrong question than anything else. As far as I can tell, there is no distinction between noticing a thing and noticing when I’ve noticed a thing. (Unless you mean something banal like “thinking about the fact that I’ve noticed a thing”? But that is not “noticing”, of course; one may notice all sorts of things, and then proceed to not think about them.)
I don’t see your response to my other comment as responsive to my questions so I’m bailing there. I’ll likely bail here soon too, but you’ve managed to draw me back in and get me curious.
No, it’s actually by definition. I see why you say that, you’re misreading what I’m saying, whatever. Not worth hashing out.
I’m genuinely confused. Are you aware of the ways in which your restatement is still completely absurd? Doesn’t matter I guess. Whatever.
This is the part that’s interesting to me. I have a response I want to try out, and I’m curious to find out how you’re going to respond.
One possibility is that you’re going to ignore what I actually say, and try to dismiss it with “But in the context of women sending signals..”/”But that much is already obvious to me, so I’m pretending it doesn’t exist”. That is, you might use the fact that you don’t yet see how to make sense of the entire previous conversation based on these initial steps as an excuse to stop following the steps which are all making sense and (in fact, if not apparent to you) leading towards a resolution. If you do this, I will have no choice but to curse you as a rat bastard, and note that you can’t be trusted to notice and stick to a path that is leading somewhere :P
Another option is that you’ll say something like “I understand what you’re saying. I don’t see how it connects”, or “Now everything makes sense, why didn’t you say it clearly like this in the first place you dummy?”, and I would consider anywhere on that spectrum to be a success.
The last option is that you follow along and still don’t see a difference between the two… which… I can’t imagine how it could happen. But I sense that it might happen anyway, so I’m curious to find out if it does. If this happens, it won’t have been a successful explanation but it’ll still have been a successful exploration and that’s enough for me.
Anyway..
What does it mean to “notice” something? How would you test that? Let’s pick “a basketball” for the thing.
1. A blind guy (Bill) on a moonless night walks by a basketball, wanting to play basketball. He keeps walking, doesn’t pick up the basketball, thinks “Shucks, if only I could find a basketball I could shoot some hoops!”. There was never any mental representation of the basketball, as evidenced by the fact that he didn’t pick it up. If the basketball were to interact with his senses in a way that led to a mental representation of “basketball”, we somehow know that he would have. This is not noticing the basketball.
2. A sighted person (Bob) walks by the same basketball the next day, picks it up, and starts shooting some hoops. Unlike in the situation with the first guy, the basketball interacted with his sensory organs and brain in such a way that led to the mental representation of “basketball”, which he acted on the way he acts with basketballs. This is noticing the basketball.
Noticing a basketball is forming an accurate mental representation of the basketball. This mental representation is not the basketball. The map is not the territory, the quotation is not the referent. They’re fundamentally different things, no matter how good you are at recognizing basketballs.
Noticing that you’ve noticed the basketball is noticing this mental representation—which again is not the basketball. Noticing that you’ve noticed the basketball is when you form a mental representation of the fact that you’ve formed a mental representation of the basketball. This representation of your mental construct is as different from the mental construct it represents as the your mental construct of a basketball is different from the basketball it represents. They’re fundamentally different things, regardless of how good you are at recognizing when you’ve noticed a thing.
The test for whether someone has noticed the basketball is whether, when they have something to do with a basketball, they do that thing with the basketball. You know they notice the basketball when they pick it up and shoot some hoops.
The test for whether someone has noticed that they noticed the basketball is whether, when they have something to do with their mental representation of the basketball, they do that thing with the mental representation of the basketball. Okay, so what might this look like?
Say Bob leaves the basketball on the court and on his way home runs into a kid who asks if Bob has seen his basketball. To answer this, Bob doesn’t have to look for a basketball, he has to look for a mental representation of a basketball. He’s not being asked “is there a basketball right in front of you”. He’s being asked “Is there a mental representation of a basketball in your memory?”. This is an easy one, so Bob will probably say “Yeah, I left it in the court”, but it’s important to notice that Bob doesn’t say yes because he found a basketball in that moment—he says yes because he found his mental representation of that basketball in memory. Bob didn’t just shoot hoops, Bob noticed that he had been shooting hoops.
But what if Bob wasn’t interested in shooting hoops? Then when he notices the basketball, what’s there to do with that representation? Perhaps walk around it so as to not step on it and fall. Is this a noteworthy event? Maybe, maybe not. So when the kid asks “Have you seen my basketball?” he might say “Yeah, I had to step around it”. But especially if Bob were preoccupied he might not have taken note of his obstacle avoidance, might fail to find in his memory a mental representation of this object he did indeed represent at the time, and say—incorrectly—“No, I didn’t notice it”. The fact that he stepped around the basketball is proof that he noticed it. The fact that he said “I didn’t notice it”, doesn’t negate the fact that he noticed it, it shows that he didn’t notice that he noticed the basketball. This is reminiscent of the famous hypnosis experiment where people were hypnotized and told that a chair placed in their path was invisible. The people instructed to fool the researchers into believing they had been hypnotized all walked into the chair, as one would. The people who were genuinely hypnotized walked around the chair, and when asked why they took the path they did, showed that they had no idea why they did what they did. They had noticed the chair, and not that they had noticed it.
If you pick up the basketball, and tell the kid you left it on the court, you’ve shown that you’ve both noticed the basketball and also the fact that you noticed the basketball.
If you walk around the basketball, and tell the kid you haven’t seen it, you’ve shown that you’ve noticed the basketball but not the fact that you’ve noticed the basketball.
If you walk right past the basketball wishing you had one to play with, you’ve shown that you didn’t notice the basketball—and so you can’t have noticed that you noticed
The weird part about this is that it can be hard to imagine not noticing. It’s hard to miss a big orange ball on black asphalt, so it’s hard to imagine there being a basketball there and not noticing it. It can seem like the distinction between the ball being there and noticing the ball being there isn’t worth tracking because you’ll never fail to notice it—except in the obvious cases like if it’s a moonless night and you’re blind but that doesn’t count, right?
But what happens the moment you try to find something that isn’t so easy to find? Animals don’t cease to exist when their camouflage works. Waldo doesn’t draw himself onto the page the moment you notice him. When you start looking for things that are harder to find, and find them, then it gets a lot more obvious that there are many many many things in that external reality which you have not yet found and represented. Way too many to ever represent them all, in fact. So yes, you might not miss the basketball, but you haven’t noticed everything that is there.
Similarly, if the only time you’re looking at your own mental representations, they’re metaphorically big and bright orange against a black background, it’s going to be hard to imagine not noticing them—except for the things that are “unconscious” and therefore “impossible to notice” but you can insist that those “don’t count” either. And similarly, once you start looking for representations that are hard to find, and start finding them where you hadn’t seen them immediately, it gets a lot more obvious that there’s a lot of things represented in your mind which you haven’t yet noticed. And that there’s simply too much external reality represented in your head for you to represent all of the object level representations you have.
Noticing the basketball and noticing that you have noticed the basketball are fundamentally different things, because basketballs and noticing basketballs are fundamentally different things. The person who can’t grasp the idea of external reality they can’t represent didn’t get there by too perfectly mapping the entire outside world for there ever to be a difference to notice. They got there by failing to ever look closely enough to notice all the things they’ve failed to represent, and the magnitude of what lies beneath their perception. The same applies to anyone who thinks they see everything their mind is representing and responding to.
Again, this doesn’t explain how it becomes important in dating contexts, or in general. I’m simply starting with the fact that they are indeed different—“walking into a chair” vs “confabulating why you’ve walked a weird path” different—and that “I’m so good at it that the two always go together” demonstrates an inability to bring the two together, not success at it.
Yes, of course.
On the contrary: these are not fundamentally different things, but rather, the same kind of thing—namely, they are both mental representations. (We might say that they are different instances, but not different classes.) And it is entirely possible that they simply co-occur basically always, as @Richard_Kennaway describes.
On the contrary again: what you are describing here is simply Bob not having noticed the basketball, and then truthfully reporting this fact.
(Note that this is different from the scenario where Bob is not preoccupied, notices the basketball, steps around, but then forgets that this happened; and, when later asked, falsely reports that he did not notice the basketball. In other words, these are what Dennett colorfully described in Consciousness Explained as the “Stalinesque” and “Orwellian” scenarios, respectively.)
Here you are again describing these people not having noticed the chair.
And if you walk around the basketball, wishing you had one to play with, you’ve shown that…?
I have not had this experience (of it being hard to imagine this distinction); it has always been clear to me that it’s important and worth tracking. But of course I am aware that some people do think thus.
Sure. Have you ever noticed individual hydrogen atoms? No? Well, why doesn’t that serve as an example of a thing that you didn’t notice? Because you can’t notice them, of course. (Unless you have one of them fancy quantum microscopes, anyway.)
There are plenty of “low-level” representations in our brains (and auxiliary organs) which are inaccessible to conscious awareness. These are of a different kind than mental representations as we ordinarily think of them. For example, take color vision: would you say that we “notice” the individual lightness values of the three color channels formed by signals from the three types of cone cells in our retina? I think that it would be very silly to say that yes, we notice this information, but we do not notice that we notice it, etc. No, we are simply unaware of it, because our visual cortex begins to combine and transform the color channel information long before it gets anywhere near the processes that we could reasonably describe as constituting any “noticing” of anything whatsoever.
Consequent does not follow from antecedent. A mental representation is the same kind of thing as another mental representation.
(Computer science analogy:
NSStringis a different kind of thing fromNSString*. ButNSString*andNSString**are the same kind of thing, and so isNSString***,NSSTring****, etc.)(Of course, you need to know about
NSString**to understand the pattern, otherwise you might think that there are two kinds of things: objects, and pointers to objects. It’s once you go to that second level of indirection that you realize that actually, there are two kinds of things: objects, and pointers to [objects, and pointers to [objects, and pointers to [objects, and …]]]… or, in other words, there are two kinds of things: objects, and pointers to things. Thus also with mental representations: to establish the recursion, you must have mental representations of mental representations… at which point you realize that there are two kinds of things: stuff out there in reality, and mental representations of things.)“Blindsight, but for social cues” is the grand revelation that all of this has been leading up to…?
>>This representation of your mental construct is as different from the mental construct it represents as the your mental construct of a basketball is different from the basketball it represents. They’re fundamentally different things, regardless of how good you are at recognizing when you’ve noticed a thing.
>On the contrary: these are not fundamentally different things, but rather, the same kind of thing—namely, they are both mental representations. (We might say that they are different instances, but not different classes.)
“No, your car and my car aren’t different things! The fact that yours is an actual car and mine is a cardboard cutout shaped to represent one is irrelevant because they’re both physical objects so they’re the same kind of thing! Which is all that really matters, since distinctions don’t exist as long as similarities do, and they can be used interchangeably! Don’t mind if I swap you, like for like...”
Okay, I see how you manage to not get it. This is really blatant. I guess I’m just going to have to curse you as a rat bastard and remember what standards you hold for yourself.
Let me know if they change.