I found your remarks about the “fast forward button” to be extremely incisive and I will probably be processing it all day. It fits into and complements my existing model of how this works.
I have a chronic pain condition that is active about half the time, and when I’m under its thumb, I will seek out exactly those distractions that are likely to intrinsically soak up most of my attentional capacity. If consciousness is a sequence of moments assembled by lower-level processes, then I need some stimulus powerful enough to bump the pain-suffering gestalt off the queue, or at least reduce its relative frequency.
Successful examples might be reading something genuinely interesting, playing chess on my phone (until that becomes boring), engaging in conversations of the right type, or even working productively on a task as long as that task is flow-y and doesn’t require a lot of conscious management. Unsuccessful examples would be cycling through fifteen different websites to find something that could serve as enough of an attentional attractor that it pulls some moments of consciousness away from the pain.
Of course chronic physical pain and background psychic pain are very similar here, and I will engage in the same behaviors to avoid the psychic pain of mundane life. I hadn’t really fully made the connection that this is what I was doing until your “fast forward” comment.
I found your remarks about the “fast forward button” to be extremely incisive and I will probably be processing it all day. It fits into and complements my existing model of how this works.
I have a chronic pain condition that is active about half the time, and when I’m under its thumb, I will seek out exactly those distractions that are likely to intrinsically soak up most of my attentional capacity. If consciousness is a sequence of moments assembled by lower-level processes, then I need some stimulus powerful enough to bump the pain-suffering gestalt off the queue, or at least reduce its relative frequency.
Successful examples might be reading something genuinely interesting, playing chess on my phone (until that becomes boring), engaging in conversations of the right type, or even working productively on a task as long as that task is flow-y and doesn’t require a lot of conscious management. Unsuccessful examples would be cycling through fifteen different websites to find something that could serve as enough of an attentional attractor that it pulls some moments of consciousness away from the pain.
Of course chronic physical pain and background psychic pain are very similar here, and I will engage in the same behaviors to avoid the psychic pain of mundane life. I hadn’t really fully made the connection that this is what I was doing until your “fast forward” comment.