I take it that the point of this thread is to find activities which exemplify a low-signalling “mental mode”.
Most of the commentators have pointed to activities, as topics, which feature more or less often in our signalling conversations. My attempt to point to the manner in which we do activities, in which signals least pollute our thinking, was voted into oblivion.
Again, however, I would like to suggest that activities characterized by ecstasy and intense engagement are good examples of what RH called “a more honest mental mode”.
When I talk about music or logic, for example, I fall inevitably into signalling. My thinking becomes less “honest” as it becomes less responsible to its topic and more responsible to the social perception it elicits.
But when I am intensely engaged in making music or logical proofs, my thinking sometimes, when I am working well, becomes almost entirely responsible to that activity. My “mental mode” is more “honest” as I become more responsible to the rhythms the activity itself elicits and less responsible to elicit social perception through that activity.
My guess is that how often an activity features in our signal-rich conversations is likely to be an inconsistent indicator of the extent to which our mental mode while engaged in that activity is made “dishonest” by the work of signalling. Some activities, like sex, often feature in our signalling conversations; but, when we do the activity well, I suggest, we are not typically signalling.
I suspect that we are more likely to find better examples of “honest mental modes” by looking at the manner in which an activity is done, and not the degree of social interest in the activity. In particular, I suspect that activities which demand or admit a high degree of ecstasy or engagement, -- activities, that is, in which submitting to the rhythms of the activity requires nearly full attention and so starves out whatever attention would otherwise be devoted to signalling, -- will be among the best examples of “honest mental modes”.
Love-making and music-making seem to me to have the capacity to transcend signalling. We can get lost in sex and song, pulled out of our usual patterns of broadcasting and receiving, taken up into something altogether free and fresh.
Of course, sex and song are also deeply interwoven with signals, and plenty of people mimic rather than make love and music; but that is over there, and over here—in the moment of rapturous love- or music-making—those things fall away, mostly, and for a time.