Reflections on the Aeon article 'I Attend, Therefore, I Am'
According to
the author (Carolyn Dicey Jennings) ‘self’ is fully realized and manifested
during moments of temporarily divided attention, when all an entity’s previous
experience and knowledge comes into play (or into ‘being’) to make decisions, decisions
which ultimately and fully reveal the person who each of us wishes to express
to the outer world.
One could
extrapolate, then, that ‘self’ (or the notion of self that is presented to the world)
is created and re-created (but seldom destroyed) many, many times during a
lifetime, or perhaps during a day. Barring any drastic life-changing
phenomenon, the recreation of that self varies little. (Simply put, ‘self’ will
often make the same decisions (about lunch, clothes to wear, or which car to
buy) so often and so subconsciously, those decisions, when pointed out by
others, are often more surprising to the individual themselves, than to their
amused acquaintances.)
The author’s
conclusions (at some small variance to my own) takes into account determinism
and in-determinism, free will, environment, and even the influence of molecular
structures (our own and those around us) going all the way back to the
beginning of the beginning. (The quantum influence on those molecular
structures is a subject for another post, and beyond the scope of this
exercise.)
If such
elements are taken into account as having influenced every action or decision
of the entity-at-large, one could say that free will, and, thus, determinate
self does not and cannot exist. Indeed, if all things have been (or are
perceived to have been) determined already (by forces already in play) long
before any of us were born, including our illusions of self and free will. Others
(including me) argue that we, as individuals, still maintain the ability and
the right to act on or not act on
those predetermined (non-restraining) stimuli according to the dictates of our
own free will, if we are mentally and physically able to.
The
article’s example of comparing attention to a murmuration of a flock of birds,
in which they fly in seemingly random and often startlingly beautiful patterns,
is a good example of what genius must be, itself an exotic expression attention
taken to highest level.
Genius can
thus be described as intensely peculiar (if not ultimate) expression of
attention and self: A constantly re-created expression of a non-substantive
being (called ‘intellect’) of pure, elevated thought (or the expression thereof)
composed in measured parts of environment, opportunity, luck, and need, both internal
and external.
‘Self’
arises from a baseline of these elements, genius, from an abundance of them. Environment,
attention, and finally, (personal) decision are the ingredients of which both
are composed, with only the amounts of these elements to differentiate the two.
