[From: Bruce Nevin (Wed 92046 08:00:23)]
Bill Powers (920505.1840)
Date: Yes, I edited it because of elapsed time since I started the
message, or that's what I was intending to do when (I think) someone
came into my office at that moment needing something of me. I suppose
my finger wandered from 5 to 4, and the 0 finger didn't press hard enough
the second time, and I never did put the time in, and I didn't go back
and check afterward as I was very late leaving. Interruption is an
interesting phenomenon, no? Now what was I doing . . .
We ARE talking about different meanings for "continuous" and
"discontinuous." You use these words, apparently, in the sense of
"constant" or "variable." I use "continuous" in the sense of having
derivatives everywhere.
I guess I am including both constant/variable and continuous/
discontinuous in the discussion, but I do intend the latter in just the
sense you do. I was surprised to find granularity in what seems (in
retrospect) to be intensity and sensation perceptions. I didn't pursue
the matter at the time (a 10-day vipassana course several years ago) as
it was just one aspect of a very rich process. I'm not able just now to
verify, don't have protracted time time free for just sitting in
awareness of one perception. I am speaking from recollection.
I proposed two alternative explanations.
According to one, it is a discontinuity of attention. Like visiting and
remarking how much the child has grown, vs. living continuously with the
child and not noticing. It is subjectively similar to a category shift,
as you say. Lying gazing at the sky and noticing that a cloud has
changed shape. It has grown imperceptibly darker at my desk and I need
to turn on the light. When your attention returns, it is no longer
the configuration of a dog's head in the cloud but that of an elephant's
foreleg, with the rest of the elephant over there. These are, as you
say, category shifts. Perhaps it is the shift of category that draws
renewed attention.
According to the other interpretation, there really is some
discontinuity or granularity in the perceptual signal that is usually
smoothed by the input function of the low-level ECS, using the
imagination loop. Usually, expectation fills gaps, that is, reference
signals from higher-level ECSs call for supplemental signals out of
memory by the imagination loop when input from sensors (perhaps mediated
by input functions of lower ECSs) is incomplete. In the unusual
situation of prolonged attention to the same sensory signal(s), I
speculated, higher-level ECSs stop controlling for that sensory input,
and you become aware of it more simply as it is, without "normalization"
through the imagination loop.
What argues for the second is the fact that the experience only emerges
after prolonged practice at keeping awareness constant, occurs only at
times when one seems to be more rather than less successful at keeping
awareness constant, and is markedly different from experiences noted
when attention wanders, then returns to the perception chosen for
meditation. In particular, it is not a category shift. The perception
is there or it is not, and when it is there again it is so far as one
can tell the "same" perception, subject to the same sorts of continuous
variation as before.
It's entirely possible that I'm wrong on both counts. I don't hear
anybody else jumping up and saying "yeah, I noticed that too when I was
meditating regularly." Nor do I hear anybody saying "I've been
meditating an hour a day for years, focussing attention on simple
low-level perceptions, and I've never come across anything like that."
Bruce
bn@bbn.com