My experience is first person. From my point of view, attention is a given.
I see-hear-feel, one frame at a time. In each frame, I recognize patterns that persist. I prefer some because they make me feel better. I avoid some because they make me feel worse.
A frame is a bundle of all my observations.
Better-worse is a contrast: a span between opposites that creates tension. In the middle is “ok”. I prefer better than ok.
My first sigil: prefer better than ok along every contrast that matters. Sometimes, better than ok is a direction. Most often, it’s a range: more of a good thing becomes too much, and that returns to ok. This sigil helps me choose so that I keep feeling better than ok.
My second sigil: ignore noise. Noise is what doesn’t contribute to my choice. If an observation can’t change what I choose, it’s noise. Attention is limited: attend wisely.
Time to define sigil.
A sigil is a pattern I recognize plus the preferences I have about it: more or less, importance relative to other patterns, and what I can do with/to/about it - the choices it affords. It helps attention collapse observations into a choice.
A sigil is a door. I can walk past it. I can walk into it. Once I’m in, the sigil changes my preferences: different patterns matter, different choices are available.
Choices arrange into narratives: sequences of choices in a happened-before relationship. This introduces an arrow of time along the certain-uncertain contrast. The past appears certain. The future doesn’t.
After making a choice satisfying the sigil, attention prefers to take it off and relax.
This is my third sigil: prefer relaxed attention, pleasantly scanning the frame for interesting patterns.
My fourth sigil: prefer certainty over uncertainty, along the certain-uncertain contrast. This orients attention along time, in a narrative with me as protagonist. Me-the-protagonist wants to succeed.
My fifth sigil: prefer that my protagonist succeeds. It defines good-bad over narratives.
Which is how I get captured by a narrative.
For several months I fully attended to the narrative of my father dying. I could not change it or put it on pause, and it was unbearable. When he died, the narrative ended. Attention zoomed out. The frame was still beautiful.
I revised my third sigil to include a preference along living in a narrative-living in the moment contrast: avoid narrative capture.
This site
This site contains my thoughts about the domain of attention. As a faithful DDD practitioner, I developed a domain language to talk about it: Attention Language (AL).
This site is a sigil of AL. This site is a work in progress.
I organized it as a graph of sigils.
The graph starts in the sigil where attention is now, wherever on the graph you are.
Vertically, it is a tree rooted at the current sigil: some branches go up, some down. The up branches point to higher-scale sigils that include me, like the United States. The down branches point to what I include: organs, cells, molecules, atoms…
Horizontally, same-scale sigils connect into patterns, like doors between adjacent rooms. You travel the graph by entering them.
You choose next sigil.
Your path is your narrative.
I wish you a good one.
Enjoy!
++ the language above is intentionally kept terse to avoid coloring meaning with value