AGENTS

Sometimes attention seems like a little animal poking its nose first in one direction and then in another and sometimes it seems like that little animal is me, call it Watcher. There is also something inside that pushes thought, that tells thought where to go, that directs traffic, call it Director; the main limitation of Director is its span of attention, its depth and focus of awareness. Watcher and Director can work together but there must also be something else, something which evaluates, something which gives a reason or desire which Director can implement, call this Evaluator. Watcher sees a thought passing in awareness, before Evaluator can suggest a direction to Director, there must also be something beyond the original thought that Watcher watches, for that original thought does not necessarily contain in itself the variation or connection to that next thought to which Evaluator could request Director to guide Watcher; there must also be some variation or extension of that first thought which somehow contains the next thought in its implicit field; thus we may introduce another agent, an agent of imaginative or perhaps rational extension of the first thought, an agent which somehow spreads the first thought into a range of possibilities which are examined by Evaluator; call this agent Expander.

There are two other agents which deserve a paragraph of their own. Very often I am aware of a stream of words flowing in thought, much like a voice talking and although it is not exactly a voice and I do not really hear it in the sense of a sound impression, it is much like both speaking and listening to myself speak; at least there is a definite impression that the 'voice' is more original than intrusive in my thought. To make names, let us call the source of the words Speaker and let us call that part of awareness which experiences the words Hearer; however, if we would prefer to not make a dualistic distinction of speaking and hearing but instead accept the word flow as a unitary phenomenon, then we might use the name Word. Word occurs, Word flows in my thought according to various degrees of focus and intensity, or volume. When explicitly Hearing, Speaker is clear and distinct; when I so Direct, Word occurs in sentences. There are at least two levels of variation clearly distinguishable for Word; there is the proportion of awareness which Word fills, from little to much, and there is the focus of Direction or organization with which Word is reigned. I do find that, when preparing to indulge in composition, Word does sometimes become the predominant medium of thought; it is also then well focused and intent, sometimes even to the very point of presaying those words which will be subsequently typed into this writing, sometimes doing it better than it will physically appear. Word is also a research tool; when looking for increased understanding of thought, Speaker will sometimes bring forth into language concepts or expressions which creatively extend that understanding. There are other situations in which Word is not present to conscious awareness, among these I most clearly recall a combination of physical and mental effort, doing some rather complicated and difficult task, trying to remember that clearly (typing is not difficult enough, raw labor is not complicated enough) I now acknowledge that Speaker was calling but Hearer was in a very passive state. There are also intermediate situations, such as driving an automobile when there is not too much traffic or when engaged in social conversation, then Speaker speaks and Hearer hears but they do not occupy the center of attention.

We reach more rugged terrain when we ask from where Speaker speaks Word or wherein Hearer hears, understands and interprets Word. Looking inward I saw Speaker calling from a triangular black swallow hole under the eave of a tall roof. That is carrying phenomenology into the surreal, which merits further discussion. Hearer should be more implicit; Word just words.

What is strange is that we could continue to discern additional steps which necessarily, or at least logically, have to occur to get from one thought to another, adding agents such as Hatcher (to hatch the thought egg), Flow (to push it all forward in time), and Collapser (to reduce the present thought to smithereens in order to make room for new thought) and others ad extremum. But we would then be pushing a possibly interesting metaphor into a silly model. Although I wonder just a little if this is only a metaphor; Watcher is an old conceit of mine, from years before this writing; haven't you seen, felt or been Watcher? not necessarily as a quick little animal with a pointed nose, maybe more like a pair of eyeglasses or parallel mirrors in infinite reflective regression; whatever, Watcher seems sort of real to me; the other agents I made up to account for some of the more vital, or so I see it, steps in the transformation from one thought to another thought.

"Hello, Watcher. Are you there?" If you are it may be difficult to answer me since you are, if you are, so nearly central to being me; not, perhaps, exactly central because there are other, such as emotional and survival, aspects to personal being that may be still more essential than the awareness of awareness (more accurately: awareness of the content of awareness) personified as Watcher. Nevertheless, to demote Watcher from absolute centrality does not deny all aspects of real existence. Is there some sort of coherent structure existent in whatever it is wherein flow my thoughts, flow thoughts of some awareness; does awareness aware of itself, stretched out across the connective continuum of time, have a personal identity? If so it is so near to being my self that it would not necessarily be remiss to call Watcher the self of consciousness, perhaps just a little bit arbitrary but fairly close to focus.

Let us call Watcher a being, if only for the sake of experiment, or perhaps provisionally (in avoidance of vivisection); then what? To me, Watcher is a young child, child of my former self, early repressed, constrained, but not absolutely, still alive, still Watching in a quiet way. How personal is this? Do you have a Watcher, perhaps stronger than mine, or are you still more bereft? If my body dies does Watcher die? This last is sort of an inverse rhetorical question because I do not know the answer and I doubt that I would believe you if you said that you did know the answer. Personally, I suspect that it does not much matter. If Watcher is a being how can we stand aside to regard Watcher? for it would seem that only Watcher can regard anything and therefore only Watcher could regard Watcher.

While walking down a road we often allow our thoughts to wander, one thought will replace another in a fashion that we do not control with conscious intent; we may have a thought to speak to our companion, then notice the lively landing acrobatics of a bird in a nearby tree, listen to a surprising comment of our friend, notice how firmly packed the gravel is into the red dirt of the road, and so on and on with one thought replacing another rhymeless and asequentially. At a more or less opposite extreme we might be conducting a long but elementary mathematical calculation such as adding the debit column of a checkbook, which requires that we sequence our thoughts in a controlled manner focused by early training and the needs of the moment. Or, perhaps, in the same direction, a still better opposition to randomness would be found in intentional philosophic thought, when we tell our minds to think about thought, for example, or a more particular aspect of thought, such as the degree of randomness or structure by which successive thoughts are connected or not. Another highly connected, although sometimes unintentional, series of thoughts appears in tunnel thought wherein each thought seems to unfold in an automatic way from its predecessor. What means this variety of forms of dissociation and association? Is there some normative value to some of these forms, are some of them to be preferred over others, should we train ourselves to think in more highly determined directions a larger part of the time or is it good to let the free flow of randomness proceed? How could we find guidance in answering such questions, are they answerable? If so, I would suspect, now that we have begun to unveil such a multiplicity of thought forms, that the answers would be likewise multiple.

When I spoke with my wife about the various questions associated with the transition from one thought to another she responded with the following teleological concept which is quoted from her own words which she kindly wrote down: "The future wants to come into existence. It is the magnetic void like yearning that attracts us into it, that subtly sends its attracting embrace into our listening ears." Personally, I had usually considered teleos much more limited, sort of as if Evaluator had wanted to cross a stream and used that desire to help decide which rock for thought to leap to next, across the roiling waters of confusion or the quiet flow of Lethe. When she asked for my response to her concept I had to explain that since it had taken me so many years to become liberated from a past oriented causal view of the present induced by early training in the presumption of scientific primacy, I was therefore somewhat unwilling to yield the hard gained centrality of the present now unto a future centered vision. She understood.

If one were to determine to train oneself in order to increase control of the sequence of thoughts, how and why would one do that, and in what context, and what would be the results? Often such determinations are task oriented, as in performing the duties of a job or following the strictures or training or creative talent. Much of the world's busyness does seem to be performed in this manner; if I call in a trade to a stockbroker then I would usually prefer him to make the trade before spending too long thinking about his grandmother's sapphire necklace. Consider the worker whose job it is to open and close the irrigation sluices; he travels from place to place, following directions, occasionally using his own discretion but usually acting a necessary part in an organized, or so he and we hope, plan. Given either his own or his supervisor's determination of the effect to be achieved, he must unlock and then turn the steel wheel which raises or lowers the sluice gates, upon his action much of our prosperity is dependent, at least in such locations as this wherein I live, where both Urban and Agricultural water supply is dependent primarily upon the melting snows of nearby mountains. It is this worker's task to control his thoughts in a manner sufficient to perform his job effectively, correctly, and with few if any mistakes. Suppose he is also a philosopher. As a philosopher he is free, if not required, to form his thoughts as he so wishes; as worker he is constrained by external responsibility.

We can give a name to that by which the agent Evaluator senses thought, and so we shall call this name 'attitude'. So called, attitude includes emotion, logic and goals: pathos, logos and teleos and all of their combinations, interactions, diffractions, diffusions, confusions, conclusions, illuminations, gradations and reductions: the colors, flavors and tones of thought.

Consider some of the flavors of logic; when the mind feels a logical conclusion, for me it is a sensation akin to satisfaction, the pieces fit together, the gap is closed, suspended tension is released. Consider again the sensation of contradiction; there is a closed door, a turning away, sometimes impatience or, in a more interesting or paradoxical situation, curiosity; this is how it is with me, it may be different for you. Are not such subjective impressions associated with logic of the same sort, genus if not species, as the emotions which color thought? Although it might be truer to associate emotions with the body than with the consciousness, nevertheless they form part of the experience of thought and they clearly also influence the direction of thought, the agency of Director.

I have recently recalled my preference for the present. Recall again the model of one thought succeeding another as strung out like beads along a string of time, or, perhaps, more like rocks along a conveyor belt from the forgotten past into the unknown future. There are some reasons to pack away this model. We have already sensed some of the difficulty of separating thought into distinct packets called thoughts; we were able to analyze some of the particular motions required in going from one thought to another, naming the agents Watcher, Director, Evaluator and Expander for some of the discernable parts of that progress. My discomfort increases when we drop these thought packets into what seems to me to be rather an abstract current of time. As regards time, it has always been clear that the past, the present and the future have each a different ontological status, which does rather divide being. This trinity of time may be useful in our daily lives, at least most of us are accustomed to using it in society: tomorrow is a useful concept and word in arranging a meeting and history is full of interesting stories, possibly even some true ones. But philosophically, this time feels like a dead fish or at least a stuffy nose; whichever, it makes it hard to breath the pure air of truth. Therefore, now I want to suggest that we transform our model from the series of thought packets succeeding on another into a more present oriented mode wherein unified thought is diverse in its forms.

Frederick Joseph Staley