Andrés Gómez Emilsson | Attention & Awareness: Oscillatory Complementarity, Non-Linearities, and the Pointlessness of It All @/Andr%C3%A9sG%C3%B3mezEmilsson | Uploaded March 2022 | Updated October 2024, 1 hour ago.
"You can never have the use of the inside of a cup without the outside - the inside and outside go together. They're one." - Alan Watts
In this video I make the case that attention and awareness are special cases of a much more general phenomenon. I call this *oscillatory complementarity*. Attention, in its most basic and studied form, can be thought of as a flashlight that highlights the contents of our field of awareness. It adds resolution to them, and then binds their features in coherent phenomenal objects (local binding). But there is a wide range of exotic states of consciousness where attention and awareness seems to work quite differently, yet follow predictable rules.
As a manner of introduction, I jokingly argue that everything in math started to go downhill since Euclid defined a point as "that which has no parts". Nonsense! - I say, for a something without parts is a contradiction in terms. Now, of course axiomatic geometry led to huge advancements in math, and admittedly tuned out to be foundational for the development of modern mathematics. But what we gained in conceptual clarity, we lost in perceptual lucidity. Points are artificial constructs that result from the interplay between attention and awareness; not self-existing real entities. Put another way, points- in a deep way- are illusory; a point and its surrounding phenomenal space are co-dependent and co-arising. Points, phenomenologically speaking, require a field of awareness in which they are embedded in order to exist. In fact, a point exists only in so far it is in resonance with a patch of awareness. Thus, we start to see how attention (represented by a point in this case) complements awareness and vice versa. "Points", as a consequence, are really only apparent, since what they represent is a particular pattern of non-linear oscillatory coupling of a *field*. And although experience (and existence) may be pointless, this does not mean it is valueless, for valence is still a perfectly real, meaningful, and holistic property of a field of awareness.
I then explore how the paradigm of oscillatory complementarity can articulate and clarify a wide range of exotic phenomena:
Concentration meditation can give rise a certain kind of oscillatory annealing where larger and larger parts of the field of awareness oscillate in phase so that they "hit" the meditation object at the same time, and thus energize it and activate its non-linearities. In turn, the "vibe" (see previous video) of the meditation object determines the wave envelope, and thus the consonance-dissonace-noise (CDNS) characteristics of the entire state in a holistic fashion (thus focusing on loving objects makes the entirety of your experience sweeter, and not only the center of your attention).
Insight practice involves de-energizing the non-linearities (gestalts) that make up your world-simulation. As you do this over and over again, eventually you start decoupling awareness from the fixation "points", until the linear resonant modes of the field of awareness are all that remains (note: beware of the Dark Night, though).
LSD non-duality can be understood as more diffuse elements of experience becoming the non-linear oscillatory complements of the field of awareness, such as "light", "space", and "being". DMT's competing clusters of coherence and their compositional properties also emerge naturally out of a hyper-energized field of awareness that generates oscillatory complements. 5-MeO-DMT is a straight path to insight territory, as it activates a new medium of wave-propagation orthogonal to the one in which our world-simulation is typically embedded. And so on...
I also re-evaluate the models introduced in the original Qualia Computing article on the geometry of DMT experiences in light of this new paradigm. In particular, I delve into the concept of exotic attention in the form of wallpaper symmetry groups and Bayesian energy sinks.
~Qualia of the Day: The Point~
----------
Relevant links:
Attention and consciousness (Scholarpedia [Don't confuse attention and consciousness!]) - scholarpedia.org/article/Attention_and_consciousness
The effects of visuospatial attention measured across
visual cortex using source-imaged, steady-state EEG - st-andrews.ac.uk/~jma23/papers/lauritzen2010JOV_spatial-attention.pdf
The Constructive Aspect of Visual Perception (Steven Lehar) - slehar.com/www/ConstructiveAspect/ConstructiveAspect.html
The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences (discusses "Bayesian Energy Sinks") - qualiacomputing.com/2016/12/12/the-hyperbolic-geometry-of-dmt-experiences
Euclid's Definitions - mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/HistTopics/Euclid_definitions
Bad interactions with MAOIs - reddit.com/r/Drugs/comments/mo6av3/recreational_drugs_and_maoi_treatment
Avoid Runaway Signaling in Effective Altruism - qualiacomputing.com/2017/10/24/avoid-runaway-signaling-in-effective-altruism
"You can never have the use of the inside of a cup without the outside - the inside and outside go together. They're one." - Alan Watts
In this video I make the case that attention and awareness are special cases of a much more general phenomenon. I call this *oscillatory complementarity*. Attention, in its most basic and studied form, can be thought of as a flashlight that highlights the contents of our field of awareness. It adds resolution to them, and then binds their features in coherent phenomenal objects (local binding). But there is a wide range of exotic states of consciousness where attention and awareness seems to work quite differently, yet follow predictable rules.
As a manner of introduction, I jokingly argue that everything in math started to go downhill since Euclid defined a point as "that which has no parts". Nonsense! - I say, for a something without parts is a contradiction in terms. Now, of course axiomatic geometry led to huge advancements in math, and admittedly tuned out to be foundational for the development of modern mathematics. But what we gained in conceptual clarity, we lost in perceptual lucidity. Points are artificial constructs that result from the interplay between attention and awareness; not self-existing real entities. Put another way, points- in a deep way- are illusory; a point and its surrounding phenomenal space are co-dependent and co-arising. Points, phenomenologically speaking, require a field of awareness in which they are embedded in order to exist. In fact, a point exists only in so far it is in resonance with a patch of awareness. Thus, we start to see how attention (represented by a point in this case) complements awareness and vice versa. "Points", as a consequence, are really only apparent, since what they represent is a particular pattern of non-linear oscillatory coupling of a *field*. And although experience (and existence) may be pointless, this does not mean it is valueless, for valence is still a perfectly real, meaningful, and holistic property of a field of awareness.
I then explore how the paradigm of oscillatory complementarity can articulate and clarify a wide range of exotic phenomena:
Concentration meditation can give rise a certain kind of oscillatory annealing where larger and larger parts of the field of awareness oscillate in phase so that they "hit" the meditation object at the same time, and thus energize it and activate its non-linearities. In turn, the "vibe" (see previous video) of the meditation object determines the wave envelope, and thus the consonance-dissonace-noise (CDNS) characteristics of the entire state in a holistic fashion (thus focusing on loving objects makes the entirety of your experience sweeter, and not only the center of your attention).
Insight practice involves de-energizing the non-linearities (gestalts) that make up your world-simulation. As you do this over and over again, eventually you start decoupling awareness from the fixation "points", until the linear resonant modes of the field of awareness are all that remains (note: beware of the Dark Night, though).
LSD non-duality can be understood as more diffuse elements of experience becoming the non-linear oscillatory complements of the field of awareness, such as "light", "space", and "being". DMT's competing clusters of coherence and their compositional properties also emerge naturally out of a hyper-energized field of awareness that generates oscillatory complements. 5-MeO-DMT is a straight path to insight territory, as it activates a new medium of wave-propagation orthogonal to the one in which our world-simulation is typically embedded. And so on...
I also re-evaluate the models introduced in the original Qualia Computing article on the geometry of DMT experiences in light of this new paradigm. In particular, I delve into the concept of exotic attention in the form of wallpaper symmetry groups and Bayesian energy sinks.
~Qualia of the Day: The Point~
----------
Relevant links:
Attention and consciousness (Scholarpedia [Don't confuse attention and consciousness!]) - scholarpedia.org/article/Attention_and_consciousness
The effects of visuospatial attention measured across
visual cortex using source-imaged, steady-state EEG - st-andrews.ac.uk/~jma23/papers/lauritzen2010JOV_spatial-attention.pdf
The Constructive Aspect of Visual Perception (Steven Lehar) - slehar.com/www/ConstructiveAspect/ConstructiveAspect.html
The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences (discusses "Bayesian Energy Sinks") - qualiacomputing.com/2016/12/12/the-hyperbolic-geometry-of-dmt-experiences
Euclid's Definitions - mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/HistTopics/Euclid_definitions
Bad interactions with MAOIs - reddit.com/r/Drugs/comments/mo6av3/recreational_drugs_and_maoi_treatment
Avoid Runaway Signaling in Effective Altruism - qualiacomputing.com/2017/10/24/avoid-runaway-signaling-in-effective-altruism
