Attention is the basic unit of experience. The direction of attention is the expression of the will of all life. Attention is continuously emitted through the various optics, secretions, clutches, consumption and expenditures of living matter. This occurs unceasingly until expiration terminates attention into what we call ‘death’. Plants grow to consume the sun, birds prospect to clutch their prey, fish sense to follow the collective school and mammals discharge genetic matter to propagate the race. Without attention life would be impotent, unwilled to impulsively direct itself in the necessary action required for existence.
The hunger of experiential direction can never be entirely satisfied. As one impulse is satiated a replacement desire intensifies or arises as if they were arranged beforehand in infinite succession. This treadmill of attention is inherent to experience, implicated by the ‘will-to-life’ that is present in the very living of life.
Extropy is the general expression of attention. Extropy being the ordering of things according to the impulses of life. Dust mites attend to the detritus of the air, roots bind the earth into solidity, avian life arranges fallen plant matter into concentric nests, beavers can’t help but dam running water, the flock’s attention is directed onto grazing under group protection and the human animal arranges reality into exponentially sophisticated tools. Such arrangements of will threaten the inherent entropy of the cosmos. This is not to say, however, that attention doesn’t express itself in destruction or expenditure. The tribal raid of the chimp tears through the flesh of their rivals in an ecstasy of attentive violence, flora releases pollen in a wasteful attempt to propagate and the fertilization of an egg requires legions among which the attention of a single lucky swimmer might be successful while the remainder wander. Destined to expire in the great vaginal graveyard.
The opposite of attention is entropy. Entropy being the seeming randomness of the universe when devoid of life. This is the tendency for things to fall apart into the background noise of cosmic dust when they are not attended to by the attention that is projected forth from the will within life. Entropy is decay, this makes the floral seed the seemingly ultimate and static instantiation of attention. In a seed the will to live is concentrated in a preserved form, to a much greater extent than the vulnerable seed of mammals and lizards. The static extropic attention of the floral seed lays in wait for the correct conditions to burst forth into the light provided by entropy and dominate it. The plant consumes the energy of the universe in order to reorder it according to the attentive impulses of chlorophyll.
Attention is hence an inevitable fact of life. The questions arising from this fact being: What has an influence on the direction of attention? Can we direct our own attention? Can we influence the direction of another’s attention? Is the human history of attention unique? Is there a distinction between good and bad attention?
What has an influence on the direction of attention? As previously mentioned, the natural direction of attention and the things which attract it are those which serve continuation. Continuation of the will underneath life. Those impulses which have passed through forms of life to serve propagation are behind all expressions of the will. Equally, as nature is creative through the incorporation of entropy as a bulwark against the vulnerability of static forms of life to a shifting existence, sources of mutation are also causes of the directions of attention.
Can we direct our own attention? Can we influence the direction of another’s attention? The naturalistic drives of attention can be augmented to the same extent that the natural environment can be manipulated. Artificial hormones can intensify attention in the libido, the color of decor can make us feel more hungry or more willing to spend money and silence with soft lighting can dull our attentive drive by lowering our heart rate or lull us into a premature sleep.
This fact equally applies to the rest of natural life as it does the human being. Fertilizer or the strong lights of grow houses can accelerate the growth of plants. Excess food unregulated under the grasping appetite of farm animals leads to plump products for slaughter. The timed spacing of feeding at the zoo creates entertaining demonstrations as a result of the attention of exotic animals towards the goal of their sustenance.
Is the human history of attention unique? The human use of tools in concert with our mutant abstract thinking by virtue of the prefrontal cortex along with our propensity to prize communal expressions have lead to intensifying super-stimuli and more sophisticated hijackings of attention. What begins with opposable thumbs ends in the reforming of attention in the technological reflection of computerized stimulation. The need for warmth and importance of the familial unit is expressed through the ancient hearth, the loci of the prehistoric dwelling. Controlled fire was, for man, rightly the center of attention. Providing utility in the cooking of sustenance, satiating the need for warmth and fostering the dissemination of communal conversation and music. Attention is expressed by the human of recent history through his technological progress. Examples are found in the way this has caused the reorientation of extropic space. Artificial light deregulated the labor of man in relation to the sun, central heating decentralized the attention of the home from the main heat source and the television refocused it back around popular entertainment.
Is there a distinction between good and bad attention? Philosophically speaking, “good” and “bad” are loaded terms. But, there is a certain ‘natural’ attention. It being purely a function of the propagation of life. A refocused attention, which has been hijacked as a means to serve alternative ends, is often as a result of the domination of humanity or the invasion of other parasites. Attention is equally retarded towards unintended ends by selective breeding as it is in the hedonism of pure masturbation. This is not to say that these are necessarily “good” or “bad”. But, one of the main conclusions that should be drawn from what I have described here should be that the human race in contemporary times is uniquely placed to creatively master the means and ends of that insatiable attention present in all forms of life.