Augustine soon turned to other concerns, and concluded this discussion of memory by plaintively asking,
How many thoughts can you think at once?
How many feelings can you feel at once? How many different things can you simultaneously ‘pay attention’ to? How many contexts can be active at once in your context-box? To what extent can you be aware of how many mental activities?
The answers to such questions depend on what we mean by ‘aware’ and ‘attention.’ We usually think of ‘attention’ as positive, and highly regard those persons who are able to ‘concentrate’ on some particular thing, without getting distracted by other things. However, we could also see “attention” as negative—because not all our resources can function at once—so there always is a limit to the range of things we can think about at the same time. Nevertheless, we can train ourselves to overcome at least some of those built-in constraints. [See
In any case, in our high level thinking we can only maintain a few different ‘trains of thought’ before we start to become confused. However, at our lower reactive levels, we carry on hundreds of different activities. Imagine that you are walking and talking among your friends while carrying a glass of wine:[148]
All this happens while you talk, and none of it seems to require much thought. Yet dozens of processes must be at work to keep that fluid from spilling out—while hundreds of other systems work to move your body around. Yet few of these processes ‘enter your mind’ as you roam about the room—presumably because they use resources that work in separate realms that scarcely ever come into conflict with what you are usually “thinking about.”
It is much the same with language and speech. You rarely have even the faintest sense of what selects your normal response to the words of your friends, or which ideas you choose to express—nor of how any of your processes work to group your words into phrases so that each gets smoothly connected to the next. All this seems so simple and natural that you never wonder how your context-box keeps track of what you have already said—as well as to whom you have mentioned them.
What limits the number of contexts that a person can quickly turn on and off? One very simple theory would be that our context-box has a limited size, so there is only a certain amount of room in which to store such information. A better conjecture would be that each of our well-developed realms acquires a context box of its own. Then, some processes in each of those realms could do work on their own, without getting into conflicts until when they have to compete for the same resources.
For example, it’s easy to both walk and talk because these use such different sets of resources. However, it is much harder to both speak and write (or to listen and read) simultaneously, because both tasks will compete for the same language-resources. I suspect such conflicts get even worse when you think about what you’re thinking about, because every such act will change what is in the context box that keeps track of what you were thinking about.
At our higher Reflective levels, our representations span many scales of time and space, and our current Self-Representations can range from thinking “I’m holding this cup” to “I am a Mathematician,” or “I am a person who lives on the Earth,” or sometimes, perhaps, only a little more than a constant, vague sense of ‘being aware.’ To be sure, a person may also have the impression of thinking all these simultaneously, but I suspect that these are constantly shifting; our sense of thinking them all at once comes from the “Immanence Illusion” of §4-1, because the contents of our various Context-Boxes are so rapidly accessible.
What Controls the Persistence of Processes?
Edmund Burke: “He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper. This amicable conflict with difficulty obliges us to an intimate acquaintance with our object and compels us to consider it in all its relations. It will not suffer us to be superficial.”
Whatever you’re trying to think about, you have other concerns that compete with it—and each should persist for long enough to justify the effort and time it will cost to switch them on and off. Still, everyone knows such feelings as these:
When none of the methods we’ve tried have worked, how much longer should we persist? What decides when we should quit—and lose whatever investment we’ve spent? We always have at least some concern with how we conserve our materials, energy, money, and friends—and each such concern would seem to suggest that we have some Critics that detect when that particular element may be getting into short supply, and then suggest ways conserve or replenish it. Such critics would lead us to think,
The simplest way to conserve your time is to abandon the goals that consume too much of it. But renouncing goals will often conflict with your ideals, as when they are things that you’ve promised to do, or that others already expect you to do. Then you might also have to suppress those values, or even regard them as handicaps—but going against your high-level ideals can lead to cascades that you recognize as tension, guilt, distress, or fear—along with the shame and humiliation we talked about earlier. So making such decisions can thus cause you to become “emotional.”
It seems to me that it is a myth that there exists a ‘rational’ way to think. One is always comparing various goals, and deciding which ones to put aside, but the apparent merits of those alternatives will always depend on other aspects of your mental state.
In any case, each Way to Think will be useless unless can persist for long enough to make some progress. To do this, it will need at least some ability to keep other processes from stopping it, and this could be done to some extent by controlling which of your Critics are working now. Let’s consider a few extremes of this.
