Another question that I want to put here that’s related to this as well is why do humans have the ability to focus on a certain thing at a time and how do humans judge what is worth focusing on at a certain point in time ? An example why can’t I watch a movie and sit on the sidewalk and watch the cars and people go by at the same time why do I have to focus my attention mostly on one or the other ?
- You’re not omniscient.
- Define everything.
- Even if you could define everything and were omniscient, some things are just not that important. Imagine what it would look like if you acted as if everything were equally important.
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If everything was important life would be badass and everything would have meaning.
I want you to talk about poop like it’s the most important thing in the universe and then get back to me.
One can focus on more than one thing at at time, but not everything at once. When playing sports one can be tracking many things at once. People can listen to music while jogging and can manage to sing alone and not fall down, even in places where they have to avoid other people and potential obstacles in the terrain. Of course, your more likely to mess up if you are doing that.
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To some doctors it is it can show important health issues with a person if they have them.
You’re right. That’s pretty badass and meaningful. I don’t know what I was thinking.
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There is a very simple explanation for this. It’s called the crow epistemology. It has to do with how many perceptual concretes you can hold in your consciousness at one time. It’s based on a study of crows done in the 1920’s. Crows can handle 3-4. For the crow it goes one, two, three, many. For we humans, it’s about 7.
For example, you can see the number of marks is 3 without counting: III.
But when it gets to 7, it’s a little more difficult: IIIIIII. But how about this: IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII. It’s impossible. This is why run-on sentences and walls of text are so annoying; they overload your crow.
But humans evolved a way around this limitation: Concepts. concepts turn an unlimited number of perceptual concretes into one mental equivalent of a concrete. The concept man stands for all men, everywhere, and at any time.
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…it’s kind of in our DNA. How’d that get there without a mind programming it or being its ground/composition?
…even before there were men/humans…persons?
Oh. No before. You see.
That’s related to working memory. But the OP is asking about focusing on a number of things at once. These are different cognitive domains. A crow eating roadkill off a trafficked road can probably tracks as many variables as we can. What are the other crows doing, is something large barreling toward me, is that bone around the eye or eye, what is that sound.
It does depend on what the OP is thinking about. We can multiprocess a hundred tasks, but not at once. But yes, language and concepts allow us to organize a day and do many, many, things ‘simultaneously’ if we spread now out to a longer piece of time.
But if we are talking about focusing on a number of things at the exact same time, I doubt we’re much better than crows. yes, a general could track in a certain sense thousands of ‘entities’, but crows also batch. 10,000 leaves, no one tree. Unless they want to focus on a single leaf. A crow being chased by a hawk through tree branches ina forest is tracking many, many entities, I think probably at our limit, perhaps better. It can’t count them, but it can be affected by them and make choices at a very high rate - or it dies.
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What is it called when you don’t have to count stuff one by one (or batch by batch), but it is still all accounted for?
Gonna let you in on a little secret…
If you put one arm in hot water and the other in cold water you don’t feel both. In fact you don’t even feel the average. Why? Because focusing comes from us, not from outside us.To focus on everything is by defnition NOT TO FOCUS AT ALL.
Michael Polanyi made a great deal of this as an epistemological fact.
- “Personal participation is the universal principle of knowing.”
- “Any attempt rigorously to eliminate our human perspective from our picture of the world must lead to absurdity.”
It got there by chemistry. It’s not a program; it is a chemical molecule. It’s like asking how the wind blows without a mind wishing it? It’s called physics. The ultimate cause of everything, except the universe, is identity in action.
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I like this one!^ 
At least 4 errors in what you say
- If I killl you by shooting you can say either that I killed you or the bullet killed you or both.
The wind blows not of its own accord.
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DNA is a program, only its ordering and not its chemical composition matters.
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Physics naturally (!) gives rise to metaphysics , your “how’ explanation leads to a ‘why’ question.As in 'why is there any wind at all?”
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Though I accept essentialism and you seem too , many do not. Neil Degrasse Tyson would sneer at 'identity in action" as did many dumb scientists. I am old enough to remeber the incredibly dumb Carl Sagan who said : "I am a collection of water, calcium and organic molecules called Carl Sagan. You are a collection of almost identical molecules with a different collective label." One of the stupidest things I ever heard (until Neil Degrasse Tyson and Bill Nye arrived, that is)
So there,
No, a crow can’t. That’s what the study found out. They found that crows can only keep track of 3 perceptual units at a time. That’s why you can’t knit a sweater while talking on the phone and cooking. Cognitive overload.
I’ve just finished designing a revolutionary training program for watercolor painting. The problem with the traditional method of teaching watercolor and the reason so many people quit, thinking they just “don’t have the spark,” thinking they are untalented, not “born with the gift”, not up to snuff, hopelessly inept, is because of cognitive overload; too many things to keep track of at one time, such as water control, pigment load, values relationships, brush handling, timeing, wet in wet bleed, color theory, finding the big connected middle tone shape, simplifying, perspective, design, composition, obeying the rules of watercolor, instead my method works brilliantly by reducign cognitive load, the number of variables a student must keep track of, starting the first month with hight intensity rapid repetition, of of two tone black and white values studies finding and connecting all the midtone values and darks in the composition and connecting them all into one, large middle tone gray flat wash, this is the secret to loose expressive watercolor, and by limiting the number of variables the student has to track at the same time, thereby allowing the student to relax and paint, focusing only on 2 variables: paint thickness and finding that large connected shape (if you are getting tired, then skip to the next paragraph), I call it the “wax on, wax off” method, and it consists of rapid drills which shut down the left hand side of the brain, and activate flow state by rapid drill repetitions that don’t allow for negotiation, analysis, etc,; a phase shift in consciousness to a state in which the “inner watercolor savant” can come out much like the phase shift from pre-classical spacetime geometry where matter, time, measurement, signal propogation, etc, can exist, to one of classical spacetime geometry where the smooting of the metric of space allows for stable quantum field pertervations to exist.
Have I made my point? I did develop a revolutionary new watercolor training system, by the way. It works, I’ve tried it. It solves all the problems that cause people to quit or give up on being artists. And it was my understanding of the crow epistemology, as we call it in Objectivism, that allowed me to do it.
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You should like me, I’m amazing. 
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It is analogous to a program. Its ordering is its chemical composition. You are treating a metaphor as if it were literal. Category error.
The ability to focus our minds to a task is the fundamental expression of free will. We can move our mental muscle just like we can move our biceps. But our focus is limited.
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