A Jedi master once said that “your focus determines your reality.” The insights of Cognitive Science give deeper meaning to this wisdom. The medium of our awareness – the way we relate to the world – determines our salience landscape: what stands out to us, what we find relevant. When we are gripped by a particular homeostatic need, such as hunger or thirst, we perceive the world through this need. When we need water, for example, we look at the world thirstily. Everything around us stands out based on its relationship to water. When we are out in a crowded city and need to find a bathroom, nearly everything in the world becomes divided into two categories: “bathroom here” or “no bathroom here”. In that moment, everything else is backgrounded by our attention, and may as well not exist at all.
Our brain navigates the world through predictive processing; it creates models of itself and the world, and casts hypotheses based on these models. We are constantly anticipating reality based on these hypotheses. This makes human beings profoundly adaptive, but also vulnerable to self-deceptive biases. If we get used to looking through a particular state or sensation, we can lock ourselves into a specific salience landscape. Then we begin to disproportionately pick out details that confirm and reproduce this state, and reinvent the same patterns. When this happens, it is difficult for us to change our perspective. The frames of our attention determine what is salient, and salience determines what we see and how we act. When salience becomes narrow, we can fall into addictive and repetitive patterns that close us to the world, and to ourselves.
Sometimes, when we’re very lucky, someone who loves us can catch sight of these patterns, challenge them, and help shake us loose from these predictive models and their salience landscapes. When this happens, we undergo what Michael Polanyi called a transparency-opacity shift. The state we are looking through (our focal awareness) becomes available for us to look at (our explicit awareness), just like taking off your glasses and inspecting them. These moments of inspection can dislodge us from our stuck place, and open the world again.
This self-examination becomes more difficult when we’re alone. We need tools that can show us these patterns in real time, and alert us when we might be lapsing into old familiar tunes, or recreating a foggy world by looking at it through a dirty pair of glasses.
This is the purpose of AGNI.