selective attention vs psychokinesis

do we see red coats worn everywhere because, coincidentally, an epidemic of red coats was brought to explicit consciousness by selective attention? or do we see them everywhere, psychokinetically, to prove to our inner thinker that they are truly everywhere?

and what's more, which is evolutionarily beneficial?

reproduction used to be the name of the game; now, those of us who have developed higher intelligence are interrupting the expression of our survival traits with a panoply of stimuli over which to ruminate. numerous strains of fly - mayfly, cattle grub, Bembix - have only one objective upon maturity: propagation. they have no mouth. when you live for sex alone you do not need to be attentive to anything else, and, as such, there is no call for your mind to be selective. this works for such creatures, evolutionarily speaking. they fertilize, lay parasitic nests and call it good. there's no hierarchical categorization of voluntary or involuntary attention, and there's certainly no psychokenesis... right?

here's what i think is interesting about the concept of mind over matter: there is no trace of the more basic mechanism from which it evolved that is given any regard in evolutionary biology. whyyy?! because it doesn't appeal to congenital impulses? that's complete crap. psychokenesis is just as relevant to survival as inhibition of return (a cohort of attention which keeps a creature from re-attending to an object), it's just shoved into the corner there is no observable suggestive behavior in lower animals. personally (and also, reluctantly), i think it's a concept just as observable in the morphogenetic fields of an amoeba as in the wannabe-telekinetic demonstrations of humans who think that bending a spoon by exerting more force than you convince yourself to be necessary is proof of internal electromagnetic command (no, not Sheldrake's concept of MF, the Gurwitsch original).

selective attention. psychokenesis.

i'm chewing.

empty thoughts II

2. “The ability to categorize is what makes it possible to use previous experience to guide the interpretation of new experience, for without categorization, memory is virtually useless” (Jackendoff 1987).

What kind of function would memory have if it were not categorized? Would memory be retrievable, and in what form? There must be some evolutionary reason to have uncategorized memory, because before memory could become associative, it makes sense that it would have begun with a single category with all information lumped together…

empty thoughts I

1. one of the keystone deficits of autism is the inability to filter visual/auditory stimuli into hierarchical importance. evolutionarily speaking, i wonder what it is about “goal-, ancestral- and expertise-derived criteria” that is lost on these victims. a way in which autistic people cope with this lack of filtering is to focus obsessively on a single thing to override all the other stimuli they cannot make sense of at once. why do they preferentially focus on inanimate objects (banging head against the wall, counting toothpicks, etc.) when animate objects are more crucial for survival? Is there support for the counter hypothesis (“no mechanisms for deploying attention to animate objects”)?

*New et al 2007. Category specific attention...