Benefits of selective, willful evasion?

[KacyRay]

Yesterday I was running on the treadmill, and I was thinking about my habit of trying to ensure I don't look down at the clock ticking down too long. I play music, I cover it with a towel... different methods that I use in order to ensure I *do not* know exactly how much time I have to spend running on that damn thing.

I don't know why, but the thought of Rand on a treadmill popped into my mind (just stay with me on this one, please...), and I was thinking about her position that she could deal with any reality, as long as she knew and understood it, and that evasion was always wrong.

Yet when i run, I don't want to know how much time is left. I prefer to be kept guessing. It made me wonder if she would watch the clock count down every grueling second... of if she, like most folks, prefer to shut off their minds and deliberately distract themselves in order to make it bearable.

Of course, this applies to other things as well. Sometimes the fact is, people prefer not to know exactly what they're facing. I've seen times on this ship where one person says "Hey man, we're almost two months in... just 6 left!" and someone else will say "Come on! I don't wanna head about how much time is left.. it just makes it feel worse!"

I remember when I was younger, I used to set my clocks 15 minutes fast and deliberately *force* myself to (just about) forget that I had done so... and that was the best method I could come up with to get to work on time. [Note: I could not pull this off today even if I needed to... thankfully I no longer need to.]

So here's my point - I've found it useful to deliberately *blank out* information that serves no functional purpose and, in fact, only serves to distract and make a tough situation tougher.

Now, would Rand have agreed that this is a rational act? Did she ever comment on anything like that?

I hold that it is perfectly rational to blot unhelpful information from one's consciousness. But this would seem to run contrary to Objectivist thought... I'm not sure Rand would have considered any information "unhelpful".

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Kacy,

Rand.had a word she used a lot: "selectivity."

It's one thing to be aware of what you filter out. You know you are filtering out the details of time. You are being selective, But you are aware of time. Things still have a start, middle and end.

it's another to refuse to think at all and just do something important any old way, i.e., without focus.

When Rand says evasion, I believe she is talking about this last and not about refusing to overload a disciplined brain during a task.

Michael

[Guyau]

Michael, yes. I don't recall where I read or heard it, but at least one Objectivist has remarked that the essence of focus is knowing what you are doing, knowing your context, and openness for such knowing.

Kacy, I recall one occasion on which Rand, up in the years, was asked something like what she thought about her coming death. She replied that since there was nothing to be done about it, she did not think about it (or maybe, why think about it?). On another occasion, however, she answered by sharing some conception she had since youth (since reading some Schopenhauer or Lucretius, I would venture) about the world ending when she would die. I do think keeping the context that one's life will end is pertinent to living. I know that if you learn the probable horizon of when you will die is pulled way in, it can change you priorities, not because they were wrong in the longevity context, only because the context has changed.

One selectivity that has seemed important to happiness in people I've known is a sort of trained-up selectivity over horrible things that have happened in the past. That is some process, perhaps pretty organic, not entirely willful, of reducing the weight and preoccupation of such things in one's remaining days. I recall a remark of Jackie Gleason as he was nearing death. He said "Let's remember the good times." As one goes along, it seems to me right to work on lightening the weight of the past bad things, even while being able to state how bad they were. It is a work to not be (always) drawn into the concretely rich memories of the bad things and relish what has been good.

[caroljane]

Michael, yes. I don't recall where I read or heard it, but at least one Objectivist has remarked that the essence of focus is knowing what you are doing, knowing your context, and openness for such knowing.

Kacy, I recall one occasion on which Rand, up in the years, was asked something like what she thought about her coming death. She replied that since there was nothing to be done about it, she did not think about it (or maybe, why think about it?). On another occasion, however, she answered by sharing some conception she had since youth (since reading some Schopenhauer or Lucretius, I would venture]

Housman read them too, I would venture.

"Good people, do you love your lives

And have you ears for sense?

I have a knife like other knives

that cost me thirteen pence.

I need but stick it in my heart

And down will come the sky

And Earth's foundations will depart

And all you folk will die."

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Stephen,

There's another consideration that is more implicit, but I still think it's relevant.

We all know Rand defined ethics as "A code of values to guide man's choices."

The part that is not elaborated on very much (at least in the things I have read and the discussions I have gone through) is that a choice only happens in the present, but from the view of preparing for choosing (i.e., setting the principles), all such choices are still in the future.

So if you are setting a code to guide your future choices, it only makes sense to exclude information that will be irrelevant when you get there.

I believe if we step back from the specific topic of ethics and look at the mental process that underlies this, it can be applied to other things--like contemplating your own death. If your orientation is toward living life well, then focusing on your own inevitable death in the future is irrelevant. You don't deny it, but you block it from occupying the limited space you have in your awareness so you can focus on things that are relevant. To put this on the timeline, you cannot choose whether you will die or not. So if you want to live life well and think about the future, you will seed your mind with things that are relevant to choices you will be able to make and block out things that are irrelevant. Including the upcoming events you cannot choose.

To put it another way, if you are on a ship that is sinking, you do not focus on why the ship is sinking, how it could be different, the things people did wrong to make it sink, or the accidents that caused the disaster. The ship is going down and you can't do anything about it. But you will focus on the things where choice is possible, like how the hell you are going to save yourself. You can choose what you do until you become incapacitated or die. And you will only look at the whys of the ship's sinking when they are relevant to that purpose.

To use Kacy's treadmill example, he said, "It made me wonder if she would watch the clock count down every grueling second... of if she, like most folks, prefer to shut off their minds and deliberately distract themselves in order to make it bearable."

If focusing on detailed measurements cause you anxiety during a task that requires effort, it is not only irrelevant to the task, it is counterproductive. You only have so much brain to apply to the task. It's far better to fill the awareness space with things that will get you to finish it. And for icing on that cake, if you can find things that will get you to finish it and feel good about it, you have used your awareness in the best manner possible.

During writing, during the writer's block times, Rand would play solitaire to distract the focus part of her awareness so she could let the rest of her mind drift. For as flawed as the editing is in the writing books based on her ad hoc courses, I believe there are some valuable things to glean from them. One is that she goes into how to access the subconscious by turning off critical thinking. And she dwells on it. (She didn't mention solitaire in them, though. The solitaire came from the biographies and I concluded the reason.)

In other words, what some people would call evasion is precisely what Rand would say (and actually said) you need to get a creative job done.

Her advice on revising your work follows the same process. The first revision is for structure and the second is for style. She specifically says the mind cannot hold everything in focus, so you need to orient it to look only for predetermined things during revision. That certainly does not mean if she refused to consider and correct a poorly worded phrase where she knows better during her structural revision, she would be evading. She just blocked that out because it was not relevant to the task she was doing.

According to David Rock, a person who had done a lot of research in neuroscience and modern psychology in order to formulate a method for people to improve their brain use, especially for productivity, he says the prefrontal cortex, the seat of our self-awareness, basically executes five functions: recalling (drawing things from the rest of the brain), memorizing (shoving things down into the rest of the brain), understanding (connecting things to what is in the rest of the brain), deciding (choosing among things) and inhibiting (blocking things from occupying and hogging the awareness "stage," and I mean stage here as a metaphorical proscenium, not as event). You can get a pretty good set of notes on his main book here.

Nobody can say for sure what Rand would have done, but I believe she would have liked his approach. A good hint for my reason for believing this, in addition to her discussions of the subconscious for creativity, is in her discussion of crow epistemology for what psychologists call short-term memory in ITOE. Interestingly, the first major work I know of on this was Milner's The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two, which gives a maximum limit of 7 units, Rand gives 5 or 6, and Rock narrows it down further to 4, which he likens to actors on a stage as a very interesting metaphor).

I think a lot of people misunderstand Rand's meaning of evasion because they dismiss or do not even know her context. To Rand, thinking is made up of hierarchical knowledge that is automated by integration and deployed by chosen values. The term hierarchical by itself already implies selectivity and exclusion.

And selectivity and exclusion are not the same thing as evasion, which to Rand would mean a willful corruption of the thought process, i.e., accepting a fundamental contradiction to the hierarchy as valid, allowing whim-like elements in the integrations, blanking out values, and so on.

Michael

[syrakusos]

Having done the treadmills, etc., I think at MSK above cuts to core of the problem. For myself, I actually enjoy the process, but do not enjoy watching the counter. It is unproductive. Focusing on the decrementer is far more painful than mere running, rowing, pumping or whatever. I enjoy the process and I let my mind go to other places. The same is true of long walks. I easily put out six, eight or more miles. (I used to call my wife to come get me. I could walk home, physically, but it would take hours, a waste of time at that point) It is not a matter of evasion, but of selective focus.

I think that Nathaniel Branden deals with the subject better on the basis of suppression and repression. Suppressing an inconvenient emotional response is one thing, but forming a habit of that becomes repression, the basis for neurosis.

[Brant Gaede]

Having done the treadmills, etc., I think at MSK above cuts to core of the problem. For myself, I actually enjoy the process, but do not enjoy watching the counter. It is unproductive. Focusing on the decrementer is far more painful than mere running, rowing, pumping or whatever. I enjoy the process and I let my mind go to other places. The same is true of long walks. I easily put out six, eight or more miles. (I used to call my wife to come get me. I could walk home, physically, but it would take hours, a waste of time at that point) It is not a matter of evasion, but of selective focus.

I think that Nathaniel Branden deals with the subject better on the basis of suppression and repression. Suppressing an inconvenient emotional response is one thing, but forming a habit of that becomes repression, the basis for neurosis.

Suppression is a conscious choice. Repression just happens out of inability to deal with something or a misunderstanding. This is common with children and trauma more generally. Abreactive psychological work can be valuable here, but it may seem like tossing about commercial dynamite and the therapist has to be really good This is above and/or beyond "talk therapy."

--Brant

[Mike V]

I think it is an issue of what you are focusing on. With the treadmill example, you are focusing not so much on how much time is remaining. I mean, you started the clock at x-amount of time, so you know from the start how much time you will be running. The constant looking down at the time is more an issue of you wanting to focus on how much time of this blasted tough work is remaining, am I close to being done, etc. So it's not an issue of blanking out on facts of reality, it's an issue of blanking out on negative thoughts that only serve to take you away from the task at hand. It would be the same thing as going to work and constantly looking up at the clock. Your desire is not to know the reality of the time of day at any given minute; your focus is on hating your work and hoping it won't last very much longer.