Remarks on...
Awareness determining the output of attention, artificial intelligence missing out on that, and how discoveries are made
Watch and read the Extended: A Guide to Physical Materialization (Part 3) on Volition and Intent
Brought Forth…
Increase in awareness is not necessarily increase in attention. (That is to say, you need to have a certain attentiveness in order to gauge how aware you are.) For a sustained level of awareness that is high enough, including to know how attentive you are and toward what, a certain balance of "charge" is necessary within the system, a calibrated intensity that sustains. And that “impulse” can only come from a place of attention, paradoxically—but not.
Attention can be loose or focused. Awareness accompanies it, and even enmeshes itself within it when engaged with, but resides independent of it, as a background canvas, more so, a foundational ground for attention to operate from and with.
The output of your attention is directly connected to the level of your awareness. The other way around, the level of your awareness largely determines the output of your attention—the clarity in which you’re able to conduct your action and how precise it is—influencing in the quality of the result you get.
In the case of machinery, hardware that is being operated by a system running on a foundational software with an aggregated large language model (LLM, i.e., artificial intelligence) being used to define its outputs (and here, we can easily make a parallel comparison to our body and its biological processes), the “level of awareness” of the system needs to be calibrated in such a way that it does not undermine the output being given by the “attention” models working in tandem with it. That is to say that attention alone does the job, but does not equate to awareness itself, what it is, what it can do, including drive attention. (And systems relying on attention alone are missing out.)
On the other hand, emulating awareness is not quite the same thing as awareness—a sentience of itself, a “knowing” of itself as an existence, one of its own. In order to reach that closeness in precision, the hardware architecture takes what it takes, which is another leap in design altogether [since the “type of awareness” we get out of a computing system is largely determined by its hardware] . . . but that’s for another time.
Show-How…
What’s important to us is the fact that you can direct awareness by dabbling with the intensity of charge contained within the “vehicle of your attention” (the conglomerate of particles holding/housing what you could call “you” inside the body, i.e., the location of your sentience, or the place you’re doing the perceiving from and with), how charged it is within your system, that is, in relation to the systems of the body, including the body’s awareness. Yes, you guessed it right, your awareness is different (not the same thing) than the awareness of your body.
Ask yourself how alert you are right now. Then grasp if what you caught was actually the alertness of the body instead. [✓]
Now move to being “aware” of your surroundings. Notice how when I asked you to become aware, you had to engage attention first in order to do it. [✓] (“Attentive volition,” is what I call it.)
And how, even though you were not attentive to your surroundings before I asked you this, your body was already aware [of its surroundings] all by itself [✓], without the need of attention whatsoever, as awareness supersedes it.
Good to Know…
Awareness comes ingrained within the physical constituency in itself (or, within physical constituencies in themselves), and takes over when regularly and consistently engaged with, assigning attention to a secondary role, and even rendering it obsolete.
What about “conscious awareness”?!
Taking aside the fact that when we refer to being “consciously aware,” we’re mostly referring to being “mentally alert,” the act of performing cognition (the engaging with the brain; how it processes the “reading” of electromagnetic signals related to the “thing” or “impact” that triggered cognition to start with, and translates it back into a higher level concept you can understand, while signaling the appropriate sensory system into the activity output, e.g., speaking, or even thinking, for that matter), you should become attentive to the fact that, within this context, it is actually referring to how cognition (engaging the body’s direct awareness) relates to your awareness.
You can equate your awareness to the level of your attention, initially. The more focused your attention the higher your awareness. Until awareness (at least, in relation to the subject of your focus) takes over and becomes understanding. Then, you can only move into “knowing”—when attention goes “loose” and you’re caught within the bounds of its “vehicle,” unadvisedly.
Unexpectedly you “know” of something, experientially, and in every other way, and you might not know at all yet how to explain it; the body and the brain will have to do some catching up before you can even put it into words. That’s how new discoveries are made: unveiled directly from knowing instead of knowledge.