These quotes on ‘consciousness’ and ‘attention’ made me ponder. Especially when I think about how we seem to waste a lot of attention on the irrelevant and trivial these days. I remember growing up gorging on books and that is probably the thing that has made me who I am. As Iain says here, subject and object both change in the process of attention. And now, with the ubiquity of technology, social media, what not… what are we paying attention to…? Probably points to the reason for the hollowness and shallowness that abounds everywhere…

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"The choice we make of how we dispose our consciousness is the ultimate creative act: it renders the world what it is. It is, therefore, a moral act: it has consequences."

 “Attention changes the world. How you attend to it changes what it is you find there. What you find then governs the kind of attention you will think it appropriate to pay in the future. And so it is that the world you recognize (which will not be exactly the same as my world) is “firmed up” — and brought into being.

[…]

Attention is not just another “cognitive function”: it is… the disposition adopted by one’s consciousness towards the world. Absent, present, detached, engaged, alienated, empathic, broad or narrow, sustained or piecemeal, it therefore has the power to alter whatever it meets. Since our consciousness plays some part in what comes into being, the play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged. So how you attend to something — or don’t attend to it — matters a very great deal.”

~ Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World