XIV
Desire Selects
A mind cannot attend equally to everything. Care changes salience. What we love can teach us where to look. What we love can also teach us to see what we hope is there.
Salient is not the same as true.
A mind cannot attend equally to everything.
- A broken sherd
- A line of verse
- A face in a crowd
- An unanswered question
- A tool on a table
- Light in a window
The field proved something about the looker. Attention is a selection. Salient is not the same as true.
Calibrate
Desire can sustain attention, motivate study, make detail vivid, and keep a question alive. It can also project, select evidence, ignore contradiction, overinterpret coincidence, and confuse longing with knowledge.
Can teach
- sustain attention
- motivate study
- make detail vivid
- keep a question alive
Can distort
- project what is hoped for
- select convenient evidence
- ignore contradiction
- confuse longing with knowledge
An observer notices a date, a number, a glance, a repeated motif. Several interpretations remain possible. Desire may motivate the investigation. It cannot choose the result in advance.
A signal
The coincidence is too exact to ignore. Desire has found a pattern that wants a name.
A coincidence
Minds are good at drawing figures in a crowded field. The same points could support another story.
An open question
The observation is real. The meaning is not yet earned. Keep the chronology. Keep the counterevidence. Keep looking.
Calibration is the refusal to let longing write the evidence. Leave more than one reading standing.
Instruments of calibration: chronology, primary source, counterevidence, alternative explanation, independent measurement, another person’s autonomy, the possibility of being wrong.
This is mature Eros.
Notes · 1
- Kent C. Berridge and Terry E. Robinson, on incentive salience: wanting and liking can come apart. A modern instrument placed beside the ancient material.
Eve
Desire Selects
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