Child’s Mind also brings me to another thing though, whilst it’s great that we can find wonder in the mundane, there is a reason why we seek novelty, and going fully down the path of the Child’s Mind and constantly experiencing wonder at how crazy cool trees are with their ever branching structure?! Or romanescos?! and then never doing anything else is also a kind of tricked desire, just that we are using mental techniques, rather than technologically exploiting brain architecture.
I’m getting reminded of this video by Peter Whidden where the RL AI that gets its reward in part from novelty (seeing screens the reward evaluator hasn’t seen before), so that it goes out into the world and explores, finds new things, new paths, new Pokémon.
But then, it finds this great spot, where it can just stare at the waves of water and the wind-blown field of flowers; ever changing.
In a sense, it just stays there, enjoying the scene.
And just sitting at the ocean, seeing the wave crash onto shore, only for the water to recede again (and little sandpipers1 to rush in, pick through the muddy sand and run away again as the next wave hits), to just stare into a fire is really great.
But eventually, we will do other things again. Without a good conversation, even these things aren’t interesting for long.
And this is good.
I value seeing and experiencing new things, but they should be new things, not just an endless stream of novel permutations of a random process.
TVs in a restaurant are already so incredibly distracting, my attention constantly getting drawn to the ever changing, meaning imbued lights on the screen providing more novel (amongst other) stimuli than a person sitting across ever could.
Footnotes
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little shore birds, that scurry in and out of the waves :3
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