Focus of attention: confidence, confidelity and confusion

Framing Global Transformation through the Polyhedral Merkabah (Part #4)

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Attention: The previous points frame and highlight the extent to which the concern at this time is fundamentally about the collective focus of attention. Somewhat ironically, and possibly tragically given the challenges of the times, this plays out most evidently in the preoccupation of marketing of products and services, most obviously through advertising.

Advertising recognizes an attention span measured in seconds, understood in terms of stickiness, the challenge is clarified by Mauricio Duque (Is your website ready for the 5-seconds-attention-span challenge? Snap2Objects, 2008):

After decades of TV, Radio, Magazines and now Internet, we find ourselves in a society overwhelmed by information begging for attention. As a result of that we have a world with an attention span now shorter than a goldfish's. How is the media and specially the web facing that? And how can we take advantage on way the human mind works? ...

Attention span has decreased in the last 30 years and TV is mostly blamed for that - when you have a generation used to watching more than 6 hours of TV per day, usually presented in chunks of around 12 minutes. So you get gradually conditioned to feel anxiety after doing the same task for 12 minutes or more.

The issue has been usefully framed in terms of how the daily news and social media "harvest" time and attention, as described by Tim Wu (The Attention Merchants, 2016). That description is itself usefully matched by that of Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway (Merchants of Doubt: how a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming, 2010) and of Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky (Manufacturing Consent: the political economy of the mass media, 1988).

Appropriately, the study of Tim Wu has also been distributed with the subtitle The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads (2016). Current development and promotion of augmented reality will exacerbate this.

Targetting: With the preoccupations of advertising understood as an exercise in targetting, the symbols above can be interpreted in relation to such a preoccupation -- with respect to collective attention and focus. From the left in the table below, ironically the symbols are as evident in framing targets as they are in framing the elusive cognitive quests highlighted above. More specifically those on the left are also to be found in the design of crosshairs (or reticles) in sighting devices required for target acquisition in quest of a "bullseye". Variants of the more complex symbols are to be found in framing the target acquisition process of firing a missile at a moving target.

Degrees of framing the quest for the elusive
"Target acquisition" ?			"Aspirational quest" ?
"Cross-hairs"	Triangle / Circle	Venn diagrams	Stars	Tetra / Sphere	Double tetra / Spheres

The concern here is with the focusing of attention implied by the progression to the right in the above table as the "target" becomes increasingly elusive in cognitive terms. That progression can then be understood in terms of degrees of "target elusiveness" and the inappropriateness of such military metaphors (Enhancing Sustainable Development Strategies through Avoidance of Military Metaphors, 1998). The complex image on the far right derives from the implications of Sphere packing as a fundamental spatio-temporal pattern (2012), as explored with respect to a cuboctahedral pattern of spherical polyhedra around a truncated tetrahedron by Keith Critchlow (Order in Space: a design source book, 1969). This is discussed further in a broader context (Imaginative Reconfiguration of a post-Apocalyptic Global Civilization: engaging cognitively with the illusion of the "End of the World", 2012).

The understanding of "target acquisition" thus becomes transformed into aspiration in the quest for inspiration -- with which religions are so notably identified. The transformation is itself subtle, with its implications for identification with what has been hitherto framed as a target, as implied by the arguments of the classic Zen in the Art of Archery (1948) by Eugen Herrigel.

Confidence and belief: Just as "target acquisition" is intimately related to degrees of confidence that it has been effectively acquired, the progression also implies a challenge with respect to any sense of collective confidence and the manner in which this is related to (strategic) consensus. As suggested above, the cognitive use of triangular symbols frames an elusive insight at the confluence or focus framed by the cognitive significance attributed to the verticies of any such triangle.

It is the elusive nature of this confluence that evokes the questioning so ably articulated by Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion, 2000). However that same mode of argument may be readily adapted to other elusive cognitive conditions implied by such frames, whether triangular or otherwise, as argued separately (The Consensus Delusion: mysterious attractor undermining global civilization as currently imagined, 2011). The elusive nature of the quest can be recognized in the ineffectual initiatives with respect to interfaith reconciliation, academic interdisciplinarity, and the psychosocial challenges of multiculturalism.

The elusive cognitive condition which is framed by some of the "academic" symbols can indeed be usefully understood as secular surrogates for what others choose to associate with the mysterious nature of deity. The challenging nature of that "target" is most readily evident at this time in both the disastrous loss of confidence in the articulations of authority and the desperate appals of such authorities for confidence and trust in their strategies and methods. As can be variously argued, confidence in one form or another is now, and how it is to invite belief, is fundamental to any prospect of viable governance (Varieties of Confidence Essential to Sustainability: surrogates and tokens obscuring the existential "gold standard", 2009; Implication of Indwelling Intelligence in Global Confidence-building, 2012)

Confidence and its Surrogates indicative configuration of the variety of expressions and tokens of confidence

Reproduced from Confidelity Container Design (2011)

Confusion and conflation: As is only too evident at this time, the loss of confidence is frequently described in terms of uncertainty and "confusion". Curiously the use of "fusion" in its relation to focus features strategically otherwise at this time:

• in the quest for a sustainable source of energy through nuclear fusion and the special implications for the design of fusion reactors enabling access to such forms of energy. This quest offers a valuable metaphor for a potential cognitive analogue (Enactivating a Cognitive Fusion Reactor: Imaginal Transformation of Energy Resourcing (ITER-8), 2006).
  
  
• in the desperate quest for greater targetting capacity, reminiscent of preoccupation with the "bullseye" framing of any target. However the confusion and ambiguity can also be explored through other uses of "bull" which is so central to the subtlety of the 10 Zen oxherding pictures, as argued separately (Zen of Facticity: Bull, Ox or Otherwise? Herding facts and their alternatives in a post-truth-era, 2017).
  
  
• in the effort to engender greater strategic clarity, focus is sought through gathering the most insightful into "think tanks". However this can be understood as engendering other difficulties through reinforcing particular biases, as discussed separately ("Tank-thoughts" from "Think-tanks": metaphors constraining development of global governance, 2003).
  
  
• potentially even more relevant is the manner in which the symbol which is the focus of this argument -- namely the Merkabah -- has been adopted as the name of the main battle tank of the Israeli army since the 1970s. The connotations derive from the sense in which the Merkabah is recognized as the Chariot of God (as noted below). It is such confusion and conflation which is presumably evident in any (mis)comprehension of Jihad. This also recalls the ambiguities of the tripartite framing of the Christian Church (Ecclesia poenitensEcclesia triumphans, Ecclesia militans), with the latter exemplified by the use of the Christian Cross in one of the most favoured common Christian hymns: Onward Christian soldiers... With the Cross of Jesus, going on before. Such an understanding of the Cross is of course historically related to crusade -- as continues to be used metaphorically in Christian campaigns against those of other beliefs.
  
  
• in response to the threats of insecurity, of particular interest is the secretive creation of some 72 "fusion centers" by the US Department of Homeland Security and the US Department of Justice. They are designed to promote information sharing at the federal level between agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. military, and state- and local-level government. They may also be affiliated with an Emergency Operations Center that responds in the event of a disaster.

Implications of "fuzing technology"? As an indication of the quest for focus on a global scale, the relevance of remarkable developments of targetting capacity merit particular attention with respect to nuclear weapons delivery, as noted in a recent study (Hans M. Kristensen, Matthew McKinzie and Theodore A. Postol How US nuclear force modernization is undermining strategic stability: the burst-height compensating super-fuze, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 1 March 2017):

The US nuclear forces modernization program has been portrayed to the public as an effort to ensure the reliability and safety of warheads in the US nuclear arsenal, rather than to enhance their military capabilities. In reality, however, that program has implemented revolutionary new technologies that will vastly increase the targeting capability of the US ballistic missile arsenal. This increase in capability is astonishing -- boosting the overall killing power of existing US ballistic missile forces by a factor of roughly three...

The revolutionary increase in the lethality of submarine-borne US nuclear forces comes from a "super-fuze" device... We estimate that all warheads deployed on US ballistic missile submarines now have this fuzing capability. Because the innovations in the super-fuze appear, to the non-technical eye, to be minor, policymakers outside of the US government (and probably inside the government as well) have completely missed its revolutionary impact on military capabilities and its important implications for global security.

Use of "fuze" is a strangely appropriate development in military thinking from the conventional use of "fuse" in relation to explosive devices. Both are an extension of their relation to "fusion" as in "fusing together". As such this current development can be understood as the extreme antithesis of the creative form of "cognitive fusion" which global governance has been so singularly challenged to enable (as argued above). Rather it marks the extent to which this reflects the alternative pathological interpretation of that ambiguous term, namely the condition in which thoughts and beliefs are confused with reality, ensuring identification with them and loss of ability to see them for what they are as concoctions of the mind. This is consistent with the issue of the post-truth era.

This development has enabled the recent shift in strategic thinking from defensive development of nuclear weapons to renewed preference for pre-emptive nuclear strike (Ian Traynor, Pre-emptive nuclear strike a key option, Nato told, The Guardian, 22 January 2008). This assumes that greater destruction of an opponent can be achieved in a far more "timely" manner, undermining the capacity for any viable response by an opponent. Such a strategy can be interpreted otherwise as offering an extremely perverse means of "simplifying" a strategic situation perceived to be overly complex and beyond the capacity of the processes of conventional governance.

Especially intriguing is the sense in which a pre-emptive first strike using EMP weaponry (nuclear electromagnetic pulse) would disable, "take out" and "bring down", much of the global information system on which civilization is now so dependent (Philip Bump, Republican warnings about an electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) attack, The Washington Post, 15 January 2016; Tyler Durden, "Real, Imminent Threat" that next World War will be initiated by first strike EMP weapon, ZeroHedge, 27 July 2016). Aside from the destruction of infrastructure, this merits recognition as an information bomb -- an extreme form of information warfare as argued by Paul Virilio (The Information Bomb, 2006).

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