This article on information management is really interesting and led to a lot of reflecting on how space, time, and goals relate to one another.
The author of the article divides information up into space, time, importance, and relatedness. This is close to how I think about it. I tend to divide it up into space (things of a thingy nature), time (processes, tasks, or projects), and relevance. (I collapse importance and relatedness into relevance.)
Relevance? Yeah, relevance.
What is relevance exactly? It turns out it is impossible to say exactly what relevance is. The definition is “the quality or state of being closely connected or appropriate.” But there are no necessary and sufficient conditions for relevance. Relevance has no essence.
Well wait. If relevance has no essence, is it even real?
Sure. Things can be real without having essences. “Everything that has ever taken place at 4pm on a Wednesday” is a real category, but that does not mean that the things in that category share an essence. Most of them don’t.
Relevance is a little bit like that. What do all the things in the universe that have ever been relevant to one another have in common with one another? That question doesn’t have an answer, because there is no one thing that it means to be relevant.
Nevertheless, there is something it means to know that one thing is relevant to another, and the systematic failure to understand relevance is largely what we mean when we say a person is stupid. There is a connection between the power to grasp relevance and intelligence.
At an experiential or perceptual level, relevance is salience. It’s what our attention is drawn toward. When things are highly relevant to us, we foreground them and push everything else into the background. So there is also connection between relevance realization and consciousness.
Living beings realize relevance in a self-organizing, self-generating fashion. Some end is valuable to the organism, and then all of its resources are organized around the pursuit of that end.
If you’re desperate for a glass of water, that’s all that matters. Nothing else has salience. It all drops away, and all of the resources available to you are mobilized in the service of having a drink. Or think about when we’re addicted to something and the world shrinks down into what is relevant to the goal of getting a fix. For this reason, relevance is also highly correlated with our sense of agency.
This shows how relevance is different from space but is related to it. In light of relevance, space does not show up as a container with things in it. It shows up as an arena (sort of like a field on which a sport is played or a game board) in which we are agents. In the context of the game, we perceive ourselves as players with paths that are constantly opening and closing. We relate to space and the things in it as potentials for action, not inert stuff.
Similarly, relevance is related to time in complex ways. Certain of our goals come and go. We play many finite games over the course of our lives. Other goals have a weaker relationship to time. They don’t come and go as easily. These would be things like our core values. Our core values—what we concretely act in accordance with—constitute our character.
In a finite game, you generate a character, and the game gives you your goals. In the infinite game of life, it’s the opposite. You’re given a character by birth and upbringing, and you have to choose your own paths. You have to choose which finite games you’re going to play, which has a complex, reciprocal impact upon your character. Powers you acquire in one game can be carried over into others, which is also unlike video games.
The way in which this is self-organizing, reciprocal, and determinative of agency is characteristic of relevance realization in general.
I would say that one of the main reasons people are unhappy is that they pay too much attention to space and time and not enough to relevance. This is understandable, because in any experience, you have the thing experienced and the consciousness of that experience, and the latter tends to be lost to the former, because it fully conforms to it.
On the other hand, reflecting endlessly upon relevance doesn’t make for a happy life, either. Relevance is highly frustrating. You can’t sink your teeth into it. It is endless, bottomless, without essence. Yet so much depends upon it.
This is why flow is such an important concept. We experience flow when space, time, and relevance harmonize with one another. It can happen when you’re reading. It can happen when you’re playing music. It can happen when you’re lost in conversation with a friend. It could happen when you’re playing a sport.
Flow is a finite experience. You can’t be in flow all the time. And since it is highly adaptive, it can also be hijacked for self-delusional, self-destructive ends (think of compulsive video game playing, compulsive pornography usage, or drug use). It’s not a panacea. But a larger, more profound notion of flow might be reached by thinking about your Way through life—like in the broader sense of true will.
Anyway, this is just an article on information management, but it touches on important issues. I think the reason why we feel anxiety and overwhelm about all the information we’re bombarded with is that it is disrupting our processes of realizing relevance. We want to pull back from it. We want to impose a system for organizing it. But at the same time, we also want a method (not a system, because we can’t have one) for thinking about relevance and how relevance legislates the difference and the relationships between itself and space and time.