 You have the ability to do something with your mind that will perplex even the best theorists in physics, philosophy, and neuroscience. It's fairly easy to do. It's called a shift of awareness. What is a shift of awareness? Well, it is exactly as it sounds. Here's a demonstration of it. Become aware of the contact point between your feet and the floor. How does it feel to have your feet resting on the floor? Don't move. Don't change anything. Just shift your awareness. Very easy to do, very easy to say, but really hard to understand. And here's why. What is and what causes shifts of awareness? It's changes of our internal conscious state that seem to be brought about by our intending them to change. For example, when you think about that contact point between your feet and the floor, that's a feeling, that's a conscious experience that you're having that you weren't having before you intended to have it. So externally, what is changing in the world? When you're still and you just close your eyes and you feel things that you hadn't felt before, you intend to shift to awareness. What is changing in the external world? What is the new sense data that is being presented to your consciousness? When you're just there, shift your awareness. Oh, I hear this. I didn't hear before. I feel this. I didn't before. Maybe I taste something in my mouth that I wasn't even aware of. What is it that's externally changing? It appears to be that what's happening is all on the inside. It's all within our conscious experience that we choose to become aware of something, of some feeling that we think is out there, and then we have that experience. This seems very hard to square with our normal conception of how the physical world works. It seems like there'd have to be something changing, something new coming into your brain, some new information, but no, I don't know another way to describe what's happening other than to say you intend to shift your awareness to some new information. Now some people, when they're presented with questions of intentionality, awareness, and consciousness, they really hold on to their metaphysical worldview. They'll actually conclude something like, well, therefore, awareness, consciousness, shifts in awareness, intentionality, these things don't actually exist. They're just illusions because they don't fit into our physicalist framework because it doesn't seem like intention is something that's a physical object, or conscious experience, subject to first person experience, is a physical object. And so they say, well, therefore, those things don't exist. I don't think that's the correct way to create a metaphysics. Our metaphysics is created to try to best explain the phenomena that we're experiencing, and it seems like intentional shifts of awareness is certainly something that we experience. And here's a terrible pickle of a question. Prior to your shift of awareness, what was the status of that sense data? So it feels like something to become aware of the contact point between your feet and the floor. But if you didn't choose to become aware of it, what would the nature of that feeling be? You couldn't have a feeling without it being felt, so is it that we are willfully bringing new things into existence when we feel feelings? Or are our feelings somehow there already whether we're aware of them or not? Are there, like, consciously independent feelings that exist in the world? Really sticky question, and it's much easier to say, oh, well, feelings don't exist. And the crazy thing is this happens all the time. All day, every day, your awareness is shifting. Sometimes it's intentional, just like the example like Abe. Sometimes it's unintentional. If we hear a loud bang, are we become aware of it? It's not like we intended to hear some loud bang. We were just startled. So that is not some easy puzzle to solve. It gets straight down to the heart of metaphysics. What types of things exist? How can we make sense of deliberate conscious intention to change our internal experience? Do such things even exist? Some people take these ideas, and I think they run with them a little bit too far. They say things like, ah, well, you see, intention can change our conscious experience. Our experience of reality is the same thing as reality. The only thing that exists is the contents of our experience, and therefore you can intentionally change the world. You can buy virtue of your intentions. You can change what exists. There is no such thing as the mind-independent world. It's all within our head. It's all within our intentionality and our conscious experience. The universe will conform to our intentions. I'm not exactly persuaded by that into the spectrum either. We have one end, which is extreme, which denies the existence of these things. The other end of the spectrum says these are the only things that exist. I have to say I think the middle ground is where the truth is to be found. What do you guys think? What is a shift in awareness, and how in the world can you consciously choose to change the contents of your experience?