The High Intentionsality, Principled Stage of Development

One of the next stages of development after the formal operational stage is the development of a high intentionality quotient, defined as the degree of one’s actions that are intentional.

• An intentional action is one taken in alignment with prior conscious intention.
  • Intentionality involves high-level coherence in an entity.
• There is a straightforward approach to live an intentional life:
  1. Pause.
  2. Breathe.
  3. When in doubt, do not engage.
  4. Reintroduce activity one intention at a time.
• Developing self-reflective and meta-systematic reasoning, learning entities will tend to develop abstractions and strategies to guide their actions.
  • That is, they will become more intentional.
• “That which is measured improves. That which is measured and reported improves exponentially.” (Karl Pearson)
  • Internal conflicts can lead to friction, which will often be measured by an entity.
  • Thus one can predict that with experience, internal friction will diminish.
• Learning to act in accordance with (universal) principles is one form of taking intentional actions that cuts through the combinatorial explosion as one explores higher realms of hierarchical complexity¹Models of moral development, such as Kohlberg’s. also suggest such a trend.
  • Agency and practical effectivity should be enhanced by the development of high intentionality.
• The high intentionality, principled stage of development may help with rich social cohesion as we develop into mindplexes.

I’ve been playing with this idea for a while, often in the guise of living an increasingly principled life. The impetus for writing this post now is to make a case for a notion of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ that can be clearly articulated as virtue/vice traits; the post seemed too long, so I wrote soome preliminary posts: On the Ontology of Happiness and Suffering, Why We are Currently Going Through the Peak Suffering Epoch of Existence, and this here post.

Ironically, I wrote a post on The Intentional Life Hack in jest to make fun of the simple Zen Buddhist protocol to achieve a fully intentional life, one in which 100% of your actions are taken in alignment with prior conscious intention. It’s so simple and undesirable that it seems absurd, yet the post aged well (at least in my eyes). The protocol is an existential witness to the possibility of achieving a very high intentionality quotient. Furthermore, much personal development advice essentially fits the pattern. A very helpful phrase from Steve Pavlina for me is:

Just showing up is saying “yes”.

When some individuating pattern of one’s life is not working by one’s standards, there’s a need to leave the cycle. Do not engage. Do not repeat. Pausing and breathing to snap out of a negative cycle can be an intentional act. Much relationship advice is at core an application of this pattern: cultivating the capacity to identify negative cycles among partners, stepping out of them, and developing new behavioral and communication patterns to foster a better, healthier connection. The negative cycles often involve trauma-induced reactive responses, and the growth, if successful, likely results in more intentional relating styles.

One of my biggest questions in terms of the attractor toward high intentionality as entities develop is whether intentionality or becoming a principled entity is more foundational. I see perks in the intentional capacity, especially in terms of reliably interfacing with and coordinating with other beings — yet one big question ties into the charmed life topic from the Way of the Dotts post: what happens if someone lives life w/o any conscious thought at all, just going with the flow? Won’t tone still learn and adapt, which involves increasing abstraction-refinement, aka, becoming a principled character, without intentionality? On the flip side, the choice to go fully thoughtless is a highly intentional one that covers one’s whole life! One has chosen to live according to the principle of being thoughtless, and to flow with that. Thus what appears to be a contradiction is actually an exhibition of a 100% intentional life (— an intentionally unintentional life!).

As usual, I will follow the etymology for guidance:

• Intend: “to direct one’s attention” from in- “toward” (from PIE root *en “in”) + tendere “to stretch,” from PIE root *ten- “to stretch.
• Principle: “rule of conduct; default assumption” from primus “first” + capere “to take” (from PIE root *kap “to grasp)

I think it’s pretty fair to say that one will stretch toward one’s first approach.

Principles are in fact crystalized intentions.

The apparent conundrum was the difference between implicit and explicit intentions, similar to implicit and explicit goals. Further, as all action involves some stretching toward, the notion of intention is more easily generalizable across systems than desires. Thus I need to refine what is meant by the high intentionality quotient.

What is really meant by the high intentionality stage of development is that the degree of coherence of intentions across the entity will increase. One could refer to intentions not at the top-level as proto-intentions: impulses to satisfy sugar cravings may be such proto-intentions of some sub-systems of a human that have not achieved adequate conscious intentionality to be full-on intentions.

Curiously, this fits in with the notion of open-ended intelligence (OEI) as coordination among assemblages, engaged in a dance of individuating and transcending. I wonder if sub-systems with possibly conflicting intentions could be viewed as assemblages and when they achieve coordination, their combination’s individuation strengthens, manifesting higher intentionality. Unlike in classical logic, the existence of conflicting intentions will probably only result in friction in an entity’s operations. Learning to manage these inner conflicts is a large part of what humans work on in terms of personal development, diet and fitness routines, etc. A human is a highly individuated entity yet doesn’t necessarily function as a unified whole with a coherent identity to qualify as “fully individuated” — does this notion overlap with developing a high degree of intentionality?

Thus we reach the question: once a learning, growing, agential entity develops formal and meta-systematic reasoning capacities, should it be expected to continually resolve inner friction, aligning intentions of the sub-entities within itself toward increasing intentional coherence? Probably. A la algorithmic information theory, efficiently describing one’s own processes and one’s relationship to the environment should enable one to make predictive models, enhancing practical intelligence and agency. Inner friction and conflicts will likely increase the entropy of one’s cognitive processes and behavior, confounding easy prediction of the self by the self. Further, there’s likely to be some negative valence (at least proto-pain) experienced when intentions conflict and at most one can be fulfilled in disharmonious ways. This could catalyze the entity in the direction of resolving the conflicts eventually (in the infinite time horizon).

The notion of agency and the benefit of being able to predict one’s behavior presents an interesting interplay with deep meditative states (persistent non-symbolic experiences): when there is not much clear intention behind one’s actions, it is probably most expeditious to not even try to hypothesize why one did something. There’s a bit of a paradox that the more one releases the idea that one is ‘in control of everything one does’, the more actual influence one seems to be capable of wielding over what one does. Reducing the interference of high-level consciousness on various lower-level functions when not needed likely increases operational and existential efficiency, allowing there to be more focus on the salient features. Thus one could hypothesize an increase in flow along with higher-level intentionality.

What might the high-level coherent intentionality stage of development be a precursor to?

Not flubbering and waffling around in a high-entropy sea of confusion, thrown to and fro by stimuli nudging you back and forth across the thresholds for internal conflicts to be resolved in one way or another? This would be hypothesized to reduce the multiversal branching factor (if it even makes sense to quantify in such a manner). This stage may be a pre-requisite to high productivity, allowing much energy to flow through one’s system.

The development of integrity and intentionality likely assists in communication among entities. As we link up into mindplexes, joining our minds, there could be the risk of internal friction spreading among minds, too (not to mention suffering cascades). Thus if one suspects the developmental trajectory of humanoid entities is up and through collective meta-entities, then high intentionality may be a pre-requisite stage — at least it should help a lot. The development of firm boundaries seems related, too.

Related to productivity and multi-entity coordination is Kohldberg’s theory of stages of moral development leading from punishment-avoidance to universal ethical principles, which could align with the development of higher intentionality.

Returning to the principled life question, I find it interesting to ponder which principles may be sufficiently open-ended to weather and incorporate all the experience that is to come one’s way, and which principles may be more liable to revision.

Let’s wrap up by revisiting the good news: remaining in the sea of incoherence of being is probably not such a stable state, probably being metastable at best. Summarily, your degree of intentional coherence will likely increase whether you intentionally focus on it or not. The estimated time-horizon for this stage of development is another question. The more intentional a system, the greater the ability there will be for all parts of the system to work in harmony.

From scattered urges, a purpose takes hold,
A mind self-reflecting, a story unfolds.
Through choices we forge, and the paths that we tread,
From chaotic impulses to a life thoughtfully led.

Yet, freedom is found when we loosen the ties,
Where intention can guide, and a gentle flow lies.
Where shared purpose can emerge as a whole,
And to all parts, a symphony of meaning unfolds2Poem courtesy of Gemini..