Active Curiosity vs Open Curiosity

Thanks for doing this investigation! I love your thoroughness and precision. 

Based on my personal ontology of this, "something sort of similar that isn't curiosity at all" doesn't register as a relevant class of object to me. It sounds like it's relevant to you, however. Perhaps there's something you want to preserve with the term "curiosity." That's interesting, and I find myself curious about it (more open than active, atm). 

As an aside, I get the vague sense that you're doing something somewhat confusing (to me) with regards to building maps of phenomenology. Especially when I read the set of questions about joint-carving. This seems like a longer conversation to be had, if you wanted to have it one day.

Some of the confusions I have can be summed up in these inquiries: 
"If 'open curiosity' ends up being fairly distinct and unitary, does that make it more joint-carving? ...Why?" 
"Does 'more joint-carving' basically stand in for 'more real' to you? Or something?" 

Anyway this is a longer conversation, I think, and best to carry out not-via-text. But hope reading this was useful or insightful for you. 

(1: Chocolate Tasting)

It's been a bit over a week. I've been wearing my counter ring, and turning it every time I notice something that might be open curiosity.

The first time I ran into "maybe this is open curiosity" was during a chocolate tasting.

Account

I ordered six different brands of single-origin Ecuadorian chocolate, laid them all out, then slowly tasted them one by one while taking notes on my experience of each. I'd break off a piece, paying attention to the sound and feel of the snap. Then I'd bring the piece to my nose and smell it. Then I'd set a one minute timer, let the chocolate melt on my tongue for the whole minute, and finally chew it up. I took notes off and on the whole time.

Here's a bit from my notes on To'ak's Rain Harvest 2018 74% dark chocolate. "A little boy climbed into the canopy to harvest flowers from the tallest vines during a rain storm, then brought them down to the dew-covered irises, sprinkled all the petals with clover honey, and brought them to his grandmother who is taking a mid-day nap in a darkened room."

Whatever it was I did with my mind to generate notes about the flavor had a quality I'm strongly inclined to describe as "open". There was a feeling like stepping out of the way, letting go of something, or welcoming. If I had to name the something I was letting go of, it might be "making literal sense of things".

I definitely wasn't letting go of trying, though. I was being very precise, discarding a lot of description pieces that weren't quite right. The thing was, I discarded them after considering them, rather than pre-determining what kinds of descriptions were allowed to present themselves. I think it was probably the space of pre-determined answers that was "opening".

By contrast, I completely failed to do this "open" thing when describing my experiences of snapping the chocolate pieces. I wrote notes like, "snappy little pop" and "crunchy crunchy snap". By the end I was feeling some combination of dismissive and frustrated about the chocolate textures. Of the last chocolate, I wrote, "I don't fuckin know, it goes 'pop' when i break it. Maybe a little quieter and lower pitched than the others." I was sort of trying to convince myself that the textures didn't matter.

Reflections

Although I definitely identified a quality of "openness" in chocolate tasting, it's much harder for me to recognize "curiosity" in this experience. I'm left feeling very unsure whether there is anything to "open curiosity" beyond "openness".

If I assume that there is a difference, and that this experience contained "open curiosity" rather than mere "openness", then I'd guess it has something to do with the frame. I orchestrated the experience with an intention to discover something. I wanted to know what the chocolates tasted like, whether I like Ecuadorian chocolate in general (this was a follow-up to an earlier tasting where I tried chocolates from several different parts of the world and found that my favorite was from Ecuador), what differs among different chocolate manufacturers who start with basically the same beans, and whether the much more expensive brand is of noticeably higher quality than the others (it is).

All of that sort of melted away, though, during the tasting. I intuitively knew that it had to, that if I kept all of those intentions at the font of my mind as I tasted, I'd basically experience what I expected to, in little more detail than my priors already contained. ...Which does sound an awful lot like a reasonable distinction between "active curiosity" and "open curiosity".

If I suppose, though, that there is a difference between "open curiosity" and mere "openness", and that this was an experience of mere openness without the curiosity, then I'd guess it was missing some kind of question-holding that is "open" rather than "active". While I was tasting, I was not aware of any interest to learn anything. My whole attention was on close observation of the chocolate and its effect on me as I interacted with it, and on the task of describing those observations in words. And I wonder whether curiosity of any sort requires some kind of question-shaped box that is held in front of you to catch some bits of information, and not others.

So I think that in chocolate tasting, I have at least explored my first question ("How can you tell when you're experiencing open curiosity vs. something sort of similar that isn't curiosity at all?"), but I don't think I have an answer yet.

(2: Dioecious Junipers)

I've also run into several instances of "maybe open curiosity" while studying botany.

My experiences with junipers have lead me to wonder about the relationship between active curiosity and open curiosity, and especially about the nature of "general active curiosity".

Account

I was listening to a lecture on the taxonomy of non-flowering plants, which touched on the cypress family and mentioned junipers. I didn't listen to it all at once, and there was a point where I'd paused just after the professor had talked about ferns, but before she'd gotten to conifers.

I already knew a little bit about junipers. I knew, for example, that gin is flavored by passing the vapors of wheat or barley alcohol over juniper berries, then collecting the condensation. (It's also sometimes made by just plopping the berries right in the liquid, though this makes for a harsher-tasting gin.) So I'd already recognized some of the plants in my area as "probably junipers", from their gray-blue berries.

But, having just learned a little about fern reproduction, I realized that many of the other plants in my area, ones without blue berries, were also junipers. They were just male junipers. I was on a drive with Duncan, watching out the window, and I remarked, "Huh, you can really tell that junipers are dioecious!"

[footnote: A dioecious species is one with distinct male and female organisms. Humans are dioecious, while roses produce both male and female reproductive organs on a single flower.]

I want to zoom in on the moments just before I made that remark.

We had not been talking about botany at all. We were not on a drive to look at the scenery; we were just headed out to the mailbox. There were many, many kinds of plants, as well as rocks and animals and man-made structures, for me to look at.

Yet I noticed the berry-covered junipers in particular. And I noticed the other plants that looked just like those junipers, but without berries. I felt a tiny confusion about it, one I'd never felt before even though I'd passed these same plants many times. Ever since scheming to fill my backyard with holly bushes for Christmas time, I knew that some plants require both male and female individuals to reproduce. So all the pieces were there. Why did they suddenly come together, with no apparent effort, in that moment?

Reflections

I figure there must have been some sense in which I was "curious" about junipers, on that day. This was not paradigmatic "active curiosity". That would have been more like, deliberately and consciously setting out to investigate the local junipers to discover whether they are dioecious or monoecious, looking specifically at their reproductive organs.

But it wasn't paradigmatic non-curiosity either. That would be more like my orientation toward the road signs, which I definitely saw but did not register on this particular trip to the mailbox.

Still, I have a hypothesis that some pre-conscious part of my mind was quite actively trying to understand local junipers, in general, in a way that it was not trying to understand chocolate during the chocolate tasting. During the chocolate tasting, I was very attentive to my experience of flavor. During the drive, I think I must have been attentive to "information about how junipers work" or "information about what's up with junipers".

This "how it works" or "what's up with it" orientation seems pretty essential to my current concept of curiosity. In Catching the Spark, I described "head tilting" as "What is this? What's going on here? Is this right? Is it really so simple? Could I be confused somehow?"

When I said that my chocolate tasting involved "openness" but perhaps not "curiosity", it was the absence of this head tilting posture that left me doubtful.

I'm a little bit inclined to locate instances of curiosity on a grid with one axis for "active to passive", and another axis for "specific to general". But I'm also inclined to suspect that I am confused enough that my concept of curiosity ought to fall apart and be re-built from scratch.

Endnote

If you're trying to decide whether to correct me about juniper reproduction, be patient. This was not the end of my conifer studies. We'll get there eventually.

fwiw, I'd kind of like to see this book epistemically-spot-checked before building too much off it (I was chatting about it recently and some of the claims seemed iffy to me. It seemed like it should probably be able to identify easier-to-check claims and check to make sure he's at least getting obvious things right)

My understanding is that the last time people got really into Left Brain / Right Brain as a dichotomy it ended getting kinda pop-sci-simplified (which eventually resulted in it falling out of favor), and I'd like to "do it right this time" if it's going to be a thing people are building theories and models around.

yes, this is basically what I'm referring to

Do you mean to say that open curiosity is diffuse curiosity? If so, then that feels a little off, since you can have open curiosity about e.g. one particular emotion that happens to be in your mind.

Active Curiosity (AC), Open Curiosity (OC)

I would consider the example with a panel of many buttons still AC or concentrated since it is simply a continuation of the desire to understand the [particular] object.

I do, however, accept your description of OC as diffuse and exploratory: a series of AC questions in rapid succession.

I suppose on some level, all curiosity could be boiled down to a simple question, which by this post's definition is AC.

Babble vs. prune.