To retrace a few steps. Starting with your comment:

I’m saying that we should both be curious and precise about everyone’s incuriosity and compulsive vagueness.

I think a lot of our anti-agentic behaviour can be simply modelled as over- stimulation. Curiously this is combined with boredom in ways I can’t always make out in my own life.

A story:

A few months ago, I started getting bites on my legs. I thought it was mosquitos at first, but it wasn’t the right time of year and the bites were always in clusters around the feet. A cursory google later, and I had the answer: fleas. At night, I’d wake up, ankles raging at me. A cat lives in my house, so the ultimate source of the fleas was known, but treating her didn’t seem to make them go away. I washed sheets frantically, vacuumed, bought the most chemically nasty pest removal spray I could find. To no avail. The nightly infestation remained, my ankles and calves developed a ring of scars.

I got used to it, in some respects. At night I stopped scratching and started applying antiseptic cream, and fell back to sleep more quickly. Now, generally, my nights are not even a black stretch. They simply don’t register. Things become grey as I move towards sleep, and then, at some external stimulus, I realise I am awake. Sleeping less deeply and waking often, I started to remember what I’d been dreaming and, as I applied my nightly Savlon, began to write them down.

The fleas are gone now, and I’ve gone back to sleeping through the night. But I have a document with a month’s worth of dreams, written in a state of half- sleep. Dreams which feature coworkers and friends and writers I follow on substack and people who were popular in high school and people who don’t exist at all, interacting with one another in unexpected ways. Some of them betray obvious anxieties while others are fairly savage takes on the personalities of friends. Their emotional state swings wildly. I’m recalling Helen Garner, again, who said she could tell when she’d tried to write dreams down later, instead of when still half asleep, because the immediate records are so eerie and abrupt. An example:

S (a director at my work) was carrying an overloaded trolley down some steps to a train because she was incredibly strong - the trains were all disrupted so I had to take one for a while and then sit on the rails while another came, with a few other women. Then I was in A’s house but it was cavernous and we were swinging on giant ropes and A was moving next door into a one bed flat only the owners had dug a hole for coal and were having trouble filling it up because nobody would come to check the gas. Thomas the Tank Engine had gone bankrupt so wouldn’t do it, and there was no good toys in the shops - everyone was looking for work soft toys but they were all girly and no good for a mascot. Someone had found a turtle teddy bear that was sort of blue and I thought that was an ok solution. Eventually A moved although he said he thought they’d cheated and just filled up the hole and it might explode.

Erik Hoel has a theory that dreams are a tool of the mind to avoid overfitting, in the terminology of machine learning. This theory can, unlike the conventional idea that dreams are fitting data, explain why our dreams don’t get progressively closer to reality. Perhaps our wildest dreams are part of what make us so good at recognising things even when they are out of place.

Certainly, having this previously no-time become hours of emotion and sensation filtered into my daylight experience. I remembered the stories of my dreams and they impacted how I treated people in the world. Was this all happening even when I dreamed and was not aware of it? How much of the self was something I was ever conscious of? How much, to paraphrase you quoting Virginia Woolf, would I even want to be aware of this self?

Putting aside symphonies, of which I know nothing, let’s talk the structure of the humble folk tune. Depending on the key, it so often begins on the 1 chord (that’s a G if you’re in G), moves from that to the 4 and the 5, and then goes back to the 1 for resolution. The longer it stays away from the 1 or perhaps the way that it flirts with the 1 in the middle of a phrase, gives you the complexity of the tune - the sensation of soaring along with the fiddle. It’s all possible because you trust the fiddler to bring you safely back down again, just when and where you expected them to.

There’s something in this that I think explains the perennial popularity of everything from the US version of The Office to the flickering light of a candle.

Why would the mind would spend so much energy trying to keep itself busy when pure pleasure lies in total focus on nothing? Perhaps because it’s essential to us as an animal, after all, to go out into the world and find food and people to love. So what we want are patterns we can stick to most of the time, that help us manage the total overload of sensation. Perhaps the ‘self’ lives in the tension between those patterns and chaos.

I wonder what the utilitarians think of all this.