Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id PAA12363 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Tue, 14 Mar 2000 15:10:09 GMT Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2000 07:08:39 -0800 From: Bill Spight <bspight@pacbell.net> Subject: Re: "unconscious" choice To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Message-id: <38CE55F7.C33A232D@pacbell.net> Organization: Saybrook Graduate School X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.61 [en]C-PBI-NC404 (Win95; I) Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit X-Accept-Language: ja,en References: <00030515230703.00439@faichney> <3.0.5.32.20000320120119.0080d3f0@rongenet.sk.ca> <3.0.5.32.20000327194003.007ef100@rongenet.sk.ca> Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Dear Lloyd,
> >Dear Lloyd,
> >
> >> Note: "unconscious choice" is an oxymoron.
> >>
> >
> >Au contraire. Most choice is unconscious. Cf. Sartre, Nietzsche.
> >
> >Best,
> >
> >Bill
>
> Dear Bill and others,
>
> I am not really a semanticist but it seems to me that if what you do is the
> result of drives or motivations of which you are not aware then you are
> really not making a choice.
The question of choice is a subtle one. However, if these drives
and motivations dictate choice, what does it matter if you are
aware of them or not? "The Devil [drug, whatever] made me do it."
> The appearance of choice is illusiary.
*Not* the position of Sartre, Nietzsche, Gurdieff, or me. I
referred you to the existentialists because choice is central to
that philosophy. Gurdieff stresses the automaticity of typical
human existence and the possibility of awakening from that.
> We
> become like a programmed robot. The choice has already been made by whoever
> or whatever is responsible for the program.
>
> Some philosophers and pure behaviorists suggest that is all we are:
> programmed automatons. It takes considerable sophistry to hold to this
> position and explain how I could be carrying on this conversation. Once a
> robot becomes aware of the programming does he then have the potential to
> change his own program?
>
Skinner thought so. (Cf. "Walden Two".) Self-programming robots
seem to be chaotic, but are not in principle unfeasable.
> This is where the analogy breaks down. Our program, if we can be said to
> have one, contains no injunction that prevents us from changing it but to
> do so we must become "self aware".
Maybe not. :-)
> I suspect that this is a necessary but
> not sufficient condition.
>
> Much of the programming to which we are subject is memetic in nature. We
> are programmed by our cultures. To become self-programming we have to go
> beyond the limits set by those cultures.
>
How do we overcome our conditioning? When I was a teenager I
enlisted the aid of random numbers. ;-)
I do not believe that there is the sharp dichotomy that you
indicate. Things are more complex and subtle.
> Galileo demonstrates this point. His culture dictated that he should see
> the points of light near the planet Jupiter as rather like fire flies zig
> zagging to and fro, sometimes "blinking out" in an erratic orbit around
> Earth.
As I understand it, some of the intellectuals of the day regarded
the moons of Jupiter as illusions. What you see in a telescope on
Earth was real, they thought, but you could not trust it when you
trained it on Celestial regions.
> He went beyond the conceptual limitations of his culture in
> suggesting those points of light were really moons circling not us, but the
> giant planet.
>
> My problem with Joe Dees is that he seems to want a Galileo monkey doing
> creative things to the rocks he throws at herdsman before he will grand
> that troop a culture. I would argue that such a creature would have, in
> fact, gone beyond the culture of his troop.
>
Best,
Bill
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