All build-up and no follow-through.

[sixbitsforfact]

A few days ago a couple friends and I got into a discussion on the on-going religious debate in France (for those not sure what I'm referring to, see this 'Economist' article). Personally, I've never been much for politics because it's shocking how quickly "friendly debates" become blood in the upholstery. That said, I do latch on to certain topics

Comments

[murderofonerose]

Oh god, I haven't read any Hobbes. Just a lot of sciencey stuff about the brain and consciousness, and a good amount of philosophy stuff about how and why God and/or the mystical experience can't be explained very well. So, like... Buber, Plotinus, Bernadette Roberts.

EVERYTHING has anticedent conditions. Except the fact that existence... exists. Beyond that point it depends on who you talk to, but I think just about everyone can agree on that.

Roberts wrote a lot (fairly recently -- she and my prof are friends, we hear a lot about that old lady) about the self versus no-self, and then beyond that a state completely free of the concept of self (whereas no-self is just... the absense of self). The general idea is that a human being starts with consciousness, something animals lack, and over the course of their lives move, unknowingly, towards a point where they no longer need a conscious self to function. A person's life is driven by his or her will to move -- esentially, to learn and experience, until you can just do things without having to think about them. Or think at all. Things just naturally happen, the way they do when you're in the zone and just act.

Er... And I think my point was that, according to this point of view, we're not just survival machines. I'm not sure this actually makes that point, though. Other than the part where conditioned thought is an aspect of the self, which should eventually fall away. In a kind of mid-life crisis deal, because it's not an easy transition (from self to no-self and then again to a pure being/acting state).

That may or may not have all made sense. I've lost the ability to make that distinction.

[sixbitsforfact]

No, it does, definitely. Though I suppose a point of contention might be this notion of things just happening without our need to think about them first. True, we often fall victim to desires/impulses/"second natures" and just do something without deliberating too much. But that only can take us so far.

Jumping out of the way of an oncoming car = good impulse, because while we technically could choose not to avoid the collision, it could very well end in our death. That impulse is both instinctual (self-preservation) and learned (years of adults telling us not to cross the street without looking both ways, for example, because cars will hurt us).

But these other impulses that become second-nature to us, are they always in our best interest?

[murderofonerose]

But there's a difference between acting on instinct, acting based on reason, and just acting. Semantic difference, mostly. I think the idea is that you get to a point where, given the choice between reasoning and acting (Roberts calls it Doing), you would end up doing the same thing anyway. It's a... focusing, cutting out the middle man that is reason. Because Reason occurs in consciousness and Doing comes out of the Unconscious, which is what consciousness (including the Self, a self-reflective mechanism) is based on. The Unconscious can exist without consciousness but not vice versa.

Simply acting - on desires, impluses, second nature, whatever - without thinking about it isn't Doing. Doing does not require thinking because thinking would be redundant.

I read at some point in one of my science classes that emotions (which are unconscious) narrow the field of possible actions and feelings (which are either conscious or subconscious but can becomes conscious) are cognitive and therefore widen the field, giving us more options. Say you see something that looks like a snake out of the corner of your eye. Your experience the emotion of fear. Then you become consciously aware of fear, as a feeling. Then you look more closely at what you've seen. Now, consciously, you register whether it's a poisonous snake, whether or not it's coming toward you, or if it's actually just a stick. With this in mind, you chose how to act next.

A really good example of how feelings/consciousness/cognition widen the field is anxiety. Unconsciously, there are a lot of things we can react to with fear. These stimuli aren't necessarily consciously registered, but once the experience fear hits consciousness and becomes a feeling we consciously start to try and piece together why. There's a lot of room for misdiagnosis there, and if you can't figure out the cause of your anxiety you can't diffuse/resolve it very well, continue to feel anxious, and continue to worry about why. Er, or that's my undertsanding of it. I haven't really taken any psychology classes.

Anyway. Consciousness is necessary to learn how to live in the world. Once you get a good enough handle on that, though, you can potentially learn how to bypass conscious thought as a middle man and still be able to function normally Doing instead of reasoning.