TITHONUS' DIARY!!
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override I've been thinking about the way that people make big decisions (haha, guess why that is) and it's occurred to me that... there's a... ok. Not very articulate today. Anyway, there's something that people say that's like, "what's the point of it all?" or "why am I working so hard? Is that all I get in exchange?" or whatever. You know, the kind of negative, defeatist, "giving up on life" type attitude. There's a good example of it in the movie "Scarface", where Al Pacino is sitting in an expensive restaurant and realises all his success and wealth is meaningless... he talks about the decay of the body and so on. Right. - Anyway, it occurred to me today that what's going on in those moments or in those feelings of "despair" or whatever is actually a correction of a certain kind of override facility of the consciousness. Um. Which is to say, the kind of life that a person lives under the influence of their unconscious mind, their "animal" mind or whatever is not all that different to the life of a cat. You seek warmth when you're cold, food when you're hungry, shelter, affection, security, and so on. And... hmm. It's hard to write about this stuff without kind of going into a whole big thing about cybernetics but basically the cat's actions are simultaneously pitched at both the long and the short term. Because the way animals are evolved... the way that the early stages of consciousness have developed is so that short-term interest of the individual and long-term interest of the species (and very long term interest of life itself) coincide. The most obvious example is sex, of course. The individual seeks to have sex because it's pleasurable, but the result is reproduction which is to the good of the species. Long term and short term planning are the same thing. The cat itself doesn't need to "know" that acting on its short term desires serve a long term purpose, because the knowledge is "effective" or "embodied" in the... workings of the system as a whole. And, see, us human beings are part of (and are the product of) the same types of circuits. Call them "feelings" or "instincts" or whatever you like, but they deserve a lot of respect because you exist as a result of them, friends. :) - Ok, but, the next thing is, we have another kind of mind, the conscious mind, which I think of as a kind of "blossoming" of what's implicit in the unconscious mind. But the special property of the consciousness is that it doesn't merely "embody" the circuitry by which life proceeds, it's actually able to understand it, to "know" something without "being" what it knows. The cat's acting-out of the processes of evolution is something that it can only "be". The cat can't explain what evolution is, what natural selection is... its knowledge, if you want to call it knowledge, is purely embodied knowledge. Whereas, we are capable of disembodied knowledge. I can "know" that the planet Venus has a surface temperature of 500 degrees celsius, without ever having been to Venus or even seen it. I don't even have any clear idea of "how hot is 500 degrees?" but I still know that that's the temperature there. - Wow, this is turning out to be much more long-winded than I thought it would. Anyway, what this capacity for disembodied knowledge allows is for the conscious mind to override the animal mind and create behaviours which are... how to put it? Disentangled in time, I guess. For example, I'm able to refrain from spending money on something I want now in order to save up for something else which I want even more and which, if I save enough, I'll be able to buy in the future. We're so used to doing this sort of thing that I think mostly we don't realise what an extraordinary capability this is. It's not merely "self-discipline" or "delayed gratification" either. Both of these functions are possible in other animals and both can exist in forms which are "synchronous"; that is... where time is all the same. Wow, this is so much harder to write clearly than it was to have the insight that provoked the writing. Anyway, for delayed gratification, think of hyenas waiting for a lion to finish eating a gazelle. They could try to run in and eat some of the gazelle immediately, but they don't. They wait until the lions have gone. They don't have to "override" the hunger instinct by "thinking" about whether or not the lions will attack if they go for the food. The instinct to avoid the lions exists on the same level as the instinct to go for the food. (Well, I'm assuming it does.) The point is, "delayed gratification" just means responding to more highly developed instincts than those possesed by, say, flies. - But "asynchronous planning" means that, to some extent, you fight against your own instincts in order to carry out a plan which you think is better than the one promoted by your instincts. It's... the capability of the conscious mind to act as a "ruler" over the remainder of the human system. "I will endure 5 years of a law degree because I will be able to make more money as a lawyer than as a clerk". That's an extraordinary capability. - But, ok, the thing is, it's not faultless. It's actually really problematic because... basically, when you start messing with the system for doing things that has developed over the course of millions of years, with something that is able to act directly contrary to that system, you're able to achieve things that would never appear as the result of biological circuitry (ie, the car) but you're also able to destroy things in ways that biological circuitry would never achieve (ie, nuclear weapons). But, also... you no longer know when you're being "selfish" whether or not this is also "altruistic" in the way that a cat does. - There's way more I need to put in to make this coherent, but I can't bring myself to do it. So, to return to the point I began with... when people "despair" I think what is really happening is that they are surrendering conscious plans and going back to the "back-up system" provided by instinct. They are returning to the embodied knowledge which they have been suppressing or overriding in order to carry out plans formulated in the consciousness. Which is, I think, often the wisest thing to do because, the "animal" part of our systems is the result of tremendous refinement and improvement on a very old and very successful system. Our animal selves are always in tune with what's in the interest of ourselves, our species and our world. Whereas, the conscious self is an experiment... some would say a very successful experiment, but... I think that remains to be seen. As Mao Zedong reputedly said when he was asked if he thought the French Revolution of 1789 was a good thing, "It's too soon to say". - Vanity of vanities, I wonder if this makes any sense. But if any part of it needs clarification, by all means, ask. :) - "Mama, put my guns in the ground" - Bob Dylan
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