This matches how I experience things as well. I certainly can consciously deliberate and then act, but the vast majority of things I do don't work that way. I view my self awareness as something I have, not something I "am". It's nice to see someone else convey this view; if I'm crazy at least I have some company!As I wrote in my previous post, in my personal experience, my volition arises in a part of my mind that is not directly accessible to my self-awareness. When I act on that motivation, it is just as much me acting as it would be if I became aware before I acted. I am just as responsible for my actions as I would be otherwise. Part of what I call "me" is hidden the way the innards of my computer are hidden. — T Clark
It is really suprising how well some of Kant's intuitions have been borne out by modern neuroscience, and yet how ready we are to jettison them to hold on to an easier narrative. — Count Timothy von Icarus
There doesn't seem to be enough consideration that moral issues don't come to us in a vacuum, but are instead filtered through a system of perception, including an inherited moral sense, that was shaped by natural selection and is contingent on the way those systems work. — Count Timothy von Icarus
A man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills — Arthur Schopenhauer
What's been labelled as subconscious is as much part of nature as the outside world is.the unconscious is doing a lot more, at a much higher level then we often give it credit for — Count Timothy von Icarus
Suppose the subconscious is a great ball of many inter-twined threads doesn't 'information' come out of the mind after the fact as a particular single thread of yarn?recursively self-referential ... only recursively integrated information reaches consciousness — Count Timothy von Icarus
this of course doesn't get into the still unresolved problems of Fichte's reading it Hegel: if all the accessible world is Self, how does something wholly other, the things in themselves, ever effect the Self. It's open to all the Berkleyian criticisms of dualism. — Count Timothy von Icarus
But we also need to take account of the recursively self-referential nature of consciousness. Scott takes the view (others have taken a similar line), that consciousness is the product of a special kind of recursion which allows the brain to take into account its own operations and contents as well as the external world. Instead of simply providing an output action for a given stimulus, it can throw its own responses into the mix and generate output actions which are more complex, more detached, and in terms of survival, more effective.
Scott proceeds to suggest that logic and even intentionality – aboutness – are affected by a similar kind of magic that similarly turns out to be mere conjuring. Again, results generated by systems we have no direct access to, produce results which consciousness complacently but quite wrongly attributes to itself and is thereby deluded as to their reliability. It’s not exactly that they don’t work (we could again make the argument that we don’t seem to be dead yet, so something must be working) more that our understanding of how or why they work is systematically flawed and in fact as we conceive of them they are properly just illusions.
Most of us will, I think want to stop the bus and get off at this point. What about logic, to begin with? Well, there’s logic and logic. There is indeed the unconscious kind we use to solve certain problems and which certainly is flawed and fallible; we know many examples where ordinary reasoning typically goes wrong in peculiar ways. But then there’s formal explicit logic, which we learn laboriously, which we use to validate or invalidate the other kind and which surely happens in consciousness (if it doesn’t then really I don’t think anything does and the whole matter descends into complete obscurity); hard not to feel that we can see and understand how that works too clearly for it to be a misty illusion of competence.
my point was that biology could be structuring our reason in ways we do not understand and cannot understand because we have no means of comparison. — Count Timothy von Icarus
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