Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!microsoft!gaben From: gaben@microsoft.UUCP (Gabe NEWELL) Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy Subject: Re: emergent properties Summary: identity, locus, choice, utility Keywords: pleasure, stoicism, self Message-ID: <58130@microsoft.UUCP> Date: 10 Oct 90 20:41:30 GMT References: <3499@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> <1990Oct3.183522.17076@riacs.edu> <3565@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> Organization: Microsoft Corp., Redmond WA Lines: 40 In article <3565@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU>, minsky@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Marvin Minsky) writes: > I actually had a point to make that illuminates this problem, though > it doesn't solve it. I wasn't telling you what to do. I was saying > something quite different: that maybe you might say to yourself, "Am I > really liking this? What am "I", indeed? When one part of my brain > "likes" something very much, is it possible that there are other parts > of my brain -- maybe much you think>> that are being suppressed, put out of it, deprived of life > and liberty etc. Ask yourself (as some stoic philosophers did, I > suspect) -- "Who are those little proto-mammalian pleasure centers in > my brain to tell me what I really *should* like. > > So I wasn't saying what to do, only suggesting that you look more > thoughtfully at what may already be telling "you" what to do. Don't > let your mind kick you around. I was thinking about this a little. It reminded me of problems I have experienced in thinking about psycho- analysis. Basically for these domains, the words "I", "know", and "choose" are not particularly useful concepts - the lead to confusion more than they do to enlightenment or adaptive decision making or self-awareness or clinical insight. (A simplistic concept of "I" is a barrier to kinds of self-knowledge.) For example which is "I", the "proto-mammalian pleasure centers", or the part of me that is asking the question "Who are ... *should* like". Should I attempt to address them as a whole, or should I try to have a test that allows me to select the most useful definition of "I" for a given decision. Clinical experience in couple or family counseling can give lots of evidence of confusion about "I" and poor representation of "choose" leading to maladaptive behavior and not particularly useful internal representations of situations. My question then is what paradigm is currently available that can richly address subtleties of "I" "choose" and "know"?