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From: rjf@canon.co.uk (Robin Faichney)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: emergent properties
Message-ID: <1990Oct12.124108.3241@canon.co.uk>
Date: 12 Oct 90 12:41:08 GMT
References: <3499@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> <1990Oct3.183522.17076@riacs.edu> <3565@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> <58130@microsoft.UUCP>
Sender: Robin Faichney <rjf@canon.co.uk>
Reply-To: rjf@canon.co.uk
Organization: Canon Research Europe, Guildford, UK
Lines: 50

In article <58130@microsoft.UUCP> gaben@microsoft.UUCP (Gabe NEWELL) writes:
>In article <3565@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU>, minsky@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU 
>(Marvin Minsky) writes:
>> What am "I", indeed?
>> [..]
>> Who are those little proto-mammalian pleasure centers in
>> my brain to tell me what I really *should* like.
>> [..]
>> 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"?

I don't know of any such paradigm, but I tend to doubt the need for
one.  Not that I poo-poo the problem -- I have become aware of it in a
very similar context.  But it seems to me that the major hurdle for
people in dealing with the plurality of "I"s is just in realising that
fact.  The primitive concept of the "I" is very solid -- independent
and individual (note I'm not saying the people are like that, just
their "I" concepts).  All you can do with that is encourage someone to
notice the transition, having first suggested the possibility, of
course.  When a person begins to realise that he can actually be
different people at different times, then the natural progression is to
watch out for that and gain skill in dealing with it.

So what I'm saying is that this is an irreducibly experiencial
phenomenon, not likely to be helped (much) by the projection onto it of
any conceptual framework.

Is this really the right group for this issue?  Seems a little too
"humanistic" to me.  :-)