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| inputs through the sense organs |
Presumably the unconscious will can be influenced by inputs
through the sense organs. These inputs trigger the unconscious patterns to follow
this way rather than that. But how are the influential inputs chosen? What
agency is involved?
Serendipity plays a part (see box). For example I have just finished
scanning the email, FaceBook and a couple of online news sites. This generated
a range of minor stimuli whose influence is largely unconscious and presumably relatively
slight. But ‘I’ have little control over the quantity and quality of inputs
that were delivered.
There is also serendipity concerning the narrow and more
wide ranging geo-historical happenstances that have been and are shaping what
passes for ‘me’. Those can be thought of as my nurture. There will also be
particularities concerning my nature – my genes.
So is it all serendipity, all accident and chance? Is my
life a snowball rolling down a mountain: something initially very small (with some
hard wired instincts and frameworks) that grew by picking up bits and pieces of
stuff (eg food and knowledge) that happened to be in its way?
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| Like a snowball down a mountain |
That makes the process sound emergent rather than
deterministic and that brings pleasure to this vital churn of matter that is me
– a zoologist by basic training.
Determinism is about conscious design and blueprints in
advance; about planning for the future in the belief that the evidence supports
pursuing this policy and plan rather than that one. But as Robert Burns pointed
out, “the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agleigh”.
Emergence involves going with the flow. Cause and effect are
still the basis for everything but the complexity of multi-cause and multi-effect
means that the ability to predict the future is severely curtailed. Meteorologists
know this only too well.
Development planners take note – humility and holism are the
order of the new day. Determinism has its uses when planning the creation and maintenance
of physical infrastructures such as water, sanitation, roads, bridges etc.
Emergence is more useful in dealing with social infrastructures such as health,
education, land tenure, culture and governance[1].
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| press button people |
But what do ‘I’ think? What is ‘my’ opinion? A lot of Pavlovian
buttons[2]
have been built into my brain by nature and nurture. There is thus reaction to particular
stimuli in particular ways. But few of these are freely chosen by me. They snuck
in by various back doors. They are not thus the conscious me. They might be the
unconscious me but ‘I’ do not know that consciously! Either way, there is the
option of being aware of what is going on in consciousness and also in the
unconscious. Where the latter is done indirectly by noting what the unconscious
throws into the attention centre and how this affects the body in terms of hot
flushes and cold sweats etc.
But, to get back to the earlier question, “is it all
serendipity, all accident and chance?” The temptation is to say yes.
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| metaphorical parent |
A key concept is ‘agency’. Our brains seem to be wired
linguistically to make sense of the world by perceiving patterns and agents.
The ‘agents’ are responsible for making things happen, they are causal agents.
And language continually evolves to map ‘reality’ - and it uses metaphor to
explain the unknown in terms of the known.
The known agents are ourselves and we have intentions, motivations
and moods. There are unknown agents
responsible for thunder and lightning, droughts and floods, feasts and famines.
But these unknown agents are like people – they have intentions, motivations
and moods. They need placating. They become the gods, ghosts and ghouls of magic
and metaphysics. The exact nature of the metaphor varies through time as indicated
in the following list.
·
The pantheon of many nature gods.
·
The ghosts of the ancestors.
·
The omniscient God.
·
The Satanic Devil.
·
The infallible Pope.
·
The Divine Right of Kings (and Queen’s).
·
The Glorious Leader.
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·
Our Elders and Betters.
·
The Good and the Great.
·
The CEO (Boss, Leader)
·
The community.
·
The nuclear (?) family.
·
The Individual.
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And so… the unconscious will is inevitably influenced by
inputs from the sense organs and by memories. It is not easy to pin down the
agencies for choosing influential inputs. But there is no need to impute magic
or metaphysics. The multi-module mind is in a continual state of flux with much
ongoing and speedy creation and destruction. Sometimes there is ‘will’ in the attention
centre and sometimes something else. It is a case of self regulation in complex
systems.
Box: Serendipity
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Serendipity means a "happy accident" or "pleasant
surprise"; specifically, the accident of finding something good or
useful while not specifically searching for it.
The first noted use of "serendipity" was by Horace Walpole
(1717–1797). He formed it from the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of
Serendip, whose heroes "were always making discoveries, by accidents and
sagacity, of things they were not in quest of".
Ikujiro Nonaka points out that the serendipitous quality of
innovation is highly recognized by managers. It links the success of Japanese
enterprises to their ability to create knowledge not by processing
information but rather by "tapping the tacit and often highly subjective
insights, intuitions, and hunches of individual employees and making those
insights available for testing and use by the company as a whole".
William Boyd coined the term zemblanity to mean somewhat the opposite
of serendipity: "making unhappy, unlucky and unexpected discoveries
occurring by design". A zemblanity is, effectively, an "unpleasant
surprise".
Source: Wikipedia
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[1] I
have developed a holistic acronym – social, technical, environmental, economic,
political, ethical and spiritual – STEEPLES http://sites.google.com/site/steeplessrds/
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