ANEXOS No aplica

“Only to the extent that man exposes himself over and over again to annihilation, can that which is indestructible arise within him”. -- Karlfried Graf von Durckheim

Consciousness as self-activity

“Man’s real needs are an expression of his universality, the nature of the species which is reborn in each individual. They are essential needs which lead to relationships with both the human and the natural world, in a reciprocal dialectic between

the naturalness of man and the humanization of nature” Biancoli (1989)

“It is understood that the subject as an individual is born with an allotment of needs. But let me repeat once more, needs as an internal force may be realized only in activity. “Leontev, A.

(1978)

That is to say that psychic energy is related to what ideas are in demand, the demand in the world; creates an internal force within the self.

It sounds silly right? But suppose the morality of a human who hasn’t accepted a morality. Or the decision of a person or hasn’t chosen a decision; if someone has no underlying philosophy – they are quickly labelled with opinions, values, beliefs, and make decisions that aren’t their own. When their peers make judgements “your smart”, “Your dumb”, “Your too selfish”,

“You’re a nice person” we accept that we have that version of our self within us, and automatically it becomes the dominant feature of our nature; the label comes to define us – because such a man lacks definition within himself.

Not to be selfish “implies not to do what one wishes, to give up one's own wishes for the sake of those in authority; i.e., the parents, and later the authorities of society. „Don't be selfish”

Fromm, E. (1939b)

“Eyes to see with ears to hear with, a brain to reason and

perceive with, a heart to feel with, organs and their use, faculties and functions this is the Marxist concept of human nature,

„dynamic and full of energy“ The concreteness of human nature lies in its position as the need for affirmation,

self-production, in the world. In the Manuscripts work is called

“self-activity“ insofar as human beings and nature are in a reciprocal relationship in which the naturalness of man shows its worth as an expression of active need which interacts with nature and humanizes it. However, the psychologist in Marx sees the “ambiguous character of needs“ Needs can be artificial even if they are not perceived as such” Fromm, E.Biancoli, R.

(1989)

Free Will, Psychology & NeuroScience

For thousands of years philosophers have looked at human act, and questioned what drives and motivates people to commit one activity over another and how society as a whole can decide what actions are most valuable.

What is free will? According to the Encyclopedia of Columbia - free will is a philosophic concern; that assumes individuals, regardless of forces external to them, is still able and does choose at least some of his actions.

Do we possess free will, do we have an ability to choose our actions? In order to discover a considered answer as to whether we possess free will provides us taking into account the

processes that exercise that will. Therefore we should look at the the mechanisms within the brain that participate in decision making.

Free will is about our ability to make choices, and is an essential question if we are going to uncover whether its really possible to make others do what we want them to do through persuasion; or whether thats just a pipe dream.

To reject Free Will is refered to as psychological determinism, it assumes that all behaviour, thoughts, etc were always envitiable

to happen. It sounds like a outlandishly bold claim, and theres plenty of reasons we might want to argue against it.

For example; if someone was always going to steal a car, or rob a bank, or murder someone then is it really fair to put them in prison as a result of their crime, as it isn’t really their crime nor their fault?

A visit to one of our nation’s jails or prisons will show rows of humans kept behind bars, many of whom have returned to prison on a second or third offense, committed despite their first-hand knowledge of the consequences of their actions.

As a society we justify the imprisonment of such individuals by our belief that one can avoid incarceration: that someone sentenced to spend years in prison got there only through his or her own choices. That is, we possess a freedom of will, and it is misuse of that freedom that justifies restrictions on it. Burns, K.Bechara, A. (2007)

Answers to such questions have dramatic consequences for our ethical and legal systems. I feel responsible for my voluntary acts and am likely to be held responsible for them by the courts.

But, if my conscious self is not responsible for my acts and if the act is determined by preconscious processing, can‘t I plead, in mitigation, that I could not have chosen to do otherwise as the acts were controlled by my non-conscious brain? Max Velmans (2008)

Jeffrey Rosen wrote in The New York Times Magazine, “Since all behavior is caused by our brains, wouldn’t this mean all

behavior could potentially be excused? … The death of free will, or its exposure as a convenient illusion, some worry, could

wreak havoc on our sense of moral and legal responsibility.”

Eddy, N. (2011)

The question of free will goes strikes the core foundation of our views about human nature and how we relate to the universe and to natural laws. Are we completely prearranged by the determistic nature of physical laws?

Are we just “essentially sophisticated automatons, with our conscious feelings and intentions tacked on as a

phenomenological accident? Or is it that we really do have some independence in making choices and actions, not completely determined by the known physical laws?”.

When consciously reading this sentence for example you become aware of the printed text on the page, accompanied, perhaps, by inner speech (phonemic imagery) and a feeling of understanding (or not). But you have no introspective access to the processes that enable you to read. Nor does one have introspective access to the details of most other forms of cognitive functioning, for example to the detailed operations that enable conscious learning, remembering, engaging in conversations with others and so on. Max Velmans (2008)

That although we might be aware of many things; there are things that go on inside our own brains that we are not always quite aware of and perhaps these cause behaviours, attitudes etc.

that we are not sure we necessarily chose?

We could say that in your environment, you often have a limited set of choices provided; for example in a supermarket you might have only three brands of beans on sale. And therefore making your decision about which brand of beans you buy isn’t your

choice because you can’t buy from any of the other 1000’s of bean selling competitors that exist.

However, this is perhaps a silly route of enquiry to show that we don’t have quite as much control over life as we would like, but the commonplace view of free will actually takes account of the fact that we cannot control everything in our surroundings, most philosophers, and it seems general public believe that we can only control the things we know about, and have access to;

leaving free will to be something conceptual, the ability to recall information we know about, and be able to act within the best of our abilities, to be able to choose to think about which one of our long-ago memories we want to choose to recall, or to be able to decide what would be an interesting meal choice for this evening.

If we are ever asked what we are thinking, we can normally answer. We often seem to believe that we have an understanding about what is going on in our own minds, that we make

consistent rational decisions and one thought leads to another in an orderly way.

But that is not really the way the mind works… most of our impressions actually come from your experience of

consciousness without understanding any of the reasoning on how they emerged. Kahneman, D. (2011) I also want to

recommend this news article for addition reading. Burkeman, O.

(2011)

A great deal of my thoughts and ideas, not only inspired from my time studying; but inspired by this new trend in books to explain every decision people make as an economic one i.e. that promotes utility. Daniel Kahneman I believe has been one of the most important researchers into psychology of our time. I know

other hypnotists have their scientist gurus; but this one is mine.

He lives in an airy penthouse on the 14th floor of an apartment block in downtown Manhattan, not far from the Eighth Street subway station. But never mind that for a moment. Instead, without thinking too hard about it, try answering the following question: roughly what percentage of the member states of the United Nations are in Africa? (I'll wait.)

Your answer to the above question; might seem irrelevant to this essay into conversational hypnosis; however its not; If I told you Daniel Kahneman is 77 years old, your answer would have been significantly higher as to how many member states from the United Nations are in Africa. Because I told you about the eighth subway street, and the 14th apartment block; your answer was much lower than the number of UN members there are in Africa.

Kahneman, states that, “Words and other stimuli activate relevant mental processes. Once 'switched on', this cognitive machinery remains accessible for a while, influencing subsequent thoughts and actions. When priming affects the estimation of number values, psychologists call it anchoring.”

William Poundstone (2011:94)

In one of many studies testing the theory that perhaps all of our decisions are pre-determined – that there is brain activity that determines the choice we make; before we make a choice; The scientist Smith, K (2011) and his research team at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, involved putting people into a brain scanner (FRMI) in which a display screen flashed a succession of random letters1. He told them to press a button with either their right or left index fingers

whenever they felt the urge, and to remember the letter that was showing on the screen when they made the decision. The

experiment used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to reveal brain activity in real time as the volunteers chose to use their right or left hands. The results were quite a surprise.

"The first thought we had was 'we have to check if this is real',"

says Haynes. "We came up with more sanity checks than I've ever seen in any other study before."

The conscious decision to push the button was made about a second before the actual act, but the team discovered that a pattern of brain activity seemed to predict that decision by as many as seven seconds. Long before the subjects were even aware of making a choice, it seems, their brains had already decided. Smith, K (2011)

However, it was found in these type of studies that conscious-will could affect the outcome of the volitional process even though the latter was initiated by unconscious cerebral

processes. Conscious-will might block or veto the process so that no act occurs.

The existence of this veto process seems evidential. In the study, the subjects at times reported that a conscious wish or urge to act appeared but they supressed or vetoed that and thus failed to lift a handle.

All of us, not just experimental subjects have experienced our vetoing a spontaneous urge to perform some act. This often occurs when the urge to act involves some socially unacceptable consequence, like an urge to shout some obscenity at a boss or to stop yourself urinating in public.

Another hypothetical function for the conscious will could be to serve as a ‘trigger’ that is required to enable the volitional

process to proceed to final action. However there is no evidence for this, as there is only evidence to veto a given thought-process, but no evidence to support that the process once initiated in the unconscious brain? (wherever that begins) needs to be triggered.

The way I can imagine this is a kind of water-pistol that is being filled up with water, this particular water pistol has a

dysfunctional trigger, that when the pressure of the water residing in the barrel of the water pistol is great enough water will begin dripping out of the end of the gun, however, one can always push this faulty trigger up into the gun to prevent the water leaking out.

Perhaps this represents some age old battle between personality dualisms, Freuds ideas of there being a ‘Superego’ that controls the impulses that are created by the ‘Id’. Freud saw that the unconscious had desires and wants, primarily associated with food and sex, and it was the job of the rule-judgement based logic of the super-ego closely associated with ‘strong opinions’, laws, moral-code and the like to prevent the person just doing what their natural bodily instinct was.

Freudian theory, can be explained through a simple illustration;

for example; we might be hungry, but we can delay and plan what we would like to eat because of our ego which allows us the time to weigh up “What would be right” from our superego, which might depending on the person say that a healthy meal would be good, but then the id simply complaining that its hungry and needing satisfaction.

The idea of there been two parts to the psyche (consciousness) goes back a long time in philosophy, for example Plato commonly distinguished the “animal” and “rational” parts of

our nature, with the rational part being particularly complex. He believed that our rational nature comes from our ability to judge what is a ‘good’ activity, what ‘goal’ is worth pursuing and seeking this goal despite considerable unpleasantness. For example early on this evening I was particularly hungry, I could have easily cooked something from the freezer, but instead I decided to walk across town and go to a restaurant that I like. I had to temporarily delay my desire to eat, in order to achieve a value that I deemed ‘worthwhile’.

Like proclaimed by Freud, and other philosophers, it’s now widely accepted in child cognitive development that children are poor at planning, and reflecting; “That their behaviour is more dominated by the impulsive system—children tend to behave in a manner that they do what they feel like doing right now, without much thought about the future. However, through learning they learn to constrain many desires and behaviours that conflict with social rules, and that lead to negative consequences. This is the first sign of the development of willpower, and an example of how the reflective system gains control over the impulsive system. Burns, K.Bechara, A.

(2007:267)

In order to understand this ability to choose according to long-term outcomes, and resist immediate desires; requires that individuals can recall and trigger memories, imaginings, of

‘other states’ than their current impulses. For example, if I’m hungry I can imagine all of the good meals I’ve had and then make a decision based on that, rather than just immediate eating what is close by, it’s triggering of these somatic states by the reflective/planning system which signal how valuable long-term outcomes are over immediate concerns.

In order to understand this ‘impulsive’ part of the human psyche, we might first research what the word impulsive means;

‘thefreedictionary.com’ states that the word ‘impulsive’ refers to actions based on sudden desires, whims, or inclinations rather than careful planning or thought. And that some people could be described in English as “an impulsive person” that these actions are based on emotional impulses or whims; and are somewhat spontaneous, like “an impulsive kiss” that they are compelling.

The dictionary tells me that to fully understand the meaning of the word impulsive we should take a read of the word

‘Spontaneous’ which is an adjective that states, that spontaneous is when a thing occurs, produced or is performed by natural processes but without any external influence, for example, “a spontaneous comment” or a “spontaneous movement” and arises from “personal impulse”.

Much credit is perhaps owed to Freud for originally bringing public attention to the idea of their being a non-conscious side to the psyche; despite his model was never shown to be reliable in research studies. For most of the mid-twentieth century various eccentrically-theoretical post-Freudian models were created. But in this modern era considering all the latest complex research into neurology surely we are capable of coming up with a more up-to-date and explanatory model of human mental existence?

In the year 2000 researchers Smith and DeCoster began a systematic comparison of the nine predominant models of mental life, and compared and contrasted their similarities and differences; they found they on the whole shared the concept of two distinctive systems of the psyche. Strack, F. Deutsch, R.

(2004)

Burns and Bechara (2007) explain these two sides “In all cases, the distinction is between the operations of one system that are

typically fast, automatic, effortless, implicit and habitual, and the operations of another system that are slow, deliberate, effortful, explicit and rule governed.” To explain further the differences between the systems Strack and Deutch (2004) explain “The reflective system generates behavioural decisions that are based on knowledge about facts and values, whereas the impulsive system elicits behaviour through associative links and motivational orientations”.

Kahneman amongst others outlines the brain to contain two systems, and impulsive system (one where associations are built through classic stimulus and response conditioning, and

associations are activated by seeing/hearing associated material in the environment, and increases when attention paid to it) that passes variables to its sub-component the reflective system;

which then generalises content into some kind of assumption, attitude, rationalisation, or the decision to make an action. It should be pointed out that although the working memory of the reflective system can ‘work’ data, it can only consider a few things at a time, and the information considered is nearly always pre-determined.

In order to begin to understand the process of human choice-making, we need to understand the process an idea goes through before it’s acted upon.

Various questions come about from this impulsive/reflective system. Is it quite as simple as saying there are two clearly distinct faculties of the human psyche as a unconscious

Various questions come about from this impulsive/reflective system. Is it quite as simple as saying there are two clearly distinct faculties of the human psyche as a unconscious