Submitted by ralphammer t3_xsn2e1 in philosophy
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TMax01 t1_iqnyn3l wrote
The cognitive dissonance within us (existential angst, I call it) doesn't come from desiring an "objective perception" while being part of the world we percieve, but in expecting that there could be an "objective" world absent the ability to "percieve". Our 'subjective' perceptions are the only kind of perceptions there can be, not just the only ones we have. Awareness requires observation, but observation doesn't require awareness: in teaching that we are no different from other animals (which also have vision systems and brains capable of integrating observations into useful information) modern/postmodern psychology and philosophy simply dismiss the conscious awareness we possess which other animals do not. Animals observe the world, but they are not aware of observing it; they are not conscious of either the world or themselves. They are simply stimulus-response automata, reacting to their environment according to the genetic programming of natural selection and the neural programming of operant conditioning, without being aware they are doing so.
We, of course, are still animals: we have genetic and neural causes for all of the most basic activities we share with animals: eating, sleeping, reproducing. But just because we are animals does not mean we are just animals: we are and can become aware, conscious, of the world and ourselves in a way which animals cannot, and all of the actions and behaviors we execute are self-determined, even the most basic ones. So we can choose to not eat, or decide whether to not reproduce. The postmodern insistence that we remain only animals, that our thoughts, feelings, intentions, and activities are "really" just more complicated forms of biological imperatives and avoiding danger, different in degree but not in kind, is what produces existential angst, not the fact that we remain physical beings "trapped" (or rather, empowered) by the unyielding and merciless laws of physics.
liamjamesjustice t1_iqodm7t wrote
So the crux of why we feel the angst is we recognize ourselves as a conscious piece of the world, and at the same time we realize this world could exist without us even being here, perceiving it?
TMax01 t1_iqokpbc wrote
That's not what I'm saying. In fact, I don't think there is any contradiction engendered by that position: there isn't anything about being a "conscious piece of the world" and being inessential to it which would produce cognitive dissonance. Not that I think it is a happy thought, that as individuals we are each almost entirely insignificant. But that is the human condition, and always has been, so while the forlorn emotions it causes can be troublesome, it isn't a matter of cognitive dissonence.
The angst arises from knowing our thoughts to be reasonable, and being told they should instead be logical. In trying to get our thoughts to be "logic", like the math which we can so succesfully use to model everything else except our thoughts (and reasoning), we experience cognitive dissonance caused by the conflict between a natural desire to be reasonable and human and the expectation imposed on us from false teachings to be logical and robotic. We know we are more than biological robots programmed by evolution to replicate our genes, but we are told we cannot know that or even be that. The cognitive dissonance this causes is far more profound than simple personal anxiety, which is why I call it existential angst. It is the root cause of the monumental tide of anxiety, depression, religious fundamentalism, drug use and addiction, and even bigotry and political turmoil that has been rising to engulf our society for decades.
I know that sounds like an alarmist and pretentious theory, but it is far easier to dismiss than it is to deny.
ICFAOUNSFI t1_iqwpj27 wrote
A question: can we chose to chose not to eat?
That is, are our decisions pertaining to our actions and behaviors resulting from our “self-determination”, not also arising from stimulation-response automata offering the illusion of consciousness where there is only a secondary system based in stimulation-response, not necessarily more complicated but just secondary and acting on the first?
TMax01 t1_iqxwe52 wrote
> question: can we chose to chose not to eat?
Indeed we can. Though looking at it plainly, that becomes a far deeper question than you might realize. So it makes sense to consider the various reasons why we might choose to do so, and why our decision may be one we can, if you'll excuse the expression, 'live with'. Are we trying to lose weight? Are we protesting injustice? Are we using medical technology to remain alive without eating? Consciousness is, by it's very nature and regardless of its origin or mechanisms, both fraught and perilous.
>That is, are our decisions pertaining to our actions and behaviors resulting from our “self-determination”, not also arising from stimulation-response automata offering the illusion of consciousness where there is only a secondary system based in stimulation-response, not necessarily more complicated but just secondary and acting on the first?
That is a much better question than your first one, but not necessarily as equivalent to it as your rhetoric suggests.
The answer is illuminating, if you are willing to even try to understand it. The truth is that, yes, our decisions (which follow from, rather than precede, our choices, as proven by Benjamin Libet decades ago) do indeed arise from mechanisms that can be modeled as computational, although to say they are "stimulation-response automata" themselves is assuming a conclusion. The 'secret' to self-determination is that those decisions, while arising in the very same brain that produced the choices, are the result of an independent set of "automota", one which includes the (seemingly) impossibly illogical stimuli and response of 'perception', 'experience', and 'mind'. The divergence (whether merely potential or actual) between the outcomes of these two putatively separate selection mechanisms is exactly what is being discussed here. The choices are selected unconsciously (Freudians suggest the term "subconsciously", but it is problematic) just as any animal executes actions as the result of neurological activity. But the decisions which follow, as explanations for why the action was executed, and provide an opportunity to imagine having chosen differently, are not bound by those choices, and can 'integrate' (if you will) information available only to a conscious creature which is, therefor, thereby, and therefore, able to conceive of things like future and past (independent of the operant conditioning which might determine choices in a simple stimuli-response automata) and desires and intentions and goals and hope and possibility and compassion and morality and 'life as more than simply surviving and replicating genes' unconsciously. In short, thinking and reasoning, rather than computation and logic. The "being" that gives rise to the word for it, not simply the physical existence of it.
As these decisions, teleological examinations of self-awareness, follow our choices, they cannot change them once those choices have occurred, because the decision cannot exist until after the choice it regards has occured, and has unalterably become physically evident. There is no free will, we cannot actually change the direction of time's arrow and reverse chronology to undo the past. But these decisions are not "meaningless", because they are real and they are at least partially independent of the "automata" which produced the choice (and this is both why and how self-determination exists, despite free will, the conventional explanation for it, being impossible) and our self-determinations become part (not a controlling part, but a factual part, and potentially a more powerful stimulus than even biological imperatives or physical truth) of all the future choices, both related by rational connection or simply subsequent in that individual brain. And this, my friend, is what consciousness is.
https://www.reddit.com/r/NewChurchOfHope/comments/wkkgpr/por_101_there_is_no_free_will_only
Thanks for your time. Hope it helps.
TMax01 t1_iqo3cr3 wrote
>our brain responds and tries to find out what it means.
>This stimulus-response model separates our inner subjective world from an outer objective world. We can never know for sure what is going on objectively. There is no meaning in the world,
[Emphasis added.]
This passage reveals an ambiguity in the use of the word "mean"/"meaning" which demonstrates an internal inconsistency, a self-contradicting premise, in the author's reasoning and source material.
As an analogy, the contrast between 'stimulus-response' and 'affordance' models can be instructive in grappling with philosophical paradigms concerning consciousness and existential metaphysics. As an example, it is, if you will forgive the word, meaningless. Animals are also using visual systems comprised of not just eyes, but heads and bodies and ground, no more or less than we do. But animals do not spend thousands of years developing technological engineering projects like text and the Internet to discuss these things. So in terms of being informative about the human condition or what meaning is, I believe there is a good reason why Gibson's book from the 1970s has faded into obscurity, as it doesn't actually provide any explanatory ideas, it simply covers the same ground ancient philosophers did and circles the same drain of existential uncertainty. The essay rightly observes that Gibson's more comprehensive analogy has been cited and used by many designers and architects, but it isn't like buildings or smartphone interfaces provide any meaning in our lives. The observation that the form of an artificial object should communicate its function does not rely on this book or Gibson's analysis.
Meaning does not derive from constructing models of the external world, or the internal world for that matter, which afford us survival advantage. It relates to the explanatory power of those models for non-utilitarian purposes, not the accuracy of the models themselves. We do not invent meaning, we observe it, and yet we are the only creatures (biological objects) capable of observing it. To say "we can never know for sure what is going on objectively" denies that there is any value in the affordable model, and Gibson's perspective admits as much by reducing the goal of that model to the same limitations of a stimulus-response system: physical survival. From a human perspective, simply surviving is not meaningful, it is the very absence of meaning. A philosophy which equates "meaning" with "what it can afford us" is a pitiful lack of philosophy which denies the existence of "meaning" to begin with.
liamjamesjustice t1_iqnmtqe wrote
I suppose there is a kind of cognitive dissonance within us when we desire to be integrated with the world while also striving for an objective perspective of said world.