How does motivation work with self-reflection? Is it self-deception? What a conception!
So many of us have probably had this before. You are doing some menial task for an employer. You start asking, "Besides not getting fired or hassled so I can get a paycheck, why the hell am I doing this shit?!". This is a statement stemming from the ability to be self-aware. In other words, we can reflect on our own actions while we are doing those actions.
Most other animals presumably just "do" without the ability to self-reflect on their own actions. Having this self-awareness causes a conundrum. We know we don't like the task we are doing, it provides no flow, it provides no satisfaction, it is simply something we do for some abstract future fear (i.e. not losing job). Other animals are at an advantage in a way. They don't have that ability to know they don't like what it is they are doing. I can't see a bird questioning why it has to always find food, let's say and experiencing ennui (however cool that would be to imagine).
So if humans can constantly self-reflect on their own daily primary tasks, how do we trick our brains into overcoming doing the daily grind of unwanted and unsatisfactory tasks? Some possibilities I can think of:
There's others too, and they are all sort of intertwined, but the point here is that self-awareness makes the process of living quite different from other animals. Someone cannot just say "just work damnit!" and people get in line. People have thoughts, reflections, desires, etc. that often conflict with the immediate work at hand. With all the work people are given, there is a lot of habit formations, self-deceptions, and other strategies to not self-reflect too much into not wanting to do the undesirable work. My main point is how we as a species can self-reflect and get anything undesirable done.
Simply the reward of future money can't be enough either. You have to buy into the belief that money is the reason you do something you normally would not want to.
@Bitter Crank, @Baden, @csalisbury, what do you think?
Most other animals presumably just "do" without the ability to self-reflect on their own actions. Having this self-awareness causes a conundrum. We know we don't like the task we are doing, it provides no flow, it provides no satisfaction, it is simply something we do for some abstract future fear (i.e. not losing job). Other animals are at an advantage in a way. They don't have that ability to know they don't like what it is they are doing. I can't see a bird questioning why it has to always find food, let's say and experiencing ennui (however cool that would be to imagine).
So if humans can constantly self-reflect on their own daily primary tasks, how do we trick our brains into overcoming doing the daily grind of unwanted and unsatisfactory tasks? Some possibilities I can think of:
- Enculturation into habits of turning off self-reflection. Repeated actions of turning away from meta-analysis through extreme focus and concentration over and over may allow for extinction of meta-analysis on a perpetual basis to become in a way, more animal-like (just do, don't reflect!).
- Self-deception. This is harder to prove but, trying to change attitude towards work through believing (despite one's initial beliefs) that the work is interesting, keeping all other thoughts out.
- Reward. Doing something menial is often seen as remediated as long as pay is seen as enough to compensate for time. This takes a certain type that doesn't need internal experiences to align with one's own preferences for future rewards.
There's others too, and they are all sort of intertwined, but the point here is that self-awareness makes the process of living quite different from other animals. Someone cannot just say "just work damnit!" and people get in line. People have thoughts, reflections, desires, etc. that often conflict with the immediate work at hand. With all the work people are given, there is a lot of habit formations, self-deceptions, and other strategies to not self-reflect too much into not wanting to do the undesirable work. My main point is how we as a species can self-reflect and get anything undesirable done.
Simply the reward of future money can't be enough either. You have to buy into the belief that money is the reason you do something you normally would not want to.
@Bitter Crank, @Baden, @csalisbury, what do you think?
Comments (80)
Did you try asking people why they worked before asking this question?
I know of only one person that would do his job without being paid, but only when he had enough money in the bank and had no expenses to pay to be able to continue. Me, I love my job even though I get pissed of with the idiots I am expected to teach.
And that is the solution to the grind most people suffer from, get a job you love.
Well the question was generally how as self-reflective creatures we can still do something we didn't like while we were doing it. I thought it an interesting phenomenon. Compare this with other animals. A bird cannot reflect on how much he is tired of gathering seeds and berries. A human can, but still trudges on. That touches on existential issues of freedom. Even the simple answer, "because I get money" is loaded with how we buy into certain socialized norms. It is not a given- If offered money, then work. It is something we have bought into as a scheme (for lack of better word) for motivation.
To reflect on something is itself a kind of further doing, a continued modification of one's relationship to that one is involved in. One should be careful in making sharp dichotomous distinctions between what humans can supposedly do that other animals cant. Most of those distinctions have had to be abandoned (tool use, culture, language, cognition, feeling, empathy, etc). Animals display ambivalence and modulations in their attitude toward an object of concern just as humans do. Its simply a matter of degree. What we have that other animals dont to the same degree is a kind of sustained memory for abstract examination and comparison. In most cases this capacity is what allows us to escape from the kind of terror and rage that other animals succumb to as a a result of the inability to undergo sustained conceptual attention. For every example of human misery caused by reflection there are many more of escape from misery due to the ability to clarify situations. It comes down to whether you think ignorance is bliss.
Would you really rather relive your childhood than have the reflective capacities of an adult? My guess is most are happier overall as adults than they were as children, despite the intensity of joy and simple pleasure that seems to be uniquely associated with childhood.
I think you missed the point of the question. It is about how it is we buy into doing something we don't like doing. I know it sounds "simple", but it is actually quite complex as I see it. We "know" what we are doing is something we don't like and we are self-aware of it. However, we create stories, deceptions, or habits of mind that get us to overcome doing unsatisfactory tasks. Self-awareness brings us knowledge of dissatisfaction of the primary task at hand, but yet we find ways to overcome this.
While I cannot prove this to be false, there is not much information about it being true either. The truth is we don't know whether they are capable of reflecting upon their own lives. Have you seen the black birds that figure out how to solve problems so that they can get food. They are very inventive and appear to contemplate problems and use trial and error to solve them. Is it possible that they prefer to solve problems over just finding food out of boredom or dissatisfaction with their usual job?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGPGknpq3e0
Quoting schopenhauer1
Not all humans do, many seek to better their lot in life. Some just give up. It is a question of opportunities being present or not. How many people of low income have a chance to make their lives better? Not many, and some don't even notice that there are occasionally opportunities for them. So they tell themselves that things could be worse and that they are happy for what they have. That is human nature as any psychologist will tell you, no one wants to suffer so we create defenses against it.
But from another point of view, just how many truly satisfying jobs are there? Would it be even possible for everyone to be able to do the job that made them happiest?
I don't think a bird feels the ennui of a boring day, despite their abilities for problem solving which I agree are very impressive, but makes sense in the context of their survival niche.
Quoting Sir2u
Right! There are stories, deceptions, and habits of mind. Again, it intrigues me that self-aware animals such as ourselves can overcome our own self-reflection on doing unsatisfactory tasks. Sartre wrote about authenticity and freedom. Are people giving up their authenticity by buying into a narrative that overrides their dislike for the work at hand? I'm not discounting the fact that it may even be necessary to knowingly trick ourselves into buying into the narrative that the work is necessary.
Quoting Sir2u
A very good point. Again, we are self-aware of these unhappy jobs, but we can make ourselves do it despite this. What a delightfully tragic wacky way to survive- self-awareness of our own dissatisfaction and the overcoming by buying into a narrative or deception.
To do something in the first place (if we don't like it?). I don't think so. Give me a scenario where we start doing something we don't like WITHOUT a narrative or deception to ourselves?
Quoting Joshs
While I agree with you that our self-reflective evaluations change over time on a particular task, the question at hand is how it is we keep doing distasteful tasks. I propose that it is narratives, deceptions, and habits of mind that we buy into. I haven't heard a counter to this. To the contrary, your examples were simply examples of these little narratives, deceptions, and habits of mind we buy into.
How many do you think are actually aware that they are doing it?
Perhaps some people don't self-reflect that much. I guess this is for the people who know they don't like doing the work they are doing. I refuse to believe some people don't reflect on whether they like the work they are doing. They may not communicate it perhaps. Or they are buying into a narrative, deception, or habit of mind. But that is my exact premise.
If the real gist of your question is 'What techniques can people suggest to help one get through an unpleasant situation'?, then self-distraction and deception are certainly among those techniques. More effective, but more difficult, is to find a way to make the job more meaningful , and that involves more than a deception or habit. You could call it a narrative, but it has to be true in some sense. Try reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Another technique could work if there arent too many distractions on the job. If its something that allows one the quiet to daydream one could train oneself to create in one's head(a story, an idea, poetry, building something). Using one;s imagination this way makes the time go much faster. Many find that immersing oneself aggressively into the work also makes the time go faster than trying to do less. Boredom can be the worst aspect of a job.
So immersion may be the key. Either immersion in one's own substantive imagination, immersion in the job, or even immersion in a zen-like state of nothingness where one performs in an altered state.
Some of these are habits, some are deceptions, but the most effective are also the most difficult, involving real use of creativity to transport oneself either more deeply into the work or deeply into another realm while working at the same time(kind of like how one can drive while not remembering driving.because one is immersed in an interesting podcast). Notice how the first day of work after a vacation often doesnt seem as bad because your head is still in that other place. What a person does when they're not working can have an effect on how the job feels to them, how trapped they feel they are, how much hope they have for escape from it, where else they can allow their mind to wander to. IF all one has is the one job that is distasteful to them ,and they have no hobbies, interests, social life outside of that work, it will be particularly hellish. IF , on the other hand, they are take classes after or before work, or involved in a challenging, growth promoting and rewarding activity of some kind, this will almost certainly make its way into their thinking during work and make that work seem less onerous.
Again, all of this comes down to the point where we have to do stuff ancillary to the work itself, to get the work done. We are the only species that contends with this and the reason is our very own self-aware nature. It is amazing we are able to get ourselves this far using these techniques.. narrative, distraction, deception, etc. I think this directly goes at Sartre's understanding that we are free but we choose to sometimes play a role and have bad faith. At work, we take the fake authority from the bossman. We do a task because we are sitting in the correct setting. We buy into the notion that the fear of losing a job is why we should care about this task now (habits of behavior and social signalling). We buy into the notion that a raise makes us care more or work harder. It's all just ways to get ourselves to do something. We don't just "do" something without self-reflection.
Sartre believed we are self-aware. Freud didnt, and neither do postmodern philosophies (Heidegger, Derrida) or the phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, Sartre's contemporary). These thinkers explained the skills you describe not as a composed self turning back to itself, but as a changing series of interactions with the world . These skills are just more complex versions of the sorts of metal adjustments that higher mammals make all the time to challenging situations. Can other animals deliberately use mental strategies? Yes, in a rudimentary way. For instance, dogs can display compulsive or ritualized behaviour that serves the function of mental soothing, even though it doesnt represent a pragmatic action directed at an object in the world. A trained dog will wait patiently for its master even though it is becoming anxious, and may use techniques such as whining to sooth itself and in order to 'do a distasteful job'. does it know its choices? Do we? What does it mean for us to know our choices and is this something we assess all at once, in advance, as surveyors of the realm? Or do we find ourselves discovering what constitutes our choices as our circumstances unfold for us, just as other mammals do?
"It is amazing we are able to get ourselves this far using these techniques."
What exactly is it that is amazing? Enactivist approaches in cognitive psychology are tracing the capabilities of sense-making to the most rudimentary self-organized living systems , so if our skills are amazing, then you can thank the paramecium, because in essence, single celled animals have the same skills(anticipatory cognition), only more complex in humans. Again , a matter of degree, not kind.
" I think this directly goes at Sartre's understanding that we are free but we choose to sometimes play a role and have bad faith."
Our freedom is limited by the constraints of our cultural embeddedness as well as our personal history. Most of what shapes our thinking is outside of our awareness(subpersonal bodily affect and perceptual processes, social cues). What most people think of consciousness is just a thin veneer of of mostly linguistic conceptualization on top of a complex web of subpersonal processes.
Since a dog's cognition is also anticipatory rather than being bound to a purely immediate present, they share the dynamics of our freedom, but within a more constricted temporal horizon of anticipation.
"We don't t just "do" something without self-reflection."
We always just do something, but the doing is future oriented. A doing is an intending and an intending points beyond itself. So what we call reflection arises out of this always beyond itself of intending . This is what gives our purposes and goals their thread of consistency, or what you call 'reflection'. Your cat thinks intentionally also. Watch it become distracted by a noise while it is in the middle of a task. What causes it to return to the task which was interrupted? Because it continues to have the ongoing intention of the task in mind. It reflects back on its purpose.
This continuing to have in mind( a better description would be the ongoing transformation of intentional acts) is what reflection is. We can glorify and fetishize our own more elaborated version of it in order to gush about how unique and free we are relative to the rest of the animal kingdom, but I think animal behavioral research is increasingly coming to the opinion that our reflective skills are not special and unique in themselves, only our ability to transform our intentions in a way that is more tightly self-consistent than other animals. This leads to our superior ability to strategize and plan, but such skills are also present on other animals.
Although there are some parallels, I think you are overselling it. Humans have the capacity for a full-fledged language system. This allows for all sorts of things animals just cant' do, including self-talk and self-reflection. We can start a project not wanting to do the project. We can work on the project and evaluate as we are doing it, and we can look back on a project and evaluate how we liked it. Interesting enough, we probably use differing coping strategies to adapt to all three stages in a project we are dissatisfied with. We may start the project out of fear of getting fired, for example (amongst other reasons). We may be immersed in the project while doing it (effectively trying to zone everything out), or on the opposite end, we may distract ourselves by listening to music, doing the project at a slower or faster pace than normal, underperform, overperform, etc. etc. After the project, the human brain tends to get all pollyannaish and forget its distastefulness and say, "it wasn't that bad, but I still didn't like it". And on and on it goes.
Anyways, the point is at almost any point before, during, or after the disliked task, the self-reflection is there. The point is to get through it, we have to perform all sorts of narratives, deceptions, habits, (and other techniques). Other animals naturally just do something as part of their programmed behavior. If the behavior is learned, it is a type of learning that is much more "if, then" and routine. In other words, with the correct exposure to the usual adaptive settings, they will learn that behavior no matter what. They don't have that ability for self-reflection. That is to say, they don't have the ability to make a large number of choices based on conceptual understanding of their own situation. We are the only animals that know that we make a choice, but we often make choices that are against our own initial wants and desires.
Rather, by being a cultural creature, we take on values, and ideas, and techniques that allow us to submerge our rebellious, individual wants, and yet again, perform the daily grind. You can make parallels to Freud's ID getting submerged in the superego by the ego and balancing the two, but I'd only accept that as an analogy.
I have found that the feeling of coming off a shift can be a real pleasure in itself...a sudden feeling of freedom.
When it comes to looking just after itself, a bird might not be able to imagine another way of life...in the way humans can....I suppose in a lot of cases there isn't much to reflect on.
That's fine, but this describes the different techniques I'm talking about. Animals don't even think on that level, but humans have to deal with concepts like "future freedom", or "future better time than now", etc. to get through. It's interesting that we can get anything done with our knowledge that we don't like what we are doing in the present, but feel compelled to do it because we have also convinced ourselves it "needs" to get done. Survival is there in the background, but survival has been abstracted into values that we take on, not just a direct immediate feeling that is programmed.
Yes, we call that instinct- something hardwired in genetics/brain responses/behaviors. It is not abstracted into cultural concepts called "values" that are then taken on by the human via enculturation. We are often motivated by values that are enculturated into us..They are useful narratives (or deceptions) by culture to give us the impetus to work through things we don't want to. It is not a knee-jerk instinct like other animals. It is not an unthinking, unreflective phenomenon, but rather something we take on via cultural transmission and individual acceptance of cultural values.
Quoting wax
Right..this whole taking umbrage to me saying other animals can't really self-reflect on their own existential situation, shouldn't be so controversial. I'm not saying they don't have other capacities, but without language and the intendant cognitive abilities, they just can't. But they do make a good foil for what we don't do.
Even without the use of formal language , animals do symbolize their experieince in that they interpret their world to themselves. This is how dolphins and certain primates can achieve all the steps you just mentioned in a rudimentary way without linguistic conceptualization.
"According to one of the leading scholars in the field, there is an emerging consensus among scientists that animals share functional parallels with humans' conscious metacognition -- that is, our ability to reflect on our own mental processes and guide and optimize them."
"Smith inaugurated animal metacognition as a new field of study in 1995 with research on a bottlenosed dolphin. The dolphin assessed correctly when the experimenter's trials were too difficult for him, and adaptively declined to complete those trials."
"his second article by Smith and colleagues also supports the consensus that animals share with humans a form of the self-reflective, metacognitive capacity. In all respects," says Smith, "their capacity for uncertainty monitoring, and for responding to uncertainty adaptively, show close correspondence to the same processes in humans."
http://www.buffalo.edu/news/releases/2012/03/13292.html
So when they say self-reflection, are they talking about the ability to evaluate whether they like doing a certain task and then doing it anyways because they decided to deceive themselves, provide a narrative, and other such thing? I don't think we are talking about the same thing. Just because they have some "self-reflective' capacities, doesn't mean that they can have "ennui" about their situation, or understand that they are "radically free", or any other conception. This is becoming a red herring that is diverting the point.
"Just because they have some "self-reflective' capacities, doesn't mean that they can have "ennui" about their situation, or understand that they are "radically free", or any other conception."
I would agree with you, but the issue for me is whether that human advantage comes from a qualitatively different capacity, as I think Sartre would want to argue, or simply a point of greater complexity on a spectrum we share with other animals. That's where I think Sartre's concepts of 'freedom' , self-consciousness, self-reflection and the Will are key. Because if we buy into his understanding of what makes humans unique in this respect, we will believe in a qualitative break between humans and other sentient beings.
On the other hand, if we go with recent thinking in cognitive science as well as contributions from philosophers like Freud, Nietzsche and others, we can abandon the idea that meta-cognition is a matter of there being as self that can survey the domain of its experience without its very nature being transformed. That is to say, if knowing is a form of self-transforming interaction with a world, then reflection is not controlled by a self so much as what we call a self is a momentary scheme of understanding which is controlled and shaped and transformed by a changing situation. Seen this way, we do not will or direct what or how we reflect so much as we find ourselves being directed toward certain forms of adaptive modification of our schemes of understanding and assessment within contextual situations.
It is only after the fact that we claim that we 'willed' ourselves into cognitive strategies of coping. So I can agree with you that we move through these situations with a much more sophisticated level of strategic complexity than other animals. But I would tend to de-emphasize Sartre's championing the 'radical' freedom of human thinking , to the extent that he conceives of it in terms of a volunteerism or agency of the self, a 'choosing' to will, rather than finding oneself willing. We are no more free than what we will, and what we will is not within our control.This makes us no more free than other animals. dont get me wrong . I am not a strict determinist with regard to either animals or humans. I just think in both cases freedom is not something that is owned by a self.
Sartre never fully embraced the insights of evolutionary biology as regards the organization of human motivation(this is why he rejected Freud and pragmatism) and this shows in his notion of human freedom. He wanted to keep the metaphysical notion of freedom that he inherited from German Idealism(Will as pure self-awareness) even though he proclaimed himself an atheist.
In sum, I see Sartre's animal-human dichotomy as between automatic , instinctive causal mechanism on the one hand and human capacity for self-knowing on the other(sounds very Cartesian to me).
Contemporary cognitive science argues that behavior of intelligent animals is characterized primarily by intentionally directed, affectively organized cognition just as is human thought. The strength of human thinking lies not in the pure awareness of a self, but on the contrary, in the variability of the ways, moment to moment, humans adaptively change this contingent self. Both humans and and other animals are basically evolutionarily adaptive self-transformation machines. We simply outperfom other creatures in our speed and variability of self-modification. But we can hardly give ourselves credit for this without first recognizing that this 'self' that we want to champion doesnt survive the modifications of thinking intact. Self is as much a temporary byproduct as it is commander. Deception, distraction and narrative could just as accurately be described as that which forms and reforms a self as they would be its handiwork.
I mean, these are valid points, but I don't see how they challenge my main point here. 1) We can KNOW that we don't like doing certain things at a certain time (I acknowledge this can change with time). 2) We can get through it through employing strategies. What strategies? I mentioned them in the OP. There is enculturation into habits of thoughts (this is probably the most ingrained way to bypass dislike, to the point of the dislike being negated itself), there are narratives, and there is other conceptual ways we deal. Much of this comes from VALUES, things that only occur in a species that transmits cultural IDEAS.
Anyways, the point was not the mechanics- you may even enlighten me on some ideas there- I am fine with that. Rather, it is the implication that we can know we don't like a task, and then have to bypass that dislike by taking upon us strategies and values that sort of "fool us" into doing it anyways. We know technically we don't "have" to do it, but we somehow make ourselves do it out of conception of future consequences, or simply taking on values that we buy into.
For most animals, their response to a task appears as a two dimensional relationship: they are aware of a stimulus, and they respond according to a current position in spacetime. They may develop awareness of the relationship that stimulus has to other stimuli in spacetime, as well as awareness of the position in spacetime which responds.
Humans have developed this awareness to the point where we have complex and multi-dimensional relationships with our relationships in time and space, and developed language to communicate abstractly. So when I say that I don’t like a task, I am often asked to specify what it is that I don’t like about that task, and how that relates to the current sense of I that doesn’t like it.
A plumber might say, ‘I don’t like the smell I experience when I’m hosing out the inside of a septic tank.’ Who would? But he might like many of the other aspects of his job - whether it’s being able to maintain clean equipment, providing a quality service to customers, a sense of pride in having a unique skill set that contributes to the community and puts food on the table. It’s the weight he personally places on each of these ‘feelings’ towards his job and surrounding that particular task that may outweigh what he dislikes about it. He’s not fooling himself - he’s made choices in life (based on sense, feeling and reasoning) that have led him here, and while he’s aware of choices that may lead him away from a specific task he doesn’t like, he’s not willing to give up what he does like (and if you’re wondering where this example came from, watch the Australian mockumentary film ‘Kenny’ with Shane Jacobson).
I don’t think it’s ever as simple as bypassing a dislike by ‘fooling ourselves’ into doing it anyway. I think we make decisions in life conscious of the complex interconnectedness of those decisions with other aspects of our life. What we articulate as our reasoning often barely scratches the surface of what went on in our minds to reach that point. And a large proportion of it was based not on reasoning but on ‘feeling’, which doesn’t always translate into words.
Right, I'm not arguing it isn't multi-dimensional, but that we take on values that can override the dislike a task. You named a few examples right there. A bird doesn't a) know it doesn't like gathering seeds (and it probably can't even register such evaluative ideas like, "dislike survival task". However, humans have a whole range of negative emotions, but we submerge ourselves in culturo-linguistic values and narratives to help us justify doing the unsatisfactory task. We have a story that we dislike, and we have a story of why we must still do the dislike.
Quoting Possibility
Sure, but the point is the reasoning, sensing, feeling itself is not something other animals do. It goes back to the choice and freedom of humans to employ all sorts of things to get through an unsatisfactory task. This just expands the strategies not rejects the major point.
Quoting Possibility
I can support this, except in a way all values are "fooling ourselves". If we take on values we initially don't like because other values outweigh it, and those other values are ones that the culture has been instilling in the individual all along..it's not outright deception, but it is a habituation strategy by society to get the individual primed to take on unsatisfactory tasks. However, the more obstinate individual, the rebellious ones, let's say, the one's less satisfied and who haven't fully enculturated these overriding strategies, it will be harder for them.. Something you won't have so much in the bird world. They don't need to weigh or justify anything. We live in a word of culture and choices. There is no set anything other than we don't like starving, being cold, bored, etc. and few other stuff related to physical preferences and psychological entertainment needs (not being bored). But, as far as how that manifests- we take on the values necessary to weigh why we do anything. Many times we pretend the choice was a given, when it was still a choice. It may be a de facto choice based on expectations, but the fact that it was a choice and not a programmed hard-wired behavior makes our situation constantly one of overriding dissatisfactory tasks with narratives and strategies. The animal that needs to constantly justify why it does anything.
In fact your use of the word 'value' comes from Nietzsche's notion of value system, which he recognized as common to all organisms.
Every account of the world organizes itself as a value system. Since all animals cognize, they all have values just as we do, and ambivalence, wavering , anxiety are shown by intelligent animals in situations of value conflicts. A dog's ambivalence and anxiety can be triggered by such conflicts due to the particulars of his socialization within the culture of his pack(human or dog).
Maybe what youre trying to get at by your claim that values are 'fooling ourselves' is something like the idea of cognitive dissonance or Freudian repression. These are forms of self-deception in that one part of the mind knows something that it hides from the other for adaptive reasons.
Of course not all psychologists accept the model of repression, instead arguing that we dont have to assume self-decepetion in order to explain how we slog through something unpleasant. One doesn't misrepresent their values to themselves, they explicitly construe themselves as the kind of person who is tolerating unplesantness because the world is the kind of place where unpleasant situation arise often, and more importantly, I am the kind of person who is willing to tolerate the unpleasant.. Built into this valuative framework may be a kind of admittance of failure, disappointment and frustration, but that is not a self-deception, it is a kind of question mark.
We construct value systems all the time which express our puzzlement at why and how we ended up in such apparently unresolvable situations when according to our previous self-valuation we thought of ourselves as the kind of person who would not tolerate such things. Our finding ourselves persevering through distasteful experience can then be thought of as a kind of crisis in our self-construal, a recognition that the template by which we measured ourselves , and our role with respect to others(I'm the kind of person who does not settle, who has too much pride and dignity,etc), has proved to be unworkable. If we have no way of 'repairing' , that is, of reconstruing our sense of ourselves through a more robust value system that explains to ourselves our failure to live up to our expectations, then we will slog though our miserable job feeling like a confused failure.
There is no internal dishonesty involved in such constructions of our world. The fact that they are accurate representations of the way we are attempting to understand our plight is evidenced by the possibility that we can , through further reflection and reconstrual, come to some resolution of our confusion, ambivalence and frustration. Not by pretending we suddenly like what we;re doing, but by, for example, coming to understand why we compromised our initial values, why we failed to uphold those values. Its also important to break down precisely what it is in a job that produces the sensation of unpleasantness. It may not be the job 'as a whole' but certain of parts of it, Do we then have to fool ourselves to get through those moments? How does an animal gnaw its paw off to escape from a trap?
How does it slog through this unpleasantness? By pretending gnawing its appendage off doesnt hurt so much? Obviously not. The animal's perception shifts back and forth between the pain of extricating itself and the pain of and fear of being trapped. At one moment one perception wins out and the animal stops trying to free itself,and the next moment the fear overwhelms the pain and it recommences its attempt to escape. This oscillation between anticipation of pain and reward explains many human behaviors in situations of ambivalence and unpleasantness, such as addiction. No account of self-deception is needed to explain perseverance through the unpleasant via oscillation between perception of reward and punishment, only a long memory. IF we remain at a lousy job, we know which perception has won out, but not likely completely, as I mentioned above. Reward may have just barely overcome punishment to allow for our perseverance, but often the price we pay is a crisis of personal identity that sometimes leads to explosive violence, which is ever more common these days.
I think most people have some part of their job that don't like, so they focus on the benefits they get from it. It is not that they are buying into a narrative or performing some sort of self deception but simple that they realize that there is little most of them can do about it so they don't sweat it.
I have had many jobs starting at 17 working as a garbageman for the local council. It paid my educational expenses and because we did the job well we were respected and got lots of tips. I had nice clothes and cash to go out at weekends and party. But I really was not happy about the job, it was hard and could be messy. I left after I had a non-work related accident and sourly missed the money in my next job, sitting on a mowing machine cut miles of grass all day did not get you tips.
This is conflating two separate phenomenon. Evaluating the sound of a threat is not the same as evaluating an idea.
Quoting Joshs
Then he is overmining the term.
Quoting Joshs
Now you are undermining. You think that humans take on values like other animals. Dogs don't have the ability to choose, or to know there is even a choice. It is much more fixed. To present it as if humans pick from a range of values at the level of a dog is a misrepresentation of human choice and a red herring at best.
Quoting Joshs
Yes that is getting close. The idea that we are kind of fooling ourselves in order to get something unpleasant done. There is sort of a subtle resignation, self-deception, or narrative going on that this is what must be done at the time. It could be out off laziness of thinking of ways to get out of the task, even. Either way, there is a weighing of ideas, and following certain values.
Quoting Joshs
Yes yes, I have nothing against this idea. It again, doesn't go against my premise which is that we take on values in order to get through unpleasant things. It could be through a sort of deception, but it could be just explicitly taking on values. But again, this is tremendously different than the world of let's say a bird, who is hardwired to just do the task at hand. A bird or even a dog don't use values to motivate themselves in the way humans do.
Quoting Joshs
Again, I don't disagree, but this is agreeing with what I'm saying, not disagreeing with it. So yeah.
Quoting Joshs
Yes indeed, good points. But I think you are hung up a bit too much on the self-deception part. There are other strategies too, but the point is that it is a culturo-linguistic way of knowing the situation (I dislike this), and then having strategies to override, overcome, avoid, etc. this situation. I only suggested that part of it is buying into a narrative.. some of which you laid out nicely in your examples. We are the animal that knows that we dislike a situation and also have to find ways to overcome it. It's a very weird system. Imagine a world where the human animal did not have any reflective abilities. We were just like birds, let's say. We did stuff day in and day out, the daily grind, and had no evaluation of value whatsoever (value in the sense of knowing you like or dislike something). Again, it's almost impossible to imagine because we are species with linguistic capabilities that provide choices and understanding that we are in situations we don't want to be in. It is an odd thing for an animal, but here we are.
Quoting Joshs
I think you are really conflating animal reward systems with something different because it is similar, but it is not the same. Instead of this idea of present tolerance for future reward being something that is a heightened degree of what other animals do, I think it is different altogether. Rather, we are a linguistic animals which really does change the game. I know it is the en vogue thing now to downplay any human differences, but I think it is providing a blindspot to some true differences that a linguistically evolved brain provides the human animal. Having this capacity means we are constantly creating reasons for making decisions. These reasons come from all sorts of places.. The "need" to get a job is a reason we give ourselves for getting an unpleasant job let's say. The fun we have on the weekend is a reason we slog through, perhaps. The unpleasantness of finding a new job maybe a reason we tell ourselves it is better to stay in the current job. It is easier to let entropy take it's course, in that regard. Also, the culture provides the matter in which the form takes. The culture already set up things so that we have "jobs" that provide "money" and that require a set of processes like "interviews" and that there is a hierarchical "structure" to an organization, etc. etc. All this is historically developed ideas that we then use as a jumping off point for our own reasonings as it is the milieu in which we make decisions in. Then on top of these structures are values we take on to some degree. The value of hard work, the value of pride in work, the value of being recognized, etc. etc. So, we can personally not like doing something, but then use the value/conceptual tools of the culture to override our personal dislike. It is just amazing that we allow ourselves to do this.
Yes I can agree with this but again, this goes to my point. We are the animal that weighs things and takes on values. We don't just "do the job of garbageman" without thinking about it. We don't do the business of surviving like other animals might. There is an evaluation, an understanding of choice, and understanding we are doing something we don't want to while we are doing it.
Actually, I think that here you are wrong. We do go about the business of survival, just like every other living thing. The only difference is the way we do it.
Let us go back to the black bird for a minute. You agreed that they are capable of intelligence and innovation to solve problems.
Another example would be the snail shells I found on my roof awhile back. How did they get up there? After looking around at the other houses I saw that only mine had shells on it. After some thought I aligned one of the security cameras so that it would show a piece of the roof. Turned out that the culprit was crows, they dropped the snails on the roof and waited till they came out of the shell to escape the heat. Dinner served. Turns out that my house is the only one around with a small degree of inclination and the snails don't roll off.
If the animals are doing things like this instead of doing things as the have all along there must be a reason. Humans started finding easier ways to do things because they realized that it was hard work the way they had been doing it. Would it not be possible that we think animals are not aware of these things but actually they are?
There again, maybe birds don't complain about their jobs because they actually enjoy them. Making love in the trees, eating healthy food outdoors, no schedules to keep, only having to look after the kids for a couple of months and no college bills to pay. Humans would not bitch about those working conditions.
"I know it is the en vogue thing now to downplay any human differences, but I think it is providing a blindspot to some true differences that a linguistically evolved brain provides the human animal. Having this capacity means we are constantly creating reasons for making decisions."
Animal reward systems, like human ones, are not stimulus-response mechanisms, but cognitive interpretive ones. What constitutes punishment or reward is relative to our conceptual aims(yes, animals have concepts, even without formal language).
"It is just amazing that we allow ourselves to do this."
It would be amazing if it worked. Reasons we create out of whole cloth dont fool ourselves. If we were able to successfully create out of whole cloth deceptive reasons for doing something, we wouldn't even need to talk about deception. We could just exist as pure subjectivities able to fabricate whatever reality we chose. Reasons have to connect organically to coping with circumstances such as to change our perception of those circumstances in an effective way. THAT'S when human coping skills are truly amazing. Simply telling ourselves something will act as no more than a hypothesis to be tested in our actual engagement with the world, and if it cannot pragmatically alter such engagement positively we will know it as a failure.
The fact that you call coping strategies deceptions means you recognize that we are aware that such strategies don't accurately describe and make sense of a situation they are designed to help us get through.
A worker using such strategies is also aware of the fact that a story he tells himself to feel better about being stuck in a job wont be effective unless it has truth to it relative to his real situation. That's why self- deceptions act as no more than a thin veneer over our suffering. They don't succeed in fooling us. If you ask anyone who you think is using such techniques how they really FEEL about their job, how their body is manifesting the stress of the job though ulcers, high blood pressure and muscle spasms , they will be able to be quite accurate about their assessment of their situation, in SPITE of their rationalization, which may have been designed more for your benefit than theirs.
I mentioned two ways to understand the process of coping with unpleasant reality. The first is through moment to moment, hour to hour and day to day oscillations in punishment-reward assessment. Again , this is not a stimulus- response mechanism but a dynamically active interpretive conceptualization and reconceptualization of what is perceived by us to be genuinely rewarding or punishing to us relative to our meaningful goals, values and sense of self.
The second way to understand a situation is related to the first as a metalevel of conceptual-valuative assessment. This pertains to the global difference between a job which is overall rewarding and satisfying but has moments of unpleasantness, vs a job that may have a few moments here and there of reward but is on the whole unsatisfying. The first instance would be akin to watching a suspenseful or scary movie. The moments of anxiety are overwhelmed by the overall positive experience of having overcome situations without having been placed into too much suffering. The second situation of overwhelming lack of satisfaction happens when there is a lot at stake for us in terms of pride, goals, self-respect. That is, features of a situation that impact deeply on our sense of ourselves. That is not something a bandaid like self-deception can ameliorate.
Self-deceptions dont work. We make our way through much of life's unpleasantness knowing, and FEELING full well what is lacking for us in our experience.
A self-deception is not adaptive in pragmatic coping except in the most superficial way, like putting lipstick on a pig.
What seems to be missing from your analysis of human reason is that human values and motives are tied to the fact that there is an internal integrity or self-consistency to the organization of meaning that we carry with us into situations to allow us to interpret what we expereince coherently. Satisfaction and dissatisfaction are perceived relative to the way that the world matches up to or invalidates our ongoing hypotheses of it.
Ha, birds got the better deal when you put it that way. There is a reason I have a bird as my avatar. But I would say unless this is tongue-in-cheek, this is not the case. Birds just don't have the capacity to register whether they enjoy what they are doing, and then have to override the dissatisfaction. They may experience an emotion in some way, but not self-reflection on that emotion, and certainly not related to its survival tasks. I never said they didn't have other capacities like using tools, and problem-solving. That isn't in question.
What would be the motivation to use these skills? Or do they just use them because they can?
So many people insist that animals don't have the capacity to register whether they enjoy what they are doing but I have never seen proof of this. That they do not reflect on enjoying themselves has not been proven or dis-proven simply because we do not know how the think. We do not understand properly how humans think still.
I see animals playing games, my dogs play what appears to be a rather sophisticated form of Tag, why would they do this if they don't enjoy it. I have seen birds, again a crow, sliding down a snowy roof and them going back and doing it over and over again. Why would they do this if it was not because of the fun of it?
There is little information about what wild animals do, most of what we know is from specific small group studies that cannot show everything all of the animals of that species do nor what they do while not being studied, or from one off observations like the videos we see on youtube.
Personally I give animals the benefit of doubt when it comes to whether they really think or not and treat them as if they do.
I am of the belief that most other animal species cannot reflect and evaluate whether they like or dislike their current emotional state and then, have to justify continuing doing an unpleasant task for expediency. That is not to say that they don't experience joy, anxiety, etc. in the moment, as a primary experience. I am not disputing that. Of course you have your outliers in rudimentary forms..the great apes, dolphins, that have certain self-reflective capacities, but really what I'm talking about takes a linguistic brain.
The main point though is that humans do do this. I am giving other animals the leg up here. They don't need to evaluate their like or dislike and then justify to themselves the continuation of the dissatisfying activity. We are the only animals that are aware of our situation and but muddle through. We are the animals that continue despite the understanding of an unpleasant state of affairs.
Those of us who have mostly fulfilling jobs that we mostly like recognize that 50%, more or less, of what we do is what you call "the daily grind of unwanted and unsatisfactory tasks." We know that those tasks have to be completed in order for the whole enterprise, which we value, to work.
And even if the job you do doesn't have any particular interest or value for you, there is still value in making money to support yourself and your family. There might be value in performing your job well, supporting your coworkers, or making your customers happy.
Why does this require linguistic capacities? What do you think reflection is? Describe its mechanics for me.I think the key here is your term 'current', as if the current emotional state stays static, just sitting there waiting for this pristine mechanism of linguistically mediated reflection to turn back itself around to survey the picture. It implies that we need word concepts to store and preserve meanings such that we can manipulate meaning and defy the passage of time. It implies that we need a word concept for our current emotion, that we need word concepts for the reflective acts which turn back to examine our emotion word concept.
But the advantage of word concepts is not that they store and preserve, but that they express more complex and abstract meanings than those that other animals construct.The act of reflection is not itself dependent on word concepts. Reflection is a function of the way that human and animal consciousness of time carries the immediate past into the present and also protends the present into the future, making our experience of the present anticipatory. These three aspects(retention, the present and anticipation, are all simultaneously a part of the experience of the 'now' moment We reflect naturally in that what we have just experienced continues to be carried over into our current 'now'. It's not so much that in reflection wwe turn back to what we just experienced, but that what we just experienced automatically carries itself forward into our present thinking.
So reflection in its primordial sense is not a function of will, choice, deliberation. It is automatic, with or without word concepts. What word concepts do for us is expand our options when we reflect, and, by organizing a meaning context into a richer whole, that context remains for us to reflect on in a more consistent and continuous manner. If there is 'freedom' of the will, it is not due to the capacity for reflection, it is a function of the complexity of the concepts that our words express. If humans are freer than animals, than modern humans must be freer than neolithic humans, and adults freer than children.
Time consciousness is what allows animals to do this:
"There is a famous psychology experiment in which children are left in a room with one marshmallow each. They are told that if they wait and don’t eat the sweet straight away, they will be given a second one. On average, preschool kids resist for less than 10 minutes.
What happens if animals are given a comparable test? A group of chimpanzees performed roughly as well as children — some resisted for up to 18 minutes. They even used the same tactics as children, distracting themselves with toys. Meanwhile, an African grey parrot withstood temptation for up to 15 minutes. " (Frans De Waal)
Right and that taking on the value comes from a lot of sources. It doesn't happen in a vacuum.
Quoting T Clark
Again, all things we take on.. It is a choice, though subtly it becomes less so if habituated. We are freer than we think, and at the same time we are not.
Yep it does.
Quoting Joshs
That's what I'm driving at- not the nuances to the degree of less complex reflection. I don't see it as much as degree as you do. I certainly think it came about evolutionarily, it is a change in kind, not just degree. As much as we want to bridge that gap with other animals' minds, we can't. We are the lonely conceptually-linguistic creature. Sorry to say.
Quoting Joshs
I have no problem with this conception of phenomenology.
Quoting Joshs
Fair enough I can agree with this. Now this thread is about the implication of conceptual complexity that we have that allows for what we can do (evaluate dislike and then overcome the dislike by narratives, strategies, coping, etc... all examples you gave which I validated, so that we agree in that regard). Other animals don't contend with their own existential evaluations. They deal with threats sure, but that's not the same thing and to say so would be to conflate two ideas. They deal with stimulus response, sure. They deal with changing conditions that trigger certain hardcoded reactions sure. They deal with problem-solving certain task, sure. They deal with complex social hierarchies (depending on the species) sure. But this existential evaluation they don't do and we do. What does that say about our species that we can do this. I see an absurdity in the fact that we even evaluate that we dislike a task and yet we still do it. I think we should explore that implication about our existential situation as a whole.
"Again, all things we take on.. It is a choice, though subtly it becomes less so if habituated. We are freer than we think, and at the same time we are not."
It's not about having freedom, it's about taking responsibility.
Your notion of a difference in kind between human and animal cognition seems to rest on your understanding of linguistic conceptual complexity not just as sophistication ofcontent but as a different kind of mechanism of organization of concepts relative to animals. It seems for you to have something to do with a supposed human capacity, thanks to language , to survey a situation as a whole, something that other animals can't do. Maybe you subscribe to theory-theory approaches in cognitive science, which model human understanding in terms of consulting internal conceptual structures in order to reflectively understand the world and ourselves.
Enactivist approaches in cognitive science disagree with the theory-theory approach, positing instead that in interacting with others, either empathically or in other respects, we dont consult an inner script or internal cognitive-linguistic structures in order to understand the actions of others. Our apprehension is direct. This is because our entire history as it is represented in mental-bodily meaning structures encounters the world as an integral whole. that is to say, we bring our whole existential history to bear on the current situation , whether we do this in explicit contemplation of our 'existential situation as whole' or not, and whether we are concerned with just one trivial particular or ontology. So this is not a capacity or skill, its a given.
This would be a capacity not unique to humans, and therefore this notion of exploring 'our existential situation as a whole' would not be unique to us. Chimps experience the world moment to moment in relation to the cutting edge of their history with it as a whole, and if they dont conceptualize it linguistically, they feel it meaningfully. The deep affective capabilities of higher animals attest to this holistic comportment toward the present. Musicians create in this way, relying not on word concept but on intuitive feeling. One could say, then, that the animal's "existential situation as a whole' is registered as an art in the way it forms the continual background directly informing and shaping their meaningful engagement with the world moment to moment. I question whether explicitly linguistically conceptualizing something like existential situation as a whole is necessary in order to know it, and thus act on it meaningfully as a whole..
Another value you are taking on :). Albeit a common one.
Maybe we are over complicating things. What tasks do most animals actually have to justify doing, whether they like them or not? Apart from putting themselves in danger to acquire food I can think of nothing else. But it might even be possible that they just decide not to do the things they don't like or want to do.
Why would an animal return to a place were a mate was killed if they knew that danger was there? Could it be that they don't know the danger is there(they forget), or that they have forgotten the mate or that need forces them to return? None of these seems plausible when there is no reason to go there except to visit the place. Dogs often revisit places that they went to with their mates and seem to remember them.
Lost pets often find their families after weeks or months of traveling, sometimes to unknown places. There has to be some sort of motivation beyond momentary happiness.
While I lived in the USA a friend moved house from Kenner, New Orleans to the other side of the lake near Covington. About half way across the bridge the cat escaped its cage and jumped out the window. There was absolutely no stopping for any reason on the then very narrow 25 mile long bridge so they had to continue. Two weeks later the cat turns up at the new house, that she never even new existed. Following the scent might explain how she did it, but it does not explain why she did it. What possible motivation would she have had to make the trip instead of just finding a new place to eat. She must have made the decision that it was worth trying for some reason.
What I would consider more important is explaining the fun and unusual things they do. What motivates them to enjoy doing things? Can it be nothing more that momentary joy, that would not account for cases where the animals repeat the actions on other occasions. To repeat the action would mean that they in some way evaluated it and made a decision to do it again, this would mean that they do self reflect upon their emotions and memories.
I don't believe that animals even know they like or dislike something over and on top of the primary emotion they feel. So, they may enjoy a type of berry, but it's doubtful they have a representation of themselves in their head (an "I") that knows it is liking the berries. It is that secondary level of consciousness I am talking about.
But, for the sake of argument, let's say they had a level of self-representation in their minds and they do reflect like humans, certainly if birds choose not to do things they don't like, and humans do, that is an interesting thing about being humans. Why do you suppose that is? Isn't it values, habituation, and other cultural things that are making it so we can override our initial dislike? Also, notice how inefficient that is to know you don't like something, and have to use coping strategies to override it. This is unlike a bird that just gets things done and perhaps doesn't even have the ability to not like what it is doing.
Quoting Sir2u
Better tracking systems don't necessarily amount to "liking" something. Their instincts to stay with the pack and track where the pack was, is not comparable to human varieties of liking and disliking tasks.
Quoting Sir2u
I doubt it is for the same like and dislike motivations of a human though, as amazing as that cat is in the story.
Quoting Sir2u
Is it a choice or do animals simply follow more basic reward systems of repeating things that felt good and not doing things they disliked (unless trained otherwise). Humans on the otherhand can dislike something and then still follow through but for much more complex reasons based on a linguistic-based brain.
Neither do humans. Its not over and on top of.
" It is that secondary level of consciousness I am talking about."
You have the topography wrong. What makes it a 'level', implying height or hierarchy or depth, instead of simply a changing of subject? Isnt insight just as much a going elsewhere as a going deeper?
Realization, insight and reflection is a sequential unfolding in time, not a simultaneous elevated meta-thought. It is a further articulation and transformation of a previous thinking. Knowing you dislike something is a a further discovery about that thing.
How does this differ from an animal's investigating a situation such as to uncover further details of it?
Is the difference the human awareness of self? I heard a rumor that self is just a heuristic concept used for convenience to give the illusion of subjective control. It doesnt really exist. And as I said earlier, both humans and other animals bring to their present experiencing the whole of their past as a kind of focaled framing of the meaning of the current context. So a person using the contrivance of 'self' awareness or the animal meaningfully unfolding their world in investigating an aspect of it are on a par in carrying forward the existential situation as a whole.
"So we can override our initial dislike." That's kind of an incoherent concept. Dislike is a specific evaluative affect rendered as it is a t a given time. It is not something to be overridden,. Either it changes or its doesn't. If you want to say our attitude changes then thats a change in the specific quality of dislike. If there's no change in the specific attitude then whatever change or realization takes place isnt any kind of 'overriding", it s a change of a different sort, pertaining to other aspects of our situation tangential to our evaluation of dislike. It could be a way the dislike becomes fleshed out in a particular direction or via particular aspects or colorations or via changes in its ongoing rhythm of intensity.
I would say that the amount of mental energy one has to apply to keep from leaving the unsatisfactory work place and highly unappealing tasks probably exceeds the mental energy required to do the job.
Having a job is beneficial when one needs an income, obviously. An income allows one to be housed, clothed, fed, amused, and so forth--even if minimally. But we don't suffer from a lack of those things until they are actually gone. So, until we are destitute we can't balance the wretchedness of a job against the wretchedness of homelessness, hunger, and ratty clothing.
What we do, when we have a job we hate, is direct about 50% of our processing facilities to minutely analyze and re-analyze the cost benefits of the job, and direct the other 50% of our processing power to doing the job well enough to keep it.
[It may not be the primary task of the job that is loathsome. It may be the work environment, it may be one's pariah status as a temp, it may be a lack of respect from one's co-workers, and so on. A really low-level job can be OK if the other factors are good, and a high-level job can be bad, given other factors.]
Obviously we are enculturated. If we weren't thoroughly enculturated, we wouldn't be hired to do even stupid boring jobs, and we wouldn't be compensating all over the place trying to justify our esteemed selves being stuck in such a sucky job.
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So, we lie to ourselves and others about what we are doing. We pretend we are not doing something abysmally bad as what we are doing. We deceive. We dissemble. We fake it.
We might resort to stealing from an employer who, and/or whose job, we really hate. Probably not grand theft, but something. We want to think that our reward (whatever is lifted) is their punishment. We might drop incorrect information into the database, lose important pieces of paper, and so on. We might, horrors of horrors, just do very little and wait for them to fire us. It might take a month before they notice how unproductive we are, and in the meantime, 4 more weekly paychecks have been received.
We will, of course, focus attention on our lousy pay - reward.
Quoting Joshs
Of course they do, but they need to be properly managed. We can safely deceive ourselves that we COULD beat the boss into submission with our bare hands, but we can not afford to deceive ourselves about getting away with it. We can safely believe that we COULD execute the perfect bank robbery; we can not safely deceive ourselves that we will be successful. When it comes to robbing banks, for instance, one needs to be meticulous and ruthlessly realistic.
Been there, done that. Humans quite often do deceive themselves into believing that they can get away with things though, and end up in trouble about it.
Do animals even need to deceive themselves? Say for the moment that they have the capability to do so, what would they deceive themselves about? And more importantly, how would we ever know that they were doing it? If they do deceive themselves then we would have just as much of a problem proving it as we would proving they are not self aware.
We take a lot for granted when it comes to what animals are mentally capable of, but how does anyone know that any of it is true. Birds, rats, dogs, cats all do things that are for no apparent reason and not all of it could be attributed to instinctual survival behavior.
When a dog looks for his master's hand to get his ears scratched, does he do it by rote? If that were so then the dog would need some sort of a trigger to activate the action. In many cases I have found that dogs just walk up to you and indicate they want a scratch. Would this not indicate that on some level they have decided that they like scratches and want one now?
Fine and dandy, but only humans employ it this. You are missing the forest for the trees. The outcome is whatever the outcome is to our own selves.
Quoting Joshs
No, it is qualitatively different. By adding the element of time and unfolding, you aren't going to convince me that what the animal is doing is the same type of thing a person is doing with linguistic-conceptual mind. This is conflating two different things to seem as if they are the same. One system requires a linguistic cogntive brain such that humans have, and as far as we know, the only species to do so.
Quoting Joshs
The dislike is there, but the decision to muddle through anyways by valuing something else to carry forward.
Yes, interviews, anxiety over uncertainty, etc.
Quoting Bitter Crank
True enough, but I contend it is a choice, just weighing one less shitty (but still shitty thing) against another shittier thing. While other animals seem to not give a shit whether they give a shit, we deal with our own understanding of how we feel at any given time about a task or event (and nod to @Joshs that this can change and unfold over time).
Quoting Bitter Crank
:rofl: That sounds about right.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Exactly.
Quoting Bitter Crank
The enculturation of self-motivation to be productive. Isn't the self-respect of the working class hero, something to be, sort of thing simply a value to get by? How is it we need to reassure by enculturated means? What does that mean that we are the only animal that can survive this way? Knowing the situation, possibly evaluating it badly, weighing worse options, and motivating self to go forward. Isn't this a bit trudgey and inefficient? Does that put us in a state of suffering other animals don't experience?
Quoting Bitter Crank
Many old school business owners are meticulous in making sure they take as much advantage as they can of workers, sizing up personalities to see how much they can take without resistance, seeing how low a pay they can work, and seeing how much the worker will take on the interests of the business as their own interests..but these are sort of separate but tangential issues.
I think a similar thought process happens when we decide to stop ourselves from performing a task that we would like to do. Like eating a second or third piece of that cake. Just as there are tasks we agree to keep doing that we don’t like, so there are tasks we refrain from doing that we would normally enjoy.
There seems to be a deeper complexity to our decision making that doesn’t appear to occur in most other animals - although I wouldn’t go so far as to draw a definitive line between humans and all animals on this complexity. There are certainly enough primitive traces of this kind of decision making in various animals to suggest that the distinction may be a greater capacity to develop awareness of additional dimensions of experience, rather than a unique ‘gift’ attributed solely to humans.
My dog derives a certain amount of reward from barking at anyone who walks past our house. She weighs that against the response she receives from her pack leader (ie. owner), and decides to sit beside me instead - and whine. She doesn’t use the words ‘I like’ or ‘I dislike’, of course, but she nevertheless appears to be communicating a level of discomfort associated with her choice of action. Has she ‘bought in’ to a set of values at some primitive level?
I think our greater potential awareness of dimensions of experience includes an awareness of continuity of the ‘self’ through time or space. So we may stop ourselves from eating another piece of cake - despite the knowledge that we would immediately enjoy it - because we are aware of longer term effects of this action (and subsequent similar actions) on our sense of self (weight gain, body image, health, longevity, etc) into the future. The awareness of abundance of choice in available food requires us to make more complex decisions based on a broader awareness of self continuing through time than perhaps another human being who experiences no such abundance on a daily basis.
The broader our awareness of choice, the broader our awareness should become of self - including the implications each choice we make has on a future self, or a more interconnected or more diverse self - and vice versa. But this awareness of both choice availability and self, including the impact of related decisions on the self, are complex potential that may or may not be developed, and also appear to fluctuate in their impact on our consciousness at any one time.
So when we choose to perform a task even if we don’t like it, what is our awareness of alternative choices, and how do we currently see each of these choices impacting on a present/future, autonomous/interconnected or individual/diverse awareness of self? And when someone complains about a task they don’t like, yet choose to perform, what are they saying about the broadness of their current awareness of self? How conscious are they currently of the complexity and dimensions of their experience? How deeply are they thinking about it?
I'm not sure how to answer your question. Can you phrase it differently or elaborate?
What you had to say is interesting, but it didn't connect with what you quoted. That's OK, not complaining.
It is just interesting to note that individuals can decide they don't like something that is the very program used by the species to make sure survival takes place. You can say that perhaps this allows for improvement as resistance and dislike lead to possible changes. That may be an answer as to how this works without collapsing, but even if that is the outcome, the affect and toll on the individual who must bear the dislike still exists. @Possibility@Bitter Crank@Joshs@T Clark@Sir2u
What I like about enactivist approaches to human cognition is their tying together survival and the continuous self-reinvention of a self-organizing system. This takes place in a dynamic coordination between the setting up of norms among indivuduals and the overcoming of those norms. Following and resisting social structures are equally important to survival via their reciprocally dependent roles in adaptive cultural evolution. We know that equilibration in dynamical systems is a spiral movement in which a given state of equilibrium is disrupted, leading to the eventual formation of a higher and more stable state of equilibrium. Our capacity to not only follow rules but at certain points to find ourselves alienated from those rules would seem to be the way we manifest the dialectical vector of human becoming.
That's great and all said objectively and with a scientific style, but being the actual human that goes through this "dialectical vector of human becoming" can be quite stressful, harmful, and negative in general, whether it is good for the system as a whole or not.
Our capacity to choose other than the program used by the system to make sure survival takes place, for me, comes down to a broader awareness of ‘the system’ that must survive, and our ability to adjust our awareness of who or what is included in ‘the system’ from moment to moment.
When we narrow or limit our focus, certain actions appear stressful, harmful or negative to the system. When we broaden our awareness of ‘the system’ to include loved ones, community, nation, humanity or life as a whole, then the value of these actions becomes more apparent.
But it is the individual who is actually experiencing the stress, harm, and negative experiences. To broaden awareness is again more coping strategies and values to motivate to keep going, and does not really resolve the issue as much as show yet another example of how buying into the values of the group, enculturation, etc. is used to help people keep going. It also doesn't really solve the fact that we are aware of disliking tasks related to the very mechanism for survival.
A life time living with and observing them.
Oh sorry, it was only the first line or so that was in reply to what you said. The rest was just my rambling mind ranting on.
You’re assuming that individual survival is the main aim here, not to mention an individual life free of stress, harm and negative experience.
I am still am animal, and always will be just like the rest of you.
And no I do not even have a double chin never mind a rollypolly neck. The only extra weight I have is the 12 pack just above the belt line which I do blame philosophy for. Too much time sitting around contemplating the universe.
Indeed I do. Your "aim" seems to be a bit elusive, but I am sure it has something to do with species-survival through group enculturation and values. The individual works on behalf of the group and the group reinforces the individual, and everything is strengthened.. Something along those lines right? The "systems view", so to say. It's almost by saying it, it feels the superior approach to that antiquated individualist.. Balance, group, system, mutual reinforcement, just have that ring of truth to it, doesn't it?
Alas, my ethical purview ends at the individual. Our first person point of view, is all there is in terms of what feels, what experiences, what copes. The group may be a concept used for this or that motivating value, but it is the individual where it all takes place- the enculturation, the motivation, the effort, etc. Going back to my antinatalist ideas, I do not believe in using individuals and their experiences as a way to further the agenda of a third-party- immediate group or otherwise. Individuals may be used as a way to strengthen the group, and the individual does indeed live in a group, but this doesn't mean the individual isn't harmed, stressed, or otherwise from experiences dealing with the group. Zeroing in on the topic at hand- the individual experiences the negative evaluation of dealing with a certain task, and having to cope with it using whatever values and ideas to get through the task.
Indeed, the individual being stressed on behalf of the group is problematic for me. Unlike (what appears from) other animals, who do not have the level of self-reflection and then a need to use values and ideas to overcome dislike- individual humans can understand they dislike a situation and use values, habituation, and the like to try to deal with it an ameliorate it to get through it, especially if other options are seen as even less attainable and this is judged the "best" option for that moment.
Yes, again a lot off stress on the individual.
Rather, it is that we humans deal with the fact that we can know we dislike and then basically have to decide if we want to deal with the stress of even lesser options or going through the unliked situation anyways- despite our UNDERSTANDING of our OWN dislike.
There are just certain undesirable tasks for the individual. One has to get through this somehow. This can be taking on values to lower the dislike for it, getting around the dislike, etc. etc. But the fact is that we KNOW we dislike, and that adds another layer to it.
I don't think that anyone here has actually denied that this is true about humans, most have accepted it to be true. Whether it is a self applied defense mechanism or even some sort of hard wired "suck it up" behavior we cannot be sure, but yes humans have this ability. It is incredible.
But it is your insistence that only humans have this ability that bothers me.
There are many examples of animals doing repeatedly things that they like to do, after obviously taking some sort of decision to do it. There are many examples of animals not doing things that they obviously enjoy doing and have done willingly plenty of times, after obviously taking some sort of decision to do it. I agree that not all animals are capable, but there are many that do seem to consider consequences before acting.
So why do you think is it not possible for them to understand their own likes and dislikes? Could it not be simply because we are not able to understand them that they appear not to be self conscious?
It comes down to a question of what awareness means, and what purpose its serves in the first place.
Philosophical Pragmatism tells us that awareness is a relation, an activity, a transformation , a way of interacting with the world to effect a change.It is not a passive looking .So if a single act of awareness takes us from here to there, then a second act, rather than going deeper within the first act, is a further accomplishment of resituating our meaningful relations with the world. So what the metaphysical thinking of self-awareness would consider a bring oneself closer to oneself is in fact a moving further away from ones prior self in each subsequent act of reflection. In a way one could argue that it is animals which are more self-aware than us humans if the measure of self-knowledge is the preserving of a static sense of self. It is we who transform our sense of ourselves more continuously, and do this in an accelerative manner over the course of human history. Awareness is adaptive not to the extent that it reifies a particular sense of self, but by virtue of its reconstituting what it refers back to. Adaptive self-awareness endlessly multiplies and invents new versions of self.
I like the use of "suck it up" here..you hear that so much in various direct and indirect ways. Just another value to be enculturated from social cues.
Quoting Sir2u
Because they don't have the meta-cognition for this. To know one's own likes and dislikes (and not just "dislike" in the moment as a primary perception) is to have a model of self, which as far as we know really requires language. That is not to say that there are not rudimentary traces of this in great apes and some other animals, but I would still not call that developed enough. Our species happened to evolve in the unique trait of linguistic mental capacities which then ratcheted the brain in a co-evolution of sorts to have abilities that co-opted this capacity with more plasticity, episodic memory, and learning (which allowed for more cultural input rather than hard-wired or rudimentary learning techniques). Anyways, just like we can make a substance that looks and acts like a spider web, we can't spin a web ourselves. That's just not what our species was adapted to do. The language centers and co-opted centers that evolved with/from this were taken from more primitive centers I agree (i.e. mirror neurons, FOXP2 gene, the neocortex development, the brocas and wernikes region, etc.).
An animal doesn’t so much interpret the bodily sensations as fear - I think it simply makes no mental distinction between the feeling of fear and its bodily sensations in response. That’s not to say it doesn’t make choices regarding its behaviour.
Interestingly, a human will often interpret these same bodily sensations as anything BUT fear in the moment: anger, excitement, anxiety, arousal, nervous energy, adrenalin, even illness or a combination. We generally have a more complex ability to intervene and rationalise between bodily sensations and how we consciously respond to them than most animals - including how we interpret these sensations, our awareness of options and factors in how we evaluate them. But our focus on this level of thought process reduces ‘feeling’ to our interpretation of bodily sensations, ignoring a more ‘primitive’ process whereby the bodily sensations are themselves an unconscious response in the physiological system to a broader feeling of fear itself.
In most cases, we make a distinction between bodily sensations and the feeling of fear in itself only by denying that feeling of fear - by interpreting the bodily sensations as something other than fear. I think humans have a tendency to either:
- oppress or deny ‘feeling’ as a valid response to the world (rationalising our physical or mental responses to various defined ‘emotions’); or
- deny any distinction or intervention between feeling, bodily sensation and conscious response (calling it ‘instinctive’ behaviour).
Both allow for self-deception and create a limited awareness of the universe.
In order to make a true distinction in our awareness of feeling, we need to understand ‘feeling’ as more than just bodily sensations or emotions that lend themselves to rational thought and language. We need to learn to retain conscious control of our body while enabling ourselves to simply ‘feel’ the universe beyond our physical senses, thoughts or memories - to recognise sensations or experiences outside of these other three forms of interaction. Only then can we become aware of feeling in itself.
Quoting Joshs
This makes a lot of sense to me, in some respects. I think ‘preserving a static sense of self’ is a step backwards, though. It’s not more self-aware, but less. Awareness is a continual process of relation, interaction and transformation between an ever-changing sense of self in an ever-changing sense of the universe. I think the more aware we become, both of ourselves and the universe, the less static everything appears...
Sounds like you're a Heideggerian.
The radicality of Heidegger shows itself in his understanding of mood as inseparable from the f self-transformative basis of Being itself, his understanding of temporality as always ahead of itself in a radical anticipation which makes past, present and future belong to each other, and his elimination of categorical distinctions between sensation, perception, cognition, willing, desiring and affect.
"Understanding is never free floating, but always attuned. The there is equiprimordially disclosed by mood, or else closed off." "The different modes of Befindlichkeit ... have long been well-known ontically under the terms 'affects' and 'feelings'(138)" Attunement brings Da-sein before its thrownness in such a way that the latter is not known as such, but is disclosed far more primordially in "how one is." Being thrown means existentially to find oneself in such and such a way."(Being and Time)
"All understanding is essentially related to an affective self-finding which belongs to understanding itself. To be affectively self-finding is the formal structure of what we call mood, passion, affect, and the like, which are constitutive for all comportment toward beings, although they do not by themselves alone make such comportment possible but always only in one with understanding, which gives its light to each mood, each passion, each affect. Being itself, if indeed we understand it, must somehow or other be projected upon something. This does not mean that in this projection being must be objectively apprehended or interpreted and defined, conceptually comprehended, as something objectively apprehended. Being is projected upon something from which it becomes understandable, but in an unobjective way. It is understood as yet pre- conceptually, without a logos; we therefore call it the pre-ontological understanding of being."(Basic Problems of Phenomenology)
On the other hand, you had mentioned Nozick in a previous post. Martha Nussbaum's views overlap Nozick's, and if this is close to your thinking, then perhaps you are in accord with Nussbaum's neo-Kantian model of affect and emotion.
As far as the relation between bodily feedback and the awareness of affect, the argument of manuy in contemporary cog sci emotion theory would be that while our conscious experience of affectivty, mood ,emotion is the result of a complex integrative process involving situational interpretation, memory, langauge and bodily feedback
, if one removes the somatic feedback the experience of affect is severely attenuated.
Sorry guys its wasn't HM IT WAS PHINES Gauge. Hm was hippocampi, Guage was frontal cortex.
How do you know that they don't have the meta-cognition for this? If as you have said this is true, there must be some evidence of it.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Again, what proof do you have that language is necessary to have a model of self. We don't even know if animals have language or not. There are many theories but no real evidence in either direction. How can you be sure that there are not animals that have a language hard wired into them. There is an theory about this question but I will let you find it.
Quoting schopenhauer1
So the only way to develop language is the human way, no other possibilities? We certainly don't fully understand how humans have developed into what we are today, and unfortunately we have even less understanding of how animals have done so. Yes they can to a certain accuracy explain the ancestry of a lot of animal, where the came from, but they still have a long way to go explaining anything other than the obvious physical changes. Little has been done to study animal culture, the norms, customs, rules and so on of the group interactions. And most social animals do seem to have them.
Let me leave you with a joke.
An old monkey was sitting in a tree deep in the African jungle with his grandson. The little one sees some people coming up the hill towards them.
He jumps up and down with excitement and says "Grandad look, people"
The older monkey says "Sit down and shut up"
A few minutes later the youngster says "Grandad look they are almost here"
The older monkey says "Sit down and shut up"
A few minutes later the youngster says "Grandad they are almost here. Lets go down and talk to them"
The older monkey says "Sit down and shut up"
The youngster, almost crying says " But Gramps I want to talk to the people"
The older monkey says "Sit down and shut up"
As the people pass by the young monkey weeps at the lost opportunity. After a while he says " Why did you not want to talk to the people Grandad?"
The old monkey looks at the little one and says " If those white things ever found out we could talk they would drag us away and make us work for nothing like they did with those black things that used to live down by the river."
Analogously, we undertake work in our lives. If we were 100% rational about the whole thing, then we would most likely turn inwards and start by altering our needs and then wants rather than the world to make it conform to how we want it to look like.
You may find that your attempts to define and then label my philosophical approach will prove frustrating for you. I am not a student of philosophy in the university-educated sense, so I have not been forced to state my position at any point in relation to certain traditions and theories. I’ve found your name-dropping interesting to read up on, but I’m not going to try and substantiate my own thoughts on the subject by attributing them to a credible name or theory - it only leads to misleading assumptions in forum discussions, in my experience. You can give it a go for your own understanding, but it’s liable to change tomorrow as new experiences come to light for me - just thought I’d warn you...
Quoting Joshs
My point is that we shouldn’t rely on what feedback we can measure or define as the only contributions that feeling brings to awareness. There is experientially more to somatic feedback than what can be substantiated by data or precise, rational language. Subjective experience contains a pre-linguistic, pre-cognitive element that regularly falls off the radar in rational discussions of emotion and feeling, for obvious reasons. That doesn’t make it irrelevant - just easy to ignore or dismiss. And then our expression of ‘felt’ awareness becomes limited, a la David Eggers’ ‘The Circle’ (the novel, not the movie).