NOTE: The message Peter Mandik is replying to here is available at http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/self-control-psyche-d-aug-1996.html _________________________________________________________________________________________ From: Peter Mandik Subject: Re: Are we always in control? (Was Re: I can't see -- all is dark Date: 1996/08/03 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 171958203 sender: PSYCHE Discussion Forum comments: Gated by NETN...@IRIS.RFMH.ORG content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII mime-version: 1.0 newsgroups: sci.psychology.consciousness I found Aaron Sloman's (Fri, 2 Aug 1996) response to me very interesting. I do not, however, feel that it answers the question I was trying to raise. It seems that I utterly failed to get my points accross the first time around, so I shall try again. First and foremost, my original inquiry was not a request for information regarding the real self (the real *you*). Whether there is such a thing is not something that I'm currently concerned with. I thought I made it clear that I was interested in information regarding the *sense* of self, which I suppose has something to do with the way we represent ourselves. Sloman writes: "Conjecture: being in control of thoughts, or attention, involves being in a state where the deliberative processes and other internally monitored processes conform to, or do not contradict, goals and plans of the meta-management system. " . . . "It was an important feature of the architecture I described that reactive mechanisms could disturb, interrupt, divert, deliberative processes (including meta-management processes). "(Think of those cases where a horrible jingle that you have heard, e.g. a silly advertising tune, just sticks in your brain and keeps re-surfacing. Why?)" Now, I assume that my wanting to remeber to pick up some beer at the store would count as a goal or plan of the meta-management system, and my being continuously distracted by overwhelming grief or an ad jingle would be due to interuptions by the reactive mechanisms. And presumably being overwhelmed by grief or distracted by jingles are things that I'd stop doing if I could--I don't want them to continue. They do not present themselves to me as things that I want to do--they are out of my control. Now we're in a position to see what my previous talk of "identifying with one layer and not the other" is supposed to mean. Why is it that what I identify as being MY wants and desires turns out to be the meta-manger's outputs? Now, in a sense that Sloman acknowledges, the outputs of the reactive layer are also a part of me. But they don't appear to me as stuff I want to do. What I want to do is NOT to be overwhelmed by grief. Now, I don't deny that the following isn't very good advice: [AS] ". . . I suggest that instead of trying to `identify with' a part of yourself you simply live with the fact that you are very complex, and although you can distinguish cases when you are in control of your thought processes and cases where you are not, most of what goes on in your mind just goes on." Nonetheless, some of what goes on in each of us comports with our wants, and some does not. It seems, then, that despite the very good advice, we do indeed end up identifying with just a part of our self: the meta-manager. So my question might be boiled down to the following. Why that part and not another? Pete Mandik Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Program Washington University St. Louis, MO USA e-mail: p...@twinearth.wustl.edu _________________________________________________________________________________________ NOTE: The message Peter Mandik is replying to here is available at http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/self-control-psyche-d-aug-1996.html