[lit-ideas] Re: Conscious after the fact?

"Their findings challenge conventional notions of choice."
 
I've said for years that we don't make choices.  We have only compulsions..  
The unconscious rules, and most of it's in place before age 6.  A child knows 
if its environment is trustworthy by age 9 months.  We are driven throughout 
our lives by decisions, not "decisions", but decisions that we make in infancy 
and early childhood, and of course those decisions, all of them unconscious, 
are gelled in later childhood and adolescence, including decisions to go to 
war.  But of course, let's all now howl that our rights to brainlessly plunk 
out a kid are being infringed and that's the end of the discussion.    
 
 


--- On Sun, 6/29/08, John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

From: John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [lit-ideas] Conscious after the fact?
To: "Lit-Ideas" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "ANTHRO-L" 
<ANTHRO-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sunday, June 29, 2008, 3:30 AM


We have known at least since Leibniz's New Essays on Human Understanding that 
there must be mental processes of which we are unconscious. How else, Leibniz 
asks, could a ringing bell wake us? We must hear it before we are aware of its 
sound. 


Now neuroscientists suggest that we make decisions up to 10 seconds before we 
are conscious of making them.  See


http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121450609076407973.html?mod=blogs


John


-- 
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
http://www.wordworks.jp/

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