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

  • From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2008 21:46:18 +0900

First, just want to say that I have no problem at all with what Phil says
below. To me it represents an articulate and thoroughly reasonable account
of our usual commonsensical assumptions about decisions. Second, as a social
anthropologist by training, I am delighted to have Phil mention social
circumstances as something that ought to be looked into.
As evidence that I have not succumbed to vulgar reductionism, I am
particularly happy to be able to point to my latest response to Robert Paul
concerning his similar suggestion in re the work of Gary Klein. There, you
might have observed, my response to Klein's description of the case of the
shooting down of the Iranian airliner was to suggest a whole series of
possibly relevant social circumstances: (1) short training and retention
cycles that increase the probability that novices are manning the radar
screens; (2) training which assumes a hostile situation; and (3) a tense
situation in which the possibility of a genuine threat was salient.

All that said, I wonder about the stance of insisting on the commonsensical
view of terms like "decision" aids understanding of how quite serious people
in several different disciplines are talking about when they use such terms
in their own technical contexts, especially when the convergence of their
disciplines on the idea that "decisions" are largely unconscious seems to
represent a major intellectual trend, albeit one uncomfortable to the common
sense that Phil articulates so nicely.

John



On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 2:52 PM, Phil Enns <phil.enns@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>
> I would, of course, say what John has me saying but I wouldn't make
> any such appeal.  We don't ordinarily point to blips on a machine as
> evidence of decisions, making me wonder whether some form of
> reductionism is going on in this argument.  The reductionism would
> suggest that _really_ a decision is this neural activity.  On the
> other hand, it seems to me that whatever else a decision is, it is a
> social phenomenon.  It is one manner by which we distinguish various
> kinds of behaviour.

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

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