Common sense won’t ‘cut the mustard’

[coberst]

Common sense won’t ‘cut the mustard’

More than three hundred years ago Isaac Newton introduced a theory of mechanics that fit beautifully within our common sense intuition and understanding. Newton’s mechanics, the theory of force acting upon objects, uses such common sense parameters as velocity, mass, force, distance, acceleration, and momentum. The student of physics could “feel” the correctness of Isaac’s formulas.

Quantum mechanics was another problem completely. The physicists seeking to intuit and understand the inner world of the atom were faced with trying to understand something that was beyond the world of human intuition. The inner world of the atom was a world incongruent with common sense.

Early in the twentieth century Freud discovered the psychic unconscious; the inner world of human reality that was somewhat like the inner world of the atom in that it was not easily understood by common sense intuition. Freud’s theory of repression represents itself as a means for comprehending this psychic phenomenon.

The Freudian theory of repression was a revolutionary idea originally discovered in the attempt to comprehend human nature as it develops within civilized society. Civilization demands that the individual repress many natural urges. “In the new Freudian perspective, the essence of society is repression of the individual, and the essence of the individual is repression of himself.”

Feud made this breakthrough discovery of human unconsciousness as a result of his attempt to understand and possibly relieve certain “mad” symptoms of the mentally deranged. Freud found meaningfulness within the psychopathology of everyday life, including slips of the tongue, errors, dreams, and random thoughts.

“Meaningfulness means expression of a purpose or an intention.” The expressions contained in dreams were Freud’s principal means for discovering the presence of the unconscious. These dream expressions uncovered an existence that drove Freud “to embrace the paradox that there are in the human being purposes of which he knows nothing, involuntary purposes, or, in more technical Freudian language, “unconscious” ideas.”

The dynamic conflict between the unconscious and the conscious, i.e. neurosis, is not easily recognized as such by the untutored self.

SGCS (Second Generation Cognitive Science) has recently discovered the importance of the cognitive unconsciousness. Utilizing new brain scanning technology and computer modeling, cognitive science has, in the last three to four decades, introduced us to a new concept; “the unconscious cognitive mind”. This new theory of cognition has made us conscious of the fact that most of our conscious life is dictated by our unconscious cognitive processes. Conservatively speaking 95% of cognitive thought is unconscious.

Comprehension of even the most basic human tendencies is no longer available to the common sense intuition. To grasp the essential elements of living successfully within a high tech society we must find ways to supplement our meager formal education that seems to prepare us only for a life of production and consumption; without the necessary understanding needed to be satisfied and successful in that new world where common sense is no longer sufficient for comprehending the vicissitudes of living.

Have you checked on your unconscious life lately? How does one check on their unconscious life?

Quotes from “Life Against Death” by Norman O Brown

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[Therapist4Chnge]

So......what do you think about this? Typically when people post excepts of things, they add their 2 cents.

 

[erg923]

This guy always does these "thought piece" type posts.....

 

[JR in SB]

It seems like the author does not understand that there is a big difference between Freud's subconscious, and the type of subconscious processing that is studied in cognitive science.

 

[baylordude]

set a recorder next to your bed before you sleep?

 

[coberst]

It seems like the author does not understand that there is a big difference between Freud's subconscious, and the type of subconscious processing that is studied in cognitive science.

Could you elaborate?

I have been studying both cognitive science and psychology for many months and I think I know the difference between the two of them as they relate to the unconscious. I would appreciate it if you were to identify my confusion.

 

[JR in SB]

Freud speaks about the subconscious as this repressed mass of thoughts and memories that would be unbearable for the person to process and accept about themselves.

Cognitive science views subconscious processing as an evolutionary tool. Obviously we as humans to not have the cognitive capacity to consciously process every single stimulus in the environment. Rather we process much of this information without even knowing it. (Think subliminal messaging). An even better example is the use of cognitive structures. Patterns of processing which minimize our cognitive load, allowing us to use higher processing on the areas which require it.


Thirsty


An even better example is the use of cognitive structures. Accumulated knowledge, beliefs, and expectancies which minimize our cognitive load, allowing us to use higher processing on the areas which require it.

 

[FrdLcnKln]

Freud speaks about the subconscious as this repressed mass of thoughts and memories that would be unbearable for the person to process and accept about themselves.

Cognitive science views subconscious processing as an evolutionary tool. Obviously we as humans to not have the cognitive capacity to consciously process every single stimulus in the environment. Rather we process much of this information without even knowing it. (Think subliminal messaging)


Thirsty

This reading of Freud is both correct and incorrect. The idea of the unconscious as the repository of repressed thoughts and memories was his first, and best known concept of the unconscious mind. However, during the 1920s, Freud added to his theory by introducing the structural model of the mind (ego, id, and super-ego). In this paradigm, there exists the idea of the dynamic unconscious, in which important mental processes (related to the ego) are carried out without the explicit attention of the subject. There is a large overlap here with cognitive science. American ego-psychologists spent a tremendous amount of time, during the last century, trying to demonstrate that the coherence of this system was an important sign of mental health, and, by extension, did research to show that neurotic processes often disrupted the smooth working of the dynamic unconscious.

On a slightly different note, I want to say that, as someone who really likes Freud, I had some problems with the initial post on this thread. I would say that Freud's work served to LOGICALLY explain seemingly random and inexplicable human behaviors, not to demonstrate that logic, reason, and common sense didn't cut the mustard. And I think one of the most disturbing trends in psychoanalysis is to believe that because patients report self-destructive or irrational behavior there is, therefore, no reason to examine it for logical consistency of any kind. To paraphrase Leo Rangell: Unreason is the object of psychoanalytic investigation and not its method.

 

[coberst]

This reading of Freud is both correct and incorrect. The idea of the unconscious as the repository of repressed thoughts and memories was his first, and best known concept of the unconscious mind. However, during the 1920s, Freud added to his theory by introducing the structural model of the mind (ego, id, and super-ego). In this paradigm, there exists the idea of the dynamic unconscious, in which important mental processes (related to the ego) are carried out without the explicit attention of the subject. There is a large overlap here with cognitive science. American ego-psychologists spent a tremendous amount of time, during the last century, trying to demonstrate that the coherence of this system was an important sign of mental health, and, by extension, did research to show that neurotic processes often disrupted the smooth working of the dynamic unconscious.

On a slightly different note, I want to say that, as someone who really likes Freud, I had some problems with the initial post on this thread. I would say that Freud's work served to LOGICALLY explain seemingly random and inexplicable human behaviors, not to demonstrate that logic, reason, and common sense didn't cut the mustard. And I think one of the most disturbing trends in psychoanalysis is to believe that because patients report self-destructive or irrational behavior there is, therefore, no reason to examine it for logical consistency of any kind. To paraphrase Leo Rangell: Unreason is the object of psychoanalytic investigation and not its method.

I think that you may have misunderstood my post. I am making the claim that we can no longer go through life depending upon common sense. I am claiming that we must become more intellectually sophisticated through a process of adult self-learning if we are to prevent our civilization from destroying it self.

 

[JR in SB]

I think that you may have misunderstood my post. I am making the claim that we can no longer go through life depending upon common sense. I am claiming that we must become more intellectually sophisticated through a process of adult self-learning if we are to prevent our civilization from destroying it self.

Since when was common sense common????

 

[coberst]

Since when was common sense common????

Probably since the phrase was first coined. Do you contend that there exists no thoughts that most humans hold in common? Is there no LCD (lowest common denomenator) of human thought. I suspect most people would conclude that there is.

 

[toby jones]

I found a paper a while back on how the cognitive psychological unconscious has NOT vindicated the dynamic unconscious. I can't be bothered finding the link, but I'll try and explain (I found it rather compelling and was surprised that people thought the cognitive psychological unconscious had vindicated the dynamic unconscious).

Lets begin by looking at two processes that are much studied by cognitive psychologists and then we can see what reason they have to believe in unconscious mental processes.

VISION

Line and edge and shape detection. There is much 'mental' processing of visual information where the contents of those mental processes aren't accessible to our conscious experience. The structuralists attempted to dissect conscious experience up into its constituents and they struggled. Conscious visual experience doesn't give us a world of sense data (kinda like just noticable difference point particles) or lines and edges. Conscious visual experience presents a world of objects and meanings (in the case of reading). Edge and line and shape detection are unconscious mental processes.

LANGUAGE

I won't even try because psycholinguistics really isn't my stong point. Something to do with rules of grammer (think Chomsky's superrules).

Some things to note about cognitive psychological unconscious processes:

Try hard as I might I'm simply not able to become consciously aware of the content of visual information on the back of my retina. Can't do it. Cognitive psychological unconscious processes aren't able to be consciously experienced (though they do of course determine conscious experience).

Cognitive psychological unconscious processes don't resemble dynamic unconscious processes (or structures) enough to be able to vindicate them. They lack the job description.

If you really wanted to look to modern experimental psychology to vindicate the dynamic unconscious I'd look to the work that has been done on schemata / schema theory rather than to cognitive psychology...

 

[coberst]

We have in our Western philosophy a traditional theory of faculty psychology wherein our reasoning is a faculty completely separate from the body. "Reason is seen as independent of perception and bodily movement." It is this capacity of autonomous reason that makes us different in kind from all other animals. I suspect that many fundamental aspects of philosophy and psychology are focused upon declaring, whenever possible, the separateness of our species from all other animals.

This tradition of an autonomous reason began long before evolutionary theory and has held strongly since then without consideration, it seems to me, of the theories of Darwin and of biological science. Cognitive science has in the last three decades developed considerable empirical evidence supporting Darwin and not supporting the traditional theories of philosophy and psychology regarding the autonomy of reason. Cognitive science has focused a great deal of empirical science toward discovering the nature of the embodied mind.

The three major findings of cognitive science are:
The mind is inherently embodied.
Thought is mostly unconscious.
Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

"These findings of cognitive science are profoundly disquieting [for traditional thinking] in two respects. First, they tell us that human reason is a form of animal reason, a reason inextricably tied to our bodies and the peculiarities of our brains. Second, these results tell us that our bodies, brains, and interactions with our environment provide the mostly unconscious basis for our everyday metaphysics, that is, our sense of what is real."

All living creatures categorize. All creatures, as a minimum, separate eat from no eat and friend from foe. As neural creatures tadpole and wo/man categorize. There are trillions of synaptic connections taking place in the least sophisticated of creatures and this multiple synapses must be organized in some way to facilitate passage through a small number of interconnections and thus categorization takes place. Great numbers of different synapses take place in an experience and these are subsumed in some fashion to provide the category eat or foe perhaps.

Our categories are what we consider to be real in the world: tree, rock, animal…Our concepts are what we use to structure our reasoning about these categories. Concepts are neural structures that are the fundamental means by which we reason about categories.

Quotes from "Philosophy in the Flesh".

 

[JR in SB]

Probably since the phrase was first coined. Do you contend that there exists no thoughts that most humans hold in common? Is there no LCD (lowest common denomenator) of human thought. I suspect most people would conclude that there is.

Oh Christ....apparently not since you didn't have the sense to understand that it was a JOKE!!!

 

[coberst]

Oh Christ....apparently not since you didn't have the sense to understand that it was a JOKE!!!

Sorry, I hate it when people do not laugh at my jokes. Ha-Ha, in retrospect.

 

[toby jones]

Okay... But I don't think that unconscious categorization or embodied cognition or schema theory for that matter are going to vindicate the dynamic unconscious.

I mean... What role does the dynamic unconscious play in analytic theory? First you have to figure out what properties the dynamic unconscious is supposed to have (given by its role in theory). Then you have to figure out what properties the cognitive psychological or embodied cognition or schema theory ascribes to their notion of the unconscious according to the role that it plays in their theory...

And then... If they fix upon something like a neural structure it might be that you can identify one with the other (like how 'morning star' and 'evening star' hit upon the same thing - venus). Or... If they have many properties in common and they are independent theories then it might be that they are converging on the same thing...

But the reasons that cognitive psychologists or embodied cognition theorists or schema theorists posit unconscious processes are quite different from the reasons that psychoanalytic theorists posited unconscious processes. It is a shame that all of those theories use a single word 'unconscious' for very different notions...

Vindicating one... Doesn't seem to vindicate the other.

Just because there is visual processing on the back of my retina that I'm not conscious of doesn't vindicate the id, ego, superego, or the conflict between these metaphorical? neurological? functional? structures.

 

[coberst]

The unconscious of psychology is different from the unconscious of the second generation cognitive science. Freud discovered the unconscious of psychology as a result of his analysis of dreams and a few other things that indicated the there was a conflict between the conscious and the unconscious, which is refered to as repression.

The unconscious of cognitive science is something different.

An infant is born and when embraced for the first time by its mother the infant experiences the sensation of warmth. In succeeding experiences the warmth is felt along with other sensations.

Empirical data verifies that there often happens a conflation of this sensation experience together with the development of a subjective (abstract) concept we can call affection. With each similar experience the infant fortifies both the sensation experience and the affection experience and a little later this conflation aspect ends and the child has these two concepts in different mental spaces.

This conflation leads us to readily recognize the metaphor ‘affection is warmth'.

Cognitive science uses metaphor in the standard usage as we are all accustomed to but it also uses a new concept that you are unfamiliar with unless you have been reading this book; "Philosophyin the Flesh". This new concept is called ‘conceptual metaphor'. Conceptual metaphor is the heart of this new cognitive science and represents what will be in my opinion the new paradigm of cognitive science.

In my example I speak of two separate mental spaces; one being the experience of being held and the other is the subjective experience of affection. The theory behind the ‘conceptual metaphor' is that the structure of the sense experience can and is often automatically without conscious intention mapped into a new mental space.

The experience structure can be mapped into a new mental space and thereby becomes part of the structure of that new mental space. In this fashion these conceptual metaphors can act somewhat like atoms that join together to make a molecule.