>Justin Schwartz wrote:
> >
> > [clip]. So what's your point, Chris? --jks
> >
> > >[clip
> > >
> > >As for imagining that we can be conscious of everything all the time,
>
>How silly. Probably almost all mental processes are _non_-conscious --
>which has nothing whatever to do with the Freudian concept of The
>Unconscious.
>
>Carrol
>
>P.S. Justin, someone whose knowledge of Russell was limited to the
>_History of Western Philosophy_ might quite reasonably think he was a
>logical positivist. I read it in high school, and for about 7 years made
>that assumption (since most of what I knew about logical positivism came
>from those few paragraphs in Russell).
Ah Carrol came near to breaking his principle of never reading my posts. Which is even more unfortunate since on the main point on which I was intervening, the role of the unconsious, I would be in large agreement with him.
>Probably almost all mental processes are _non_-conscious
That does not mean we have to separate out, almost mechanically, a concept of the Conscious and the Unconscious.
In a fairly light hearted and creative exchange Wojtek and Joanna were contrasting two ways of interpreting adolescent fashion
Joanna was arguing for a cultural subconscious:
>there IS a cultural subconscious: how else to explain the adolescent
>tendency to wear the uniform of the oppressed in every era: ethnic wear
>and army jackets in the sixties and early seventies, bag lady clothes in
>the eighties, ghetto huge dragging pants in the nineties?
Wojtek preferred the following explanation:
>Again, I think you are giving the brats too much credit. Most what they do
>fits one of the follwoing two categories:
>1. trying to be popular among peers
>2. trying to piss off everyone else, especially parents & teachers.
>The popularity of the attributes you describe can be satisfactorily
>explained by these two factors - no subconscious is needed (remember
>Ockkam's razor?)
Provided that Joanna is not insisting on a particularly mechanical concept of The Cultural Subconscious her claim would not ncessarily seem to be out of order to someone with Carrol's views.
Partly a true word said partly in ject, Wojtek's reply was to argue that everything could be explained by two factors: trying to be popular among peers and trying to piss off others, and recalled William of Occam.
My objections for Justin's reference is that this sort of approach simplfiies the complexity of the universe.
It is surprising to find a perfectly civilised amiable person speaking a foreign language fluently, but I strongly suspect Justin and I are speaking foreign languages.
I come with what I believe to be loyalty to dialectical principles, including that everything is connected with everything else. The idea therefore of arbitrarily ruling out but the bare number of possible explanations by the narrowest, and I would say, mechanical, logik. That would be a crime against the Truth.
Certainly in the example given, I would regard teenage behaviour as far more complex and self-sustaining as a life form, in competition by others, than two drives on their own could really generate.
As for my remarks about Russell, one of the opportunities of posting on a list like this is to be challenged in areas of ignorance. In the emphasis of logic, I would claim that Russell is in a similar current to logical positivism. His "History" peaks at the end with a chapter on "logical analysis".
Wittgenstein provides a bridge with his early writings between Russell and the Vienna Circle.
In a broader sense the reductionist scientific method has been strongly influenced logical positivism.
From:
http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/l/logpos.htm# The Main Philosophical Tenets of Logical Positivism
"Until 1950s logical positivism was the leading philosophy of science; today its influence persists especially in the way of doing philosophy, in the great attention given to the analysis of scientific thought and in the definitely acquired results of the technical researches on formal logic and the theory of probability."
So in the broader sense were are still fighting the reductionist, logical, and positivist restrictions on scientific discussion that the Vienna Circle emphasised.
Chris Burford
London