Just now, softwareNerd said:
Human beings do not always apply their full mental focus to everything they do. In fact, many tasks that we have to focus on and prctice very consciously become increasingly automated over time, so that we can drive 100 miles on a daily commute and hardly know how we got to our destination. This clearly has many advantages, and yet the risks are also pretty clear.
That’s just automated tasks. There are also “automated judgments and decisions” which follow the same theme of economizing the need to spend time thinking everything through. Sales people take advantage of this “thinking” that people do based on a quick pattern recognition, and without spending the time needed for a good decision.
The conscious mind is always there to be awakened. This allows for a “meta” approach: after an experience where we did something unthinkingly, we can analyse it, and fit that into the same pattern-recognition machinery. So, the next time, it can be a reminder to wake up and start to think more critically about something. Or, one could decide that when one recognizes the same pattern one will not make a decision without sleeping over it.
One can go beyond one’s own experiences and learn from the experience of others. Books like Cialdini’s “Influence” and Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow” have many such examples. They can be tools to prepare oneself for such situations.
Yes, this is not about chemicals that “pre-exist”. But, I think it is analogous. In the sense that after some experiences, a thoughtful person might decide not to make a major decision if he’s feeling particularly unwell… or some such thing. The classical example is PMS. At least one woman has told me that there are some times in some months where she (paraphrasing) puts her conscious mind on high-alert for a few days, and also tries to avoid certain situations where she thinks she might react in a way that she will later regret.
Does this contradict “blank slate”. It really depends what exactly one means by a blank slate. Every time the topic comes up, people argue about what it really means. I’ll suggest that the way to clarity is to replace the term with something more descriptive, for the duration of this topic.
No, none of what you are describing contradicts tabula rasa. I’m currently reading (almost finished) a book called “The power of habit” (I recommend it, because it doesn’t just spout advice, it describes the cutting edge science and studies that back up the advice), which goes into detail about how habits are formed, which parts of the brain light up or go dim when they take over, and how we can consciously determine or affect these subconscious, semi-automatic habits.
These are not fully automatic reactions, they can be created, bypassed or altered through conscious mental effort.
I’m also not talking about physiological reactions like PMS, or a reaction to illness. That doesn’t contradict Oism either.
But Oism makes the claim that, in human beings, emotions can only be caused by values, and that old “instincts” are entirely defunct. And that’s being contradicted by some very convincing voices these days…they’re not looking to contradict Objectivism, just trying to figure out human psychology, and they are making a convincing case that parts of the brain are left over from before humans became rational, and are doing their own thing, sometimes in spite of our rational mind. That is the key here: they’re not just controlling physiological functions the rational mind has nothing to do with, and occasionally reminding the conscious mind about these physiological problems. They’re recognizing outside events that DO NOT PHYSICALLY AFFECT US, and reacting in a prescribed manner, in a muted version of the way the primitive, non-rational ancestor’s brain used to react to them before we developed a rational ability.