Jean Matthews

May 18. 2008 15:15

Great minds think alike - I read David Brooks article link last night (yes, I know it was Saturday night)and thought it fascinating too and also read Tom Wolfe's essay "Sorry but your soul just died" www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles/WolfeSoulDied.php

I have always thought that conditions such as AHDH are an embellished social construct portrayed as an underdiagnosed medical disorder. There is no doubt that some do suffer severe and debilitating hyperactivity, but it seems that the definition is now expanded to embrace just naughty boys...it's always boys??......promoted of course by the pharmaceutical industry.

To know how much of our self is gentically pretermined, even down to being hard-wired for 'moral' and 'immoral' behaviour and how much is socially determined is potentially unfathomable. Personally I think our behaviour is hard-wired to survival instincts and to the spread of DNA, but social constructs have made our phenotypic behaviour, our responses, much more subtle, although if you look at the crisis in Zimbabwe and Burma, some perhaps are less subtle than others. I think its Gell-Mann who believes that part of the structure of our genotype is the ability to stay adaptive and step ahead of our competitors.

I thought the Jochen's comment that the self is a 'dynamic processes or relationships' that bubble under the surface and the 'death of the self' however show some sympathy for the post-structural position, especially interesting for someone in AI. I agree, there is no self, an agents practice is constituted in the space between relationships.......the space between experience and the human genome maybe

Nice to 'talk'....there was good blog on consciousness and unconsciousness a few weeks ago from same CAS network...when does one become conscious of the unconscious??