Ed Porter quoted from the following book: >> > From > http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/books/review/Berreby-t.html?ref=review > a NYTime book review of "Predictaly Irrational: The Hidden Forces that > Shape our Decisions, by Dan Ariely.. > In its most relevant section it states the following > "At the heart of the market approach to understanding people is a > set of assumptions. First, you are a coherent and unitary self. Second, > you can be sure of what this self of yours wants and needs, and can > predict what it will do. Third, you get some information about yourself > from your body - objective facts about hunger, thirst, pain and pleasure > that help guide your decisions. Standard economics, as Ariely writes, > assumes that all of us, equipped with this sort of self, "know all the > pertinent information about our decisions" and "we can calculate the value > of the different options we face." We are, for important decisions, > rational, and that's what makes markets so effective at finding value and > allocating work. To borrow from H. L. Mencken, the market approach > presumes that "the common people know what they want, and deserve to get > it good and hard." > "What the past few decades of work in psychology, sociology and > economics has shown, as Ariely describes, is that all three of these > assumptions are false. Yes, you have a rational self, but it's not your > only one, nor is it often in charge. A more accurate picture is that there > are a bunch of different versions of you, who come to the fore under > different conditions. We aren't cool calculators of self-interest who > sometimes go crazy; we're crazies who are, under special circumstances, > sometimes rational." >> The last paragraph here sounds remarkably like the teachings of Gurdjieff. In his teachings which he called "The Work", he helped his pupils identify all of the different versions of themselves and slowly taught them recognize when they took control and what their motivations were and why they surfaced. The version that did the analyzing and observation would eventually gain dominance and control over the other versions until other less logical and more mechanical versions of the self were recognized when they tried to take control and subjugated by the new version of self which observes. His teachings stated that serious spiritual work could not proceed until a unified self existed. Although all of his spritual teaching were lifted during his world travels from other philosophic and spiritual traditions. His teachings as explained by his student Peter D. Ouspensky after his death in a book called "The Fourth Way" detailed exercises which could be used to unify the separate selves under the control of the observer.
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