Gary Miller wrote:
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.
I haven't studied Gurdjieff, but "The Work" sounds doomed to failure.
The rational self is inherently a tool of the sections of the mind that
supply motives (for actions). An unguided rational engine generates
entirely too many lemmas to be of any use whatsoever for any purpose
except filling memory. And a unified self is obtained only by ignoring
the parts that don't fit in. (Note that the sections quoted by the
grandparent don't contradict these assertions.)
P.S.: I suspect that Gurdjieff was also advocating something rather
different than you suggest, but as I said I haven't studied him. It is,
however, my understanding that he often intentionally stated "truths" in
an obscure manner under the belief that the enlightenment came during
the work to discover the truth rather than in having it stated to one.
(This sounds plausible to me.)
-------------------------------------------
agi
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