What to do with the chicken?

[Beingist]

Aug 20, 2013 16:20:23 GMT -5 ???????? ???????????? said:

Freud claims that all forms of dreams are wish-fulfillment, i.e. there is an internal conflict in the unconsicous and desire is the desire to resolve the conflicts.

Yanno, I'd never heard or read this before (though it makes sense, from what I have read of Freud). But, I realized it myself just last week, after waking up from a dream. Suddenly the pattern of all my dreams fell into place. Was rather a cool realization, actually.

How very interesting that I should read this, now.

[enigma]

Aug 20, 2013 4:55:08 GMT -5 topology said:

Aug 19, 2013 15:46:18 GMT -5 ???????? ???????????? said:

The correct term is "preconscious". en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preconscious

How exactly the calculating mind works is not so important. The point of the snake/rope analogy, and that which I'm critisizing about it, is that it delegates the problem to the calculating mind (both conscious and preconsicous) and fails to acknowledge the dimension of the unconscious.

Maybe so. I would have chosen a different analogy if I remembered one. I simply mention it as a model which, at least in my interpretation, puts the focus only on the unconscious.


The unconsious is not irrational. It is in fact a perfectly ordered structure, if it were chaotic then we couldn't account for why its effects are so repetetive. The problem is simply that it is precisely not conscious, i.e. it is an "other" relative to the conscious intellect. That's why just because we have figured something out with the intellect it doesn't mean that the unconscious is going to respect this new information. Instead a way must be found to bring the unconscious to acknowledge new evidence.

The Kafkaesque bureaucratic apparatus is one analogy to describe how it functions. The bureaucracy has an extremely strict internal logic, everything has its place, all rules must be followed to the last detail. Even if you do have absolutely convincing evidence, it is of no importance whatsoever for the lower clerk, he doesn't care. He will instead forward the information to the next authority, and he will do the same etc. In other words, even though the bureaucratic entity is perfectly structured, its structure is not transparent to the guy who is making the request to have his information acknowledged. The unconscious appears to be irrational only because its rules are not known to us. It does have rules, and it does not negotiate them, instead it is as if it says "this is so and so because that's what the documents say!"

This is why, although the patient does with total certainty know that he is a man and not a grain of corn, the chicken (the unconscious) doesn't care. His challenge is how to make the chicken acknowledge his evidence. It seems that you are proposing that the conscious entity simply insists on its version of things in the hope that one day somehow the unconsious acknowledges it. It is a sort of "brute force" method, I guess it's the common sense view and I don't know whether it is correct or not, but I suspect there has to be a more elegant solution.

My intention for now was simply to present the view as a point of reference for future discussion.

The unconscious is filled with thoughts that have been bought into implicitly on a sub-conscious level. While one has bought into those thoughts, they will stick around and rule the hen house. Consciously examining the thought-system operating in the unconscious begins to challenge that belief and degree to which the thoughts have been bought into. When the belief in the unconscious thoughts evaporates from the thought system, the thought structure collapses. The unconscious does not need to be convinced of anything, it need only lose its falsely held conviction. This is done through conscious examination of it's thought structure until the thoughts become meaningless. While there is meaning and value placed into a thought or thought-system, it will dictate how things play out in the mind.

It can be useful to see the conscious mind driven by reason and the unconscious driven by feeling, which makes the unconscious fundamentally irrational. Dreams are basically feeling driven and illogical, often creating dream scenarios that not only don't make sense, but which you would not consciously choose to create, such as nightmares, and yet you do.

Hencely, communication between conscious and unconscious becomes problematic. What you consciously reason is best for you is of little interest to the unconscious, which simply wants what it wants in spite of the consequences and without regard for how reasonable or true it is. Unbidden unconscious thoughts, feelings and urges will bubble to the surface (or at least try to) that may be rejected as unwise, annoying, or even impossible once the conscious mind's reason is applied.

As such, it's not effective to apply reason as a means of influencing the unconscious. We see this failure when we consciously see through an illusion, and yet continue to respond unconsciously as though we haven't seen through it at all. Another example is consciously reasoning that we don't want to think, and then watch as thoughts keep coming. The unconscious doesn't care about the reasoning at the base of your decision to not think. It's interested in storytelling and drama and reinforcing the illusion of a self to which all of it is happening.

There is a science behind evaporating the meaning attached to a thought: place your full unwavering attention on the thought. When you get distracted, come back to the thought and keep looking at it until the mind becomes bored with it and releases the meaning it has invested in it. Meaning can only exist in contrast and relationship between thoughts. By fixing one's attention on a single thought and refusing to go along with the train-of-thought transitions, you begin to decohere the meaning that has been invested in the thought.

Try it out with an image or picture. Look at the picture with a fixed gaze, no wandering attention. Fix your attention on a single thought or impression and simply watch what happens. If the thought fades, do not re-assert the same thought, simply let it fade. If an alternate thought enters the mind and you are distracted, come back to the thought being focussed upon and focus on it until the mind loses focus but does not get distracted by other thoughts. While there is any meaning or value in the thought, focus on it until the value bleeds away.

The mind and it's thought system thrives on contrast. When you rob the system of it's ability to generate contrast, meaning and investment of belief evaporates. But a word of caution, the mind will buck at being starved from the meaning it is addicted to.

Experience itself is a movement, which is what you're referring to with the idea of contrast. Hencely, when a particular movement is prevented, experience ceases. However, I would not conclude that meaning has been removed from that thought. Interest has been temporarily lost because nothing is moving, not because the movement of the thought has lost it's meaning.

The way to remove meaning from a process that is driven by feeling is to offer a better feeling, which is why carrot dangling is so effective in changing the thoughts that arise. Unfortunately, the whole process of chasing better feelings is fundamentally flawed, and the unconscious has zero interest in your reasoning as to why that is so.

This is where realization enters the picture. Realization is not a reasoning process, and what is seen is self evident. Ironically, the conscious mind, in it's eagerness to put this realization into a rational context, can easily disprove the self evident, while the unconscious has no such ability. A desire, fed by feeling, can collapse utterly in the presence of a non-conceptual seeing that reveals the futility of the desire. It needs no reasoning because it is not based on reasoning.

[serpentqueen]

Aug 20, 2013 16:20:23 GMT -5 ???????? ???????????? said:

Aug 19, 2013 22:52:59 GMT -5 enigma said:

"You see, they knew that Burt's identity as a rabbit was entirely in his imagination, but it's from this identity that the desire to realize his humanness can even arise. The desire to realize his humanness, which they had worked so hard to encourage in Burt, is really as imaginary as the identity through which he wants to realize his humanness. Actually, they pondered, Burt is already what he seeks, and is in fact the one seeking it. The desire is the desire to be what he already is, and the desire itself is based entirely on a misunderstanding of what he is. Now he's left with two delusions instead of one; the delusion that he is a rabbit, and the delusion that this rabbit can realize it's humanness.

I think it's not so inconsistent and actually it's a nice example of Hegelian logic.

I would say his humanness is not at all realized before he falls into the bunny-delusion and finally dismisses it. And even for his friends and family the humanness is also not fully realized before they at least encounter a human caught in the delusion of not being human. In other words, first comes the fall into delusion, the delusion is inconsistent and produces a conflict which means that it produces the motivation to overcome the delusion, and realizing humanness is only possible against the background of the delusion. This does not mean that the realized humanness is a fake one, i.e. only an extension of the rabbit delusion, instead it means that without the conflict there is no motivation to become aware of the human dimension that one already embodies. There is a difference between the pre-delusion and post-delusion humanness, namely that the former was unreflected and without defense against the bunny-delusion, the latter however is a humanness that can't again fall back into delusion.

Yes, the realization is strictly speaking an "I am not that", the dropping of a false idea. But before the realization there is no proper knowledge of an "I am that", and even if there were, strictly speaking we do not return to this kind of unreflected knowledge anyway.

The dilemma is further exacerbated by the fact that the whole plan was destined to fail from the start, since of course Burt's identity as a rabbit cannot possibly succeed in realizing it's humanness as the identity itself would simply vanish at the precise moment of realization, eliminating the very reason for even realizing it, and so the best that can be hoped for is a total failure to awaken. There isn't actually a rabbit there that can awaken, there is only Burt, who never for a moment stopped being Burt."

But this view is inconsistent. You have written it, so it is possible to realize. Not from the bunny-prespective, but instead the "I am not that" can be realized where the bunny-delusion is fully abandoned. Just because the bunny-delusion is given its proper place in the process doesn't mean that everything must be poisoned by it.

I don't see rules or rigidity of structure in the unconscious at all. The unconscious is what is permitted to dominate in the fluid, and often discontinuous and illogical, structure of the dream state, which demonstrates the lack of respect for structure and reason, and seems more driven by feeling association. In the absence of conscious reasoning in the dream state, this lack of continuity and logic doesn't seem to be a problem.

This 'irrational' motivation is precisely why the unconscious cannot be reasoned with through the conscious application of logic, and why corn-man still fears the chicken.

Lacan claims that the unconscious is structured like a language, i.e. that it does have an internal structure and that it functions on a symbolic level. If I can fly in the dream then it is a symbolic expression for something - usually a fulfillment of a desire. Freud claims that all forms of dreams are wish-fulfillment, i.e. there is an internal conflict in the unconsicous and desire is the desire to resolve the conflicts.

I don't know when the chicken became the unconscious. Hehe. I thought the chicken was just there to expose the shallowness of his belief that he is a man. The unconscious doesn't lie. The split between conscious and unconscious is exploited to make self deception possible.

It's an old joke from psychoanalysts and the chicken stands for the unconscious. Of course, as all things, it can be read differently, but I'm using the originally intended meaning here.

You mean this one?

"Why did the man cross the road?  Because it was stapled to the chicken."

[enigma]

Aug 20, 2013 17:12:31 GMT -5 serpentqueen said:

Aug 20, 2013 16:20:23 GMT -5 ???????? ???????????? said:

I think it's not so inconsistent and actually it's a nice example of Hegelian logic.

I would say his humanness is not at all realized before he falls into the bunny-delusion and finally dismisses it. And even for his friends and family the humanness is also not fully realized before they at least encounter a human caught in the delusion of not being human. In other words, first comes the fall into delusion, the delusion is inconsistent and produces a conflict which means that it produces the motivation to overcome the delusion, and realizing humanness is only possible against the background of the delusion. This does not mean that the realized humanness is a fake one, i.e. only an extension of the rabbit delusion, instead it means that without the conflict there is no motivation to become aware of the human dimension that one already embodies. There is a difference between the pre-delusion and post-delusion humanness, namely that the former was unreflected and without defense against the bunny-delusion, the latter however is a humanness that can't again fall back into delusion.

Yes, the realization is strictly speaking an "I am not that", the dropping of a false idea. But before the realization there is no proper knowledge of an "I am that", and even if there were, strictly speaking we do not return to this kind of unreflected knowledge anyway.


But this view is inconsistent. You have written it, so it is possible to realize. Not from the bunny-prespective, but instead the "I am not that" can be realized where the bunny-delusion is fully abandoned. Just because the bunny-delusion is given its proper place in the process doesn't mean that everything must be poisoned by it.

Lacan claims that the unconscious is structured like a language, i.e. that it does have an internal structure and that it functions on a symbolic level. If I can fly in the dream then it is a symbolic expression for something - usually a fulfillment of a desire. Freud claims that all forms of dreams are wish-fulfillment, i.e. there is an internal conflict in the unconsicous and desire is the desire to resolve the conflicts.


It's an old joke from psychoanalysts and the chicken stands for the unconscious. Of course, as all things, it can be read differently, but I'm using the originally intended meaning here.

You mean this one?

"Why did the man cross the road?  Because it was stapled to the chicken."

That's a dead baby joke. Now you're on a roll.

"Why did the dead baby cross the road? ... Because it was stapled to the chicken"
Dark Tower

[Deleted]

Why did the chicken cross the road??!...

What is the difference? The chicken was merely deferring from one side of the road to other.

And how do we get the idea of the chicken in the first place? Does it exist outside of language?

Any number of contending discourses may be discovered within the act of the chicken crossing the road, and each interpretation is equally valid as the authorial intent can never be discerned, because structuralism is DEAD, DAMMIT, DEAD.

Jacques Derrida:

[serpentqueen]

Aug 20, 2013 19:37:03 GMT -5 enigma said:

Aug 20, 2013 17:12:31 GMT -5 serpentqueen said:

You mean this one?

"Why did the man cross the road?  Because it was stapled to the chicken."

That's a dead baby joke. Now you're on a roll.

"Why did the dead baby cross the road? ... Because it was stapled to the chicken"
Dark Tower

I know it as a dead baby joke too, but maybe there's an old psychoanalyst version that the dead baby joke was based on... I had one of those "OMG *that's* what they meant???" moments... That was my favorite dead baby joke, because it was just so .. nonsensical... I hope Q will weigh in.. I am so curious now!