From: Greg Jordan (jordan@chuma.cas.usf.edu)
Date: Tue Mar 25 2003 - 08:43:39 MST
On Mon, 24 Mar 2003, Samantha Atkins wrote:
> But the issue of consent is utterly essential to the discussion
> as it is essential to any notion of freedom vs coercion.
It isn't essential to my point about economic forces being real forces
that need to be considered in the analysis.
> He consents in many places along the way that leads to a
> conclusion that his life is of less value than what he thinks
> this bit of violence will accomplish.
But what leads "him" (part of the personality) to "consent" (behave as if
a choice had been made, not entirely consistently) is that forces,
"internal" or "external" have acted upon the elements of the personality
so as to bring this event about.
> > Does he consent to being
> > coincidentally exposed to the suicide-bomber-philosophy?
>
> That would be silly. No one has full consent over what memes
> they will encounter. That does not mean they are powerless to
> choose which memes they will carry in the sense of acting on
> them vs which ones they will oppose. There is really no such
> separate thing as a suicide-bomber-philosophy or a
> suicide-bomber-meme.
It is silly - that is the point of my asking the question, to expose this,
although I did not intend a reductio ad absurdum.
Rather than say people then "choose" which memes to adopt, I would
break it down a bit more and say that the memes that a person happens upon
may or may not enter into symbiosis with the person, depending upon the
characteristics at the time of the person (and all their mind's parts) and
the meme and the whole rest of the environment. Some of the critical
characteristics of the person and their mind may be other memes, or memory
traces, or inherited personality traits, or the metabolic state, or any of
a host of other characteristics. These various elements/units interact and
can exert various forces. The behaviors of the person, including their
appearance of "choice", are a result of at least some of these forces.
> > Does he consent to only two products of the
> > sort he wants being available?
>
> His power of consent does not determine how many competitors are
> in a particular field directly or how many products of the
> kind he wants are currently being offered except indirectly in
> that the fact of his ability to choose (consent) makes
> competition possible. Again, such overarching consent as to
> self-determine the number of things that can be chosen from is
> not in the least necessary for consent to be real.
Consent is a concept. I am breaking it down to reveal that it can be
affected by economic considerations, thus making it not entirely the
property of the isolated, detached "individual" of traditional
philosophy. Perhaps that is the basic point of disagreement I have - that
the old philosophy does not highlight enough how human beings are formed
and operate openly, as systems in interaction with the general
environment.
The practical upshot is that a company's product line for what you want to
buy DOES affect your choice, since it constrains WHAT you can buy, and
even what you are most LIKELY to buy, based on who you are, etc. Infinite
freedom of choice is imaginary - in the real world choices are
constrained by various factors.
> Same answer as above and also irrelevant in first-world
> communities where an abundance of product choices are generally
> at hand.
No matter how many products are sold of a certain type, if you want one of
that type, you can only buy X of Y (one of the available), not X of Y+1.
> Yes, to some degree. There is a continuing battle to widen the
> degree of choice here. Also, marketing does not overrule consent.
Marketing can affect "consent". No matter how much choice of products is
widened, it cannot be widened to infinity, in theory (unless
literally infinite variety of products are actually available, each of
them perfectly equal in appeal, accessibility, cost, etc.).
> Marketing can only influence choices to some degree. It is a
> technique of persuasion and not coercion. The targets of the
> marketing still choose.
All choices can be understood as results of combined forces acting within
or upon the personality - again, "coercion" and "persuasion" are just
conceptual categories for certain types of forces. One could say that a
person who has a gun to their head still "chooses" - they just choose,
perhaps, to do what they have to not to die.
> The deeper argument that consent is meaningless unless one can
> chose (consent to) one's own nature is empty and devoid of value.
This is certainly not my argument. But if you regard a person's
"nature" as part of their personality, then it is related to what
"chooses", and since it is not "chosen", then there is no choice that is
not already chosen by something/someone else, another unit of force.
> I see. I was not aware I was speaking with an automaton. I
> will choose to stop doing so now. :-)
Sentient and intelligent automatons - that ought to be familiar to people
on this list.
> Seriously, questions of freedom vs. coercion can only be asked
> and answered in terms of what *is* including the nature of human
> beings. It cannot be meaningfully discussed in terms of some
> imaginary possibility of real "consent" to choose everything
> including the nature of and contents of reality down to any
> desired level.
I am asking the questions only to make my point. "Choice" or "consent" as
framed by the old philosophy would cause an endless regression. The
ancient took the regression back to the First Cause, aka the old Israeli
war god Yahweh, creator of humans and first Programmer of Human Nature.
In reality, human beings' minds are partly open systems, open to the
environment. When we notice what has formed us, what is continuing to form
us and our decisions, then we - that is, our conscious attentive
etc. self - can be in a position to exert a deeper bit of control if we so
choose. But if we foolishly imagine we are immune to economic forces, and
actually have a transcendently free nature, then we are all the more
puppets of other puppeteers since we don't notice the strings attached to
our arms.
> What would you substitute for economic consent/choice which you
> regard as coercion? The State choosing for us?
The state is just another product of the forces, forming and being
formed. I suggest the relationship we all have to economic and political
forces can be tidied up, improved to increase our happiness, if we perform
a more detailed analysis of how things are working - how the complex
interactive system is working on us, by us, through us, in us. We and the
state are one. We and the economy are one. We are a complex,
partly open subsystem of units within the whole dynamic system. There is
no detached "us" facing off against a detached "it", able to make a
transcendently free "choice" that is uniquely "ours" to affect "it". We
are not a thought in the mind of God, but a thought in the mind of the
world.
gej
resourcesoftheworld.org
jordan@chuma.cas.usf.edu
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