Yesterday you decided to go vegetarian...
January 8th 2009 22:57
Yesterday you decided to be a vegetarian. What was your reason?
You look within yourself, and search. You're looking for some thought, belief, desire, feeling, experience, or else for something external, that caused you to make a decision.
Ideally, you're looking for something that "causes" on multiple levels. On the one hand, there is the cause and effect, the compulsion, of logic and rationality -- the norms by which someone or some community has decided that language must connect and thought must be structured. And on the other hand, there is the cause and effect of motivation, seeing that we don't always do what is logical -- which can in turn be explained from the inside, giving someone an account of the progression of your thought, or from the outside, in terms of conditioning, psychological tendency, neurology, sociology, anthropology, evolution...
Well, there are two problems with this game of words, this asking and giving of reasons.
The first is one I've foreshadowed -- perhaps the search is misguided in so far as it focuses on consciousness and requires both an inner and an outer. Why should the words we say to ourselves, and the things we're aware of being aware of, have anything to do with how we act?
The second problem is that the asking often (though not always) presumes singularity, as does the process we're taught to go through in answering. "What is your reason, what is the reason?". We search and search. Though of course, there is rarely one such "reason" for doing (if any such reasons exist at all -- this magic thing that causes on multiple levels, that satifies multiple systems of explaining or understanding). It seems to us that there's lots of interrelated beliefs, desires, influences, that somehow take on weight, and then carry us towards one option or another.
We know this from the experience of reasoning itself, when we bounce from consideration to consideration to counter-argument to counter-counter argument, and we switch viewpoints and look from several perspectives, without arriving at a decisive for or against.
You look within yourself, and search. You're looking for some thought, belief, desire, feeling, experience, or else for something external, that caused you to make a decision.
Ideally, you're looking for something that "causes" on multiple levels. On the one hand, there is the cause and effect, the compulsion, of logic and rationality -- the norms by which someone or some community has decided that language must connect and thought must be structured. And on the other hand, there is the cause and effect of motivation, seeing that we don't always do what is logical -- which can in turn be explained from the inside, giving someone an account of the progression of your thought, or from the outside, in terms of conditioning, psychological tendency, neurology, sociology, anthropology, evolution...
Well, there are two problems with this game of words, this asking and giving of reasons.
The first is one I've foreshadowed -- perhaps the search is misguided in so far as it focuses on consciousness and requires both an inner and an outer. Why should the words we say to ourselves, and the things we're aware of being aware of, have anything to do with how we act?
The second problem is that the asking often (though not always) presumes singularity, as does the process we're taught to go through in answering. "What is your reason, what is the reason?". We search and search. Though of course, there is rarely one such "reason" for doing (if any such reasons exist at all -- this magic thing that causes on multiple levels, that satifies multiple systems of explaining or understanding). It seems to us that there's lots of interrelated beliefs, desires, influences, that somehow take on weight, and then carry us towards one option or another.
We know this from the experience of reasoning itself, when we bounce from consideration to consideration to counter-argument to counter-counter argument, and we switch viewpoints and look from several perspectives, without arriving at a decisive for or against.
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