Moral Deliberations in Modern CinemaVaknin, Samuel
Philosophy
Moral Deliberations in Modern Cinema
Vaknin, Samuel
Motion pictures -- Reviews
Hume said that to be considered in possession of a mind, a creature
needs to have a few states of consciousness linked by memory in a kind
of narrative or personal mythology. Can this conjecture be equally
applied to unconscious mental states (e.g. subliminal perceptions,
beliefs, drives, emotions, desires, etc.)?
In other words, can we rephrase Hume and say that to be considered in
possession of a mind, a creature needs to have a few states of
consciousness and a few states of the unconscious - all linked by
memory into a personal narrative? Isn't it a contradiction in terms to
remember the unconscious?
The unconscious and the subliminal are instance of the general
category of mental phenomena which are not states of consciousness
(i.e., are not conscious). Sleep and hypnosis are two others. But so
are "background mental phenomena" - e.g., one holds onto one's beliefs
and knowledge even when one is not aware (conscious) of them at every
given moment.
We know that an apple will fall towards the earth, we know how to
drive a car ("automatically"), and we believe that the sun will rise
tomorrow, even though we do not spend every second of our waking life
consciously thinking about falling apples, driving cars, or the
position of the sun.
Yet, the fact that knowledge and beliefs and other background mental
phenomena are not constantly conscious - does not mean that they
cannot be remembered. They can be remembered either by an act of will,
or in (sometimes an involuntary) response to changes in the
environment. The same applies to all other unconscious content.
Unconscious content can be recalled. Psychoanalysis, for instance, is
about re-introducing repressed unconscious content to the patient's
conscious memory and thus making it "remembered".
In fact, one's self-identity may be such a background mental
phenomenon (always there, not always conscious, not always
remembered). The acts of will which bring it to the surface are what
we call "memory" and "introspection".
This would seem to imply that having a self-identity is independent of
having a memory (or the ability to introspect). Memory is just the
mechanism by which one becomes aware of one's background, "always-on",
and omnipresent (all-pervasive) self-identity. Self-identity is the
object and predicate of memory and introspection. It is as though
self-identity were an emergent extensive parameter of the complex
human system - measurable by the dual techniques of memory and
introspection.
We, therefore, have to modify our previous conclusions:
Having a memory is not a necessary nor a sufficient condition for
possessing a self-identity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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