"Mechanical" is a word often used to describe any habitual action, thought or word. I think it's probably a Gurdjieff-Ouspensky term, but it occurs to me to ask how useful it is as a way of describing a conscious, living organism.
I do recognise what it's saying, but ought we to speak of ourselves, even in our worst moments, as if we were machines? If a machine goes wrong, it blows up, or just stops; but if a person goes wrong, they usually keep going pretty well. I can live 'mechanically' for a whole day or a week and at the end of it I probably haven't walked off any cliffs, forgotten to eat, or accidentally stopped breathing. Maybe it could be said that I'm living "vegetatively" or "animalistically"?
And even when I am relatively unaware at one level, at another, I am witnessing all: there is the possibility of learning, even in the most unpromising circumstances. There's a chance that I might 'wake up' into consciousness.
It's all too delicate and mysterious to attribute to cogs churning round. Scientists, until recently, were very enamoured of machine metaphors, but they seem to be getting over it. Maybe it's time we did too.
I don't believe people are ever like machines. What about you?
Saturday, December 09, 2006
Does Not Compute
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
22 comments:
Frequently, I'm afraid. We often live mechanically, in that we perform - possibly quite well - without any consciousness of consciousness.
Furthermore, we react to various stimuli in a mechanical way, a knee-jerk reaction. It's not easy to recall ourselves so that we don't. That's where the Work - as Gurdjief would say - begins.
Until we are awake then no work is possible. All that refinement and endeavour just makes a better machine.
what Gurdjieff - and the School's initial mentor, Ouspensky - had to teach is valuable. It's not the end of the story but it is a very useful discipline and practice.
I once practised the Movements at Sherborne in, I think, Wiltshire. It was a Sunday open day on a course run by J.G. Bennett and for an hour or so we moved arms and legs in various steps as instructed. It was very revealing, because a)it showed the difficulty of remembering, and b)it revealed the confusion the mind creates. There is no doubt a good deal more to it than that, but that was what I observed in a short practice.
In the late afternoon the students gave a demonstration. Bennett flew about and every now and again cried 'Stop'. In the instantaneous stop, not only those practising the Movements, but also the audience, saw in clarity the confusion.
It's this dreaming that the Gurdjieff method can show. One can rarely arrange an awakening for oneself. Occasionally, you may get a shock which recalls you to yourself but it can be a dangerous business. I came within a whisker of death once as I dreamily crossed a road. I would have died cogitating on my Sainsbury's shopping list. That was a shock alright.
Laura,
That's interesting, but it's not what I am asking about.
The point is NOT whether we walk around half asleep or behave in a knee-jerk fashion - on that we are agreed - but whether "mechanical", ie "machine-like" is a helpful metaphor for that.
How long have machines been around? 10,000 years? How long have humans been evolving? 3 billion years?
Do you see what I'm saying? Our conditioned responses are utterly unlike what a machine does. I will explain why I say that.
A machine does not respond. We imagine that a smoke alarm is somehow 'aware' of smoke, but it's not, any more than a match is 'responding' to being struck by catching fire.
A deer in the forest detects smoke and starts running. Maybe it doesn't know why its legs are moving, but it's aware of something. That, I would suggest, is actually what our conditioned responses are like. We may not be fully conscious at such moments as humans can be, but neither are we unconscious as machines invariably are.
We don't always behave like human beings, but we NEVER descend to the level of a machine, of an inanimate object.
(Heaves down The Fourth Way by Ouspensky, blows off dust... and let's see...)
The problem, as you have posited it, seems to depend on a definition of 'mechanical'. If, as you suggest, mechanical can only refer to a man-made machine then you are right - we are not a machine in that sense. Even the dullest, even Caliban, has a spark of consciousness available to him.
If, however, as Ouspensky stated, 'mechanical' means that one depends on outside circumstances then we lie all the time when we attach an 'I' to any state of being or opinion. There are so many 'I's and none of them are 'I'. Change begins when you remember the possibility of self-observation and self-remembering.
In this sense, he continues, every function may be more mechanical or less mechanical, more conscious or less conscious. Moving centre should remain mechanical, that is alright. 'But mechanical thoughts, mechanical feelings - that is what has to be studied and can and should change.' Otherwise, one remains in sleep.
Perhaps usefully, he says that mechanically we can do the most abominable things which later we cannot understand why we did - if we see this then we will know what mechanicalness is. 'All our life we do mechanically what we would never do consciously.' (Also we omit doing things which we would have done if we were conscious.)
One develops consciousness, he suggests, by effort to self-remember, to observe, not to identify. 'Consciousness is a force, and force can only be developed by overcoming obstacles. Two things can be developed in man - consciousness and will. Both are forces. If man overcomes unconsciousness, he will possess consciousness; if he overcomes mechanicalness he will possess will.'
This is getting interesting, particularly when he goes on to say, 'One's own efforts are necessary because... otherwise, even if a man is made conscious, he will not be able to use it... he will become an instrument in the hands of others.'
A weakness is a thing in which you are most mechanical.
Enough now.
What's above is not, Kevin, at cross-purposes with the smoke-alarm or the deer. Ouspensky does not say that man does not have consciousness. But he does say that consciousness and will must be developed, they are not given free, otherwise they would slip away at the first sign of difficulty. (Presumably on an easy come, easy go principle.)
Re: mechanical actions. I tend to disagree with your distinctions.
Yes, of course, even a 'sleeping' man is more than the most sophisticated machine, but he is still acting from a preset programme and has virtually no power of choice, only the illusion of same, unless he wakes up. Ouspensky describes people walking, sleepwalking, into the First World War, where they literally did blow up and things did 'stop' for them.
You bring in the witness. Yes by definition that is always present and everything is recorded, but as long as we are identified with anything in mechanical creation the witness remains 'unavailed'; of no more use, says the Upanishad, than the Veda unread or a hidden treasure undiscovered.
Of course, the difference between the human and the machine is the potentiality that the human has, but if this is not realised, life continues in its predictable grooves. This is the system that Vedanta describes in terms of the Hita nerve, and I have seen very clearly how this works in my own system. For reasons that I won't dwell on, I was once in a heightened state for a short time where I was able to see the various layers of the mind in operation. I found out from this that the true state of affairs in the mind is that our inner clarity is masked by a system of inner defences, installed to protect ourselves from the pain of our inner contradictions, childishness and unreconstructed savagery. Gurdjieff called these defences buffers. I saw the ego level clearly locked into an inhumane and claustrophobic world, a totally unreasonable 'reality' of its own. From there it was running the show, almost contiuously. This was seen to be my usual state, in spite of my pretensions of being conscious. Indeed, part of my prison consisted in the illusion of being awake, or at least of having the option of being so whenever I wished.
All right, let me put it more strongly, since neither of you have even glanced at the main point I was making!
Is there any reason why "animal" would not be a BETTER word than "mechanical" to describe what you are talking about? IE - repetitive, bounded by nature, predictable, incapable of self-reflection BUT NOT inanimate, man-made, soulless? (maybe Ouspensky wanted to suggest that such people didn't have souls, as Gurdjieff said).
All right, maybe you could say "mechanical" means "unthinking", as in "rude mechanicals" in Shakespeare ... but I don't think that that definition is current any more. If I said that someone was 'mechanical' you wouldn't think I meant that they were a manual labourer, would you?
In today's language, mechanical means machine-like, which starts off chains of associations unless you trouble to define the term carefully.
I find 'mechanical' more helpful. If we were to use animal-like the word would associate with brutish, and that's not what is meant here. Someone may act quite mechanically and yet appear refined.
We frequently use animal imagery, usually to describe some unflattering characteristic, such as 'eating like a pig', or 'that old goat', referring to a man looking like Lloyd George with an eye to the girls.
But animals have their nature and it's much more circumscribed than ours. At the same time - which animal? They vary.
Machines on the other hand are essentially all the same, although some are more complex than others. It's far less confusing to speak of 'mechanical' than to get tied up with images of fluffy bunny rabbits.
After my last post I went to do some ironing, only to discover that I'd left the iron on hours ago - and could remember nothing about it.
That's mechanical.
Maybe an elephant?
I dunno - this is one of the points made by Jonathan Haidt in his book. Psychologists today seem to believe that people are not like machines (as they did in the 1950s to 1980s, being surrounded by gleaming technology), but like the animals they evolved from. When we go wrong, we don't malfunction, we just regress ...
I would turn it round - all right, maybe you like the image of a machine, but since our 'lower nature' is in fact animal not mechanical, maybe that is just a habitual way of thinking?
Laura, the iron is mechanical. You are just delightfully dotty.
The origin of the SES usage of 'mechanical' in later years dates from a particular week at Stanhill when LM was chivvying us to distinguish between actions that were made thoughtlessly, mindlessly, and those to which we brought some degree of awareness.
His actual words were "From now on, you should refer to the physical body as 'the machine' "
It was a comment made at a particular stage in SES development.
He probably avoided the use of the term 'animal' since that by definition is a creature with a heart.. so yes, and no !
It could be said that the effort to distinguish between aham and ahamkara has superseded this practice ?
And a happy Christmas to you, too, Kevin!
Kevin, the mysterious goddess Serendipity occasioned the following limerick to fall into my surfer’s net a day or two ago:
‘There was a young man who said "Damn!"
It grieves me to think that I am
Predestined to move
In a circumscribed groove:
In fact, not a bus, but a tram.’
With more time to devote to your posting, I offer the following.
You say ‘If a machine goes wrong, it blows up etc., but if a person goes wrong, they usually keep going pretty well’. Further, contrasting the ‘mechanical’ with the ‘animal’, you say that the former malfunctions , but we ‘just regress’.
Is this really correct? After all, if a person goes wrong (as a person, not just their body) they may have a nervous breakdown, or even self-destruct. How many animals do this sort of thing?
What, then, do we understand by the term ‘machine’? It is something constructed by someone to perform a function. It is programmed to respond to certain signals. But is not a human, for most of life’s needs, the same? And this is just as well, since we could not consciously perform all the things we do – breathing, using our hands, running etc. etc. The only problem is that, for us, there is usually ‘no one there’ for an astonishing amount of our life.
Your main point, as I understand it, is that, since there is in us, as in animals, awareness of at least some rudimentary sort, the term ‘animalistic’ would be more accurate than ‘mechanical’. Fair enough, but I see a danger here. Due to our social and cultural conditioning, we tend to think of animals as far more conscious than they really are. This is the Bambi, Toad of Toadhall, Watership Down syndrome. We attribute far more consciousness and choice to animals than they really have. In reality, the butterfly is not aware of being a butterfly, that it has wings, that it is gracing a sunlit landscape, etc, etc (‘The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet, though to itself it only live and die.’ Sonnet 94). To say that animals are mechanical is therefore a useful way to draw attention to the fact that they merely respond to preset triggers, like movement or colour, but are not aware of a larger context. Is not this the same with us? In fact, I would love to know more about the world that animals and insects do live in. Anyone know a good reference for this?
Anonymous,
Your posting is helpfully illuminating on that point. I'm sure most of these skool sacred cows have a similar historic basis, almost forgotten. It's interesting how much resistance there is when one tries to call these things into question.
Son of Moses,
Like the Limerick! Also the sonnet ... clearly you are in a poetic mode today.
I'm not sure all the same that we believe Bambi to be really conscious. Yes, we do project ourselves anthropomorphically onto animals, but we can almost as easily do this with machines - eg Marvin the Paranoid Android, those Sony robot dogs and talking SatNav systems in people's cars. Don't forget, too, that a computer programme costing £35 has just beaten the world chess champion, and that some scientists take seriously the prospect of real Artificial Intelligence in the next 50 years.
So I would say that the 'danger' of getting confused about animals being conscious is if anything more real with machines.
If we are talking about metaphors, maybe there is an argument for using a machine as being more suggestive; but if there is a danger of mistaking the metaphor for reality, then perhaps we ought to use one that actually corresponds closely to reality.
To all intents and purposes, our 'automatic'* self is animal. Therefore, why go to a machine to help understand it?
(Greek automatos, 'self-moving')
LM's comment on the physical body as 'mechanical' also implied, in my understanding at the time, that it is nevertheless a 'magnificent machine' and a 'magnificent servant' in that it does naturally the most wonderful things (e.g.circulation of the blood, breathing) best not interfered with !
Yes, I'm afraid we tend to repeat slightly out of context -- and without acknowledgements such as the above !
So there's two points to be made there -- don't interfere with natural 'mechanical' workings; and then look to the rest of the human stature !
But nice point -- perhaps we should refer to ourselves as automats-in-training !
PS or are we flogging this one too much ? -- the Greeks invented the word before automobiles and automatons !
Kevin, I thought I'd said enough...but, reverting to your original post --
The other week, I watched with wonderment as the two hands performed 'of themselves', a new and more efficient way of cleaning carrots -- the two hands even reversing their usual right hand primacy at times..
The physical body making its own connections with mind, simply witnessed, is certainly a matter of glory..Some 'machine' !
Funnily enough, when I tried to repeat the new method with the intellect trying to control it, I never quite did it as neatly as the first time !
Well, I suppose that for me, the 'machine' language is just too alienating. This is what Descartes did with his mind-body dualism. By making the body (and the emotions) into a 'thing', the mind is put in control. Power is gained, but at a terrible cost.
I am not this body; but nor am I separate from it.
PS anonymous, perhaps the reason your so-called machine works so well is that it's the product of 13 billion years of evolution; and the reason your intellect doesn't work so well is that it's only 100,000 years old. The intellect is better, but it's just a prototype.
Walking home this evening I heard a little squeak and, on looking more closely, saw that a cat in the shadow was greeting me.
Cats quite often do this. They sit silently curled up on the wall, or wander along the pavement, and if they feel like it they say hello.
A cat which squeaks in this way is never in need, either for food, shelter or company.
It seems to have a choice and, to the degree that it has that choice, then so there is consciousness.
A machine would always squeak given the same stimuli.
Son of Moses - you ask about animal books and about the world that they live in. The following recommendation only deals with one part of it - but a powerful impulse at that.
It's The Territorial Imperative by Robert Ardrey. It caused a stir at the time. His opening paragraph asks the question - how many men have died for a woman and how many have died for their country? (Which puts half of us in her place, her role just to admire while the males slug it out.)
He points out that male animals regularly fight each other to establish who is top dog (this seems to be important for some reason)but they avoid killing each other in so doing. For example, two male wolves will grapple and knash, but when one recognises that he is beaten he bares his neck to the other. This could be the cue for the stronger to deal the death cut to the jugular but, rather, it's taken as a sign of surrender. Both wolves escape without further injury, but precedence has been set and, along with it, the trophies of war, specifically the best cuts of meat and the most attractive she-wolves. Being a leader does, of course, have its burdens but also has status and benefits.
People tend to complain about the behaviour of fans at football matches (and it is sometimes deplorable) but, for all the blood-curdling language, they don't actually kill their opponents. Rather, it's more like a formalised dance (with strict rules and penalties) in order to establish who is the strongest and swiftest.
In a similar way, especially since the advent of television in the House of Commons, there have been complaints about the behaviour of MPs in the chamber. The lessons of the Territorial Imperative have not been understood in this respect. Again, there are rules and penalties, and again they are hallowed by tradition and precedent, which allow the contest to be conducted without bloodshed.
Other interesting animal/psychology works are Konrad Lorenz on imprinting and Desmond Morris's books.
Despite the sighs and yawns from the females of whatever species at yet another Match of the Day, or its equivalent, we tend to buy in to this. It's for our survival as well.
Kevin, don't insult my intelligence ! It worked much better in the Golden Age ! ;¬)
The following doesn't coincide with any of our conversations but it's intriguing, all the same. Apparently it's an example of 'predictive behavioural psychology'. Here goes:
Think of a number between 1 and 10 (no fractions). Multiply by 9. Add the two digits of this number together. Now deduct 4 from that number.
Next, turn this number into letters of the
alphabet. So, number 1 is A, 2 = B and so on.
Now, think of an animal whose name begins with the letter of the alphabet you have chosen.
Next, think of the colour you associate with that animal.
Done that?
The answer is likely to be 'grey' and the animal is 'elephant'. Apparently, 9 out of 10 people choose this.
Yes, the maths is predictable - but the rest?
Don't know quite what to make of it. It's sort of 'mechanical' and yet the emotional ground - one of delight at a puzzle - belies that, and suggests it's more unifying.
I think I can explain this mystery.
The digits of any number times nine add up to nine - eg 3 x 9 = 27; 2+7 = 9. 7x9=63; 6+3= 9. Therefore you always end up with "E" and the obvious animal is elephant, which is grey ...
Reminds me a bit of the old circle of 9 points material, which claimed that because of this odd quality of nine, the 'nineness' of the creation was proved. Needless to say it's untrue, har har.
Makes sense. Vedic Maths is a grey area, and elephants never forget.
Post a Comment