Re: virus: Consensual Bandersnatching

Dave Pape (davepape@dial.pipex.com)
Thu, 13 May 1999 20:06:26 +0100

At 23:26 12/05/99 -0700, KMO wrote:
>
>
>Dave Pape wrote:

>> when I was /conscious/ of all the little tasks I
>> had to succeed in to drive a car, it was a
>> baaaaaaaaad experience. Now I do the driving on semi-autopilot. What I'm
aware of
>> is... tunes from the stereo, worries about what I'm going to do when I get
>> where I'm driving, that sort of thing. Habit's sometimes better than
>> mindfulness.
>
>So you see that as an example of your not wanting to be conscious of
something.
>I see the time when you move from having to think about all the things that
>will eventually "just come naturally" to you behind the wheel as a time
when a
>very small amount of the potentially interesting and useful information
>available to you takes up all of your attention. Then you "get it" and things
>just "click", and suddenly the autopilot takes over the mundane aspects of
>driving and consults "you" only for high level decision making. Now you're
free
>to let your attention take other features of your environment. When you can
>"automate" some task that at first is a consciousness hog then, from your
>perspective, you've suddenly got a lot more attention to allocate here and
>there. Now you throw the net of your awareness over a number of other
tasks and
>topics. That's an expansion of consciousness.

Well... I think in another post I said that maybe the value of consciousness is that it's useful for learning new and complex things. Unfortunately it was just before I dissed your use of the word "Phaith" so it may've died in your short-term memory.

HOWEVER: it's not an expansion of consiousness, it's more like an expansion of the abilitites of your autopilot, and a moving-on-to-other-things of consiousness.

>> Why don't we agree some
>> arbitrary dogma, and cut to the phase where we beat up people who don't
>> like it?
>
>If it's just some random dogma and we don't really feel like we own it, then
>it'll be harder to really get caught up in it and take it absolutely
personally
>when someone rejects or criticizes it. If it's not OUR dogma, we won't be as
>righteous about enforcing conformity and we'll miss out on the really potent
>buzz we could be getting if we were filled with the
>atheistic/agnostic/pantheistic spiritualist motivational equivalent of the
holy
>spirit.

In that case we should work the dogma into wonderful hymns and sing tehm for half an hour every morning. Soon we'd be lethally programmed killing machines. Of hate.