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Keith and All, Keith wrote: 1) I do not presume that there is an unconscious - given that Kalus and Brynjulf want to talk about not being able to inspect an act of consciousness on the part of another I would presume, logically, that if they think that you can't inspect an act of consciousness then you have no hope of knowing about let alone inspecting an unconscious event, either of the self or of another. This sorta makes a large logical hole in the construction of an interiority. 2) There is no interiority that is not mediated, as an object of consciousness and therefore, in order for any event of consciousness to be available to consciousness it needs to be mediated - hence all events of consciousness are intentional - they are only know as objects. To presume away something might lead to wrong conclusions. If somebody hits you on the head hard enough events may happen around you that you are utterly unaware of - you are unconcious. But it does not have to be that drastic. According to A. C. Millar, a noted american psychologist who wrote the famous article "Seven Plus minus Two", our conciousness capacity is extremely limited - to roughly 7 information bits. If information exceeds the capacity, we start a process of putting the content of the concious into our unconcious space, which is thought to be limitless in capacity in practice. It has been measured that the average person probably uses only roughly 10% of their unconciousness memory capacity. How we process from concious to unconcious and back has been studied by many, including people trying to understand the role of dreaming. Have you ever tried the game of looking at 20 items for a minute, and the try to recall all of them? Unless you group the items into acronyms or other systems of association, you will not be able to account for all of them, because you have to reconstruct what you have seen by using associations to recall items in logical sequences. Some claim to have photographic memory, and may recall the whole picture, but that is rare. Have you ever driven home in your car with your head full of the day's events? I have, and woken up finding myself at home, being totally incapable of telling anybody, including myself how I got home. Keith, I think you make another error in your e-mail by presuming away the possibility of not being aware of one's own driving forces. What associations our brain makes with our unconcious we cannot fully be concious about. In other words, we are not necessarily aware of our own motivation. To improve our understanding of our own driving forces we can get help from others (sensitivity training, meditation, etc.), but you cannot do that all the time in any situation you encounter. Several great books have been written about "the hidden Powers". If you are not aware of what is happening to yourself, you cannot relate it to others even if you wanted to. And often you don't want to let others become aware of your thoughts and feelings. Ever played Poker? The weakness of all the research related to the above is that the theoretical constructs cannot be seen and measured directly - because they are indeed invisible, especially to others. What is measured is the visible: artifacts and other objects resulting from behavior, behavior including speech, and bodily chemical/electric processes (lie detectors are of this kind). The problem with artifacts, objects and behavior is that they do not tell us the underlying motivation, intentions and thought processes that drive and direct and result in what we as outsiders observe. So we rely on bodily uncontrollable (?) reactions and story-telling to gain insight into that other person to the extent that the person is willing and able to relate personal and subjective realities to us. As interpreters of others' behavior and artifacts we use our own brain. To the extent that my associations are different from that of the subject observed I will draw wrong conclusions - and I guess that happens more often than not. I will therefore communicate back from a different reality than what the other person thinks I have, and so goes the spiral of miscommunications. We will therefore seldom communicate at a perfect level, some degree of miscommunication is the rule, not the exception. Yes, I will admit that because of inconclusive evidence on a lot of theories dealing with individuals (psychology) and relations between people (language, anthropology sociology and culture, etc.) and with objects (estetics, symbolism, etc.), we do have large holes in our knowledge. That does not mean that the theories put forward necessarily have large logical holes, but can have perfect internal consistency. Several theories with perfect consistency (or as close as you get) are competing and cannot all be true. Our trouble is that we do not have conclusive evidence to choose which one is right, but we do have subjective opinions on which ones we trust more than others. So we are doomed to live in a world of uncertainty and not knowing, and how boring it would be if it was not. Brynjulf Brynjulf Tellefsen Associate Professor Department of Knowledge Management Norwegian School of Management P. O. Box 4676 Sofienberg N-0506 Oslo, NORWAY Phone direct: +47-22985142 Via exchange: +47-22985000 Faximile: +47-22985111 Private phone/fax: +47-22149697 e-mail: [log in to unmask] %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%