Your Brain vs. Cable and the Rest of Your Brain
Today at lunch a couple of coworkers and I talked a little bit about how not to watch unnecessary TV. (Unfortunately none of us had ever read a whimsical French novel on the subject.) Two of us talked about how refusing cable and/or TiVo made this considerably easier; another thought that it was more effective to hold yourself to watching less television rather than restricting content that you might have a positive desire or reason to watch.
This reminded the sometimes cable-free coworker of an old blog post by a personal productivity writer named Merlin Mann. That post, jumping off from a New York Times Magazine story about compulsive gamblers self-banning themselves from casinos, talks about what Mann calls "life hacks" and how making high-level decisions to modify your external environment can circumvent (and come into conflict with) your more gut-level decision making.
An interesting post. The coworker emailed it around in the afternoon to confirm that the philosopher cited by the NYT Magazine story was in fact David Hume; my reply follows. The Dennett ideas referenced are in Consciousness Explained and also crop up in at least the two-thirds that I've read of Elbow Room.
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Daniel Dennett has written on some really interesting ideas about how the "self" is a sort of center of gravity defined by a number of more or less Hume-style parallel mental processes, which communicate with each other with varying directness. In fact he posits that human-style consciousness developed as an interior version of speaking to ourselves, or more likely (in some pre-linguistic fashion) processing the sounds that we make to communicate information to other individuals. In which case consciousness itself could be thought of as an optimized, iterated version of an earlier "life hack" in which we (1) use one mental subsystem to produce a sound in the exterior world, and (2) use a different mental subsystem to process the information conveyed by that now-external stimulus.
At any rate I think indirect self-control is integral enough to the human mind that (at a sufficiently abstract level) canceling your cable subscription in order to watch less TV isn't a fundamentally different operation than thinking to yourself, "I'm not watching Family Guy anymore because it's lame all the time now". Though unfortunately we as a species haven't had time for that to evolve into an instinctive action.
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This was countered with the full lyrics of Monty Python's Philosophers Song. This may have been a gentle admonition against pulling my smarty pants up too high (I even forgot to flag the email with the downward-facing, blue "low priority" arrow). But I reproduce it here, since I think it's a neat topic. This was, perhaps needless to say, not the fastest Tuesday I've ever experienced at the office; personal productivity is more interesting in theory than practice.
This reminded the sometimes cable-free coworker of an old blog post by a personal productivity writer named Merlin Mann. That post, jumping off from a New York Times Magazine story about compulsive gamblers self-banning themselves from casinos, talks about what Mann calls "life hacks" and how making high-level decisions to modify your external environment can circumvent (and come into conflict with) your more gut-level decision making.
An interesting post. The coworker emailed it around in the afternoon to confirm that the philosopher cited by the NYT Magazine story was in fact David Hume; my reply follows. The Dennett ideas referenced are in Consciousness Explained and also crop up in at least the two-thirds that I've read of Elbow Room.
***************
Daniel Dennett has written on some really interesting ideas about how the "self" is a sort of center of gravity defined by a number of more or less Hume-style parallel mental processes, which communicate with each other with varying directness. In fact he posits that human-style consciousness developed as an interior version of speaking to ourselves, or more likely (in some pre-linguistic fashion) processing the sounds that we make to communicate information to other individuals. In which case consciousness itself could be thought of as an optimized, iterated version of an earlier "life hack" in which we (1) use one mental subsystem to produce a sound in the exterior world, and (2) use a different mental subsystem to process the information conveyed by that now-external stimulus.
At any rate I think indirect self-control is integral enough to the human mind that (at a sufficiently abstract level) canceling your cable subscription in order to watch less TV isn't a fundamentally different operation than thinking to yourself, "I'm not watching Family Guy anymore because it's lame all the time now". Though unfortunately we as a species haven't had time for that to evolve into an instinctive action.
***************
This was countered with the full lyrics of Monty Python's Philosophers Song. This may have been a gentle admonition against pulling my smarty pants up too high (I even forgot to flag the email with the downward-facing, blue "low priority" arrow). But I reproduce it here, since I think it's a neat topic. This was, perhaps needless to say, not the fastest Tuesday I've ever experienced at the office; personal productivity is more interesting in theory than practice.
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