Tuesday, 30 October 2018
Two monozygotic twins raised apart are typically found to have uncanny similarities of detail in their lives, such as being married to partners with the same first name, driving the same make and colour of car, preferring the same kind of pizza, etc. This is more than you would expect if brains wired in the same way were shaped by entirely different sets of experiences, in which case the similarities would emerge in more general dispositions. It is as if a fault in the steering mechanism of your car was expressed by your always turning left onto a certain street every time you passed it - if you complained of this to a mechanic you would be thought crazy. It is not unlike the highly specific behaviours induced in certain creatures (apparently including humans) by certain parasitic infections, described not inaptly by researchers as 'zombification'. The common idea is that of having desires which are not 'truly' your own, going beyond what could be accounted for by such mechanisms as seduction or mimetic desire where influence is effected by heteronomus steering of pre-existing autonomous desire. It suggests that what appears necessarily to understanding as self-transparency is in fact a peculiar mosaic of belated opacities. By the time you have identified your deepest and most immediate thoughts they are merely the wake of an event that has happened very much more quickly than you can consciously grasp. So that while there is self-transparency it it seated prior to consciousness, and the conscious intuition of it is already a mediation.
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