Noah
Posts: 1660
Joined: 7/5/2005
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Devilslilsister
Like i said in my previous post - i'm contemplative and feeling like crapola. (yay me) ha
My last post brought me to the thought of intent. One of the things i have struggled with my whole life is intent. My family has tried to beat into my head that some things just have no intent behind them. No motive. People just do things with out thinking about them. I fully understand that people do things with out thinking them through, but i have issues with the whole concept that they didnt think about it before hand. My mother has looked at me when i have questioned her and thrown up her arms and said "i dont know, i just did it" Which of course always leaves me to believe she is lying through her teeth and not wanting the truth to be known. What if i am wrong though? What if people do do things with no forethought? Is it possible? Can there really be no intent?
Can some one really walk off a bridge and not think before hand "hey i'm going to walk off this bridge"
I look at people and their actions and i look for intent. From intent i look to motive and from motive i look to them. Like liars. I look at the lie and then i look at their reasoning to lie (to harm or to protect them or another) and from their objective i look at why do they feel they need to harm, protect themselves, or another.
Yet i am told there isnt always intent or motive. Some people just do things for no reason. How is that possible? We are thinking creatures are we not? Its like looking at some one and saying "what are you thinking about" and them saying "nothing" thats absurd.
But then the question really is..... is it? Is it possible to not think, not have intent, and to not have motive? How is it possible?
I think this is a very worthwhile question.
Here's one way to look at it. Think of all the things you do in a day. The separate, individual things.
You breathe all day. Inhale, exhale. When you stop to look at it in the big picture you can reasonably say that we all breathe to oxygenate our blood etc etc to stay alive. But that breath you drew just before starting to read this paragraph. Did you "intend" for it to introduce a fresh oxygen supply into your lungs? Probably not. You probably did not have any intention whatsoever for that act. Like your mother, and the guys who make the Nike ads, you just did it.
Did you blink a few seconds ago. What intention did you then hold for hat act?
Yeah these are obscure acts I'm describing, but I'll try to connect these thoughts up with others less silly-sounding.
When you walk to the kitchen for water and begin your walk back, you start with one leg rather than the other. Why? What is your intention? I'm guessing you don't have one, you just used that leg without forming any conscious intention to use it. Period.
This isn't terribly far from taking a breath in terms of probable intentionality but in some small way it might be more familiar or usual to talk about intentionality in terms of walking than in terms of breathing. But this example is meant to show that the acts that comprise walking can indeed be performed with an important absence of intentionality.
Yeah, you may "intend" to walk from the sink back to the computer, but you sort of totally don't intend anything about picking this foot up first rather than that one, it seems to me--in some cases, anyway, like if after drinking your water yo arealready headed in exactly the right direction.
And usually it will be a matter of no importance, but hey, if your cat just happened to put her tail right there and she springs up startled and claws your leg and you get an infection and feverish dreams which inspire you to write a big hit song that makes you rich and famous, well what the fuck, I mean maybe it isn't utterly trivial which foot we start off on, huh? ANd yet it was unintentional. Unmotivated.
Have you ever walked down the street for a good little distance and realized that you had been so lost in thought that you basically were not consciously aware of what was going on around you to some degree? Your friend says on the phone later "You looked right at me when I drove by and didn't even wave back. You must have been zoning out." I don't think this is unusual.
Here we don't just see one step insufficiently explainable in tems of intention, we see lots of steps, and looking here and there, and all of the little muscle twitches that keep us balanced. A pretty huge complex of behaviors that really don't yield a satisfactory explanation in terms of intention. You are "just doing them."
Maybe you even walk right past your mom's mailbox that you "intended" to stop at because you promised to check it for her while she was out of town.
If you get on the bus and head to work and her check gets stolen from the mailbox before you can swing back and grab it for her, she might ask you WHY you didn't check her mail. Maybe you tell her you just got distracted or sort of forgot. Maybe she says: "What do you mean? You were right there. You were at my mailbox and you walked away from it after I specifically asked you to check it for me. WHY did you do that? What was your intention? What was your motivation? You could have stopped and reached out to the mailbox but instead you kept putting one foot in front of the other, over and over, and you got on the bus and carefully paid the driver exact change instead of checking my damn mail. Don't tell me you didn't have any intention. What was your intention?"
And maybe all it boils down to is You Just Did It.
So we can do utterly trivial things without intention, at least in some important senses. And we can do some pretty small, unimportant things without intention that aren't utterly trivial. And we can even do some significant things, like walk two blocks past our mother;s mailbox and get on a bus rather than check her mail, all this with a really big chuck of intention missing from the picture.
So that's one part of an answer to you, from my point of view. If you boil life down to the individual acts which make up the bigger actions we tend to care at all about, maybe a majority of them (the breaths and steps we take, the thoughts we let stay in our heads when we have the option of thinking about somethign else, etc) the majority of these just can't be helpfully--or anyway not anywhere near completely--explained in terms of intentions. And sometimes some of this unintened (or at least "not particularly intended") action tiurn out to be really important.
The other part of my answer would have to do with with, yeah, we can tell a story after the fact about why we did something. But really, how confident should we be that this is the way of things?
A certain bird does a certain dance in the matingf season. Does he "intend" to attract a mate? Or does he just curiously find his wings and legs jerking around, like spasms from his point of view, at this time of year? And is he surprise every damn time when some cute girl bird bends over for him afterward?
I don't know.
Does the Arctic Hare grow white fur in Winter because she "intends" to camoflage herself? We could tell an intelligible story in those terms. But we might also agree that such a story doesn't really, you know, necessarily get at the truth. We might even decide to think that in terms of rabbit intentions there may not even be a truth there to get at.
I think that the explanations we give ourselves for actions, whether before or after the fact, should not be relied upon too strongly.
A behavioral psychologist would explain your mailbox malfunction with one kind of story. A Freudian psychologist would explain it with another kind of story. You would offer yet a different account, personally. Which one is right? Maybe each has something useful to point out. But its uesfulness, to me, arises from the degree to which it can help us guide future steps much moreso than any degree to which someone might be able to say that it is an objectively true explanation for the thing in the past that it is talking about.
But what was your REAL INTENTION AND MOTIVE when you very actively and in full consciousness took that first step past that mailbox? I have no idea whether there even is an answer to that question, beyond the simplistic "I guess my intention was to get one step closer to the bus stop." Cause just between us girls, I really doubt that you held any such intention in your mind at that moment. I think you "just did it."
I mean, hypothetically.
So what was your intention whe you signed up for a CM account. It seems reasonable to say that you had one, or several, even. I don't think that would be a dumb question. I just think we should handle questions like that in a gingerly way. Maybe in fact your action was friven less by intention than by, uh, maybe hope, or fear, or confusion, or something else altogether. Maybe even whenthere is present an intention in a sense we could all agree on, maybe the intention is really secondary in the full explanation of why you did something.
I think the matter isn't as black and white and definitive and "I can hold you morally to account for this" than your original post might suggest.
In any case, when something is done, it is done. What's more important, having a perfectly adequate theory for why you fell of your bike and skinned your knee? Or having the nerve ad willingness to get back on?
Sure, the why can be important. Real important in some cases (you fell becauseof some bent thing that's gonna keep making you fall till you fix it.) But in lots of cases, maybe more than you now believe, I think that it is a really poor use of time and energy and emotion to dwell in the past. And every single time you ask someone why she did something--whatever else is going on--you are in an important way dwelling in the past.
I'm only suggesting that you might do just as well or even a little bit better in your life, on your own terms, if you loosened your grip on this belief that all behaviors can be explained interms of intention and motivation. You can then relax a little bit about things that used to tense you all up (and often without any major positive resuklts, I bet.) Or, you can use some of teh psychological and emotional energy you saved by applying it to the new moment, the one you're in now--with an eye toward the next monet coming, rather than performing inconclusive autopsies on the dead -and-gone moments that trail behind us all.
Now you can grab any little corner of this post and say, quite fairly: "Yeah but that isn't really like this!" Go ahead if you want to. Do that with every corner. I don't care.
I can point to every little corner of your photograph and tell you ten ways in which it isn't really like you. But the whole photograph still manages somehow to portray a useful image of you, presumably.
If you feel like it, let this whole post kind of roll around in your head and after a while you may or may not see that despite the weaknesses of its analogies and stuff, it may have something useful to show you.
Anyway, I hope that the deep sleep you probably fell into while trying to slog through this post left you feeeling a little bit better.
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