Saturday, April 3, 2010

If Only I Had a Superego...

In class this week we discussed a mess of interesting topic discussions that related back to Sigmund Freud. One of these particular conversations was about the differences of the "Id, Ego, and Superego" amongst different species and living creatures on the planet. This conversation became fascinating to me when it came to describing the differences between what life is like when you only have certain pieces of this equation.

The example that we had discussed in class was that of a dog. A dog has an Id and an Ego, but lacks that of the Superego. The dog has an ambition for the pleasures of life, and it knows full well that its actions have certain effects on its ability to receive such pleasure (i.e. getting a treat for doing a trick). However, a dog does not have a superego, the dog has no ambition to get out some cleaner to go and fix what it has done to the rug when it decides to pee on it.

This conversation is interesting to me specifically because at some point in our developing as humans we came to understand and utilize this "superego". So the question that is on my mind is: what if other species are in the process of becoming fully aware and capable of understanding the same way that we understand things? Do we even know if there hasn't already been a case where other creatures can reason the same way that we are with respect to the Superego?

In class we also discussed that some birds literally use their ability to sing as a means of pleasurably making music, just for the sake that it is pretty.... are we even going to have the capability in the future to communicate with these creatures to understand if they are indeed that intelligent?

It is an interesting topic, what are some of your views?

A Response to Bryan's Post

This response corresponds to the conversation taking place on Bryan's Blog, found here:
http://bacton.blogspot.com/2010/03/do-not-forget-we-are-talking-about.html
To catch you up on things, currently me and Bryan are talking about how to perfect a socialist utopian society. As a response to his post, I felt that there may be some things to add to my original argument, these are my revisions to the plan:

For starters, this conversation we had was very basic and in the birth of its coming to completion. I think that the equal wages with freedom to spend it on what interests you is still a very valid argument, it just needs some help with other potential circumstances to encompass the things that you think would be wrong with it.

With respect to the jobs situation, equal wages has to be rephrased a little bit. The real solution to that statement would be that jobs would pay differently based on how much you have to do / contribute to society. Rather than saying that everyone gets equal wages, it would be a statement of everyone gets appropriate wage caps based on their contribution to society.

Another important part to this conflict is that of the self being frustrated with this system. What you had mentioned is that the normal person would notice that they don't need to do as much work as expected and still make the same money. This is a very true statement, and thus my solution to it is that there must be a form of punishment (whether to the wages you make or the job itself) for not complying with the job that you are participating in. This would work very similarly to firing someone from the job that they are clearly not adequate for, expecting that the person who will now not have any wage coming in will find a different job that they will actually participate in.

This leads to the next interesting issue of running out, and or wasting away the wage money that you are expected to use appropriately. My solution to this brings the whole argument to a level of finally making sense. For if you have been fired from your job, and or you have been wasting your wages away to the point that you can no longer survive without government help, then you are sent to jail. This would have to be a slightly different kind of jail than what we have now though. It would have to be more of a rehabilitation to society program; where you take these people who have wasted their money away and have them do community service without pay until they make up for what they have done wrong. Once they have proven to be humbled by this means of service, they are sent back out to try again with the expectation that they can now appreciate their wages.

This concept of the jail would also make up for the people trying to take advantage of the system. For you can go back to jail as many times as you want, but it would be more efficient to keep your job and try and save your money for what you want; rather than a means of taking advantage of others.
This concept of the jail system would also take the blame on the government out of the people's eyes, because it is a standardized system that would work efficiently without bias to any one person who ends up there.

What do you think of the revisions?