@galaxie: "I cannot speak of any form of reasoning (if any) outwith the scope of my brains limitations."
You'd be surprised.
There’s this idea in Jungian psychology called The Circumambigulation. Jung basically believed that you had a potential “future self” which would be, in potential, everything that you could be, and it manifests itself moment to moment in your present life by making you interested in things. And the things that you’re interested in are the things that would guide you in the path that would lead you to maximal development.
While that sounds like a metaphysical or even a mystical idea, it’s actually not. It’s a really profoundly biological idea. Your interest is essentially captured by the things that will lead you down the path of better development. We basically rose out of the dirt and the muck three and a half billion years ago and here we are, conscious, but not exactly knowing what it IS that's guiding our individual thought systems on this lifelong journey.
It was through developmental psychologist, Jean Piaget, that I began to understand that our articulated systems of thought are embedded in something like a dream. That dream is informed in a complex way by the way we act. All of us act out things in a way we don’t always understand. If that wasn’t the case, we wouldn’t need a psychology, a sociology and an anthropology, etc because we would be completely transparent to ourselves - and we’re clearly not. We’re much more complicated than we understand, which means that the way we behave contains way more information than we know.
It was Freud who popularized the notion that your actions, your perceptions and your thoughts were all informed and shaped by unconscious motivations that were not part of your voluntary control. I find that an incredibly strange thing. It’s one of the most unsettling things about the psychoanalytic theories, which are something like: you’re a loose collection of living sub-personalities, each with its own set of motivations, perceptions and emotions and rationales. And you have limited control over that. You’re like a plurality of internal personalities that’s loosely linked into a unity.
We know this because we can’t control ourselves very well, which is one of Jung’s objections to Nietzsche’s idea that we could create our own values. Jung didn’t believe that, especially after interacting with Freud, because he saw that human beings were deeply affected by things that were beyond their conscious control. But no one really knows how to conceptualize those things.
The cognitive psychologists think about them in some sense as computational machines. The ancient people thought of them as gods. For example, rage was a god. The god Mars possessed a soul who was feeling that emotion, causing that person to say what it wanted to say. And it didn’t just inhabit an individual - it inhabited everyone, including animals - and lives forever. So you have this transcendent psychological entity that inhabits the body in politic like a thought inhabits the brain.
LONG STORY SHORT: We can derive from the psychoanalysts that there are things inside you that are happening that control YOU instead of the other way around. I’m sure there’s a bit of reciprocal control, but these internal manifestations of subconscious spirits (so to speak) determine the manner in which you walk through life. Perhaps it is THIS reason that everything you've done in your life has happened.
