NICK@AI.AI.MIT.EDU (Nick Papadakis) (05/27/88)
Date: Wed, 11 May 88 17:18 EDT From: Conrad Bock <BOCK@INTELLICORP.ARPA> Subject: non-AI theories about symbols To: ailist@AI.AI.MIT.EDU For those interested in non-AI theories about symbols, the following is a very quick summary of Freud and Marx. In Freud, the prohibition on incest forces children to express their sexuality through symbolic means. Sexual desire is repressed in the unconscious, leaving the symbols to be the center of people's attention. People begin to be concerned with things for which there seems no justification. Marx observed that the act of exchanging objects in an economy forces us to abstract from our individual labors to a symbol of labor in general (money). The abstraction becomes embodied in capital, which people constantly try to accumulate, forgetting about the value of the products themselves. Both Marx and Freud use term `fetish' to refer to the process in which symbols (of sex and labor) begin to form systems that operate autonomously. In Freud's fetishism, someone may be obsessed with feet instead of actual love; in Marx, people are interested in money instead of actual work. In both cases, we lose control of something of our own creation (the symbol) and it dominates us. Conrad Bock -------