116 A Programmer’s Guide to the Mind
you are going to steal from mother. So come here and bend over. Now tell
me, how many do you plan to take?” Likewise, conscience is not involved
when the crime and the punishment occur at the same time. That would be
like mother standing guard over the cookies with a rolling pin. No
conscience involved there. Instead, conscience requires a plate full of
warm, tasty cookies with mother not present, followed by the reappearance
of mother and an inspection of the cookies.
Third, conscience usually makes general statements. Johnny is being
warned not to take any of the cookies which are on the table: “Please mom,
can‟t I have just one tiny cookie? That one over there is already crumbling
apart. Nobody will miss it.”
“No, Johnny. If you take any cookie from this table, then you will get a
spanking.”
Fourth, conscience also includes Mercy emotions and feelings. When
Johnny looks at the cookie, he experiences an emotional tug. If he takes a
cookie, then he will be able to savor the feeling which we call guilt. Finally,
conscience definitely involves identification. Mother tells Johnny that he
must not take the cookie. Guilt attacks my person. It makes me feel bad.
Punishment afflicts my body. The physical pain which it produces also
makes me feel bad.
So, we see that conscience is precisely a „general principle within the
internal Mercy-Perceiver world that includes time.‟ Hmmm. We look for
an ideal mental building site and search for the perfect material and what
do we encounter? That nasty thing called conscience. You can see now
why I told you first why we wanted to go in this direction. If I hadn‟t
shown you alternatives, who knows what you might be calling me right
now. Some of you would probably be demanding a refund on your travel
ticket: “I didn‟t come all the way just to see that!” As we know, building
with conscience is tricky. Working with it is like handling dynamite; you
never know when it will blow up, leaving you covered with grime and soot
or worse.
Conscience is Perceiver belief in cause and effect.
Perceiver mode knows two Mercy experiences belong together.
The second experience occurs after the first one.
These two Mercy experiences have differing emotional labels.
The first experience feels good.
The second experience feels bad.
The pain of the second experience is greater and lasts longer than
the pleasure of the first experience.Denial, though, is not a solution. This is because life and conscience
appear to be inextricably linked. As long as we are alive, we will have
some sort of conscience. Likewise, if we want to create mental life within