Evaluation and Decision Making

The discussion that follows is confined to intellectual, conscious evaluation and decision-making. Some aspects of this become automated and go on in the fringes of awareness, but they are potentially available to full consciousness should we turn our attention to them. Other subsystems, such as Emotions and the Subconscious, also evaluate data, classify them as good or bad, threatening or benign, etc. we are not concerned with these here, however we shall consider only conscious, intellectual kinds of decision-making and evaluation. 

Now, unless you a rare individual indeed, you have seen the difficulty of stopping activity of your Evaluation and Decision-Making subsystem. This enormous psychological inertia is excellent for maintaining your social membership in consensus reality, but if your personality structure and/or consensus reality is unsatisfactory and/or you wish to explore other d-SoCs besides you ordinary one, this endless activity of the Evaluation and Decision-Making subsystem can be a tremendous liability. 

Ordinarily Evaluation and Decision-Making activity consists of a sequential progression from one thought to another. You think of... 

Note that the Evaluation and Decision-Making subsystem controls Input-Processing to some extent in order to find "relevant" data to help solve problems. This can be useful or it can merely reinforce prejudices. Our evaluation of a situation may distort our subsequent perception of it and thus increase our faith in our evaluation, but at the price of distorted perception, in our desire for certainty, we can throw out the reality of the situation. 

Figure 8-3. Steps in atypical evaluation and decision-making process.

I do not consider right and left hemisphere modes of functioning to be two d-SoCs themselves, but rather two modes of functioning of the Evaluation and Decision-Making subsystem. The balance can vary in different d-ASCs. (back)... 

Cost-benefit analysis A quantitative evaluation and decision-making technique where comparisons are made between the costs of a proposed regulatory action on the use of a substance or chemical with the overall benefits to society of the proposed action often converting both the estimated costs and benefits into health and monetary units. 

The discussion that follows is confined to intellectual, conscious evaluation and decision-making. 

Figure 8-3 illustrates the typical operation of the Evaluation and Decision-Making subsystem for the ordinary d-SoC. The process starts (lower left-hand comer) when you encounter some kind of problem situation in life. The stimuli from this situation, coming in via the Exteroception subsystem, are subjected to a large amount of Input-Processing, and some abstraction of the situation reaches your awareness. Assume this initial abstraction is puzzling it doesn t make sense to you and you don t know what to do. 

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