Automatic: People

See also automatic places and automatic things

Automatic people sounds as if it ought to mean robots and such, and because of search engines we have to allow for the possibility that you are indeed looking for androids and robots and that kind of thing. This section arises though simply because we are trying out a pattern of dividing subjects up into people places and things, thus as well as this section on automatic people we also have sections for automatic places and automatic things.

The concept of automatic people brings up one of the criteria that some folk seem to try to use for deciding whether a thing is a person. In other words, some folk might not consider an automatic person to really be a person, thus to them automatic people would not really be thought of as people. The thinking there seems to be that anything that is strictly automatic is a machine not a person, and thus should be filed under things instead of under people. So in a way automatic people is a potential interface area where the concept of people and the concept of things can meet.

Gurdjieff taught that most people are in fact very much and quite truly automatic people and that is in fact part of why we have gone ahead with this scheme of categorisation and thus created this section about automatic people. We wish to look into the area where such theories might intersect with the research of Evan Harris Walker. The possibility that our brains might utilise quantum mechanical processing to get around some of the limitations of classical processing was raised in some of Evan Harris Walker's papers. Could quantum mechanical processes in our brains somehow provide some kind of escape from the state of being automatic people? Could such processes be behind the kind of escape that Gurdjieff and his students wrote about?

Evan Harris Walker

G. I. Gurdjieff