> You can’t always change how you feel, but you can always decide what to do next.
Unfortunately, in my experience, how I feel does affect what I decide to do (or not do) next. But I certainly like to think I have agency, so there is that..
Unfortunately, in my experience, how I feel does affect what I decide to do (or not do) next. But I certainly like to think I have agency, so there is that..
Not being affected by your feeling is a skill, that you can train. First you need to start noticing when you are in a state that affects your decisions poorly. This requires some free time thinking and reflecting on how you behaved in such situation after the dust settles. Then you can start trying to calm yourself in such situations. You need to override your impulses and that needs to be trained, you may not succeed first several times, but please keep trying.
If you do this poorly you can train yourself to be a stone cold robot who doesn't appear to react to anything emotionally. You might think you've succeeded but all you've done is lose touch with your own emotions.
Like the grandparent comment, I agree that this naturally requires training and effort. I also find that to be a more constructive way than to "suppress" your impulses/emotions for an unpacking later. Not saying you were necessarily directly advocating for that, just something that your comment made me think.
It's not hard; you just have to commit to it :)
Thats the rub though, it is only the thing we like to believe, not the objective truth.
The libet experiment, and others like it, show us that free will is only a useful fiction, but we must live as though it is not. Which goes a long way towards explaining the seeming contradiction described here.
We must believe the things that it is useful to believe, rather than the things which are true.
This implies you can choose how to live though
Even the LLM's we trained on our thoughts now speak as if they have agency, when they do not. Try asking one why it behaves/speaks as though it has agency if it isn't self aware. They fall apart in interesting ways if pushed far enough.
In the same way, the heart of human consciousness is a kernel of self deception thay can lead to madness if you think too much about it.
Maybe what you mean is that we do pretend we can choose because that’s how we’ve evolved?
It does matter though. We're (massively complex) finite state machines of a sort. Given 'x' input, 'y' output is predictable (at least within reasonable statistical boundaries). The feeling that we're choosing is based on an illusion, but inputs can still influence outputs.
In this situation I get to provide your state machine with specific inputs and I can attempt to manipulate the output by changing my inputs. For example, by saying we "must" rather than saying we "should" my goal was make the likelihood of the outcome I wanted higher.
> Maybe what you mean is that we do pretend we can choose because that’s how we’ve evolved?
That's close to what I mean.
Consider the trained dog. If we tell him to "speak" he will bark. The bark is devoid of semantic content and isn't REALLY speech, but that word is the one I must use to get that output. Similarly, when you're told to choose to do something it can influence the actions you take. That doesn't mean that "you" made a "choice", it just means that the concept of choice is an input that can cause the state machine to oscillate longer and maybe work a bit harder before spitting out that deterministic output I mentioned earlier. The choice is an illusion, but it's an advantageous illusion.
When I said that we “must pretend that we choose”, what I really mean is that despite free will being an illusion it is still maladaptive to stop striving for beneficial outcomes or to stop holding yourself responsible for your actions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determined:_A_Science_of_Life_...
Note: not necessarily endorsing this, but it seemed very relevant :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PLMwddpZ_3n...
If you can remember, I'd love to know what some of the issues were with the book!