> 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..
> 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..
> how I feel does affect what I decide to do (or not do) next.
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.
With an extremely important caveat. Learning how to control impulses in the heat of the moment is important, but they need to be unpacked and properly processed as soon as possible.
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.
I think it is also possible to just acknowledge the emotions in the heat of the moment, "process" them quickly as unproductive for the situation, and let them go their way.
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.
I think you and the person you are responding to are both correct. He added some important details and you added smaller but important details. Reality has a lot of nuances and different situations call for slightly different rules.
Meditation is also extremely useful for this. In breath-based meditation, you focus your mind on your breathing and try to eliminate thoughts. Obviously your mind gets bored and you begin to think of other things. Once you recognize that you're losing focus, you simply return to your breath. Over and over. Over time, you gain the ability to view your thoughts and emotions as easily disposable. It takes time but you can actually recognize that you're being affected by emotion, able to let go of thoughts, and be more present in the moment.
It's not hard; you just have to commit to it :)
As someone with autism, I often feel the urge to do certain things, but I know they aren't fitting, morally right, or socially acceptable, so I refrain. I deeply resonated with the author's discussion of Benjamin Franklin, because this is exactly how I live. Virtue is a habit, not an essence: I don't feel like being social, I don't feel like being moral, I don't feel like fitting in—but I still do it. Because in the end, the reward is a life where I have a steady job, meaningful friendships, and a fulfilling life.
As someone neurotypical I take it for granted that my feelings most often align with what’s best to fit in with society. A few times it doesn’t and I end up giving in to my feelings and do the morally wrong thing
> I certainly like to think I have agency
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.
> but we must live as though it is not
This implies you can choose how to live though
As I said, we must pretend that we choose. Our language, our society, and even our minds are built for it.
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.
My point is that the phrase “must pretend that we choose” is meaningless if we have no ability to choose, I.e. you have no choice whether to pretend you can choose or not, you either do or you don’t and it doesn’t matter how much you “must” do it.
Maybe what you mean is that we do pretend we can choose because that’s how we’ve evolved?
> you either do or you don’t and it doesn’t matter how much you “must” do it.
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.
"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom". -- Viktor Frankl (maybe)
Robert Sapolsky [1] has entered the chat...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determined:_A_Science_of_Life_...
Note: not necessarily endorsing this, but it seemed very relevant :)
Also a semester of lectures on Evolutionary Psychology
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PLMwddpZ_3n...
I love Sapolsky, but not this book. He was out of his depth on this topic.
Also a big Sapolsky fan, but I did really like this book. That said though, I have only a read-a-lot-of-books-from-people-like-sapolsky level of knowledge on the subject, so take my opinion with a large grain of salt.
If you can remember, I'd love to know what some of the issues were with the book!