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I take the point about the non-replication of experiments, but I cannot see how will-power could not be limited. Our brains have evolved to minimize energy use
by wvbuwvbu 9y ago
I take the point about the non-replication of experiments, but I cannot see how will-power could not be limited.
Our brains have evolved to minimize energy use and all the faculties they manifest: attention, will-power, imagination, creativity, critical-thinking, decision-making etc are parts of a finite budget of energy (glucose), and other resources like metal ions, enzymes & RNAs.
Thinking of will-power as an unlimited resource is a vestige of spiritual-thinking which denies the mechanistic nature of the brain.
There's another way in which will-power is constrained though: the inherited set of parameters that control the rates of production of neurotransmitters. Some people simply cannot ever achieve the levels of focus that others can, no matter how hard they try.
- sgt101 9y agoThe physical things that you note - well, depleting them would mean death or unconsciousness and collapse, so that is a definite limit on will-power. On the other hand there are many cases of individuals dying while crawling home or resisting torture until death. In terms of parameter inheritance - is there science on this? Are some humans predisposed to have less will power than others?
- wvbuwvbu 9y agoalcoholism, bipolar, ADHD, autism, and schizophrenia are all partially genetic, and we are all on the spectrum of those
- Bakary 9y agoIn the cases you outline, doesn't it simply mean that for those persons one critical life system failed before the willpower one did? (whatever the latter's form may be)