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My understanding of the thinking about free will is that it actually is an illusion that's a byproduct of the way the brain processes, consolidates, and stores
by hotdesk 8y ago
My understanding of the thinking about free will is that it actually is an illusion that's a byproduct of the way the brain processes, consolidates, and stores information (similar to the way consciousness is thought to be an emergent property of the same processes). I've read about studies showing that a decision is made at the neuronal level before a person is consciously aware of it, so it's not as though we consciously deliberate before making each decision.
That is not to say that everything is pre-determined, or that we're hopeless to change our behavior. Our self-talk or conscious narrative help to create a feedback loop that can influence the way future decisions are arrived upon by reinforcing certain neural pathways over others, making some decisions more likely than others.
And FWIW, I have dealt with DP/DR for a lot of years, and most of my symptoms fall to the side of feeling like everything is a dream state, or that neither I nor the outside world are actually real. The prolonged detached feeling can be super unnerving before you realize what's going on. I can see there being an aspect of a crisis of free will (or w/e) for others dealing with this, but I don't think it's necessarily true for all of us.
- feanaro 8y ago> That is not to say that everything is pre-determined, or that we're hopeless to change our behavior. Our self-talk or conscious narrative help to create a feedback loop that can influence the way future decisions are arrived upon by reinforcing certain neural pathways over others, making some decisions more likely than others. Yet the self-talk or conscious narrative themselves are a result of a combination of deterministic and stochastic factors. We are not hopeless to change because we are systems that react and adapt to our environment all the time. We are a ship afloat a partly stochastic sea.
- neuralzen 8y agoHey, this is out of context, but I noticed you replied on a thread almost a month back saying you were interested in vajrayana visualization practices. Sorry I didn't notice your reply! I cannot reply to that thread anymore, but here's a link for you (sorry everyone else, just ignore this reply). https://studybuddhism.com/en/advanced-studies/vajrayana/tantra-theory/visualization-practice-in-tantra https://studybuddhism.com/en/advanced-studies/vajrayana/tant...
- feanaro 8y agoThis is totally unexpected, but very appreciated. Thank you!