7 ms·

Imagining Life as a Stack of Mental States

108 points by _o-O-o_ 7y ago

suyash 7y ago
Very interesting take on looking at life activities. I find the concept of mental states not new but more or less happening at sub-conscious level. The example the author gives of making a decision about going to a music festival or not based on the emotions vs planning an activity, happens automatically and almost instantly so that way it's nothing new and our brain already does that, however deliberately analyzing one's day or week using this metaphor can bring about interesting insights.
mwgkgk 7y ago
Inspecting mental state data may yield strategic insight, however optimizing strategy for positive mental states I don't think is a viable suggestion Mars-colonization-wise.
winchling 7y ago
Yeah but there's more to mental states than how they make us feel. They have content and meaning. Which may affect subsequent and contingent feelings, for example. >Our outdated brains are built to handle the realities of ancient societies. Our brain is supposed to be really good at certain things like escaping a lion attack, finding a mate, or sharing a common meal. So, in discovering the laws of thermodynamics, evolution and quantum theory, which our brains presumably weren't designed for, we were just being lucky? When will this luck run out, exactly, and how?
- Bakary 7y ago
  >Yeah but there's more to mental states than how they make us feel. They have content and meaning. Which may affect subsequent and contingent feelings, for example. Could you explain the distinction?
  - winchling 7y ago
    We're learning creatures. But the knowledge we gain can't be predicted in advance. So if I'm aiming for a mental state I'm not going to know in advance all the features of that state. If I could, it would have to be an undesirable state since I wouldn't be learning anything. I can only go for a feeling. Yet the choices of subsequent future mental states based on the feelings I predict they will elicit will depend on details of what I learned last time. So we're not really aiming at mental states. Nor are we accumulating them because in reality we forget most of the details of our experiences.
- bigiain 7y ago
  You _can_ hammer a nail in using a power drill. But that doesn't mean there aren't better tools for hammering nails with, or jobs that a power drill does way better than hammering nails. (I'm not _really_ convinced that pop psychology explanations involving our brains being optimised for not-getting-eaten-by-lions are necessarily correct, but I certainly acknowledge that some of our physiology like our vision system and muscle makeup have evolved under different conditions to sitting in a university with instructions to "Write down the problem. Think really hard. Write down the answer.", as Feynman characterised the process of discovering modern physics...)
- coldtea 7y ago
  >So, in discovering the laws of thermodynamics, evolution and quantum theory, which our brains presumably weren't designed for, we were just being lucky? No, it was using a tool evolved over million years for something else, and very good at that something else (that it can even do it instinctively), to do another task. And that task only 1 in millions of us can do (how many "discovered the laws of thermodynamics, evolution and quantum theory"?) that have uniquely smart brains, and that even them had to undergo years and years of training to perform them. Case in point, billions of people can predict where a baseball would fall instinctively, thanks to their brain's evolutionary capabilities, without solving the physics equations. But to do it with solving the equations takes years of training. Even in Einstein or Feynman or whatever, their basic evolutionary capacities and instincts (hunger, anger, lust, fight or flight, etc) would trump their physics prowess anytime...
  - winchling 7y ago
    Nah, learning where a ball will land takes years of training too.
    - coldtea 7y ago
      People can trivially estimate it by looking at the curve without knowing the equations. And all kinds of animals do it to catch things we throw.
      - winchling 7y ago
        How long does it take children to learn to catch?
jazz_singh 7y ago
I'm personally pretty riveted by this article -- it seems to translate the beneficial mental health activity of tracking your emotional progression over time (which lots of cool, useful mental health apps and startups allow users to do now, and this genre of hack is one of the most common at mental health hackathons) to an entirely different perspective on how to view human existence. I wonder what the trade-offs of adopting this perspective are. On the one hand, we'd become more attuned to our emotional states, and mental health would presumably be positively affected; but on the other hand, in creating a society that relates every single venture and activity and thought process back to the end goal of how the individual feels about it, aren't we making people a lot more selfish? Maybe this perspective in combination with a healthy sense of altruism, ethics, vision / dreams / ambitions, etc., might be a neat way to view the world. Or maybe a lot of us already view the world a lot like this, subconsciously.
- CyanBird 7y ago
  >aren't we making people a lot more selfish? Not necessarily, we all are to a degree or another, hard wired to care for each other and to want to belong to something. I care for my neighbor because I have met him several times and I just feel within me that when he's happy I can feel better and more relaxed. It is like that Charlie Chaplin Great Dictator speech; >"We all want to live by eachother's happiness, not by eachother's misery" For the last year or so, I had been thinking on this topic, specially from the direction of de-radicalizing people when talking about politics, specially in today's age. I realized that the amount of time I spend talking with people and engaging them on conversation on said subjects is just a sliver of the amount of time they actually spend consuming polarizing content and altering their own neuron network to be unfriendly to new ideas, meaning that wherever I discuss things, I'm fighting asymmetrically against their set past experiences, therefore I should instead of go in long diatribes, I need to get past said wall of pre-conceved notions, arguments and dialogue trees right into shared interests and outlook, after all, we all want a better world, so we can set that as the goal and build on each other's views. Thank you for the link btw, I very much liked that last drawing, it is super cute
- lcuff 7y ago
  > aren't we making people a lot more selfish? It depends. When I dug deep, I realized that I get a lot of pleasure out of being a good guy: I currently mentor a kid (and have been doing so for 10 years). Very satisfying. A really shallow analysis might make it a case for using drugs.
mr_toad 7y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introspection_illusion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introspection_illusion
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jeromebaek 7y ago
Classically reductionist, and completely incorrect. If I like my blanket-tea-kindle-bed ritual, it's because I like my blanket-tea-kindle-bed ritual. It's not reducible to anything else.
- Rainymood 7y ago
  >If I like my blanket-tea-kindle-bed ritual, it's because I like my blanket-tea-kindle-bed ritual. But why stop there? What you are saying now feels (to me) much like circular reasoning: I like X because I like X. But why do you like X? I also like to lie in my blanket and read with a cup of tea because: it is comfortable, it is safe, it is stimulating for the mind ... so I urge you to think why do you like your ritual
  - mrmonkeyman 7y ago
    Other things are also comfortable and stimulating in equal measure. I don't want to do them. Thesr reasons are adhoc and we delude ourselves with them. Like we do this advanced calculations, is A more comfortable than B if I do X.. nope. Like the poster above said, you just like it because you like it. Painful for reductionists, but every animal will know what you mean. So there's that, Mr. Dolittle.
  - callesgg 7y ago
    There is never a clear answer to why something is the way it is. The answer depends on the context in which you ask the question. Which context is best to use is impossible to answer. You don't know all the contexts.
- kranner 7y ago
  You may like ritual-X-ostensibly-to-facilitate-end-Y now, but surely when you first started following ritual X it was to achieve end Y, and not just to have a ritual you would eventually come to like for its own sake.
- coldtea 7y ago
  That is so absurd, it's not even wrong. For one, you weren't born with the affection for blankets and tea. You developed it under several conditions. And you chose this particular comforting pass-time other others for several reasons. Heck, billions of people crave the lifestyles the see on movies and commercials, and e.g. go creating rituals of "hygge" (blankets and hot beverages being essential to it) because they saw a show about it or read about it on Goop and think they will make them as happy as the people in the photos...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
tghouht 7y ago
I believe that “mental state” is a misnomer. While trying to rewrite this articles main points on my own, I constantly felt my explanations getting mucked up by the phrase. I eventually opted to use “emotional state” in its place, and will be doing so likewise for the rest of my comment. 1. The opening note leads me to an important point: emotions =/= mental state. They are certainly a part of it, but they are not the whole. Suppose, for instance, that you've been forced to stay up later than usual the past few days, and haven't gotten enough rest. Maybe you've only had five, six hours a night. we'll say. All other things being equal, the day after this streak of less-than-okay sleep, I anticipate that you'd find yourself working less than stellarly. This has just about nothing to do with emotion. It has everything to do with your brain not getting all that it needs to function acceptably. Just replace “sleep” with “food” or “sex/human contact” and the idea would hold. If the hardware isn’t running that well, I’d darn well say that regardless of how happy you might be on that day, your “mental state” is probably still below average. To take the metaphor further: No matter how happy the IQ 70 child is about having received lots of chocolate on a particular day, one can’t really call her mental state a good one. That is why I would’ve used “emotional state” in this writer’s place. 2. I’m going to point out that “mental states” are - for some people, yes - the end goal. That is not true for all people. This seems patently obvious to me. Take anyone who donates large fractions of their incomes to charity. Their cutesy emotional state week-charts would be full of frowny faces! Sporadically (whenever they would do their donations), they would be happy, but that is not what they care about! That is not how this kind of person would evaluate their life! They would evaluate it by how much impact they had on the world, not by their happiness. Though, for most people, sure, happiness is a pretty good measure of how well your life has been going. 3. I feel as though the super zoomed out looks at emotional states over the course of years is a little silly. The average of years worth of emotion… it just doesn’t seem to me like you could extract all that much out of the information, even if you did have a pretty good record (like a journal or something.) Like, ideally, you’ll want to evaluate your emotional (and overall mental) state regularly so you can pivot towards better states as quickly as possible. You don’t, I don’t know, wait ‘till the end of each month to look back on your records and then decide what to do when you could’ve just looked at a week’s worth of data and come to the same conclusion. You wouldn’t wait a year to change when you could’ve made the same change with a month’s worth of info, yeah? Sure, go ahead and what the forest is to make sure that it’s not burning down, but you could probably just look at the trees in front of you to find that out instead. 4. Can I say, I just really like those drawings, they’re very cute and cool. The building blocks of each person’s life in the “Expanding the Metaphor” section was especially cool. --------------------------- Actionability-wise, keeping records of how well you were thinking and what you were feeling on a particular day is definitely useful information to keep.
callesgg 7y ago
Every action, activity, hobby, or ritual is nothing more than the pursuit of a certain mental state. I would much rather change that to "Every action, activity, hobby, or ritual can be accurately described as the pursuit of a certain mental state." Saying that something is nothing more than one thing is never ever true.
- krick 7y ago
  I guess that's pretty much the core point the author is trying to make, and your interpretation loses it. Like, it points out, that while I'm typing this comment it is going to change the state of the HN DB and maybe transfer some information to you and etcetera, but also I may feel differently after it's done. The author rather suggests the point of view that all these things don't really matter and the only thing that this comment is (from the personal standpoint) is an attempt to make me feel like I'm socializing...
  - barrkel 7y ago
    It's overly reductive. Why not take drugs and cut out the middleman - the action? Why not become a brain in a vat and be fed sensations by some stimulation device? There's a lot of existing philosophy in this area, worth reading if one is so inclined.
    - krick 7y ago
      Well, I'm not the author, so it isn't me who you should ask, but I guess, again, that that's entirely the point: there is no such a "why not". Except that you are saying that as if it's something you can actually do. But in reality you have neither the supply of all the necessary drugs to make you feel what you are trying to feel, much less the "some stimulation device" to make this all happen. Otherwise, that's precisely what you'd do, despite you saying the contrary.
      - barrkel 7y ago
        > But in reality you have neither the supply of all the necessary drugs to make you feel what you are trying to feel Plenty of people find and use drugs to improve what they're feeling, and they're reasonably successful at it, from the inside, from their own perspective. > Otherwise, that's precisely what you'd do, despite you saying the contrary. No, it's not, and it's not what most people would do, for reasons too long to get into here. Like I said, there's a lot of literature here. Most people have pretty strong beliefs that they would rather suffer in a real world than have a satisfied fake life with managed feelings. It's only when the pain is too much that they fall back to alternatives.
snickmy 7y ago
For front end developers, this is basically redux @ react
nudpiedo 7y ago
"Every action, activity, hobby, or ritual is nothing more than the pursuit of a certain mental state." In other words: determinism. The philosophy opposed to "free will." That is the same as saying: humans are goal directed animals, etc. Even when they are not aware of it. It's interesting as a working framework for habit makers etc.
- eveningcoffee 7y ago
  I do not think that it is describing determinism. I am not sure how you did come to this conclusion. Perhaps you can elaborate more deeply? I think that this piece extends our control over our free will (i.e. gives us more free will) because it helps us to see and understand our inner state more clearly. But I think that strictly following it can also be limiting because it will leave out unexpected outcomes. For example you may not go to see some concert/play etc because you have estimated how it would affect your mental state and have decided it to be not worthwhile. Perhaps it would have been a ground breaking experience you could not have ever imagined.
  - nudpiedo 7y ago
    For me it is the clear message of the post: humans do not have free will but obey to a set of rules which happen to be a "stack of mental states" ergo humans are deterministic (implicit conclusion). These mental states are described in previous literature. I also didn't study philosophy long enough to have a lengthy debate, but I can identify the topic and the argument.
anoncake 7y ago
Stop messing with scrolling.

108 points by _o-O-o_ 7y ago

Very interesting take on looking at life activities. I find the concept of mental states not new but more or less happening at sub-conscious level. The example the author gives of making a decision about going to a music festival or not based on the emotions vs planning an activity, happens automatically and almost instantly so that way it's nothing new and our brain already does that, however deliberately analyzing one's day or week using this metaphor can bring about interesting insights.

mwgkgk 7y ago

Inspecting mental state data may yield strategic insight, however optimizing strategy for positive mental states I don't think is a viable suggestion Mars-colonization-wise.

winchling 7y ago

Yeah but there's more to mental states than how they make us feel. They have content and meaning. Which may affect subsequent and contingent feelings, for example. >Our outdated brains are built to handle the realities of ancient societies. Our brain is supposed to be really good at certain things like escaping a lion attack, finding a mate, or sharing a common meal. So, in discovering the laws of thermodynamics, evolution and quantum theory, which our brains presumably weren't designed for, we were just being lucky? When will this luck run out, exactly, and how?

Bakary 7y ago
>Yeah but there's more to mental states than how they make us feel. They have content and meaning. Which may affect subsequent and contingent feelings, for example. Could you explain the distinction?
- winchling 7y ago
  We're learning creatures. But the knowledge we gain can't be predicted in advance. So if I'm aiming for a mental state I'm not going to know in advance all the features of that state. If I could, it would have to be an undesirable state since I wouldn't be learning anything. I can only go for a feeling. Yet the choices of subsequent future mental states based on the feelings I predict they will elicit will depend on details of what I learned last time. So we're not really aiming at mental states. Nor are we accumulating them because in reality we forget most of the details of our experiences.
bigiain 7y ago
You _can_ hammer a nail in using a power drill. But that doesn't mean there aren't better tools for hammering nails with, or jobs that a power drill does way better than hammering nails. (I'm not _really_ convinced that pop psychology explanations involving our brains being optimised for not-getting-eaten-by-lions are necessarily correct, but I certainly acknowledge that some of our physiology like our vision system and muscle makeup have evolved under different conditions to sitting in a university with instructions to "Write down the problem. Think really hard. Write down the answer.", as Feynman characterised the process of discovering modern physics...)
coldtea 7y ago
>So, in discovering the laws of thermodynamics, evolution and quantum theory, which our brains presumably weren't designed for, we were just being lucky? No, it was using a tool evolved over million years for something else, and very good at that something else (that it can even do it instinctively), to do another task. And that task only 1 in millions of us can do (how many "discovered the laws of thermodynamics, evolution and quantum theory"?) that have uniquely smart brains, and that even them had to undergo years and years of training to perform them. Case in point, billions of people can predict where a baseball would fall instinctively, thanks to their brain's evolutionary capabilities, without solving the physics equations. But to do it with solving the equations takes years of training. Even in Einstein or Feynman or whatever, their basic evolutionary capacities and instincts (hunger, anger, lust, fight or flight, etc) would trump their physics prowess anytime...
- winchling 7y ago
  Nah, learning where a ball will land takes years of training too.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    People can trivially estimate it by looking at the curve without knowing the equations. And all kinds of animals do it to catch things we throw.
    - winchling 7y ago
      How long does it take children to learn to catch?

jazz_singh 7y ago

I'm personally pretty riveted by this article -- it seems to translate the beneficial mental health activity of tracking your emotional progression over time (which lots of cool, useful mental health apps and startups allow users to do now, and this genre of hack is one of the most common at mental health hackathons) to an entirely different perspective on how to view human existence. I wonder what the trade-offs of adopting this perspective are. On the one hand, we'd become more attuned to our emotional states, and mental health would presumably be positively affected; but on the other hand, in creating a society that relates every single venture and activity and thought process back to the end goal of how the individual feels about it, aren't we making people a lot more selfish? Maybe this perspective in combination with a healthy sense of altruism, ethics, vision / dreams / ambitions, etc., might be a neat way to view the world. Or maybe a lot of us already view the world a lot like this, subconsciously.

CyanBird 7y ago
>aren't we making people a lot more selfish? Not necessarily, we all are to a degree or another, hard wired to care for each other and to want to belong to something. I care for my neighbor because I have met him several times and I just feel within me that when he's happy I can feel better and more relaxed. It is like that Charlie Chaplin Great Dictator speech; >"We all want to live by eachother's happiness, not by eachother's misery" For the last year or so, I had been thinking on this topic, specially from the direction of de-radicalizing people when talking about politics, specially in today's age. I realized that the amount of time I spend talking with people and engaging them on conversation on said subjects is just a sliver of the amount of time they actually spend consuming polarizing content and altering their own neuron network to be unfriendly to new ideas, meaning that wherever I discuss things, I'm fighting asymmetrically against their set past experiences, therefore I should instead of go in long diatribes, I need to get past said wall of pre-conceved notions, arguments and dialogue trees right into shared interests and outlook, after all, we all want a better world, so we can set that as the goal and build on each other's views. Thank you for the link btw, I very much liked that last drawing, it is super cute
lcuff 7y ago
> aren't we making people a lot more selfish? It depends. When I dug deep, I realized that I get a lot of pleasure out of being a good guy: I currently mentor a kid (and have been doing so for 10 years). Very satisfying. A really shallow analysis might make it a case for using drugs.

mr_toad 7y ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introspection_illusion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introspection_illusion

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jeromebaek 7y ago

Classically reductionist, and completely incorrect. If I like my blanket-tea-kindle-bed ritual, it's because I like my blanket-tea-kindle-bed ritual. It's not reducible to anything else.

Rainymood 7y ago
>If I like my blanket-tea-kindle-bed ritual, it's because I like my blanket-tea-kindle-bed ritual. But why stop there? What you are saying now feels (to me) much like circular reasoning: I like X because I like X. But why do you like X? I also like to lie in my blanket and read with a cup of tea because: it is comfortable, it is safe, it is stimulating for the mind ... so I urge you to think why do you like your ritual
- mrmonkeyman 7y ago
  Other things are also comfortable and stimulating in equal measure. I don't want to do them. Thesr reasons are adhoc and we delude ourselves with them. Like we do this advanced calculations, is A more comfortable than B if I do X.. nope. Like the poster above said, you just like it because you like it. Painful for reductionists, but every animal will know what you mean. So there's that, Mr. Dolittle.
- callesgg 7y ago
  There is never a clear answer to why something is the way it is. The answer depends on the context in which you ask the question. Which context is best to use is impossible to answer. You don't know all the contexts.
kranner 7y ago
You may like ritual-X-ostensibly-to-facilitate-end-Y now, but surely when you first started following ritual X it was to achieve end Y, and not just to have a ritual you would eventually come to like for its own sake.
coldtea 7y ago
That is so absurd, it's not even wrong. For one, you weren't born with the affection for blankets and tea. You developed it under several conditions. And you chose this particular comforting pass-time other others for several reasons. Heck, billions of people crave the lifestyles the see on movies and commercials, and e.g. go creating rituals of "hygge" (blankets and hot beverages being essential to it) because they saw a show about it or read about it on Goop and think they will make them as happy as the people in the photos...

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

tghouht 7y ago

I believe that “mental state” is a misnomer. While trying to rewrite this articles main points on my own, I constantly felt my explanations getting mucked up by the phrase. I eventually opted to use “emotional state” in its place, and will be doing so likewise for the rest of my comment. 1. The opening note leads me to an important point: emotions =/= mental state. They are certainly a part of it, but they are not the whole. Suppose, for instance, that you've been forced to stay up later than usual the past few days, and haven't gotten enough rest. Maybe you've only had five, six hours a night. we'll say. All other things being equal, the day after this streak of less-than-okay sleep, I anticipate that you'd find yourself working less than stellarly. This has just about nothing to do with emotion. It has everything to do with your brain not getting all that it needs to function acceptably. Just replace “sleep” with “food” or “sex/human contact” and the idea would hold. If the hardware isn’t running that well, I’d darn well say that regardless of how happy you might be on that day, your “mental state” is probably still below average. To take the metaphor further: No matter how happy the IQ 70 child is about having received lots of chocolate on a particular day, one can’t really call her mental state a good one. That is why I would’ve used “emotional state” in this writer’s place. 2. I’m going to point out that “mental states” are - for some people, yes - the end goal. That is not true for all people. This seems patently obvious to me. Take anyone who donates large fractions of their incomes to charity. Their cutesy emotional state week-charts would be full of frowny faces! Sporadically (whenever they would do their donations), they would be happy, but that is not what they care about! That is not how this kind of person would evaluate their life! They would evaluate it by how much impact they had on the world, not by their happiness. Though, for most people, sure, happiness is a pretty good measure of how well your life has been going. 3. I feel as though the super zoomed out looks at emotional states over the course of years is a little silly. The average of years worth of emotion… it just doesn’t seem to me like you could extract all that much out of the information, even if you did have a pretty good record (like a journal or something.) Like, ideally, you’ll want to evaluate your emotional (and overall mental) state regularly so you can pivot towards better states as quickly as possible. You don’t, I don’t know, wait ‘till the end of each month to look back on your records and then decide what to do when you could’ve just looked at a week’s worth of data and come to the same conclusion. You wouldn’t wait a year to change when you could’ve made the same change with a month’s worth of info, yeah? Sure, go ahead and what the forest is to make sure that it’s not burning down, but you could probably just look at the trees in front of you to find that out instead. 4. Can I say, I just really like those drawings, they’re very cute and cool. The building blocks of each person’s life in the “Expanding the Metaphor” section was especially cool. --------------------------- Actionability-wise, keeping records of how well you were thinking and what you were feeling on a particular day is definitely useful information to keep.

callesgg 7y ago

Every action, activity, hobby, or ritual is nothing more than the pursuit of a certain mental state. I would much rather change that to "Every action, activity, hobby, or ritual can be accurately described as the pursuit of a certain mental state." Saying that something is nothing more than one thing is never ever true.

krick 7y ago
I guess that's pretty much the core point the author is trying to make, and your interpretation loses it. Like, it points out, that while I'm typing this comment it is going to change the state of the HN DB and maybe transfer some information to you and etcetera, but also I may feel differently after it's done. The author rather suggests the point of view that all these things don't really matter and the only thing that this comment is (from the personal standpoint) is an attempt to make me feel like I'm socializing...
- barrkel 7y ago
  It's overly reductive. Why not take drugs and cut out the middleman - the action? Why not become a brain in a vat and be fed sensations by some stimulation device? There's a lot of existing philosophy in this area, worth reading if one is so inclined.
  - krick 7y ago
    Well, I'm not the author, so it isn't me who you should ask, but I guess, again, that that's entirely the point: there is no such a "why not". Except that you are saying that as if it's something you can actually do. But in reality you have neither the supply of all the necessary drugs to make you feel what you are trying to feel, much less the "some stimulation device" to make this all happen. Otherwise, that's precisely what you'd do, despite you saying the contrary.
    - barrkel 7y ago
      > But in reality you have neither the supply of all the necessary drugs to make you feel what you are trying to feel Plenty of people find and use drugs to improve what they're feeling, and they're reasonably successful at it, from the inside, from their own perspective. > Otherwise, that's precisely what you'd do, despite you saying the contrary. No, it's not, and it's not what most people would do, for reasons too long to get into here. Like I said, there's a lot of literature here. Most people have pretty strong beliefs that they would rather suffer in a real world than have a satisfied fake life with managed feelings. It's only when the pain is too much that they fall back to alternatives.

snickmy 7y ago

For front end developers, this is basically redux @ react

nudpiedo 7y ago

"Every action, activity, hobby, or ritual is nothing more than the pursuit of a certain mental state." In other words: determinism. The philosophy opposed to "free will." That is the same as saying: humans are goal directed animals, etc. Even when they are not aware of it. It's interesting as a working framework for habit makers etc.

eveningcoffee 7y ago
I do not think that it is describing determinism. I am not sure how you did come to this conclusion. Perhaps you can elaborate more deeply? I think that this piece extends our control over our free will (i.e. gives us more free will) because it helps us to see and understand our inner state more clearly. But I think that strictly following it can also be limiting because it will leave out unexpected outcomes. For example you may not go to see some concert/play etc because you have estimated how it would affect your mental state and have decided it to be not worthwhile. Perhaps it would have been a ground breaking experience you could not have ever imagined.
- nudpiedo 7y ago
  For me it is the clear message of the post: humans do not have free will but obey to a set of rules which happen to be a "stack of mental states" ergo humans are deterministic (implicit conclusion). These mental states are described in previous literature. I also didn't study philosophy long enough to have a lengthy debate, but I can identify the topic and the argument.

anoncake 7y ago

Stop messing with scrolling.