3 ms·

Yeah, and I think all of this brings us closer to the truth as you say - that ultimately we are responding to cellular/electrical activity. I'm inclined to beli

by cromd 5y ago

Yeah, and I think all of this brings us closer to the truth as you say - that ultimately we are responding to cellular/electrical activity. I'm inclined to believe truth-finding is good overall, but we also have to buckle up for some weird stuff then. Sam Harris, while I never followed his meditation talk much, had one example recently that really drove home the "can't predict thought" concept. Something like "think of a song, any song", and then he challenged you to think about why you picked that song, and not one of the other songs you know. And then, despite whatever explanation you concoct, think about all the songs it didn't even occur to you to choose that fit the same criteria. It's kind of magical. I do think all this can make us more tolerant towards other people, but it's still a bit circular. If it's all meat and electrons, they're destined to commit the crime, and we're destined to lock them up. (edit: I mean: if they commit the crime, you can't blame them, and if someone jails them, you also can't blame them) As far as I know, the trend is that older people tend to mellow out - usually! And I think that having a sudden realization that you're not so in-control can be tough. It can catch you off guard if the time isn't right. But after a few years, hopefully people course-correct a bit and start to give themselves more buffer and steer away from activities that exacerbate those anxieties. Or at the very least, one may become more numb to it as the novelty wears off.

sparks1970 5y ago
As I have got older (I'm in my early 50's) I have gained the ability to step back from situations and think about them from all sides. Sometimes that makes me more mellow about it, not always. I'm not much into meditation but I have had experiences that viscerally proved to me that I am not in full control of my actions. In my late teens and early 20's I developed a social anxiety, paruresis, which made it impossible for me to urinate in the presence of strangers. I could stand at a urinal, I could will myself to go as much as I wanted, nothing would happen. It felt very much like being a passenger in my own body. Happily, I was able to use graduated exposure therapy to make this manageable. With kids I've also seen a lot of storymaking. A child will have an impulse to do something and when you ask them why, they don't know but they make up a story for it. I strongly believe we all do this. We act on impulse and then tell ourselves stories to explain our motivations and maintain a coherent sense of self. Back in the early 2000's researchers were doing experiments on rats to remote control them via brain stimulation https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/researchers-guide-rats-by/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/researchers-guide... The ethical aspects aside, my intuition is that if you wired up a human being with something similar you could remote control them to go left, right, forward or back. Afterwards you could ask them about their behaviour and they would explain it with a story in terms of their own free choices and decisions. We already know this to be true: Advertising.
- jamiek88 5y ago
  Split brain patients will do something similar making up a story for why one side of the body did something unexpected.
argc 5y ago
I find this interesting because I can barely get my brain to do what I want so I've never felt in control (and am totally fine with it) but I've never felt like I have complete free will or anything. At most I can try to send my thoughts in the right direction and hope the rest of my brain plays along.

by cromd 5y ago

sparks1970 5y ago

As I have got older (I'm in my early 50's) I have gained the ability to step back from situations and think about them from all sides. Sometimes that makes me more mellow about it, not always. I'm not much into meditation but I have had experiences that viscerally proved to me that I am not in full control of my actions. In my late teens and early 20's I developed a social anxiety, paruresis, which made it impossible for me to urinate in the presence of strangers. I could stand at a urinal, I could will myself to go as much as I wanted, nothing would happen. It felt very much like being a passenger in my own body. Happily, I was able to use graduated exposure therapy to make this manageable. With kids I've also seen a lot of storymaking. A child will have an impulse to do something and when you ask them why, they don't know but they make up a story for it. I strongly believe we all do this. We act on impulse and then tell ourselves stories to explain our motivations and maintain a coherent sense of self. Back in the early 2000's researchers were doing experiments on rats to remote control them via brain stimulation https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/researchers-guide-rats-by/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/researchers-guide... The ethical aspects aside, my intuition is that if you wired up a human being with something similar you could remote control them to go left, right, forward or back. Afterwards you could ask them about their behaviour and they would explain it with a story in terms of their own free choices and decisions. We already know this to be true: Advertising.

jamiek88 5y ago
Split brain patients will do something similar making up a story for why one side of the body did something unexpected.

argc 5y ago

I find this interesting because I can barely get my brain to do what I want so I've never felt in control (and am totally fine with it) but I've never felt like I have complete free will or anything. At most I can try to send my thoughts in the right direction and hope the rest of my brain plays along.