A lot of things look like conundrums when we treat things like "belief", "want", "awareness", "decisions", etc. as clear cut attributes of our minds. But like

A lot of things look like conundrums when we treat things like "belief", "want", "awareness", "decisions", etc. as clear cut attributes of our minds. But like most explanations of our histories, these labels are oversimplified stories we use to label very poorly understand protoypical behaviors. If "want" is a feeling of desire, then we all want things that we spend no effort getting. If "want" is a deep configuration of our wiring to seek something, then we all want things we haven't even noticed were important to us. The reality is, we are bundles of wants of various depths, fluctuating motivation, haphazard awareness, and thinking about our wants without diving into our physical makeups only shines a very dim light on them. We don't even know what we want now, even when we actively attempt to. ---- One day, there are likely to be entities that can access their own states at any level at will. They will have designed the ways those states are encoded and channel behavior. Their stories about things like "wants" and "beliefs" will more rationally derive from subsystems designed to be "want systems" and "belief system" (or at least similar concepts). And they will be able to edit their state and behaviors, at the natural level of the relevant states and behaviors. So now we can discuss things a little more clearly: Can it be said that those much higher informed, fully self-aware, fully self-designed, self-directed beings have the power to truly choose what they want to want? There are three answers. The first is if we look at an entities current state in fine detail. Examining a minds activity at its lowest level, it pre-cognitive levels of mechanism, then we will see the entity is never is able to do anything, make any decision, that wasn't encoded already inexorably by its current makeup, state and experience. The second is if we zoom out of any particulars, and note that minds are recursive, Turing complete, capable of unlimited mutations of state based on underlying physics or external influence, so obviously capable of making any kind of change (consistent with physics), although probabilities for some changes might be very small. Or we could look at a collection of such entities, notice that some entities change themselves in difficult and useful ways, and conclude inductively but not mathematically that this means they can change their wants at will. Ignoring that we are really just creating a heuristic, a story, not a fact, when we say that. ---- If believing you can change your wants help you get into a positive mental state where you actually making some good changes, then regardless of the irrationality of such a broad statement about complex things, it is a good heuristic. Something perhaps worth believing regardless of whether it is true.