Choice
PAGE IN PROGRESS
What you see here is a page of my hypertext book Me, Looking for Meaning. Initially empty, it will slowly be filled with thoughts, notes, and quotes. One day, I will use them to write a coherent entry, similar to these completed pages. See this post to better understand my creative process. Thank you for your interest and patience! :)
What you see here is a page of my hypertext book Me, Looking for Meaning. Initially empty, it will slowly be filled with thoughts, notes, and quotes. One day, I will use them to write a coherent entry, similar to these completed pages. See this post to better understand my creative process. Thank you for your interest and patience! :)
Existentialism - we are "radically free"
Choice can be liberating or it can be scary. When we can choose, we have to take responsibility for our choice. If somebody else chooses for us, we can blame them when something goes wrong.
interpretation is a choice
having a choice does not mean that using this choice is easy. What this means is that often we have a choice to see things differently, to attach different meanings to them. However, actually using this power of choice and seeing things differently requires substantial effort on our part. It often requires awareness of the fact that we even have the choice in the first place.
addiction
Philip Seymour Hoffman
Choosing how to see things: we have a choice how to see ourselves (my clear plastic bag meditation)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPnpEDMN90o&t=1s&ab_channel=ElizavetaFriesem
from Why Buddhism is True:
« But is “conscious motivation” really the right term? That could be taken to mean that the motivation originates with conscious volition. And this experiment suggests a different scenario: the actual brain machinery that translates incentive into motivation is the same regardless of whether you’re consciously aware of the incentive and consciously experiencing the translation; so maybe the conscious awareness doesn’t really add anything to the process. In other words, maybe it’s not so much “conscious motivation” as “consciousness of motivation.” With or without conscious awareness, the same physical motivational machinery seems to be doing the heavy lifting.† Sure, you might feel as if your awareness of the incentive is what led you to strengthen your grip. But what this experiment suggests is that maybe this is an illusion. That’s not the only possible interpretation, but it’s a salient one, and it’s one the Buddha would probably warm to: you think you’re directing the movie, but you’re actually just watching it. Or, at the risk of turning this into a metaphor that’s impossible to wrap your mind around, the movie is directing you—unless you manage to liberate yourself from it.
Questions about how in control the conscious mind really is have now been raised from a lot of experimental angles. In a famous series of experiments first done in the early 1980s by Benjamin Libet, researchers monitored the brains of subjects while they “chose” to initiate an action. The researchers concluded that the brain was initiating the action before the person became aware of “deciding” to initiate it. This body of research is still coalescing. Not all the findings will hold up in the long run, as the experiments are repeated. And in some cases, including the Libet studies, there are unsettled questions of interpretation. Still, at a minimum it seems fair to say that the role of our conscious selves in guiding behavior is not nearly as big as was long thought. And the reason this role was exaggerated is that the conscious mind feels so powerful; in other words, the conscious mind is naturally deluded about its own nature.«
…
” The anthropologist Jerome Barkow has written, “It is possible to argue that the primary evolutionary function of the self is to be the organ of impression management (rather than, as our folk psychology would have it, a decision-maker).” The only thing I’d add is that the folk psychology itself may be part of the evolutionary function; our presentation of ourselves as effective, upstanding people involves believing in the power of our selves.”
» Gazzaniga is talking more about struggles that get resolved at an unconscious or barely conscious level. The things I pay attention to, the stories I tell about the things I pay attention to, the stories I tell about myself—all these result from choices getting made, and “I,” the conscious “I,” the thing I think of as my self, am by and large not making the choices. »
About this project: Start page
Choice can be liberating or it can be scary. When we can choose, we have to take responsibility for our choice. If somebody else chooses for us, we can blame them when something goes wrong.
interpretation is a choice
having a choice does not mean that using this choice is easy. What this means is that often we have a choice to see things differently, to attach different meanings to them. However, actually using this power of choice and seeing things differently requires substantial effort on our part. It often requires awareness of the fact that we even have the choice in the first place.
addiction
Philip Seymour Hoffman
Choosing how to see things: we have a choice how to see ourselves (my clear plastic bag meditation)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPnpEDMN90o&t=1s&ab_channel=ElizavetaFriesem
from Why Buddhism is True:
« But is “conscious motivation” really the right term? That could be taken to mean that the motivation originates with conscious volition. And this experiment suggests a different scenario: the actual brain machinery that translates incentive into motivation is the same regardless of whether you’re consciously aware of the incentive and consciously experiencing the translation; so maybe the conscious awareness doesn’t really add anything to the process. In other words, maybe it’s not so much “conscious motivation” as “consciousness of motivation.” With or without conscious awareness, the same physical motivational machinery seems to be doing the heavy lifting.† Sure, you might feel as if your awareness of the incentive is what led you to strengthen your grip. But what this experiment suggests is that maybe this is an illusion. That’s not the only possible interpretation, but it’s a salient one, and it’s one the Buddha would probably warm to: you think you’re directing the movie, but you’re actually just watching it. Or, at the risk of turning this into a metaphor that’s impossible to wrap your mind around, the movie is directing you—unless you manage to liberate yourself from it.
Questions about how in control the conscious mind really is have now been raised from a lot of experimental angles. In a famous series of experiments first done in the early 1980s by Benjamin Libet, researchers monitored the brains of subjects while they “chose” to initiate an action. The researchers concluded that the brain was initiating the action before the person became aware of “deciding” to initiate it. This body of research is still coalescing. Not all the findings will hold up in the long run, as the experiments are repeated. And in some cases, including the Libet studies, there are unsettled questions of interpretation. Still, at a minimum it seems fair to say that the role of our conscious selves in guiding behavior is not nearly as big as was long thought. And the reason this role was exaggerated is that the conscious mind feels so powerful; in other words, the conscious mind is naturally deluded about its own nature.«
…
” The anthropologist Jerome Barkow has written, “It is possible to argue that the primary evolutionary function of the self is to be the organ of impression management (rather than, as our folk psychology would have it, a decision-maker).” The only thing I’d add is that the folk psychology itself may be part of the evolutionary function; our presentation of ourselves as effective, upstanding people involves believing in the power of our selves.”
» Gazzaniga is talking more about struggles that get resolved at an unconscious or barely conscious level. The things I pay attention to, the stories I tell about the things I pay attention to, the stories I tell about myself—all these result from choices getting made, and “I,” the conscious “I,” the thing I think of as my self, am by and large not making the choices. »
About this project: Start page
