Quote:
Originally Posted by Mutt
Yet on the other hand you suggest that our brains are working away subconsciously making many of our decisions for us without us really in command. So perhaps many people who fail in life to a significant degree are just being betrayed by their own brains over which they don't have much control.
|
I'd say that's fairly accurate to a degree.
Though i am not saying we don't have any control over our actions, i am saying that we have often live in an illusion that we are exercising volitional control when we aren't. We just sort of roll with it. We say "i just figured it out!" when in fact, we might have been thinking about it unconsciously for months. We might have read the answer yesterday and it just didn't really register consciously and was instantly deleted from short term memory but made it to our explicit memory for later recollection. Meaning that "i just did it" moment isn't real. It's a lie and really just an illusion.
To use social psychologist Jonathan Haidts analogy of the division between the conscious mind and unconscious brain, it is like an elephant and a rider. The rider, is very quick to tell you all about the elephant, what he's doing, why he's acting that way and can easily explain away all of his behavior. Of course the elephant is an elephant. The rider has no idea whats going on in the elephants brain, as he has very little access to it, relying only on what is an imperfect understanding of what is observed. In reality, the elephant does what it wants to do and the rider is really just a White House Press Secretary trying to spin answers to questions he really doesn't know the answer to.
Though we all live in a sort of illusion of volition, we do also have a say in the relationship between the elephant and the rider. It can be improved. It can be strengthened and they can always learn to better work together. New things can be learned and applied and new habits can be formed.
You can choose to do things. You can choose to work hard. You can choose to learn. You can choose to apply what you've learned. You can choose to be more diligent and organized. You can choose to tame the elephant and improve the relationship between elephant and rider.