Do we have free will or are our actions controlled by our subconscious?
Yes.
With this answer to your dual question, you mind will question which I answer. Thus you didn’t ‘automatically’ responded to it.
First off: ‘free will’, is a religious infused concept.
Consciousness is the part that makes us human. The ability to plan and reflect. Other primates lack this consciousness.
What we call subconsciousness is basically our basic neural adaptability system, which creates decision trees or ‘instinctive behavior’. What animals show as behavior from instinct is what humans see in themselves as subconscious.
The first time we encounter a situation, we will evaluate, cognitively what the risks, chances, probabilities there are. When we have planned and executed actions, they become a blueprint for the next time you encounter the same kind of situation. Still, humans also have gained the possibility to have abstract thoughts and concepts, these are not behavioral. This results in the answer: we are conscious, which gives us to choose. We also are primarily a result of millions of years of evolution, which causes us to learn, adapt and behave much in the same way as other animals: instinctive.
The parts that have been ‘etched’, we don’t think about it anymore. They are an ‘agreement’ between events and your neural system, to respond in a previous acted way. If the event happens more often, the response will become automatic and will not be a ‘choice’ anymore.
Concluded: yes, we have free will over what we are conscious about, and are controlled by our subconscious over what we don’t (anymore).
When do you lose temper? Did it start recently? Also: What is your age, if you are between 13 and 20, it is likely a hormonal thing and you should try to learn to count.
Losing temper can come from hormonal inbalance, stress, justified irritation (though irritation itself can have many different causes), too little sleep, but also neurological/cognitive dissonance caused by many different factors (from light/sound sources, to actual conflicting information).
In case you are under a large amount of work stress, of course this can cause ‘a short fuse’. Your mind can not cope with the given signals and you respond with the irritation about other stressfactors, that is not connected with the situation at hand. Because it is an emotional reflex, it is difficult to do something about it at the moment. I suggest that after having had a stressful time/moment/period, you take a moment away from everyone and everything and blow off steam. This can be by ‘silence’, ‘meditation’, a punchbag, running or listening to music (preferably classical or ambient).
In other cases, I would suggest you consult a professional.
With hormonal imbalances, it might be due to gland over/under production of enzymes and hormones, but it can just as well be a insuline/glucose issue (meaning early diabetes).
Sometimes you really just are in ‘the wrong crowd’, people around you behave against your most basic values: Being on time/late, using foul language or not, respecting others or not, etc. This can cause a continuous build up of internal strife, which will (if continuously) result in fast bursts of reactions from you. This is basically a form of neural/cognitive dissonance.
In case you are not in any of the above, there can still be many different causes. One of the most ‘devious’ ones, is cognitive dissonance. Why? Because mostly people don’t recognize it. Heck, even professionals often miss signals. What does it mean? Your brain is basically a network of neural paths, which allows electrical currents of different strengths to influence parts of the brain depending on combinations and strength. We are born with a blueprint given by our parents, but are building our own actual network from the moment the brain is started up in the womb. What this means is the neural network will be ‘etched’ according to the decision tree you build from everything you learn. If something fits the patterns you create nicely, it causes a ‘ressonance’, like when listening to sad music, you feel sad, and doing something where someone reacts happy can cause your nervous system to cause ‘happy hormones’ to be emitted into your bloodstream. Dissonance is the oposite and causes your brain and nervous system irritation. Sounds, ideas, feelings, sights can all cause ressonance or dissonance.
In any of the the above cases, I suggest you do one thing first (you already started with this question): Write it down.
I use the method I created, called: ‘Affairs of the state’. This means you write down the subject you are unaware of why you act in such way and then start to go by 5 basic sections that go for everything. The first is: What happens right before you get angry. Then you see what other elements you can find in your life that are connected to the same feelings. Historically.
All humans by definition are irrational. This is the emotional state we are in. We have out grown the animalistic rationale behaving solely on survival, yet animals when not in their everyday behavior of such survival show emotions and irrationale.
Are theists more irrational than non-theists?
The point is here that rational or irrational isn’t a general state of mind. You can be fully rational about one thing and totally irrational about the other. For the deduction whether one person is more irrational than another, we need to look what it would be that we call irrational. Irrational behavior or thinking means it is inconsistent with logic (hence irrational could be equalled to illogical).
So, irrational would be illogical response to specific stimuli, information or knowledge.
For instance, if we know snow is cold, illogical would be to say it is hot. If we know snow melts from heat, it would be silly to say you can’t melt it with a fire. That would be irrational.
Humanity started of as an animal with a totally changing habitat, which gave its nervous system many new possibilities. It didn’t need as much responses (all based on fear meant for survival) to survive anymore, it could predict, plan and imagine. Eventually the huge brain mass was used to make causal connections which weren’t needed for survival of the individual, but for the generation, and next and next. Communication became more complex and caused holding knowledge from one generation to another other than the fear etched instincts that are inherited genetically. Cognitive knowledge was growing. But this cognitive knowledge was build on emotional knowledge (patternicity), for survival. As with all species, the choice for survival supersedes that of the cognitive mind. Thus fear is still causing people to choose rather on fear than cognitive insights. This is what we can define as irrational (as long as the choice is not warranted by actual stimuli). Patternicity eventually caused agenticity and this is where belief started. As with every theory, one first has to believe something occurs for a specific reason. At first, like children, humanity saw patterns that seemed connected to arbitrary events. Mostly connected to their own actions. Opening your eyes in the morning would bring the sun back. That kind of magical thinking. But like children, humanity learned how to distinguish more and more.
The human origin in mind
When more and more humans populated the earth due to the improving temperatures and more secure locations, more and more ‘technological’ advancement came about. BUT, emotions came first, societies grew on the same fears and emotions as the first humans. They still needed soothing for these fears, to not go crazy. Religion was the structure that, based on answers given by ancestors, to these fear questions, controlled the societies (like witch doctors and medicine men and others ), even when people were using less emotional driven choices to decide who should lead (often out of greed, or alpha male protection). Eventually humanity started to become fragmentised. As everyone (literally) had their own belief, they would teach their children a little bit different. Eventually folklore and superstition were slowly discredited by logical thinking. We now could philosophize what was a rational thought and irrational thought. Something that was (by test and deduction) an illogical choice or reaction to the pletoria of impulses, was seen as irrational. As such, holding to any superstitious idea from before, was seen as irrational, because these ideas were rebuked by science and advancement in human intellect. Answering that ancestors were both rational and irrational, is correct. We all still are. Humanity doesn’t know everything yet, but we do know where certain ideas came from. We even know that in some way, believing (irrational sometimes) isn’t mutual exclusive or is even required to get to the next step of finding out.
Irrational in a way is subjective to the observer, like quantum physics. Don’t tell Highs by the way.
So, yes, when a person is religious AND chooses to deny humanity’s collected facts, he/she is irrational. If one keeps to religion for the comfort of it, but still tries to find new knowledge to equate away the leftover beliefs, he/she isn’t automatically irrational.
So here we are. You are reading this, I have written this. These occurrences were not at the same time, yet they connect two things. My mind to your mind. Yet, besides your ability to cognitively (by thought process) distinguish characters, words, language and meaning, you will likely also have your emotional luggage stirring up while reading this. Especially the following. But where does neorology and cognitive abilities meet, divert and moved from one to another?
Where animal and mind meet
Ever watched one of those movies, where they had a human person make a connection with an animal? Think Lassie, White Fang, Life of Pi, etc.
How did you watch such story? Did you think it was fiction? Well, likely you did, as of course movies and books are written from the human mind, and as such are always fiction, even recollections of real life events, they are never fully objective representations.
So, lets get back to the story of man and animal. Have you ever looked at such an event, where for instance a person was wounded in the wilderness and the ‘animal’ was suddenly close to their side, comforting them?
Did you ever consider, why this is? Do you think that a dog, wolf, or tiger, thinks: Look, this meat bag looks delicious and I haven’t seen a chicken for a decade, but I will lay with it, because it looks like he has a cellphone, or atleast some money to buy me a McBurger.
Why would it do that? What animal would consider human concepts as its own? How did we come to these concepts?
I hope you will agree with me, that to understand the ‘motives’ of an animal, you will have to investigate to what it’s ‘reference’ is. An animal doesn’t have any words or abstract conceptualization. What does it have? Well, for one it has emotions.
It is very hard for humans to ‘imagine’ how an animal, even one that is so close to us as an Chimpansee or other primate, behaves, without the appearance of a mind.
Ever been angry? Ever been so so…FF’ing mad that you could hit someone? No? Ever been so heartbroken that it physically hurt? That you couldn’t get a straight word out of your mouth, you couldn’t think a straight line of thought? No….jees, though crowd…ever been so scared that the first reaction you had was to jump back? Yes? Aw…finally. Good. Well, I agree, likely you have had all of the three, but now I guess everyone has some reference to connect to.
These things: Anger, hurt (not only pain), fear, etc, are emotions. They are the place where things go when minds stop working, and they are the thing that makes minds stop working. Why is that? Because of the way it creates the mind just the same.
The mind is considered to be a feedback system between the prefrontal cortex and the Claustrum (apologies for the technical terms if they are new to you). How did this come to be?
Well, in other posts I have already explained how our ancestral primate forefathers/mothers were surviving by evading predators. Yes, before several thousands years ago, humans weren’t the primary force on Earth (apologies for the spoiler if you hadn’t seen the episode yet).
Like most mammals, primates had to survive in a landscape that was warming up again after the last ice age
“Nothing is evil which is according to nature.” – Marcus Aurelius
A good start
Think of a person you know. Whether that person is a close relative, or a person far far a way in some forgotten place and time. Imagine that person that has the best intention to the world. The best impact. You would consider that person to be a ‘good person’, right? Why so?
We often find the person that has the most relatible behavior to what we would want to instill on the world, to be a good person. It is the bias of our own emotion and empathy that causes us to consider a person as good. Not just someone that acts like we do, but a person that acts like we WANT to do. This is the person we most often see as good.
Now turn it around. Think again, close and home, far and wide, for a person that you think is a bad person. A personification of evil. Yes, that one. Whether it is a man or woman, killed one or millions with their bare hands, or caused such grief it would be considered equal to as if he/she had killed those. Did you find such a person? Of course you did. Again, we find people that do the farthest of what we would do, the worst, the most evil, the most bad person alive. Not just farthest from what we do…but what we imagine we would do.
Can we agree, from this moment on, that someone we think of as good, is a person that upholds the highest positive values we can imagine (want) and a person that upholds the oposite, or undermines the earlier mentioned values the most, we call a bad or evil person?
If you can agree to the above, you are already quite a step further down the line of acknowledging what the end of this post will tell you (no peeking!)
See no evil, hear no evil
“Half of the results of a good intentions are evil; half the results of an evil intention are good.” – Mark Twain
In the previous paragraph, I tried to show you, that there are distinct features to what you will see as evil or good. These distinctions are very important, but the most important part of them is, to understand that they are SUBJECTIVE. It is what you want them to be. The power of upholding your own moral compass depends on the will to believe that what you do is right and what you envision as good IS good, and visa versa.
But imagine that you were actually wrong? Look at the item you hold as good (whether you have rational reasons to accept this as good or not), and see it as evil for a second. Can you? No? It will be hard, but there are reasons you can’t easily change your view. They are the ways your emotions have been ‘etched’ on the cognitive biases you have created/enforced, in your neurology.
“You can think of anything to be good, until the aftermath of the action shows you otherwise.”
People that you might think as evil, have done the same as you, but visa versa. Even sociopaths and psychopaths don’t automatically wake up in the morning: ‘Woah, I need to do something superbly evil today, or people will not think I am a psychopath!’. They wake up as Joe next door, mind you, married and playing in a soccerteam or hard laborer at their company. They don’t intend to do evil, they tend to approach their ideal of good as best as they can. This ideal can seem bad to you, but imagine you have been searching your life for what is good and you found out all around you are dellusional and lying people. Even if they don’t, if you believe it, it will mean those are bad. We can agree that lying is bad, right? Being dellusional is not a healthy treat, right?
Evil is as evil does
So, why do we think that someone did good, even if that person has a history of violence? And now I will come with a very dangerous example, because I myself find this man to have changed the world for the better, as many do: Nelson Mandela. He fought against apartheid, by many means. He did so by being a lawyer, by presumably using militant force against citizens (these days called terrorism or rebelism). Thanks to his effort new generations of humans live more equal to each other.
Another person, who many think was good, is someone I do not think in any way represents what is good:
Che Guevara. He fought for freedom of his people in Cuba, but used such brutal force and enjoyed violence at one point, that I can not find myself to agree with anyone wearing a Che silhouet shirt. It is, to me, a utter sense of ignorance of history.
These two are examples of many people, ranging from Mother Theresa, to Ghandi, to worse examples like Stalin, Hitler and Mohammed ‘the prophet’. Sainthood can be attained by showing good, even when being bad. As such, if you don’t openly ‘do bad’, you are not seen as bad or evil (example most vile is Mother Theresa, who gained sainthood, while she openly has shown misconceptions on the need for human suffering on more than one occassion).
The road to hell is paved with good intentions
As you will know from this page, it is in no means a religious page. Even the opposite, it is rationalist and atheist. So why use this phrase used often, regarding an imaginary place from contemporary religious writing? Because of the meaning that is indistinctive calling from it.
The general idea of a place called ‘hell’ in judeo-christian religion, is that of bad omen. If you go there, you did something bad (or not enough good, depending on the perspective of religiosity). In general, all participants of this believe that if you do evil, you go to this place.
Regardless of faith, if you equate ‘hell’ as destructive and negative impacting the environment around one, you could say, that one easily causes unwanted negative effects, while wanting to do good things.
You can think of anything to be good, until the aftermath of the action shows you otherwise. The same is true in reverse. How many stories or movies have you watched, that you were sure the bad guy was bad, until at the end, the real cause and effect was differently explainable, making the bad guy the good guy all along? Yes, that is right. Until the point where the protagonist in the 12 Monkeys accepts that HE is the one who brought out the disease, all viewers are thinking that HE is the good guy. Now a more heavier load is the latest (year 2020) ‘phase’ ended in the ‘MCU’ Marvel Cinematic Universe), where the bad guy Thanos was portrayed as such a rational guy, that his reasons for doing what he did almost seemed good.
Good measurement, evil insight
Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment. – Will Rogers
Now, I did add the ‘almost’, but the most important thing to remember is, that good and evil don’t exist. They are constructs in our emotional-cognitive worldview. They are concepts, a hatstand for combining observations into a more complex judgement.
Once you forget about the idea of evil and good in the judgemental sense that even the best religions and politics try to hold you on, you will start to make better judgement for yourself. Remember, any human is as good as you, you are as good as any human.
We, as a species are in a weird predicament. Our entire species, no matter what culture, is in trouble with a new version of a virus that we have been threatened by several times over the last few years. Now we can go into large detail on what the virus does and how it is a danger to young and old. But the bigger problem isn’t the virus. It is our sudden inability to distinguish between usable patterns and non-usable patterns (aka superstition/conspiracies).
Super stitious
Humans have prided themselves (especially from scientific perspective) on our ability to distinguish patterns and to use concepts regarding patterns that exceed our visual observation. However, as a species, we have learned many things parallel and these things haven’t all be correct.
Some of the most obvious superstitious items that have been lingering in western society for a long time, was black cats and walking under ladders. There are many more, but these most likely everyone knows. Lets consider the claims and see why they exist and why they are bogus (or not).
Bad luck
‘Black cats bring bad luck’. For one thing, when in the dark, black cats are hard to see. When a cat is in heat or are fighting, their screams sound very very unearthly. Combined with the fact that because they are hardly to see in the dark and when you do see them, mostly you will see the prying eyes that judge you as all cats do, it makes them mysterious and scary creatures.
So, if someone stumbles (literaly) on a cat in the dark, one can say: That is bad luck. But if more people admit this has happened to them (black, brown, grey, turtleshell, whatever color the cat had), the patterns starts to become very easy. Sometimes someone repeats it as a joke, sometimes someone wants to be the middle of attention and reiterates the story altered or that of another. Eventually, the story sticks and people start to create constructs in their minds that will RATIONALIZE the pattern that they should be able to distinguish. For some, all cats become a danger. Others stick to the specific story. If we take a look at when the superstitious tale about cats started to diminish, we see a trend with street lighting. The more electric streetlights (and therefore continous bright) the less the story would stick. Nobody tripped over cats in the dark anymore. Cats don’t like looking into bright lights, so they would mostly look away, diminishing the ‘scary judging view’. Additionally, more and more people in western countries started holding cats as pets and their different breeds started to make the stories less ‘general patterned’.
Math and geometry magic
Then how about ladders? This is more of a goofy thing, where people took religious concepts into realworld situations. A ladder against a sil will create a triangle (often almost perfect), which people from abrahamic religions would adher to 3, thus trinity. This combined with the fact that a ladder is mostly used to bring things to a height (like paint or water to clean windows), it could happen that someone got some of that paint or water on them when walking under a ladder. This seems to be the most legit version of rationalizing illogical patterns. It is better to not walk under ladders, though there is no actual ‘superstitious’ reason for it.
Con spiracy
Most often we seek patterns that are biased to what we want. This is logically, because we as an organism, want to trust on our ‘instincts’ to get us easy food and lazy life fast and easy. If something falls in our expectations, we are easy to accept it as confirmation of our bias, so we don’t have to venture into scary territory. When we add confirmation bias on confirmation bias and the bubble/box we keep ourselves in, is not broken, we will claim that something is true. Our subjective observations can not prevent this mistake, because we are less ‘intelligent’ than we think.
Masked truth
The problem is that most of our actions are hidden from ourselves. Our thoughts are only a small portion of our cognitive activity. When we are children much of our thought is new, because much of what we observe is new. We conduct investigation. Question everything. But when we get older, things we have observed before, are processed by our brain automatically. Much of the patterns that we have recognized and determined (whether right or wrong) as some kind of causal effect, will remain beyond our future vision. These patterns then cause an automated reaction in our brain, a reflex/instinctive behavior, and we are then sometimes wondering why we behave a certain way in certain situations. We, depending on what values we have before learned, decide these actions are having special meaning. Nothing is further from the truth. If we were to have learned of these behaviors before, we might have thought differently about them.
Blurred vision
But the result of this ‘masking’ of our own behavior by the fact that our identity is only a limited part of ourself cognitive awareness, is that anything we observe afterwards depends on the way we have created the filters before. These filters are the automatic processing of patterns by our brain. The reflexes and instincts. Anything we observe and think is objectively processed, is not so. It is always subjectively processed. Depending on our reference frame and our internal processes. This causes us to never see clear.
20/20
How can we prevent that we fall for the most obvious of mistakes in superstition and conspiracy thinking? By taking the first step back that is possible and be honest that whatever we observe will NOT be the whole of the pattern and what we will think of it is NOT determined by the moment alone. Once we are honest to ourselves and say: Look, whatever I think will be influenced by how I became who I am and judging things based on that will not do much more than confirm my bias. Take a 360 perspective first. Look at it how you think it is, BUT then also look at it totally opposite to what you think it is (But that is only 180. Correct.). If you have a clear overview of where you might be right and you might be wrong, shift the burden of proof halfway against and halfway for yourself (and yes, then you have 4 directions).
Conclusion
The most important part is, acknowledging that you are human and that humans are nothing more than primates with additional neocortex functionality (aka selfawareness). Also, as soon as you think you are clear on a subject, expand your view, include more parts. If the pattern from smallest to broadest part concur, it is more likely to be correct.
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