Another nail hit squarely on the head. Your concept of a strange playing field has helped crystallize an insight I’ve been grappling with for a while—a strategy can be locally rational even if it is in some important sense globally irrational. I’ve had several other insights which are specific instances of this and which I only just realized are part of a more general phenomenon. I believe it can be rational to temporarily suspend judgement in the pursuit of certain kinds of mystical experiences (and have done this with some small success), and I believe that it can be rational to think of yourself as a causally efficacious agent even when you know that humans are embedded in a stream of causality which makes the concept of free will nonsensical.
It seems impossible to choose whether to think of ourselves as having free will, unless we have already implicitly assumed that we have free will. More generally the entire pursuit of acting more rational is built on the implicit premise that we have the ability to choose how to act and what to believe.
It seems impossible to choose whether to think of ourselves as having free will, unless we have already implicitly assumed that we have free will.
That just means that you lack the ability to think in non-free will mental frameworks. I don’t think a calvinist who thinks that God is in control from everything has a problem with the word choose and thinking of himself as making choices.
More generally the entire pursuit of acting more rational is built on the implicit premise that we have the ability to choose how to act and what to believe.
Not completely. It’s build on the idea that we have an influence on what we choose and what you believe.
If you take a belief like: “There’s no ego depletion.” it’s not straightforward to acquire that belief. All the studies that tell me that having that belief means not having ego depletion are not enough to help me acquire that belief while I’m suffering from ego depletion in the present.
For my own part, I didn’t find it too difficult to reconceptualize my understanding of what a “choice” was when dealing with the knowledge that I will predictably fail to choose certain options which nevertheless feel like choices I’m free to make.
The experience of choosing to do something is part of the experience of doing certain things, just like the experience of feeling like I could have chosen something different is. These feelings have no particular relationship to the rest of the world, any more than my feeling scared of something necessarily means that thing is frightening in any objective sense.
Another nail hit squarely on the head. Your concept of a strange playing field has helped crystallize an insight I’ve been grappling with for a while—a strategy can be locally rational even if it is in some important sense globally irrational. I’ve had several other insights which are specific instances of this and which I only just realized are part of a more general phenomenon. I believe it can be rational to temporarily suspend judgement in the pursuit of certain kinds of mystical experiences (and have done this with some small success), and I believe that it can be rational to think of yourself as a causally efficacious agent even when you know that humans are embedded in a stream of causality which makes the concept of free will nonsensical.
It seems impossible to choose whether to think of ourselves as having free will, unless we have already implicitly assumed that we have free will. More generally the entire pursuit of acting more rational is built on the implicit premise that we have the ability to choose how to act and what to believe.
That just means that you lack the ability to think in non-free will mental frameworks. I don’t think a calvinist who thinks that God is in control from everything has a problem with the word choose and thinking of himself as making choices.
Not completely. It’s build on the idea that we have an influence on what we choose and what you believe.
If you take a belief like: “There’s no ego depletion.” it’s not straightforward to acquire that belief. All the studies that tell me that having that belief means not having ego depletion are not enough to help me acquire that belief while I’m suffering from ego depletion in the present.
For my own part, I didn’t find it too difficult to reconceptualize my understanding of what a “choice” was when dealing with the knowledge that I will predictably fail to choose certain options which nevertheless feel like choices I’m free to make.
The experience of choosing to do something is part of the experience of doing certain things, just like the experience of feeling like I could have chosen something different is. These feelings have no particular relationship to the rest of the world, any more than my feeling scared of something necessarily means that thing is frightening in any objective sense.
My point is that we can’t help but think of ourselves as having free will, whatever the ontological reality of free will actually is.