Upvoted because I deliberatively judge that this should scare me, and yet I immediately recognize it as obviously true, and yet it does not really scare me, because nearly all of my emotion, motivation, and so forth are below the level where my deliberative judgement desperately cries that she should be in control of things.
nearly all of my emotion, motivation, and so forth are below the level where my deliberative judgement desperately cries that she should be in control of things.
The conscious mind finds itself riding an uncontrollable wild horse of emotions, and generally the success of a person in the real world will depend on the conscious mind’s ability to strategically place carrots in places such that the horse goes roughly the right way.
But, on the other hand, moral antirealism means that if the conscious mind did ever completely free itself from that wild horse, it would have only an extremely impoverished purpose in life, because rationality massively under-constrains behaviour in this morally relative existence.
The conscious mind finds itself riding an uncontrollable wild horse of emotions, and generally the success of a person in the real world will depend on the conscious mind’s ability to strategically place carrots in places such that the horse goes roughly the right way.
This is a very common view about the human mind, and I think it is a mistaken one. In most domains of daily life, the unconscious knows what it’s doing far better than the conscious mind; and since much of our conscious goals consist of signaling and ignore the many unconscious actions that keep them running, the conscious goals would probably be incoherent or awful for us if we genuinely pursued them in an expected-utility-maximizing fashion. Fortunately, it is impossible for us to do so by mere acts of will.
I instead hope to let my conscious thought model and understand the unconscious better, in order to point out some biases (which can be corrected for by habit or conscious effort or mind-hack) and to see if there are ways that both my conscious and unconscious minds can achieve their goals together rather than wasting energy in clashes. (So far I haven’t seen an unconscious goal that my conscious mind can’t stomach; it’s often just subgoals that call out for compromise and change.)
Also, there’s no hope of the conscious mind “freeing itself”, because it is not enough of an independent object to exist on its own.
Upvoted because I deliberatively judge that this should scare me, and yet I immediately recognize it as obviously true, and yet it does not really scare me, because nearly all of my emotion, motivation, and so forth are below the level where my deliberative judgement desperately cries that she should be in control of things.
The conscious mind finds itself riding an uncontrollable wild horse of emotions, and generally the success of a person in the real world will depend on the conscious mind’s ability to strategically place carrots in places such that the horse goes roughly the right way.
But, on the other hand, moral antirealism means that if the conscious mind did ever completely free itself from that wild horse, it would have only an extremely impoverished purpose in life, because rationality massively under-constrains behaviour in this morally relative existence.
This is a very common view about the human mind, and I think it is a mistaken one. In most domains of daily life, the unconscious knows what it’s doing far better than the conscious mind; and since much of our conscious goals consist of signaling and ignore the many unconscious actions that keep them running, the conscious goals would probably be incoherent or awful for us if we genuinely pursued them in an expected-utility-maximizing fashion. Fortunately, it is impossible for us to do so by mere acts of will.
I instead hope to let my conscious thought model and understand the unconscious better, in order to point out some biases (which can be corrected for by habit or conscious effort or mind-hack) and to see if there are ways that both my conscious and unconscious minds can achieve their goals together rather than wasting energy in clashes. (So far I haven’t seen an unconscious goal that my conscious mind can’t stomach; it’s often just subgoals that call out for compromise and change.)
Also, there’s no hope of the conscious mind “freeing itself”, because it is not enough of an independent object to exist on its own.