I once ran as fast as I could to catch a train, despite knowing that I was already too late.
I arrived on the platform a few minutes after the departure time. This was my expectation, but not my intention. My intention was to catch the train.
I got on the train with seconds to spare, because, unknown to me, it had been delayed a few minutes in leaving.
I had an intention to catch the train, no expectation of doing so, and succeeded in catching the train. How does this fit your conflation of intention and expectation?
If two variables are made to take the same values, that does not make them the same variable. If they were the same variable, it would be unnecessary to do anything to cause them to have the same value.
This is where it gets confusing, so we have to be careful. Let’s start from the beginning and get our terms clear.
Your expectations are your predictions of what will happen, which you use to prepare for the reality you expect to find yourself in. If your wife says “It’s not going to rain” and you say “I believe you sweetie, you could never be wrong about anything”, whether you pack your umbrella and rain jacket says a lot more about what you’re predicting than your words do. If you say “I know you’d never hit me” and then flinch when she gets close, your actions show your true expectations.
Similarly, your intentions are what you’re aiming towards. If your performance suffers every time you’re about to pull ahead in the board game and picks up again when you’re at no risk of winning, it starts to look like you’re trying to do something other than win. If the person you’re playing with is the type to get upset about losing, then a more likely explanation is that you’re intending to avoid upsetting the person and that any words of “I’m trying I promise!” aren’t actually representative of what you’re actually optimizing for.
So what’s going on when you “know” that you’re too late and “expect” to arrive a few minutes after departure time while simultaneously “intending” to catch the train?
The first thing to notice is that you describe your expectation as “arriving after the departure time” and intending “to catch the train”. You didn’t specify, but if you mean that you expected to arrive after the scheduled departure time, that actually doesn’t contradict having an intention/expectation of catching the train. You did arrive after the scheduled time and also catch the train. It just implies an expectation that the train would be late, which is obviously not impossible either because it was.
There are all sorts of ways to configure the details and get the same description of events. Maybe you expected that the train might be late, and correspondingly intended to catch the train if it was. Maybe you intended to catch the train no matter what, and did not care to expect anything about how that happens because the details don’t matter and you were willing to expect incorrectly.
If I’m speaking loosely, the match I describe wasn’t the first one where I “intended to win” while simultaneously “expecting to lose”. It wasn’t even the first one of these that I had won. It’s only when we look closely and examine what was actually happening that we can notice the difference between things like “Expecting to win, and expecting that this expectation probably won’t be realized” and “Expecting to do my best, and not bothering to expect much in the moment about where this leads”. Both of these look like “Intending to win while expecting to lose”, but technically neither are. They describe different situations and make different predictions. To give one example, in matches where you’re doing only the former you don’t get that loss of motivation and you also don’t get that surprise when you score enough that you’re not losing anymore.
When you look closely enough, the apparent contradiction always dissolves.
Because your intention is the potential reality you are aiming towards, and your expectation is the potential reality you’re preparing for. The only difference, which makes it so that we can say we can expect things that we don’t necessarily intend, is that sometimes our preparations really can’t do much of anything to change the reality we’re preparing for.
I once ran as fast as I could to catch a train, despite knowing that I was already too late.
I arrived on the platform a few minutes after the departure time. This was my expectation, but not my intention. My intention was to catch the train.
I got on the train with seconds to spare, because, unknown to me, it had been delayed a few minutes in leaving.
I had an intention to catch the train, no expectation of doing so, and succeeded in catching the train. How does this fit your conflation of intention and expectation?
If two variables are made to take the same values, that does not make them the same variable. If they were the same variable, it would be unnecessary to do anything to cause them to have the same value.
This is where it gets confusing, so we have to be careful. Let’s start from the beginning and get our terms clear.
Your expectations are your predictions of what will happen, which you use to prepare for the reality you expect to find yourself in. If your wife says “It’s not going to rain” and you say “I believe you sweetie, you could never be wrong about anything”, whether you pack your umbrella and rain jacket says a lot more about what you’re predicting than your words do. If you say “I know you’d never hit me” and then flinch when she gets close, your actions show your true expectations.
Similarly, your intentions are what you’re aiming towards. If your performance suffers every time you’re about to pull ahead in the board game and picks up again when you’re at no risk of winning, it starts to look like you’re trying to do something other than win. If the person you’re playing with is the type to get upset about losing, then a more likely explanation is that you’re intending to avoid upsetting the person and that any words of “I’m trying I promise!” aren’t actually representative of what you’re actually optimizing for.
So what’s going on when you “know” that you’re too late and “expect” to arrive a few minutes after departure time while simultaneously “intending” to catch the train?
The first thing to notice is that you describe your expectation as “arriving after the departure time” and intending “to catch the train”. You didn’t specify, but if you mean that you expected to arrive after the scheduled departure time, that actually doesn’t contradict having an intention/expectation of catching the train. You did arrive after the scheduled time and also catch the train. It just implies an expectation that the train would be late, which is obviously not impossible either because it was.
There are all sorts of ways to configure the details and get the same description of events. Maybe you expected that the train might be late, and correspondingly intended to catch the train if it was. Maybe you intended to catch the train no matter what, and did not care to expect anything about how that happens because the details don’t matter and you were willing to expect incorrectly.
If I’m speaking loosely, the match I describe wasn’t the first one where I “intended to win” while simultaneously “expecting to lose”. It wasn’t even the first one of these that I had won. It’s only when we look closely and examine what was actually happening that we can notice the difference between things like “Expecting to win, and expecting that this expectation probably won’t be realized” and “Expecting to do my best, and not bothering to expect much in the moment about where this leads”. Both of these look like “Intending to win while expecting to lose”, but technically neither are. They describe different situations and make different predictions. To give one example, in matches where you’re doing only the former you don’t get that loss of motivation and you also don’t get that surprise when you score enough that you’re not losing anymore.
When you look closely enough, the apparent contradiction always dissolves.
Because your intention is the potential reality you are aiming towards, and your expectation is the potential reality you’re preparing for. The only difference, which makes it so that we can say we can expect things that we don’t necessarily intend, is that sometimes our preparations really can’t do much of anything to change the reality we’re preparing for.