Posted by Eddie Sylvano on December 8, 2003, at 11:18:19
In reply to do you all really want help??, posted by MOTHERNEEDHELP on November 22, 2003, at 16:15:32
> This is what I wonder alot.. My husband has been taking these pills for awile and I'm starting to think that he really likes them and that he does not want help.Does anyone else relate to this.
-------------I've mentioned this in several other threads, but it's worth mentioning again.
Why is it that we often find ourselves unable to control our actions? It's often blamed on a lack of "will." Will is based on the idea that our minds are special entities, above the laws constraining our physical body. According to this notion, everything we do is the result of a decision made in this special plane. We eat because we want to eat. We run in from the rain because we want to avoid getting wet. We decide what we do, and we have our own reasons for doing so. But why do we decide that these are good things to do? People accept the idea that our body gives us signals to do certain things (i.e, we're "hungry" so we eat. We're "cold" so we seek shelter), but we believe that these phenomenon are seperate from our ultimate desicion to act upon them.
In science, an idea is evaluated based on it's ability to most accurately predict things. If the idea of will were a scientific theory, we should expect that a person's behavior will unfold in accordance with his stated goals. This works most of the time, but I think everyone can agree that it doesn't happen all of the time. Our will isn't inviolate, as is evidenced by failed diets, affairs, and drug addiction. A defense of will in these cases would be that we "caved to temptation." We really wanted to do X, but Y just proved too tempting, so we changed our minds. It was our idea to do so.
Now, consider another theory. What if our thoughts were the result of the *same* process that defines our desires? We experience the intangible desire to eat that eclair, and our thoughts bubble up from the same desirous cauldron ("I'm going to eat that thing." ). In thinking about, say, a dog in the same circumstance, it's obvious that the dog follows these rules. Desire and thought (or lack of) are the same. The dog doesn't much ponder the ramifications of his act, unless he has been trained not to eat such food, in which case he will make sure no one is watching. By the same token, what is the difference between our own training to avoid temptation and the dog's? Ours is richer, with more social and personal associations of guilt, but is a reasonable parallel. Now consider ever simpler animals in such a situation. Could you train a cat to not eat it? A rodent? A fly? At some point, the desire is all that remains. Will obviously comes in gradations, then.
That we act to satisfy desires not of our own creation is the most telling clue that we do not indeed forge our own independant courses of action. We have desires, we become aware of them, and our past experience guides us in the value of satisfying them. Quite apart from being in control of what we want to do, we really only have the executive ability to decide what *not* to do, based on our experience, and even this is suspect, because our own thoughts are shaped by our desires, and thus contaminated from the start. It is only because of others (who present ideas *not* tainted by our personal desires) that we are able to do things against our desires, and this only because we also desire the approval and support of others. When our desires outweigh the desire of social rewards, the scale is tipped. Complicating things further, our brains don't think long-term in their desires, so it takes very strong social bias to ignore our immediate impulses. Given all this, you have a system that seeks rewards outside of our conscious control, and a control mechanism that is formed by the same system. Ultimately, what we experience as thought is just the result of this system seeking rewards and comparing the results of such actions as well as those of alternative actions. This is the experience of consciousness, and it works from the bottom up, not the top down. Will is merely a socially optimistic interpretation of this automatic process. This also points to the idea that the best enforcer of individual will is strong social pressure.
poster:Eddie Sylvano
thread:282565
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/subs/20031208/msgs/287687.html