Oh, yeah. It’s because In our historical environment it was actually super important to be able to do that. Even now its super handy sometimes. There was one time my foot had been fully down on the break for several seconds before I consciously realized I had seen the eyes of a deer in the bushes next to the road.

It’s actually a super important concept I teach in violence deescalation classes. Our human brain has a natural capacity for risk assessment you just need to learn to evaluate it properly. My two examples are:

• patient w/ dementia is asking a repetitive question. This makes me uneasy and I’m struggling to pin down why. After a bit I realize that if I was still working with criminally insane men, repetitive questioning means he’s not liking the answer he’s getting and trouble is coming. A dementia patient genuinely doesn’t remember asking. False alarm (but never call your brain stupid, always tell it thank you and make it a hot cup of tea or whatever your equivalent is).

• patient w/ severe Psychosis has a hair trigger. One day they slammed their body into the heavy hardwood exit door hard enough to crack it away from the maglock. About a week later I’m walking past them standing in the hall and my brain just started screaming at me that I needed to do something right that second so I went and pulled an ativan and offered it, which they were suspicious of but took. I was going to document that the patient looked tense, which was enough with how rapid their escalation pattern was, but when I sat down to document I also realized, they were staring at the door. If I’d waited a few minutes later they probably would have been doing something very dangerous and I would’ve had to do an injection and a physical hold which is so much more stressful and less safe for both them and us.

TLDR; there’s also a book called “The Gift of Fear.” Anxiety is not your enemy, but you do need to learn to ask it,“Why?” and you need to learn how to address your brain’s concerns in a way that’s safe and intelligent. And on a public scale there’s a LOT of people who will try to take advantage of your anxiety and you need to evaluate their motives very carefully.

I feel like this is action dependent. I mean if you decide to do something in an hour or the next day, week, month, year. and you mull it over and kinda go back and forth. I dunno. Now when things come out at you like an accident or your attacked. I think later you think about moving and doing things but maybe the point in time your limbs are moving and thinking about it later your like. I tried to shield my face like you made the decision but in reality your reflexes went off before it reached your brain.

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There’s this scene, next to the end of “The Artifice Girl”, where Cherry (a young-girl AI designed to hunt and bust CSA criminals in partnership between her creator/programmer, a detective and a cop; mission gets successful, virtually ending online CSA, then she receives a physical robotic vessel so CSA can be hunted down in the physical realm too) is talking to her creator. Once the mission is totally successful and CSA crimes got essentially zeroed, the creator gives her a key to autonomical behavior (but he’s far from benevolent: he always saw her coldly through engineer eyes, as he was the one who coded her existence; he only handles her the “key to autonomy” because he’s dying, and only after insistence both from her and from one of the human detectives). On the one hand, she dreams of getting into ballet, but she complains how she is “influenced by the initial directives” inherent to her creation: no matter what she decides, it’d be always consequence of said directives.

Maybe my recounting is a bit off because I watched the movie a long time ago, but essentially it’s a “Demiurge and his creation” moment: creation is tied to immutable principles (creation directives) that influence the creation. No matter how we look at reality, be it religiously/spiritually or scientifically, there’s this common ground of causality: things, and by extension living beings, are inexorably tied to the invisible chains of cause and effect, and this includes the very mechanisms (both spiritual and physical) from which sentience emerges.

Then I came to the conclusion that, if there’s any bearer of True Will (as per the term coined by A. Crowley), is just one: exclusively the causality, specifically what’s known by science as thermodynamic Entropy and, by everything else, as… Death, yeah, the one with a scythe.

“Decision” is part of inteligence, and intelligence is not Will, let alone True Will. And there can’t be True Will within causality, only the cosmic bearer of causality possesses True Will, because She’s way beyond the causality: Death Herself isn’t bounded by causality, everything else is.

And no, we’re not “lying” to “ourselves” when we think we are thinking, it’s just part of the script, where we’re so bounded to the chains of causality that the mechanisms of intelligence always seek explanations based on causality: see, for example, those experiments where the corpus callosum is severed and the patients try to justify when asked why their hands wrote diverging things (their brain hemispheres aren’t talking, but each hemisphere can’t even “conceive” this kind of situation so they can’t help but “hallucinate” an explanation).

You might enjoy this quote from Arthur Schopenhauer:

Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.

The most important revelation I ever had about existing and being human was the understanding that our brains are not machines of logic and reason, despite being capable of performing logical reasoning.

The brain is, by default, a story telling machine. It just takes your memories and experiences and uses those things to explain whatever you’re feeling at the moment. Those explanations don’t necessarily have to make sense or be connected to reality, it just has this massive priority to weave a coherent story to explain how you got here, feeling this thing, doing whatever it is you’re doing.

In the early world of survival, this helped us. Seeing paw prints by your watering hole made you feel uneasy, your brain tied that to the time a saber-tooth cat killed your uncle. Emotional connection to a sense, an association, a story for why you should feel afraid.

In the modern world, the brain tries to do the same goddamn thing when someone you like ignores you or when you feel embarrassed in a social setting. Small things that spark the same survival response to weave a story together around it. Or you feel a sad spell from a chemical imbalance and instead of waiting for it to pass, your brain decides it’s because of your entire life, the people around you, and your lack of success.

From that understanding, you can beat rumination, you can challenge yourself, you can overcome addiction and do a lot of amazing things with your life, but it all comes back to understanding that your brain doesn’t work “out of the box” and if you want to make better decisions and feel better, you have to manually TRAIN IT to make you feel better and make better choices. You have to learn to control not your emotions, but your reactions to those emotions, to think through your thinking, to follow your chains of thought to a source. This is what a good therapist will do for you, set you on a course to retrain your brain.

A lot of people resist this because it feels “fake” and that you’re “fooling yourself,” so they resist change and training their own brains.

You are not your brain. Your brain however is very, very complex, with a multitude of voices inside of it each trying to get attention, you’re only aware of the top-most surface level that uses language to think, but the very best thing you can do for yourself is get in the habit of thinking about how you think.

Maybe I overanalyze everything, but I definitely l know why I do anything. Whether or not I tell you the truth is a different story.

I don’t think that’s true for all decisions, but snap decisions, for sure.

I know this is a hard pill to swallow for most people, but our conscious thoughts are not necessarily “ourselves”, even though they often get framed as such. We are the whole, the uncountable unconscious small machinations, as well as the big thoughts.

As somebody else mentioned: Reacting first and thinking about it later was most often advantageous for our ancestors. “Flee from the lion first and think about that was necessary later.”

But that does not mean that the process of arriving at the point of “Flee from the lion” isn’t individual and very much “ours”. It’s just the fastest part of our brain taking the lead and everything else following.

I made the genious decision to run away from home… when I was 6 years old…

idk what the fuck I was doing…

probably 6 year old me was like: “Me scared, big brother scary, home is scary, me want my mommy”

So I just went to her workplace… mom was so shocked that I knew which bus routes to take from the few times she took me to work…

I’m still traumatized from that day…

But yea I don’t remember what I was thinking, I could only guess from the circumstances…

it was so spontaneous

I saw the door, and I decided to run…

Can’t believe its now like almost 2 decades gone by

but that’s still deeply engraved in my hippocampus

felt like it happened a month ago, I remember it as if it happened moments ago, I can feel those emotions, the atmosphere…

Free will is an illusion.

Sam Harris had a video on free will, and in it, he asked the audience to think of something (a color, or something simple but spontaneous). Then he asked them to try and think when in their thought process did that choice make itself known and get picked? I don’t think it’s as simple as there being free will or not, but I think what we experience is a bit of both coming together to give a sense of choice and self, when actually some things are deterministic by who we are or have become through life and experience. The wiring in the brain and its software. We’re not so hard wired that we can be perfectly predicted every time, but we do have preferred pathways created over time that influence any actual choice that’s made at the core.

So in answer to the title, it’s yes and no. There are some things that are far more fixed in our personalities that we understand at least partially why we do what we do. Then there are others that we don’t or can’t, or take years of therapy to figure out. But it’s a mix.

Bastian had shown the lion [Grograman, the Many-Colored Death] the inscription on the reverse side of the Gem [Auryn]. ‘What do you suppose it means?’ he asked. '“DO WHAT YOU WISH.” That must mean I can do anything I feel like. Don’t you think so?

All at once Grogramann’s face looked alarmingly grave , and his eyes glowed. ‘No,’ he said in his deep, rumbling voice. ‘It means that you must do what you really and truly want. And nothing is more difficult.’

‘What I really and truly want? What do you mean by that?’

It’s your own deepest secret and you yourself don’t know it.’

‘How can I find out?’

‘By going the way of your wishes, from one to another, from first to last. It will take you to what you really and truly want.’

‘That doesn’t sound so hard,’ said Bastian.

‘It is the most dangerous of all journeys.’

‘Why?’ Bastian asked. ‘I’m not afraid.’

‘That isn’t it,’ Grograman rumbled. ‘It requires the greatest honesty and vigilance, because there’s no other journey on which it’s so easy to lose yourself forever.’

‘Do you mean because our wishes aren’t always good?’ Bastian asked.

The lion lashed the sand he was lying on with his tail. His ears lay flat, he screwed up his nose, and his eyes flashed fire. Involuntarily Bastian ducked when Grograman’s voice once again made the earth tremble: ‘What do you know about wishes? How would you know what’s good and what isn’t?’ -The Neverending Story by Michael Ende

I think a lot of our decisions are made unconsciously because they “feel” right based on past experiences. We probably don’t notice the process that makes the decision so we try to justify it afterwards but we’re only guessing. But I’m not smart and I’ve smoked a joint in the last half hour so I could be way off base.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2eOtzEB8D8 Kastrup talks about this. Congrats, you woke up a bit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpU_e3jh_FY you don’t have free will, but don’t worry