Kisil comments on Being a teacher - Less Wrong

51 Post author: Swimmer963 14 March 2011 08:03PM

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Comment author: Kisil 25 March 2011 03:25:03PM 3 points [-]

Stop reading this.

Did you stop? So I don't think the difficulty is avoiding compliance with commands in general. Rather, it's switching between the mental modes of "complying" and "not complying" under time pressure.

Comment author: [deleted] 25 March 2011 03:58:36PM 1 point [-]

The very fact that there is a "compliance mode" rather than individual acts of hearing each command and deciding whether or not to obey each command one at a time I think demonstrates that all is not in accordance with our folk model of voluntary action, according to which each action is willed. Rather, the mental path from thought to action is only imperfectly under voluntary control.

By the way the book The Illusion of Conscious Will deeply explores the limitations of voluntary control, which as Wegner demonstrates is in some sense a fiction.