= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
HughRistik comments on Actions and Words: Akrasia and the Fruit of Self-Knowledge - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (20)
More like, we have multiple parts of the brain which can reach different judgments, and rational arguments act on the wrong part. I think this is what you were getting at (and your subsequent examples seem to support that), but it should be explicit.
I think the rational (mostly linguistic) parts of our brain can influence decisions made by other parts, if we're smart about it. The main trap seems to be that when the conscious and subconscious parts of our brain disagree, we may decide that we didn't will hard enough. So we try to "will harder", which to the linguistic part of our brain means sticking the word "very" in front of everything and generating a bunch of negative self views, which has the opposite of the desired effect on our subconscious.
jimrandomh said:
Exactly. I think the notion of modularity from evolutionary psychology would help to understand some types of akrasia. While consciousness is probably not a complete bystander per Annoyance, it's merely one of the mental modules in the brain. This hypothesis explains Annoyance's observation that there may be factors in our judgment that we don't understand.
If we act against what we say we want, it may not mean that we "didn't really want it," but that one part of brain wanted it while another part didn't, and the second part won.
"Want" is not always a unitary phenomenon inside the brain; neither is "judgment."
Please note: I said consciousness is ALMOST without influence. It's not completely so. The problem is that it attributes nearly everything we do it itself, instead of the few bits it actually contributes.