Think back to the last 10 choices you made today.
How many of them, if any, do you feel or think you made out of free will?
And how many, if any, were a result of past patterns determining your behaviour, or external influence(r)s navigating your choices?
We’ve learned a lot from psychology about how to manipulate others.
Sales people have long taken advantage of what we’ve learned and gotten quite skilled and setting up the right conditions to steer purchasing behaviours. Social media platforms have taken this to a whole new level. And while we haven’t quite gotten to the point where we can reliably predict people’s choices, we’ve certainly gotten close. And under the right conditions, with the right people, it’s been done (see e.g. one of my favourite manipulation segments from Derren Brown).
As a little Nugget for you, this morning I listened to an excellent segment of 2 astrophysicists debating the existence of free will, which may open up a new perspective for you. It goes:
Even if, in the heat of a moment, you may not have access to free will, you can exercise your free will to lay the conditions for making a certain kind of choice when such moments arise.
For example, you’re in a conversation and someone says something to you that triggers a trauma-response. You’re now shaking and full of anxiety. Or imagine a family member pushes all the right buttons and you lose your temper and shout at them even though you didn’t want this to happen.
Can you control yourself in those moments? Is that part of the free will you have? I believe that in many scenarios we just don’t have access to the kind of choice we would have wanted to make, in hind-sight.
But I couldn’t agree more that we can consciously and freely choose to reflect on what happened, and/or anticipate future such scenarios, and work to lay the conditions for us to make different choices next time.
Martial artists train to create reflexes that work faster than conscious thought in the moment that they need them.
Someone suffering from depression may engage in therapy or choose to use medication to prepare for moments during which they might feel so low that certain choices are not available to them.
And coaches (ideally) train, reflect, discuss, work with a supervisor, in the Coaching Lab, or otherwise engage in activities that make it more likely to act in a way that they want during a session with their client.
It is the choice to prepare for eventualities that exercises free will where the heat of the moment may have previously determined your behaviour.
Thank you Charles Liu.
Oh and also, that clip is worth watching as a wonderful example of how amicably you can debate opposing positions when you’re curious and engage a scientific mindset.
With Love
Yannick
