Recognise free will is an illusion and reap the emotional benefits | Psyche Ideas

Pretend that you have free will. It’s essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know they don’t. The reality isn’t important; what’s important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.

what we call the mind emerges as a constantly shifting collision of two basic events: bare recognition (the simple awareness that something is happening) and conditioning factors (the processes that not only describe what we perceive, but also determine our responses).

we think we’re choosing things for ourselves, but in fact we may not be choosing anything. It could be that everything’s decided in advance and we pretend we’re making choices. Free will may be an illusion. I often think that.”

feel that we freely author our own thoughts and actions (however difficult it may be to make sense of this in logical or scientific terms).

Le truc dur à avaler, mais complètement radical et paradoxalement libérateur, c’est que l’intégralité des choses que l’on expérimente et des choix que l’on fait dépend exclusivement de ces deux facteurs : gènes et conditionnement ; et qu’aucun de ces deux facteurs ne dépend de l’exercice de notre volonté, puisque nos gènes nous sont transmis par no

By this definition, free will entails the choice to be rational or to be irrational—which ultimately means the choice to respect reality or to defy it.