Sublime

“It’s not just about observing what a person does,” says Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University and the author of Predictably Irrational, among other books. “It’s trying to understand the reasons behind that.”

that people—or, if you like, automata, algorithms—can and do act in situations that are not well defined.

Mill’s defense of the feelings and the imagination has two components. The first is that bringing analytical power to bear on a problem is not enough, especially if one’s goal is to make the world a better place. Rather, one must have a certain kind of character: one must be a certain kind of person, a person who has both the ability and the inclin

For all practical purposes, it was reasonable to argue that I have free will, because my will was shaped mainly by the interplay of inner forces, which nobody outside me could see.

In the first situation, subjects would be presented with two buttons and told that each represented a particular charity; press one of the buttons and that charity will be sent a thousand dollars. Second version: two buttons, two charities, push whichever button you feel like, each charity is getting five hundred dollars. The brain was commanding t

Another key fact is that agency isn't intrinsic to a system, but rather something we ascribe to it. It's a way of describing a system at the level of abstraction that includes goals, obstacles, motivations, etc. If you look too closely (at a sufficiently low level of abstraction), the agency might seem to disappear. A plant, for example, is 'merely

Thus, three different techniques, monitoring the activity of hundreds of millions of neurons down to single neurons, all show that at the moment when we believe that we are consciously and freely choosing to do something, the neurobiological die has already been cast. That sense of conscious intent is an irrelevant afterthought.

all analyses of rational choice incorporate two principles: dominance and invariance. Dominance demands that if prospect A is at least as good as prospect B in every respect and better than B in at least one respect, then A should be preferred to B. Invariance requires that the preference order between prospects should not depend on the manner in w

Adler was opposed to any kind of dualistic value system that treated the mind as separate from the body—reason as separate from emotion, or the conscious mind as separate from the unconscious mind.