Category: Ethics

Free will may logically and physically be an illusion.

But there is another way that you are not the master of your own mind that is useful to know.

There are three huge forces at work in your body besides your consciousness. Probably others.

1. Your symbiotic systems.
2. Your enteric nervous system.
3. Your unconscious brain processes.

In order to root your own brain you currently need to spend a great deal of time learning how and implementing it.

Meditation, biology, neurobiology, lucid dreaming, neuropsychology, public relations.

The cost of learning to do so is high in terms of time and effort. However, realizing you aren’t (yet?) in full command has immediate benefits. And the concept applied to choices can carry you in a more comfortable direction.

You may not need to learn to command them, to make peace with them. This is the real source of ancient concepts like unifying “mind body and spirit.” A modern program of internal peacemaking is possible.

There are a seemingly infinite number of variables no question, but you may chance on solutions easily if you at least begin looking. And they might feedback. Gains empowering further gains.

I’ve noticed that my mood is best over the long term when I try to cultivate a concept of compassion for all the “people” trapped inside me. That sounds weird. Let me explain. I use people first of all just to cultivate compassion. If I say animals or systems or pets even, we tend to dial back compassion, that’s unwise. Also, humans are wired to relate to other humans, which means that a metaphor using hypothetical people is easier to process.

Now, the enteric nervous system is a living thing. It’s my guts. It feels things, it has nerves and does a lot of information processing. Having it is like being linked to a large blind and deaf pet snake. What and how I eat is really the only substantive way I have to be good to it. And I should, just generally, but also because when I am, it in turn is good to me.

There is a scientific basis for this:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-second-brain/

Every aspect of your mind also has a time element. It’s best to realize there is a past self, a future self, and a present self, and they all have links to each other. Your past self for example has made decisions which your present self is now dealing with. Your future self is making requests of your present self at all times as well. You will eventually be your future self so it’s wise to listen, however, you ARE your present self and it is the only self truly capable of feeling. You can’t feel the future until it’s the present. You can remember feeling from your past self, and memories themselves can cause feeling in the present self as well.

It sounds complicated but really it’s intuitive after you think about it and sleep on it a few times.

Why I say that brings us back to the people inside us. There are literally parts of your brain that are in a sense very separate from you. Like your guts, they can be thought of as organs and their feedback takes every possible cognitive form. The phrase five senses is extremely misleading. You actually have thousands. These thousands mesh to form your entire reality. Every modular and integrated bit of your sensorium is composed of sensations which are senses. They just aren’t direct linkages with the outside world. But they are built on that data and are thus every bit as valid.

Your sense of physical orientation for example is a sixth direct sense. Your time sense is an indirect one. Your sensation of proportion, the distance from your eye to your hand for example. And on and on. EVERY aspect of what you think of as reality come from these brain “organs” which aren’t always discreet organs. This goes to neuropsychology. You don’t need to understand all that to make use of it. You can just realize that you have a whole bunch of back brain processes going on all the time and they don’t all happen instantly.

Memory and learning require sleep cycles. Remember the compassion and people inside thing? Well, imagine there’s a second person, a second mind, trapped in your mind, and it only gets to be awake when you’re asleep. If you don’t give it good sleep it will be miserable, and it’s misery is partly your misery. Be good to it and it will be good to you.

Don’t let your future self tell you to pound coffee because you want career advancement for example. Being awake is a short term benefit anyway. Being awake or asleep right now is hardly ever worth having a lousy memory and being unable to learn things properly later.

My system of ethics is universal externally and it recently occurred to me that I should apply it internally as well. And just aiming the concept inwards fit and inspired this essay.

I feel like it could turn into a book almost hehe. It’s such a massive subject and I feel like I can parse so many elements of the human condition in this way usefully.

I feel compelled to point out why one can accomplish with a hacked or unified mind. Extremes of human accomplishment spring to mind and there are many, but really I think the most informative is Quang Duc and other self immolators.

We know, for an indisputable objective fact, that it’s possible for a person to train themselves to not feel pain. Not everyone can do this of course in their context. But it’s important and informative to realize that it’s physically possible and has a firm basis in reality.

I share that not to scold or inspire feelings of ineptitude but to inspire with a concept of what this line of thinking might be worth to you.

Earlier I mentioned a symbiotic system as well. By this I mean all the life that lives in you that isn’t even human. Most people are aware of the bacteria in their gut and on their skin but people tend to think of it as mostly a pest when in fact it’s a protective ecosystem.

There’s good evidence that your appendix and tonsils exist to provide shelter for beneficial strains of bacteria. Some hospital born skin infections can only exist because things done at a hospital temporarily strip away that skin based ecosystem.

Now again, some compassion applies here, not in the sense that bacteria can feel, (though that is debatable imo at the colony level: https://futurism.com/bacteria-can-use-electricity-to-communicate-across-species/) but in the sense that you can choose to be either mean or nice to your bacteria.

I think it’s unwise to take a genocidal approach. And the harm done by the overuse of antibacterial soap supports that. Extend and apply this concept where ever you can. Don’t be over zealously clean or filthy. The filth thing is a factor too. The bacteria aren’t very smart. They need you to manage their civilization basically. You can’t let it turn into a giant slum because that’ll hurt it and therefore you.

It’s important to point out that all this applies to other actual people as well. This is why altruistic groups do better than selfish ones.

The Apex

See also:

Avoid my Mistakes

Your Emotions are NOT Under Your Control

This notion that emotions are controllable is shared social mythology, not science.

“Conscious emotion is in a way a red herring: the feeling and behavior prompts are surface responses the initial mechanism orchestrates … Emotions are things that happen to us rather than things we make happen. We try to manipulate our emotions all the time but all we are doing is arranging the outside world so it triggers certain emotions, we cannot control our reactions directly. “~Joseph LeDoux, Professor of Neural Science and Psychology, New York University.

We hide from it to avoid the hard problem of free will and the resulting problem with culture based on that myth.

These facts undermine virtually all of our excuses for harming others and lauding ourselves. From the work ethic to prison to democracy, to identity itself and even religion.

Sorry, you’re just a meat machine too and you live inside a great big lie. The sad fact is that OTHERS have more control over your emotions than you do:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self

You know… I’m reminded of the Chinese parable of hell, the one with the long chopsticks. Where in heaven they feed each other and in hell they all starve because they can’t feed themselves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_long_spoons

Our emotions are literally a lot like that. So quit being mean to each other.

Specifically you can start by supporting a basic income and making prison tolerable.

One Possible Solution

Prison

See also: http://underlore.com/avoid-my-mistakes/