The specific example I would go to here would be when I was vegetarian for a couple of years and eventually gave up on it and went back to eating meat. I basically felt like I had given up on what was “right” and went back to doing “evil”. But remaining vegetarian was increasingly miserable for me, so eventually I quit trying.
I think it’s actually more fair to call this a conflict between two different System-1 subagents. One of the definitive aspects of System-1 is that it doesn’t tend to be coherent. Part of System-1 wanted to not feel bad about killing animals, and a different part of System-1 wanted to eat bacon and not feel low-energy all the time. So here there was a very evident clash between two competing System-1 felt needs, and the one that System-2 disapproved of ended up being the winner, despite months and months of consistent badgering by System-2.
I think you see this a lot especially in younger people who think that they can derive their “values” logically and then become happier by pursuing their logically derived values. It takes a bit of age and experience to just empirically observe what your values appear to be based on what you actually end up doing and enjoying.
The specific example I would go to here would be when I was vegetarian for a couple of years and eventually gave up on it and went back to eating meat. I basically felt like I had given up on what was “right” and went back to doing “evil”. But remaining vegetarian was increasingly miserable for me, so eventually I quit trying.
I think it’s actually more fair to call this a conflict between two different System-1 subagents. One of the definitive aspects of System-1 is that it doesn’t tend to be coherent. Part of System-1 wanted to not feel bad about killing animals, and a different part of System-1 wanted to eat bacon and not feel low-energy all the time. So here there was a very evident clash between two competing System-1 felt needs, and the one that System-2 disapproved of ended up being the winner, despite months and months of consistent badgering by System-2.
I think you see this a lot especially in younger people who think that they can derive their “values” logically and then become happier by pursuing their logically derived values. It takes a bit of age and experience to just empirically observe what your values appear to be based on what you actually end up doing and enjoying.