The thing that you are calling “freedom” seems to be the inability to act, to make a choice. Why would this be a desirable thing?
Here’s something I’ve quoted a couple of times before on LessWrong. Time to bring it out again:
“You pride yourself on freedom of choice. Let me tell you that this very freedom is one of the factors that most confuse and undermine you. It gives you full play for your neuroses, your surface reactions and your aberrations. What you should aim for is freedom from choice! Faced with two possibilities, you spend time and effort to decide which to accept. You review the whole spectrum of political, emotional, social, physical, psychological and physiological conditioning before coming up with the answer which, more often than not, does not even satisfy you then. Do you know, can you comprehend, what freedom it gives you if you have no choice? Do you know what it means to be able to choose so swiftly and surely that to all intents and purposes you have no choice? The choice that you make, your decision, is based on such positive knowledge that the second alternative may as well not exist.”
-- Rafael Lefort, “The Teachers of Gurdjieff”, ch. XIV
Every choice you make removes that choice from you. If your first thought on making a decision is “Was that the right decision?” then you did not make a decision. When you have truly made a decision, the decision is no longer in front of you, it is behind, receding into the past. Every step in the dance moves on, cutting off from realisation all the steps that were not made in order to make this one.
No-one is granted a God’s eye view of the whole garden of forking paths, from where you might experience all the different possibilities together without ever having to choose among them. You only get a single run-through of the game.
I’m very confused about this. Here’s what I think you’re saying:
Choices are bad, particularly with regards to regret. It is better to make a decision based on instinct and forget about it than to consider your options carefully and potentially regret the decision.
Is that about right or is there something that I’m missing?
The quote (in my undertanding of it) is not about “instinct”, i.e. not knowing why you did something. Quite the opposite: it is seeing things clearly enough to make the right choice quickly and knowingly. Recognising what must be done and why, not dithering in “choice”. And this is recommended as the way to live, or to strive to live. Achieving anything requires action, action requires choice, and choices must actually be made, cutting off paths as the sculptor cuts away marble, destroying all the sculptures that could be made except for the one that he has decided to make. The sculptor who sits beside a block of marble, merely contemplating the great works that he might make but never raising his chisel to the stone, is failing as a sculptor.
The thing that you are calling “freedom” seems to be the inability to act, to make a choice. Why would this be a desirable thing?
Here’s something I’ve quoted a couple of times before on LessWrong. Time to bring it out again:
-- Rafael Lefort, “The Teachers of Gurdjieff”, ch. XIV
Every choice you make removes that choice from you. If your first thought on making a decision is “Was that the right decision?” then you did not make a decision. When you have truly made a decision, the decision is no longer in front of you, it is behind, receding into the past. Every step in the dance moves on, cutting off from realisation all the steps that were not made in order to make this one.
No-one is granted a God’s eye view of the whole garden of forking paths, from where you might experience all the different possibilities together without ever having to choose among them. You only get a single run-through of the game.
I’m very confused about this. Here’s what I think you’re saying:
Is that about right or is there something that I’m missing?
The quote (in my undertanding of it) is not about “instinct”, i.e. not knowing why you did something. Quite the opposite: it is seeing things clearly enough to make the right choice quickly and knowingly. Recognising what must be done and why, not dithering in “choice”. And this is recommended as the way to live, or to strive to live. Achieving anything requires action, action requires choice, and choices must actually be made, cutting off paths as the sculptor cuts away marble, destroying all the sculptures that could be made except for the one that he has decided to make. The sculptor who sits beside a block of marble, merely contemplating the great works that he might make but never raising his chisel to the stone, is failing as a sculptor.
Thanks, got it! I hadn’t read the post as advocating a lack of decision but re-reading it now I can see how you read it.