It occurred to me that, for a human being, there is no way not to make a choice between different preferences: in any next moment of time I do something, even continue to think or indulge in procrastination. I either eat, or run, so the conflict is always resolved.
However, an interesting thing is that sometimes a person tries to do two things simultaneously, for example, if content of the speech and the tone do not match. It has happened to me – and I had to explain that only content matter, and the tone should be ignored.
It occurred to me that, for a human being, there is no way not to make a choice between different preferences: in any next moment of time I do something, even continue to think or indulge in procrastination. I either eat, or run, so the conflict is always resolved.
This matches an excise you may be asked to do as part of Buddhist training towards enlightenment. During meditation, get your attention focused on itself, then try to do something other than what you would do. If you have enough introspective access, you’ll get an experience of being unable to do anything other than exactly what you do—you get first-hand experience with determinism at a level that bypasses the process that creates the illusion of free will. So not only can you only ever do the one thing you actually do (for some reasonable definition of what “one thing” is here), you can’t every do anything other than the one thing you end up doing, viz. there was no way any counterfactual was ever going to be realized.
It occurred to me that, for a human being, there is no way not to make a choice between different preferences: in any next moment of time I do something, even continue to think or indulge in procrastination. I either eat, or run, so the conflict is always resolved.
However, an interesting thing is that sometimes a person tries to do two things simultaneously, for example, if content of the speech and the tone do not match. It has happened to me – and I had to explain that only content matter, and the tone should be ignored.
This matches an excise you may be asked to do as part of Buddhist training towards enlightenment. During meditation, get your attention focused on itself, then try to do something other than what you would do. If you have enough introspective access, you’ll get an experience of being unable to do anything other than exactly what you do—you get first-hand experience with determinism at a level that bypasses the process that creates the illusion of free will. So not only can you only ever do the one thing you actually do (for some reasonable definition of what “one thing” is here), you can’t every do anything other than the one thing you end up doing, viz. there was no way any counterfactual was ever going to be realized.