It felt like you couldn’t control yourself, but which one of you (two) was really “yourself”? English usually refers to people and minds in the singular, but my mind feels more like a committee. Maybe the stroke drove more a wedge between the committee members than usual.
I mean, we can go down the rabbit hole about what constitutes a “self,” but in pragmatic terms, everything involved in making decisions seemed to be more or less aligned and coordinating as well as it ever does… what was missing was that I didn’t have any awareness of it as coordinated.
In other words, it wasn’t like my arm was going off and doing stuff that I had no idea why it was doing; rather, it was doing exactly what I would have made it do in the first place… I just didn’t have any awareness of actually making it do so.
That said, the more extremely disjointed version does happen… google “alien hand syndrome.”
I’d say that you felt that you had free will, along with more severe problems expressing it than usual. I’m guessing that paranoid schizophrenics obeying voices telling them to do things is a better example of a feeling of not having free will.
Fascinating!
It felt like you couldn’t control yourself, but which one of you (two) was really “yourself”? English usually refers to people and minds in the singular, but my mind feels more like a committee. Maybe the stroke drove more a wedge between the committee members than usual.
In this particular case, I don’t think so.
I mean, we can go down the rabbit hole about what constitutes a “self,” but in pragmatic terms, everything involved in making decisions seemed to be more or less aligned and coordinating as well as it ever does… what was missing was that I didn’t have any awareness of it as coordinated.
In other words, it wasn’t like my arm was going off and doing stuff that I had no idea why it was doing; rather, it was doing exactly what I would have made it do in the first place… I just didn’t have any awareness of actually making it do so.
That said, the more extremely disjointed version does happen… google “alien hand syndrome.”
I’d say that you felt that you had free will, along with more severe problems expressing it than usual. I’m guessing that paranoid schizophrenics obeying voices telling them to do things is a better example of a feeling of not having free will.
Not to mention ordinary people who happen to have guns pointed to their heads.