I like to say “you’re always doing your best”, especially as kind words to folks when they are feeling regret.
What do I mean by that, though? Certainly you can look back at what you did in any given situation and imagine having done something that would have had a better outcome.
What I mean is that, given the all conditions under which you take any action, you always did the best you could. After all, if you could have done something better given all the conditions you would have.
The key is that all the conditions include the entire history of the world up to the present moment, and so that necessarily includes your life history, the life history of others, the physical environment, your emotional state, how tired you were, how your brain works, etc.. The trick is that when you condition your actions so fully there’s no room left for any counterfactuals, for you could have done nothing else!
As you might guess, I’m proposing a deterministic outlook on the world. I won’t really argue that too much here, other than to say that if you look long and hard enough at free will it dissolves into an after-the-fact illusion contingent on how your brain compresses reality and models yourself and that this is robust to quantum effects since even if quantum effects result in random outcomes you nonetheless only ever find yourself in a single history where some particular thing happened regardless of how it happened.
The immediate corollary of all this is that you also are always doing your worst, only that doesn’t land too well when someone feels regret.
I like this insight because, fully taken it, it dissolves regret. Not that you can’t imagine having done better, propose things you might do differently in the future, and then try them to see what happens and maybe actually do better than you previously did. Rather, it dissolves regret because regret hinges on feeling as if a counterfactually could have really happened. Once you deeply believe that counterfactuals are not real, i.e. they are purely of the map and have no existence in the territory independent of the map, regret just has no way to come into existence.
This doesn’t mean you can’t still feel related emotions like remorse, especially if you realize you were negligent and had a responsibility to have done better but didn’t, but that’s different than clinging to a desire to have done something different; remorse is owning that you did something less than what you were capable of under the circumstances and might reasonably be asked to make amends.
So next time you feel regret, try reminding yourself it couldn’t have gone any other way.
You’re always doing your best
I like to say “you’re always doing your best”, especially as kind words to folks when they are feeling regret.
What do I mean by that, though? Certainly you can look back at what you did in any given situation and imagine having done something that would have had a better outcome.
What I mean is that, given the all conditions under which you take any action, you always did the best you could. After all, if you could have done something better given all the conditions you would have.
The key is that all the conditions include the entire history of the world up to the present moment, and so that necessarily includes your life history, the life history of others, the physical environment, your emotional state, how tired you were, how your brain works, etc.. The trick is that when you condition your actions so fully there’s no room left for any counterfactuals, for you could have done nothing else!
As you might guess, I’m proposing a deterministic outlook on the world. I won’t really argue that too much here, other than to say that if you look long and hard enough at free will it dissolves into an after-the-fact illusion contingent on how your brain compresses reality and models yourself and that this is robust to quantum effects since even if quantum effects result in random outcomes you nonetheless only ever find yourself in a single history where some particular thing happened regardless of how it happened.
The immediate corollary of all this is that you also are always doing your worst, only that doesn’t land too well when someone feels regret.
I like this insight because, fully taken it, it dissolves regret. Not that you can’t imagine having done better, propose things you might do differently in the future, and then try them to see what happens and maybe actually do better than you previously did. Rather, it dissolves regret because regret hinges on feeling as if a counterfactually could have really happened. Once you deeply believe that counterfactuals are not real, i.e. they are purely of the map and have no existence in the territory independent of the map, regret just has no way to come into existence.
This doesn’t mean you can’t still feel related emotions like remorse, especially if you realize you were negligent and had a responsibility to have done better but didn’t, but that’s different than clinging to a desire to have done something different; remorse is owning that you did something less than what you were capable of under the circumstances and might reasonably be asked to make amends.
So next time you feel regret, try reminding yourself it couldn’t have gone any other way.