Let’s assume I can make a simulated world with lots of carefully scripted NPC’s and with a script for the Main Character (full of interesting adventures like saving the galaxy), which somehow is forced upon a conscious being by means of some “exoself”. Then I erase my memory and cease to be my old self, becoming this MC. Each of my actions is enforced by the exoself, I cannot do a single thing that isn’t in the script. But of course I’m unaware of that (there are no extremely suspiciously unexplainable actions in the script) and still have all of the sensations I have right now—my consciousness explains each of my actions as having some reasons inside myself.
This seemed to me an example of Author* self-control at first (seemingly paradoxically lacking “free will”), but it’s not really MC who had written the script, it is essensially another person. So I just leave it here as a slight exaggeration of our current state. Of course, we don’t have such scripts (at least I hope so), but since (due to the neuroscience research Hopefully Anonymous obviously talks about) our actions are not determined by our conscious decisions, the situation is not totally different. Our unconscious mind can be viewed as a kind of exoself.
Let’s assume I can make a simulated world with lots of carefully scripted NPC’s and with a script for the Main Character (full of interesting adventures like saving the galaxy), which somehow is forced upon a conscious being by means of some “exoself”. Then I erase my memory and cease to be my old self, becoming this MC. Each of my actions is enforced by the exoself, I cannot do a single thing that isn’t in the script. But of course I’m unaware of that (there are no extremely suspiciously unexplainable actions in the script) and still have all of the sensations I have right now—my consciousness explains each of my actions as having some reasons inside myself.
This seemed to me an example of Author* self-control at first (seemingly paradoxically lacking “free will”), but it’s not really MC who had written the script, it is essensially another person. So I just leave it here as a slight exaggeration of our current state. Of course, we don’t have such scripts (at least I hope so), but since (due to the neuroscience research Hopefully Anonymous obviously talks about) our actions are not determined by our conscious decisions, the situation is not totally different. Our unconscious mind can be viewed as a kind of exoself.