The idea of reflection is Cartesian to its core: a stand-alone consciousness, calmly observing the parade of thoughts and feelings, assuming a higher vantage point, drawing lessons and extracting principles: a wise Self.
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Explorations Outside
Sometimes the straw man is a “hollow man”, i.e., a complete fabrication of the opponent’s views. These are pretty easy to refute, since they can’t be supported by actual evidence. Harder to refute are strawman arguments based on half-truths.
So it's more accurate to say humans are prediction machines: "devices that constantly try to stay one step ahead of the breaking waves of sensory stimulation, by actively predicting the incoming flow." (Clark, 2016)
The urge to label hovers before the stream of consciousness, ready to take the wind out of its sails. Of course, the weather's always changing and the wind often comes out of nowhere.
Benefits often come with a cost... Burdens may yield benefits.... Benefits and burdens may be certain but small or uncertain but large...immediate but brief or delayed but long-lasting. Moral principles only go so far in helping us sort it all out.
Indignation is pretty much a knee-jerk reaction to perceived injustice and is associated with a desire to punish the guilty party. The guilty party may be seen as having too much of a good thing or too little of a bad thing.
No one likes being told they're an ideologue or that their profound observations are profoundly ideological.
Thing is, what gets you in isn't what keeps you there. The hardest part is to jump in. To place yourself within a new web of experience and influence. If monetary incentives are what it takes to make you jump, so be it. New reasons for being there will unfold as new rewards are discovered.
The effects of self-determined actions and non-actions come with varying degrees of certainty, immediacy, importance, magnitude, and vividness, as do the effects of restricting self-determined actions and non-actions.
The Harm Principle: "We should allow rational people to be self-determining, except possibly where autonomy should be restricted if, by doing so, we act to prevent harm to others." Don Berkich
How do we prioritize moral principles when they’re in conflict with each other? Why that way and not another way?
As our moral sense develops, we may find ourselves reflecting less and reacting more. In the beginning we struggle to sort it out. Eventually we become more settled in our judgments. What began as moral reasoning is increasingly replaced by moral intuitions. Some of us may become opinionated and easily outraged...
My goal is not to provide answers. It's to stimulate thought. Thought reveals and lights the way. Thought conceals and distracts. Self-correction is more likely when we think with humility.
...if the brain and its tracking systems didn’t do a reasonable job of approximating reality, I wouldn’t be able to write this sentence because Homo sapiens wouldn’t even exist. An animal has to be tuned into the world in order to survive that world.
When we try to resist temptations, there's a tension between immediate, certain reward and later, uncertain reward. The more certain the later reward, the more likely temptations will be resisted. But certainty is just one part of the equation. Later rewards may feel far-off, abstract, and only intermittently compelling, while temptations are concrete and immediately satisfying.
What matters is a sense of control and hope within a lifetime. The feeling that through my actions, I can make progress towards something that matters to me. Self-efficacy! Not that I’m the master of my destiny – more that there are things I can do that will make it better.
Political coalitions are more or less ideological. On the less ideological side, they may be held together by alliances of convenience, whose common cause may be more dislike of the other side than broad agreement on a range of issues.
An ideology is an army of convictions about how the world is and how it ought to be. As befitting a military force, ideologies are fueled by a sense of threat - kept at bay through a fortress-like structure called the ideological square.
Whenever we seek goals under conditions of uncertainty – not knowing the best way forward, perhaps not being sure what success even looks like – we are faced with explore/exploit trade-offs as we guess our way to what we think we want.
Here is the theme of endemic pain and suffering in our everyday lives, in which minor and transitory negative feelings become something deep and debilitating...