[crazygringo]

This is similar to the thesis of Antonio Damasio's "Descartes' Error", which argues that all our decisions are ultimately taken by an unconscious emotional part of the brain, and that the conscious reasoning part is merely one of many inputs to the unconscious decision-making part.

Which means we literally can never explain the "why" behind any decision we make, because we never know it -- yet that is our true "self", our free will if you choose to interpret it that way.

It's why we can have every rational reason to not eat the cookie, and zero rational reason to eat it (we're not hungry and we rationally know it's in our best interest to lose weight)... and then we eat it anyways. We can't give any rational explanation for why we ate it... it just comes down to, in the end, I wanted to due to emotional factors I can only hypothesize in hindsight.

It's a pretty powerful thesis.

[projektir]

> It's why we can have every rational reason to not eat the cookie, and zero rational reason to eat it (we're not hungry and we rationally know it's in our best interest to lose weight)... and then we eat it anyways. We can't give any rational explanation for why we ate it... it just comes down to, in the end, I wanted to due to emotional factors I can only hypothesize in hindsight.

I don't really think this is as a convincing example as a lot of people think. It has less to do with people having no control and more with people not understanding what "rational" is.

You eat the cookie because you do not, in reality, think eating the cookie is that much of a problem. The issue is that you likely have 5 other layers sitting trying to convince you that you don't want the cookie, because you're trying to fit in with society or whatever.

If you really didn't want to eat the cookie, you wouldn't.

The problem is that the average reason a person has for not eating a cookie is very unconvincing. It's often something along the lines of "well, people, somewhere, think I shouldn't eat too many cookies". "Cookies are unhealthy" also doesn't register, it's too broad. If someone told you the cookie was poisoned with cyanide, trust me, you wouldn't eat it.

It really doesn't have /that/ much to do with raw emotion, except in so far as emotion is composed from values, and your values don't care about eating cookies that much at the end of the day.

[perl4ever]

I think you can and should, make an effort to infer the desires of the non-conscious part of the brain, because it's essential to happiness. It's easy to say people shouldn't deny what they truly want, but I think it's even more important to realize you don't know what you and your subconscious want until you explore possibilities and consequences.

Because brains are jury-rigged by evolution and not a clean integrated design by an intelligent engineer, I think it's natural that there should be a lot of co-dependent modules and redundant cruft that leads to conflicts.

[NihilumExNil]

No, I don't believe this. Rather, as you note inhibition, you rationalize an excuse before hand, here that you have no control over your actions, and as that has so far always worked out, as far as immediate gratification is concerned whereas detriment is harder to grasp, the inhibition is inhibited. The mind is complex and for every prohibitive experience you have an inhibition to find an excuse to justify your actions. Of course, in habitual actions these processes are pretty deeply ingrained, quick, and hence not very conscious compared to much more complex problems that might even compete for attention. Still though, the rationalization of what was done can only come after wards. That is correct.

[jasonkostempski]

"Because it taste good" isn't a rational reason?