a big day (and existence without choice)
i couldn’t really choose. people tend to find such assertions incomprehensible. “how is that possible? how could you not have chosen?” indeed, i’ve told myself many times: “just make yourself. there’s nothing that can’t be surmounted with an act of will.”
but what i’ve said about undecidability is only part of the story. the options weren’t too hard to choose between - murky thought process or not. they failed to even present themselves. my thought process just couldn’t go there. this is the problem with, and definition of, not having volition. the choice about whether to do something or not doesn’t even occur. it’s not only possible not to do things, it’s in a sense only possible not to do things.
this is frightening and scary for many reasons. most of all, not being able to choose means you tend to stay in one place indefinitely. and because you can’t even make the choice to get out of the state that you’re in, indefinitely could very easily mean a long time. you have to rely on your unconscious mind to make even the most incremental step forward. the unconscious mind, as i’ve noted, can do some surprising things by itself, but the ability to react in a novel way to present situations is completely gone without conscious reflection and choice.
today represented a huge change in that regard. my thought process became fluid. the ‘pressure’ or the internal wall that confined my ability to choose and to reflect totally disappeared over the course of the afternoon. where my thoughts before were still somewhat walled in, they are now roaming quite freely. it goes without saying that there’s still much room for improvement, but there’s much less room for improvement, too.
it’s really hard to believe these years of plodding progress were just a build up to this one day. of course, though, they were a build up to whatever happens after this.
Consciousness is a Cosmic Joke
Evolution run amok. Our brains have gotten comically - and cosmically - large.
They were never supposed to be this big. Our neocortical columns absorb more information about our environment than was ever supposed to be absorbed.
3.5 billion years is enough for this?
