There is something about the nature of conditionality that has been floating around my head in these last years, I couldn’t really expand upon the idea because I lacked information and direction to what exactly I was pondering so much about. I guess the own nature of personal choice-making is something that interests me, especially since it relates so much to Existentialism. It wasn’t until I took a course on Computational Neuroscience (Neuromatch) that I realized that the brain itself can be modeled as a Bayesian Distribution of priors and posteriors.
This is a cool development of my first enquire about it, because choices are always conditioned to a certain prior. There is a smell of determinism to it, in the sense that our choices are always bound to something that happened before, which kind kills free-will. But this is where things get interesting because instead of proving the idea of determinism right, just proves what existentialists more right I consider. You can interpret this idea of modeling personal action like this in two ways:
- The conditions are what make up the next choice, so if you only have access to a limited amount of premises, they will inevitably lead you to one of a set of probable (but not necessarily predictable and certain?) choice.
- The conditions are preset, they happened and there is nothing we can do about them since this is the past we are talking about, but we live in the present and we get to choose what we do to the prior information that we have saved in our brains. This resonates a lot with the quote that what matters is not what happened but what you chose to do with what happened.
I consider the second one more true. I’ve been finding hard to objectively argue against the first one as of late. There are clear ways to combat that mentality for those who want to however.
The first one is to be aware of the conditions that are setting up a certain type of reasoning. I guess that is why when people argue it is always easy to find flaws on the argument if you pay attention and attack the premise. It is basic conditional logic really, a false premise will always lead to any conclusion. That is why Mindfulness is of utter importance, this is the tool allows you to be aware of what is going on the backstage of your reasoning and proof-check your premises.
The other and just as important way is to expand your own consciousness, since there are levels to it (Gödel, Escher and Bach). Books are a great way to do just that (On the importance of reading), talking to different people with different points of view is just as valuable as well.
I guess this tackles the issue of the amount of premises you have at hand that I raised. But still, I think it is possible to make a probability distribution of what people will likely choose based on that, the hard part is always to know the premises. I guess it is easier if you already know the person and they have a strong personality and don’t change their mind so easily. I mean if they do then whatever is more convincing will be their choice I guess. This is an interesting, very interesting topic. I bet there are a lot of books that dive into this, I just need to dig a bit more into Neuroscience and Philosophy.