S2E3 Choosing Your Next Thought
In the last few posts I’ve tried to explain why:
- It is a logical contradiction to claim you’ve arrived somewhere first if other people have arrived before you.
- It is also a logical contradiction to claim you’ve consciously chosen the first thought in a sequence. ‘Consciously chosen’ means thoughts occurred before the ‘first’ thought. If thoughts occur before the ‘first’ thought, the term ‘first’ is no longer valid. In this way points 1 and 2 are both logical contradictions.
In this post I’d like to extend the logic of points 1 and 2 to show that it is a logical contradiction to claim you can consciously choose your ‘next’ thought. ‘Consciously choose’ means that there will be thoughts that come before the ‘next’ thought. This means the phrase ‘consciously choose’ invalidates the term ‘next’.
When it comes to a sequence of thoughts, the only two relevant categories for this discussion are ‘first’ and ‘next’. It doesn’t matter how many thoughts are in the sequence. If we can’t consciously choose the ‘first’ thought or any of the ‘next’ thoughts, then this means we can’t consciously choose any of the thoughts that precede a specific behavior. If we can’t consciously choose any of the thoughts that precede a behavior, then I don’t believe it’s reasonable to claim we have any degree of conscious self-control. Consciousness allows us to witness thoughts and the resulting behavior, but we don’t control these things in any conscious way. It seems to me that the most reasonable conclusion is that all choices that are made re: our behavior are made by an unconscious, but highly intelligent process.