iNow

Regular exercise and good sleep are pretty universally good for our minds.

Depends on which narrative arrives that day, but it’s always just a narrative. Exactly Once more:

Vehicle in background should be a raised pickup with knob tires filthy from a recent muddin trip

How can you be so certain? But those cogitations seem to be pre-conscious, too. In short, you appear to be asserting a distinction without a difference.

We agree. Decline occurs and generally quite rapidly as we age. I’m still thankful given the current happenings in the world that he’s the one helping us navigate it. He knows how this works and better than most.

The trust scientists receive is precisely because they're willing to abandon past beliefs in the face of new evidence, and to ensure hypotheses map to our experiences in the world regardless of what we'd prefer to be true / regardless of what we want to be true. Your own example confirms this. We once believed in geocentric universe, but updated that to heliocentrism when new data arrived. Is that not a good thing, to update our thinking as we learn more? What point are you attempting to make, exactly?

What does it mean to "make a choice?" Are you not always acting on the conditions present in your neurobiology, based on the chemical inputs and signals which arrive prior to any conscious awareness or involvement from the parts of the brain commonly referred to as "self?"

No such condition is possible in our universe. Conditions are always present. Exactly, hence the previous comment is moot.

It's not necessarily more "free," but we do tend to feel better about our choice when it was made from a limited set of options. We're also less likely to be overcome by a "paralysis through analysis" when fewer options are presented. Relative value is the core point here. We seem to perform a relative value comparison across the options available before us, and when there are too many options we often feel regret that the one we selected may not have been the best fit... that we perhaps failed to maximize our return. We seem to fear that a different option may have had a higher marginal benefit / return to us, and the probability that we didn't maximize the benefit of our selection is higher when the set of options is higher. If you buy a hot dog at the baseball game, and the concession stand has 16 toppings (ketchup, BBQ sauce, relish, onions, chili, yellow mustard, dijon mustard, spicy mustard, horseradish mustard, stone ground mustard, etc.), you tend to enjoy your selection less for fear that a different combo may have been better. If we instead got a stand with only 3 toppings (ketchup, yellow mustard, and relish), then we feel far better about the selection since it's so much more obvious it was the best one available to us). The idea here is that with a smaller set of options, the selection we make is MORE likely to be better than the other available peers in the group, thus we generally feel better about it and more confident it was the correct one (we paradoxically doubt ourselves much less and feel remorse far less often in these circumstance of fewer choices, even though one would intuitively think more options are better). Not really related to free will though, IMO. The decision still occurs before we even realize it was a decision.

More precisely, the "language," the "rationalization," and the "choice/decision" are all also chemo-electrically done and it happens in areas of the brain which come BEFORE conscious awareness / BEFORE the areas normally considered "self" in our own minds eye. I understand, which is why I keep reminding you of the importance of not making too many uninformed assertions about it. This is another example of a post-dictive narrative that you are telling yourself, but it does not accurately map on to the way it actually occurred in your wet meat computer (aka: brain and nervous system).

As in... once an object crosses the event horizon, it's light can no longer escape gravity and thus can no longer reach us as the distant observer. For that reason, the object appears "frozen" and stuck still to us at the location immediately prior to event horizon crossing.

I’ve been grateful for his decades of experience and the experience of his hand picked leadership teams these last few years. A set of steady hands at the tiller. They’ve done a remarkable job returning us to normality in otherwise chaotic times. If congress wasn’t so dysfunctional and full of ignorant clowns, we’d surely be even better off than we already are.

You assert this, seemingly without having any knowledge about the way your mind functions and how chemo-electricity is making those decisions before you even “think” them. You seem to have convinced yourself that the post-dictive narrative the language centers in your brain created AFTER the decision event occurred was the event itself. It's not. It’s just a story you tell yourself. Experience, not will. Whether free or something else, it’s just the outcome of chemistry.

How so? Will you please provide an example? You seem to be suggesting some supernatural capability beyond our neurobiology.

I'm about 25 in mine

One point that some are trying to remind us of (rightfully so) is that the hundreds (thousands, likely?) of infants and children and pregnant women and nursing mothers and farming fathers and otherwise peaceful Palestinians in Gaza are just as dead when they die by rocket fire as when meeting their maker thanks to a blade or bullet. I see you beat me to the same point.

I'm not aware that Biden had surgury to alter his image. Sounds like one of those false claims that so quickly gains traction and spreads like wildfire across social media. Regardless, one thing which is already here is Digitally altering apparent age. Insta-filter on video, real-time. Commercials with Biden in his 30s looking young and vigorous coming soon to a screen near you... (though, if we're being honest, it's far more likely we'll see it first with Trump since he's so vain and insecure). This is more about optics than medical need. He trips sometimes, as do we all. When I trip, everyone after laughing thinks, "Ooops... happens to us all!" When Biden trips, they think, "Jesus that guy's old," even though it's a fairly common thing to happen to humans. "Make no mistake" is literally how they have to operate today to avoid being misconstrued and meme'd.

We appear to be in violent agreement.

The things which are the result of chemical interactions, all of which occur prior to conscious awareness of them, you mean? It's not my intent to redefine anything, only to explain it with knowledge rooted in how our minds work. As we can't make choices and IMO only post-dictively apply a narrative pretending that we have, I suggest we simply call it "experience" and not "will," as it's most certainly not "free" given my framing of the issue.

Solve them? They define me.

National polls don’t vote in presidential elections. Individuals within individual states do. It’ll likely come down to ~500 people in Wisconsin (or some similar scale event to happened in Florida when GWB got elected by the SCOTUS). Microtargeting is have macro effects.

That election was very long ago. Don’t blame the children for the mistakes of the parent. Hamas does need to be eradicated, but the Palestinian people are not Hamas.

A point to potentially reflect upon is that too many right now are conflating Hamas with Palestinians, and that’s no more valid than conflating Iraqis with ISIS. The children dying right now didn’t vote for Hamas 16 years ago, nor has anybody living there the last decade plus.

Monolithic one dimensional labels do a disservice to my actual thinking around this. I don’t align with some crowd. I come at the subject along my own path. But yes, I’m complicated. Appreciate the compliment.

Perhaps, but I’ve already earlier mentioned it doesn’t appear to be free so it strikes me as similarly useless. No. Choice implies freedom to do otherwise, which for reasons already noted I reject.