You’re a special “house of cards” arrangement that magically falls back into its original shape whenever cards are removed (Neil Theise, liver pathologist)
I don’t know if you have a scientific or a divine interpretation of life, but irrespective of the nature of our existence it nonetheless “chooses” to follow rules and regularities.
The human being is a dynamic system, an ensemble of many processes where each individual process rests upon the others’ existence, giving rise to a semi self-sustaining whole. A being is a sort of strange “house of cards” that rests upon itself, relying on itself in a way that grants it relatively great independence from the (in)stability of the surface/environment on which it rests. Its overall pattern (its identity) is maintained by a dynamic organization where instead of static cards there are active processes, and, instead of an inert stable configuration there is a dynamic stability where precisely the perpetual creation, transformation and movement of the components is what confers the enduring sameness (identity) of the whole. Destroy a few cards, remove them or just try to flip them from their place (akin to burning the skin, cutting it, or giving poison to a human) and the strange structure just falls back in its usual stable shape.
This is also a good model for our psychological aspects. If you punch an individual on the street and yell at him that he’s stupid and lame, you not only push his bodily activity away from the normal dynamic stability (homeostasis) but you also considerably shift that of his brain, hence his mind (the body and the brain are just one system, but for certain purposes some of their aspects can be considered in relative independence). What ensues is the whole system “trying” to reestablish its usual identity — disturbed chemical bits and pieces impinging on or making way for other bits and pieces, and the process of falling back into dynamic equilibrium is afoot. Thought patterns are very much a manifestation of this process, where things like: “I’ll show him next time who’s stupid! The son of a bitch was just lucky i tripped.. else i would’ve destroyed him!” are a manifestation of the nervous system dealing with internal stresses and “trying” to recover dynamic equilibrium: its identity — a coin with two faces moving in step, one physical and the other conscious. Saying those things to yourself or inventing excuses in front of others is part of the attempt of reestablishing dignity which is a part of this general process of recovering former identity. Just like in a case of liver trauma, regaining the baseline activity is contingent upon the magnitude of the imbalance created by the stressor — it may take a while, or it may never happen. In the latter case the system becomes an unrelenting succesion of compensatory activities that consume the body’s resources.
All this seems like denying free-will but this activity schematically presented here IS your will!
If it weren’t for the shock of transitioning from the religious understanding to natural understanding, this would be a most welcomed situation. Most of us cherrish our identities and would feel aversion towards the prospect of drastically changing who we are. And the thing is, this cherished enduring identity stems preciselly from this strange “house of cards” condition described here! The cases where we do seek to change “who we are” are those where we are not in harmony within ourselves (when our beliefs, our ways of thinking, feeling, being, reacting, are functioning badly amongst each other keeping our being dissonant*), or, where we are out of harmony with our environment (especially when we don’t meet the cultural conventions*).
(* Note that being dissonant isn’t neccesarily a bad thing, this is what pushes us to grow or to be creative)
Have you ever seen human individuals jumping from ‘sensible’ to ‘savage’ to ‘girlie’ to ‘orgasmic’ in such an unmistakably unconditioned and uncaused way that it must of required metaphysical free-will? We don’t do that precisely because we are systems following rules, and consequently having regularities, hence identities (note, the rules shouldn’t necessarily be those of current laws of physics). Hyperthymic individuals aren’t upbeat and euphoric because “they will themselves to be that way”, which is an absurd statement anyway — it’s just how their physical being “falls together” by cause and effect, under certain conditions, giving way to this particular type of mental dynamical equilibrium. And the rest of us aren’t following suit.. not because “we don’t want” to be euphoric, but we are physically composed in another way, one that simply doesn’t maintain that kind of “identity”. We may though, temporarily alter our physical makeup by ingesting a chemical compound like 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine which would automatically imply a distinct change of our minds — again, pointing towards the fact that those highlighted concepts are intimatey related! However, this is not a desirable healthy sustainable way to better one’s psyche.
The strange paradox is that we must first accept our situation — including our lack of metaphysical free-will — before we can open another degree of freedom within ourselves and work towards the stoic or optimistic spectrum or whatever our identity requires for its wellbeing.
We must understand that there’s no magic hand doing all this, it’s just the immanent intelligence specified within the system’s organization — it’s made just so that it falls back into a stable configuration. This intelligence was impressed upon the biologic system by the countless evolutionary interactions (this source is termed “free floating rationale” precisely because it doesn’t belong to any-one agent; it’s the intelligence of a vast space and deep time) and the manifestation of this intelligence is allowed only due to the underlying stable predictable laws of physics. If you don’t have a stable lawful substrate you cannot give it shape and you can’t sustain anything intelligent on it for more than a brief instant. However, if one persists in messing with the organism’s structure, or damages it beyond a certain degree, this intelligent organisation cannot recover the system’s identity, it cannot fall back into its previous shape. It either hopefully falls into another stable configuration that doesn’t have negative consequences, or, the whole gets annihilated into separate aimless bits. A dead body is just as bustling with activity as it ever was (even complex activities like gene transcription and translation continue, for as long as days after death), it’s just not an activity that’s part of a coherent whole anymore (more of a pile instead of a system). A dead body doesn’t have overall dynamical equilibrium — the various processes aren’t working in a meta self-sustaining loop, they’re aimlessly evolving without an ‘attractor’ (like it’s called in physics).
So, besides the body, whose dynamic equilibrium is more constrained around a certain homeostatic ideal, this human “house of cards” also has a “loft” which holds tremendous dynamics. Thus the brain, apart from specifying a greater space of possibilities, also allows for greater changes in the parameters of the space itself. A mechanism like that of a clock on the other hand has a fixed space of posibilities — this space can only be changed if a watchmaker dissasembles it and changes the system’s specifications, or if the clock breaks in just such a way that allows it to run in a different manner.
Any new experience is an addition of information to the brain — and the latin etymology of information is perfect because “informare” literally means forming/shaping something from the outside. Thus, human beings are made just so that their brains “register” information from their environment, which in turn, according to the character and the magnitude of that in-formation, changes the space of possibility (the “lunar landscape” from the image above) and shifts the usual paths taken across it by the system. This consequently changes the system’s identity. As i’ve already mentioned, this is not solely a physical matter, because the brain’s physical activity is also accompanied by a covariant conscious experience. I am like i am right now — my 1st person experiential character — because of how my inherited and very particular “house of cards” got further in-formed by my personal environment. As a result, my brain’s dynamic equilibrium is different from what i had at 16 years old, hence i now have a very different identity and different conscious experiences (more pessimism, aggressiveness, cautiousness, perhaps more intelligent actions, more linguistic representation and duller emotions, different goals, tastes, etc).
The thing is, bad experiences have a way of entering the human being and changing its equilibrium, leaving it with an enduring negative conscious experience. Some get so firmly lodged into the dynamic activity of the being, as compensatory processes (which are now part of “identity”), that trying to remove them would initially lead to an even greater loss of stability accompanied by worse conscious states. It’s known that people are reluctant/or cannot give up negative thinking (hence bad feelings and emotions) even tho they realize it has no benefits — that’s precisely because these have now become part of their beaten paths, their identity!
This explains the apparent paradox of people continuing with actions that subjectively feel bad — they’re part of an inner dynamical equilibrium!
How then could someone find a new pattern of dynamic equilibrium — change their lunar landscape and their usual paths across it? By the same principles they got where they are: either by exceptional (positive) experiences, or by micro interventions persistently nudging the system out of its present equilibrium towards one that’s marked by the aspired conscious qualities. And it’s hard work! One needs to be consistent without any immediate rewards. More so, in trying to exit your undesired equilibrium you are initially bound to feel exhaustion, anxiety and self-frustration (which is kinda what you’re attempting to do). This is why meditation is the hardest most simple thing you can attempt to do — even tho it involves a trivial task (focusing on the breath) it correspondingly means interrupting the normal attractor-walks that the mind takes, usually marked by erratic focus and constant thinking. Just like in any other natural physical system, you first need to put up a force/stress to defeat the status-quo stability — and the ensuing phase is one of transient instability, which implies a negative conscious experience. Yet with time you may be able to rearrange your interiority, inner patterns and their resulting equilibrium, and hopefully reach an enduring state of fulfilment. This is how belief and rituals of all sorts are working — from prayers, visualizations, chants and mantras, mindfulness, self-talk, coaching, psychoanalysis and the many kinds of cognitive therapy, hypnosis, distractions, short pauses and deep breaths to disrupt negative loops, etc. Unfortunately, most anxious or depressed people instead of making these kinds of positive interventions they keep reliving nasty experiences, reminding themselves their bad situation and reiterating “how bad life is” — it’s a kind of self-maintenance that is an aspect of the bad dynamical equilibrium itself.
I think that having this “schematic map to your own being” is freeing in itself (to a certain degree). But more importantly, it can make you understand that you can with some amount of dedication increase the degree of agency you have over your self: identity/experience. We will always desire positive states and flee bad ones, there’s no freedom in that — but leaving from this basic truth of positivity and negativity, we can always increase our intelligent behaviour around them. Life is fated with the “search” for this mastery, yet human beings are the only ones who are able to go about it in an awake and informed way.
The downside of this view is that it leaves a “mechanistic” aftertaste. This would be the nightmare for the 18th Century fathers of romanticism as it concerns the very soul of everything — our soul. In its defense i’d say that it’s not meant to be taken as reality, rather as an useful map that reveals some salient coarse features of the territory. The territory is definitely beyond the map, beyond its sketchy features, and beyond any subtler features too. It could be said to be “magic” in a way — how else could a piece of Existence be?
I think we can all take comfort in the facts of abstract logic (where a formal system cannot fully describe itself unless it also contradicts its premisses), or those of science (where you eventually remain without means to bridge the observed-observer asymmetry), or those of philosophy (where, as we attempt to define everything in terms of other things, we arrive in a situation where once there’s ‘nothing’ left that ‘something’ is not, the latter loses all meaning), or those of cognitive studies that point to the fact that the mind must involve some misrepresentation of its own/or the environment’s states to be able to work — it must have some flight of fancy to initiate action. Both existence and transcendence involve an irrational magic component, there’s no other way. Be in communion with that by refraining yourself from thinking you know reality, for once you do this it becomes a lie.
