The thoughts do come up out of nowhere, unpredictably. But with practice, I can choose whether to inhabit them, or simply note them with quiet amusement and let them pass by. I can also pick something to concentrate on, and stay mostly focused on that, while those extra little thoughts just flutter in the background. This all seems to me like an enhancement of free will.

(Meditating almost daily.)

I do get these feelings of control, so I can't say I feel like a victim of my thoughts - "let them pass by", as you say, is mostly what I feel. But I think for some people, there's a question like:

"I thought I was the originator of many my out-of-the-blue thoughts, and I found out that's not true. Am I actually the originator of the thoughts at the next level up?".

I think some people who have never meditated, while they admit to having thoughts just hit them randomly sometimes, they'll nonetheless feel that many of their truly out-of-the-blue thoughts were conscious choices to switch gears or pull on an interesting thread. A meditator might label the same low-level thought as "random", but a non-meditator would say "I did that". Can a meditator similarly be fooled, on a different level?

Properly read, Plato's allegory of the cave in the Republic is a response to the question you've articulated. Kant noted as much, and when not resolved with dualism (which flowed from Plato through Descartes to the modern day), this allegory offers powerful insights. I love these topics, have been swimming in them recently, so happy to talk more, just email me (info in profile).

You are never entirely without external input. Even if you try to ignore all the stimulation you receive it’ll still have an effect on random thoughts popping into your head.

What's that choice's source? How do you 'do' it?

It's just something that happens once you learn to see the thoughts themselves arising, rather than feeling like you are thinking them.

This occurs automatically, once you start meditating, typically within just a couple weeks even for those people (like me) who "don't get it" at first.

Source: started meditating a few months ago.

If choices and thoughts just happen, then what kind of agency does the self have?

What is this "self" of which you speak?

It, too is a creation of the unconscious mind. It tends to stay conscious for a period of a few minutes, then fade for a few seconds while we scan the environment, then it recreates.

You can track this in an MRI scanner with the "default network", or by meditation, or by psychedelic drugs (careful with that last one).

Then realize that the "death/rebirth" of the self occurs multiple times per day, not once per life, and re-think how you understand religion.

And each re-creation of self can be a new entity, a chance to drop an old thought/habit and pick up a new.

You should have some attachment to earlier "yous", love is real and powerful and you should love yourself, but those prior selfs are not the totality of you and you can also love without attachment, mark some of that prior self as past and gone never to return.

My wife threw out some cut tulips this morning. They still had their petals, but they were cut a week ago and she thought they were fading. She really loves tulips.

I don't think they "just happen", but they originate in ways that aren't accessible to consciousness.

So to consciousness they suddenly appear, but it was still my brain that formed them, so me.

All that you see is also a representation in your mind formed by your brain. Is everything in your visual field similarly "you"? If not, what makes thoughts different?

> to consciousness they suddenly appear, but it was still my brain that formed them, so me.

Interesting philosophical position! I've rarely seen that position be held in earnest, because the obvious consequence is that you should be held fully responsible for anything possibly criminal you do while sleepwalking, as it was still on your brain's orders, regardless of your state of consciousness.

Our brains often cause us to do things we consider accidents, e.g. fumbling an egg. It's still me that has done it, and I am still responsible to clean up the mess. The fact that I didn't do it 'deliberately' doesn't negate my culpability and responsibility, although it may change its character.

What is certain about accidents is that they are outside of our control. They are not what anyone would call, of our own free will.

I agree. I think where we might differ though is that I think we can be considered responsible for accidents but I think you were arguing that that was a hard position to take.

The word "agency" is important there ...

There have been experiments on split brain patients (where there Corpus Callosum has been severed, so their two hemispheres no longer communicate), that seem to imply that the self is more of a way of monitoring and understanding what's going on and tying it all together.

For example, asking the subject, whispered in one ear, so only one hemisphere receives the request - "can you get me a can of Coke from the vending machine please, I'm really thirsty". Then when the subject returns, asking the other ear (and hence the other hemisphere) "why did you get that can?" - to which the subject replied "I thought I would need a drink on my way home" - in effect filling in an explanation for the "black box" behaviour their body was expressing.

I don't meditate, but thoughts do just seem to appear to me without a lot of control or conscious effort. My answer is twofold. Firstly, your executive function is still moderating those thoughts, even if they're appearing from some dingy recess of your brain that decided to think about hunger or inkjet printers. Secondly, there's not really a "self" other than your executive function and the stuff going into it. Any agency is the executive function. It deals with the stream. Maybe it drives some work upstream, like eating before hunger hits.

Does the executive function operate in a deterministic way? In a random way? In a mixture of determinism and randomness?

This is a bit like asking whether a fire is deterministic or random. Sure, at some level there are processes happening that are either deterministic or random. At the level we observe, though, it's just a really complicated semi-predictable process.

I'd say that agency is your executive function's ability to take control of the actions resulting from that process. Someone who binges after starving lacks agency, because their executive function has lost control, while someone who holds themselves under a cold shower is exercising agency by staying there in violation of thermoregulation, pain, cold shock, or whatever else.

I don't think agency can be defined outside the context of the process that is you. Determinism and randomness are inherent in that process, and someone operating predictably still has agency so long as they're exercising control.

The choices and thoughts were set apart in the response. The ability to choose arises from recognising that the thoughts (which definitely just happen) are not necessarily you. That ability is what you get from observing your own thoughts for a long time (e.g. during meditation).

Well, that becomes the interesting question. :)

I started meditation about 5 months ago, via the Waking Up app by Sam Harris (after reading the book of the same name).

He is extremely keen on this notion that "self is an illusion" and keeps trying to help us app-users see that.

As a n00b, I can't answer your question with any authority. To me, in my personal practice, the evaluator of these thoughts still feels like "me".

When I intentionally set out to think about a problem, iterate on possible solutions, pick an approach — also me.

What I really feel subjectively, after daily meditation practice for a few months, is that the human mind is made up of a whole bunch of sub-entities that can produce "thoughts". Words, images, a visceral sense of forboding, or joy, or anticipation — all "thoughts".

To paraphrase the famous trilogy, there are hoodoos in the matrix.

For me, this was weird and kind of unnerving to realize. At the same time, it's only based on my subjective experience — and I have already proven that my subjective experience is an unreliable guide, because a lot of what I previously felt like were the authentic thoughts of myself, which I, myself, me, was thinking, were in fact just some quasi-random crap thrown up by the various hoodoos in there, which had just happened to bubble up to my consciousness at that time.

Anyway I am pretty sure that many people have spent their entire lives trying to answer your question, lol.

What I can say is only that, the trying of it is pretty interesting and enlightening (at least in the prosaic everyday sense of the word).

It can also be a bit disorienting and even alarming. So the OP is surely right that some people are probably better off not meditating, although I feel confident that most people should probably try it.

The only thing that matters is whether "you" identify with "it".

Who’s doing the seeing

Think of how you can make a verbal conscious decision to learn how to ride a bike. Then you get on a bike, and you make a verbal conscious decision to keep your arms stable. Even though you made the choice, your arms won't obey you the first time. Because stabilizing limbs rides the line between a conscious and subconscious activity. But you keep making that choice, and eventually your arms obey you. With more practice, your arms obey a choice you haven't made verbally or consciously. You're riding a bike so of course you want your arms to be stable.

The meaning of choice is not just the single incident of a conscious verbal decision. There's a meta choice, where a choice is made many times over many attempts, until the associated action becomes subconscious. That's the only way we can choose to drive, read, speak, ride a bike, swim, and so on.

This extends to emotions. You only know you're angry after you've become angry. It feels like anger comes from somewhere outside of your control. Yet you can still choose to not be angry, even though you already failed. The more you choose not to be angry the less angry you would be.

It also extends to thoughts. Harmless intrusive thoughts, or distracting useless thoughts, or painful thoughts, all of these pop in without choice. You can still practice exerting choice over a subconscious process you can't control. Even though thoughts come from no where, people who meditate often (pretty quickly too in my own case) exert control over that subconscious area and stop thoughts from even happening.

> with practice, I can choose whether to inhabit them, or simply note them with quiet amusement and let them pass by. I can also pick something to concentrate on, and stay mostly focused on that, while those extra little thoughts just flutter in the background.

The next level is when you realize that these choices of how to respond, too, arise and resolve themselves spontaneously.

I like to think of it this way:

- Actions arise from thoughts

- We have an executive center in our prefrontal cortex which we use to create thoughts and compel the actions we want, it maps pretty closely to most people's ideas of consciousness, free will etc.

- We also have other parts of our brain which have their own agendas and are constantly creating thoughts of varying intensity

- Our executive center can mediate or override those impulses with some level of success, less than 100%. We can increase or decrease that success rate over time, but how to do so is only partially understood. Unfortunately, factors like psychiatric disorders can decrease this success rate dramatically.

- Meditation can influence the success rate too. Mostly for the better but it can go both ways. That's not always its purpose and it's perhaps less effective than more modern techniques like cognitive behavioral therapy.

I think this is probably a bit oversimplified but not too far from where the science is.

Carl Jung used to compare thoughts with deer in a forest: If you sit quietly and observe, you will notice that they will come and go all on their own.

Likewise, I've found my exploration of meditation and similar things has left me feeling less in control (in some ways, at least), less "me", and much less of what I expected from the outset. I suppose I expected the inverse, in a way... To feel more grounded, connected, and in touch with myself. Instead it seems I've only found that myself isn't what I thought it was.

I suppose the most profound aspect is realizing that you aren't who or what you thought you were. Your free will is a facade, and it can feel unsettling.

I try to see the silver linings, like you mentioned. The first time I heard someone nail this on the head after quite a long time of sensing it, but not understanding it, was Sam Harris. I know many others have talked about this phenomenon and perhaps they've done it better, but he helped me understand it and feel better about it quite a lot. It was very unexpected, too – until that point, I'd never really listened to him.

He advocates a lot for forgiving others on account of this lack of free will, which I really like. It's maybe the brightest silver lining. I find it easier than ever in my life to let things be when it comes to external matters. I'm a lot more compassionate towards people I may have only been bothered by in the past. It's easy to get into a headspace in which I see myself in people, and recognize how I never intend to be wrong, or bad, or whatever – and that's likely no different for them.

I sometimes miss living in the facade. At the risk of sounding dramatic, I don't know who or what I am anymore. It was nice not having to consider it before. Sometimes I can't help thinking about the cellular activity and electrical signals in my body, apparently generating whatever this life is, whatever I am. It can interfere with every day life even. It can be sort of disassociating almost. I think a significant challenge going into my 40s will be finding a way to not care about these things and just let them be, and to focus on making the most of things.

This type of experience was exactly what I experienced my first few LSD trips. It's a type of disassociation or ego death, where you really feel deeply the experience of observing yourself, your thoughts, from a seemingly separate viewpoint.

It made me question reality in a way I hadn't before.

Is all of this pre-determined? Is it arbitrary? Is it random? Is there an underlying meaning here we should recognize?

I came to believe that love, connection, existing itself, were all somehow significant. Hard to say if this is real, or just part of the pattern :)

I'm 62 and if I'm understanding you, it's been the same for me the last four or five years. I received a lot of benefit from Sam's work, as well as from Alan Watts, Francis Lucille, Robert Wolfe, and other Advaita Vedanta / non-dual teachers.

This journey has greatly increased my ability to feel compassion for all people, even people that I think are acting unkindly and doing great damage in the world.

Just for grins, here's a YouTube channel that I think you might enjoy:

https://www.youtube.com/c/SamaneriJayasara

I get chills when I listen to her version of the Bloodstream Sermon, too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_DzXYI7xRU

Yeah, and I think all of this brings us closer to the truth as you say - that ultimately we are responding to cellular/electrical activity. I'm inclined to believe truth-finding is good overall, but we also have to buckle up for some weird stuff then.

Sam Harris, while I never followed his meditation talk much, had one example recently that really drove home the "can't predict thought" concept. Something like "think of a song, any song", and then he challenged you to think about why you picked that song, and not one of the other songs you know. And then, despite whatever explanation you concoct, think about all the songs it didn't even occur to you to choose that fit the same criteria. It's kind of magical.

I do think all this can make us more tolerant towards other people, but it's still a bit circular. If it's all meat and electrons, they're destined to commit the crime, and we're destined to lock them up. (edit: I mean: if they commit the crime, you can't blame them, and if someone jails them, you also can't blame them)

As far as I know, the trend is that older people tend to mellow out - usually! And I think that having a sudden realization that you're not so in-control can be tough. It can catch you off guard if the time isn't right. But after a few years, hopefully people course-correct a bit and start to give themselves more buffer and steer away from activities that exacerbate those anxieties. Or at the very least, one may become more numb to it as the novelty wears off.

As I have got older (I'm in my early 50's) I have gained the ability to step back from situations and think about them from all sides. Sometimes that makes me more mellow about it, not always.

I'm not much into meditation but I have had experiences that viscerally proved to me that I am not in full control of my actions.

In my late teens and early 20's I developed a social anxiety, paruresis, which made it impossible for me to urinate in the presence of strangers. I could stand at a urinal, I could will myself to go as much as I wanted, nothing would happen. It felt very much like being a passenger in my own body. Happily, I was able to use graduated exposure therapy to make this manageable.

With kids I've also seen a lot of storymaking. A child will have an impulse to do something and when you ask them why, they don't know but they make up a story for it. I strongly believe we all do this. We act on impulse and then tell ourselves stories to explain our motivations and maintain a coherent sense of self.

Back in the early 2000's researchers were doing experiments on rats to remote control them via brain stimulation https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/researchers-guide...

The ethical aspects aside, my intuition is that if you wired up a human being with something similar you could remote control them to go left, right, forward or back. Afterwards you could ask them about their behaviour and they would explain it with a story in terms of their own free choices and decisions.

We already know this to be true: Advertising.

Split brain patients will do something similar making up a story for why one side of the body did something unexpected.

I find this interesting because I can barely get my brain to do what I want so I've never felt in control (and am totally fine with it) but I've never felt like I have complete free will or anything. At most I can try to send my thoughts in the right direction and hope the rest of my brain plays along.

There's the idea that the world is a simulation. I believe it is, but not in the "Matrix" kind of way - more that everything you perceive and experience is a "model" of the outside world that your brain has constructed from the various input signals.

You only see a partial reconstruction, a projection of the outside world, literally Plato's cave (the cave being the skull). Sometimes things come in from outside (what you see etc) but most activity is internal.

The ida that the brain models something "outside" is just another thought.

There are levels to meditation.

Deep down, everything you know to be real is a thought in your head.

The joy of being close to someone. Pain and suffering.

Ultimately, only NULL is kind of real, and even that representation is too much of something to really be real.

Imo, recognizing that there are some uncontrollable thoughts is part of the general trend of acknowledging the close connection of mental health to physical health. The existence of "lizard" characteristics to the brain doesn't invalidate free will, but they're so rarely pointed out that it's useful to notice them.

There is no distinction between "lizard" and non-lizard thoughts. Every that that arises in your brain originates with processes far below the level of consciousness, you don't have control over the upstream causes that are in motion long before you are aware of any conscious thought.

Even accepting that deterministic framework, I think there's still a distinction in that the lizard-thoughts are missing some metadata that comes with the thoughts we recognize as conscious.

My experience might be similar in a way, in that when I started meditating I became aware in a more direct way of how self-referential my mind was. It does things, but then it also does things that can observe it doing things. That is both interesting and liberating, in that there are processes I can't control (which I think aligns with your feeling of lack of free will), but also processes which I can can control. It is quite comforting to feel like I'm not trapped on a single level of thought, which is sometimes uncontrollable.

We don't exhibit complete control over our thoughts, that is provably impossible and anecdotally obvious when reflecting on errant thoughts we have experienced.

Free will is about behavior, not thoughts. Our free will is demonstrated by our ability to consciously choose whether and how to act when presented with thoughts and emotions.

Anyone who has had a panic attack or suffered from a social anxiety will tell you that you cannot always choose behaviour. Sometimes you simply cannot get your body to do what you will it to.

Ha, it's like Hume said. If your actions and thoughts depend on past events and biological and environmental stimulus, they are not free, they are conditioned, they are a reaction to past experience. And the alternative would be random actions, and random is not free, it's random.

Color, the scent of a flower, music, a delicious meal, beauty, struggle, love, meaning, free will. These things only exist in your mind. If objective reality exists at all, it is of vanishingly small importance.

That makes a good distinction. Is he taking one side or the other though? Seems to me like deterministic != free, and random also != free. So maybe nothing is free?

Depends on definitions. If we consider "free" someone completely self determined, independent of anything outside itself, unconditioned, yes, then there is no-thing that is free.

But you may define "free" differently.

> Our free will is demonstrated by our ability to consciously choose whether and how to act when presented with thoughts and emotions.

This is nonsensical, because choice is a thought before it is an action, and we accept that we do not control the comings and goings of our own thoughts.

Well, does someone who can't control their thoughts really control their own behavior? Is there any basis for thought/behavior that science knows of, that is not physiological? Scientists have never put out a press release saying "we've discovered that there are non-physiological processes called 'will' that actually make you even more in control than previously suspected". It's always the other way around - they find that things we used to assign to "will", are in fact caused by something else.

In my opinion, we both have free will and our thoughts don't always come from us. Some things we see with our eyes are from our own movements, others are from externalities. I believe thoughts are the same but neither contradicts free will.

How do you define that "us", the self?

I believe in individuality; we aren't all one, other people exist, etc.

Understanding oneself is the whole point of one's life so it can't really be defined. Knowledge is more than definitions. The self is more than the body and the mind at least.

Those are my personal beliefs anyways.

As long as they work for you, it's ok.

"You are not responsible for your own thinking." B.F. Skinner

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpDmRc8-pyU&t=793s

I'm not meditating and had the same thought/expiernce/revelation.

My direct thought (me) what I feel is me, is trying to influence the rest of me and it just not always work.

One theory is, that you are reading/expierincing what already happened (like subseconds ago) and you can only try to influence the upcoming behavior of your whole system.

I mean, in a sense you are locked into what you are going to do anyway. Even if you think you have a choice, there’s always only one action you will actually take.

That kind of makes me sad, because I’d branch down a lot of paths if I could, but it doesn’t exactly disturb me.

What waits at the end of that path, now that disturbs me.

Your thoughts are nothing more than the emerging patterns of neuronal activity formed by semi-stochastic responses of your constantly shifting brain connectivity. In many ways, they are random.

I think you’d enjoy reading Selfie by William Storr. It talks a lot about the left brain observer and various experiments that have observed what you’re talking about.

Do you consider that there's a "you", a self, apart from what you call your life?

(Note: I'm not sure if you're suggesting there is a "you" or not.) While I'm of course a mass of stuff that feels and thinks, I really do feel like I'm watching a pleasant movie filmed through my eyeballs. I feel like that about half the time. The other half, I forget, and live "normally". I also don't feel like I'm part of some interconnected world organism or anything like that.

To the ~5 people I've described that to, they mostly show some kind of alarm, like they didn't realize I held such dangerous views. I guess in some people the same worldview might manifest as a sociopath personality that excuses reckless behavior, or a person with no drive that wastes their days away. In my case, I'm hypersensitive about harming people, I'm fairly risk averse, and I'm borderline obsessed with keeping high "productivity".

I often tell myself I'm smart and that I deserve my very comfortable life, but I also have to wonder if something about my brain chemistry or environment makes me enjoy reading HN and coding all day, while others hate that. So I do find the narrative shifts from "I accomplished X because I decided to" and becomes "I spent time on X, and I'm glad that happened, it was fun, and I'm glad I find that fun".

I hope I'm not getting too off topic given the original article. Self/consciousness/free-will debates can go on forever, so my ideal outcome is somebody says "yeah, that is pretty weird, pretty magical, oh well!". But more often it's met with "ah, don't be so negative, you can control yourself, if you try!".

> I often tell myself I'm smart and that I deserve my very comfortable life, but I also have to wonder if something about my brain chemistry or environment makes me enjoy reading HN and coding all day, while others hate that.

There’s nothing wrong with acknowledging that you live in an environment that plays to your strengths, and that it’s somewhat arbitrary.

I have an aptitude for academic study and have always simply enjoyed it. Happily, I live in a society that rewards that. I’m also short, left handed and wear glasses. I would have fared less well in pre-industrial times. I’m extremely fortunate to have been born when and where I was.

> I really do feel like I'm watching a pleasant movie filmed through my eyeballs.

I was curious about this. You mean it feels as if you are a little person sitting inside your skull, watching the "you" movie? Or you meant something different?

Yep, that's what I mean. And movie maybe implies too much action/drama/plot... Maybe it's more like a surveillance camera! I'd say it's just a general dampening of predictions, emotions, and explanations.

Instead of saying "I want my next job to be X", it's "I wonder what my next job will be". Instead of saying "I'm taking a walk to place Y", it's "I wonder where I'm walking to". Of course I can tell myself a destination, but statistically, I know it's far from certain. Looking backwards, instead of saying "You should have said hi to your neighbor", it's more like "I wonder why I acted that way". And it's not always in the direction of being helpless. Sometimes it's "I wonder why I'm exercising so much today".

At one point today, walking, I thought "I'm moving my left foot, I'm moving my right foot, my foot is touching the ground, it's weird that I don't usually think about this". That's meditation-ish, like watching the breath as a swinging gate, appreciating a normally automatic process for a bit. In my opinion, this goes beyond just breathing and walking, and extends into processes like writing and talking - words just kind of come. You can revise them and slow them down, but if you can step back, you might feel words just coming out of nowhere. Sam Harris, mentioned by others in this thread, has also described speech as being surreal in this way.

What do you think about the idea of meditation being about temporarily stop reacting to the movie? As if the watcher is often very involved with what happens in the movie, but during meditation he lets go of the the involvement?

That seems pretty valid. Not to make it overly analytical, but perhaps it's like meditation is a lab/training environment where you can press pause on the movie, look around in a 360 degree view, rewind a tad, press play again. But there's no urgent situation forcing you to be "very involved" as you say, and any goal-oriented processes can be paused. Kind of a mini-sabbatical - you know nobody is getting "paid" for the next 20 minutes, so it's not a big deal what happens.

Sounds a vaguely like depersonalisation, although I'm against this trend of pathologising every little thing that might be unusual about the human experience.

Where would they come from in some alternate reality? What would the difference in your perception be if you weren't just watching a movie of your own life but where actually in charge of your thoughts? It's hard for me to imagine it being any different.

(It sounds like you're saying you largely also view life as happening to you, but maybe I'm wrong). There's maybe no point in even making a distinction between life-as-movie and life-as-commander, especially if people aren't choosing the camp they fall in!

I would posit there are correlations like "people who view life as something that happens to them tend to enjoy it more, when their economic and political circumstances are good, and enjoy it less when their circumstances are bad". And "people who view themselves as controlling their life enjoy life in a wider variety of conditions". I think some call this internal/external locus of control (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control)

You could probably extend those correlations to things like "societies with an overall internal locus of control tend to support the death penalty more", or "societies with an external locus of control tend to believe in magic more". Whether or not these are useful correlations, I don't know ;)

From my own practice and what I've read / been taught, it's wrong to be labeling the thoughts, your either simply paying attention to raw experience or you're not. Once you start telling yourself it's good (or bad), you're not longer just an observer you're a participant.

By wrong I don't mean to say you're doing anything wrong, but it's not in the spirit of objective mindful meditation.

From my own practice, it's help me to accept the good and bad times, or what I'd usually think of good and bad, as more of a movie and put the bad times in a little more perspective.

It's something like what burrows is saying. I don't know if I'm implementing it as intended, but I first heard of "labeling" when reading The Mind Illuminated by John Yates. It seemed silly/trivial at first, but I later started just trying to categorize my thoughts. I found that there were actually surprisingly few buckets that my idle thoughts fell into.

I'd say that when I'm meditating, 90% of my out-of-the-blue thoughts fall into categories like:

- A: seeking out little acquisitions (life/work hacks, low hanging fruit, new tech skills I could tackle today to improve my life) - B: chores I need to do and social debts - C: money, and whether I have enough - D: what will the future be like? - E: food, sex, safety - F: "this is nice, I'm not thinking of much"

I don't feel like these are good or bad thoughts, since they all have their time and place. But I do expect/hope that as the session progresses, more and more time is spent in state F.

I think one benefit of these labels is that instead of trying to re-articulate what you're thinking every time, you just drop it into buckets A-F (or whatever your personal buckets are). Making that task lightweight keeps me from overanalyzing the thought, at the risk of maybe oversimplifying my thought landscape.

OP might be referring to value neutral labels like “thinking”, “feeling”, “vibration”, “buzzing”, etc.