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.