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Wednesday, September 02, 2015

Fiction/Personality Suits.

Build a Habit-Robot in your Brain | Scott Adams Blog: "We humans think of ourselves as single entities because our bodies make each of us look like one person. I tried to maintain that illusion for most of my life and have finally released it. Now I accept that I am lots of personalities and I cycle through them during the day according to a schedule I do not set. 

When my body chemistry makes me confident and ambitious, I’m that guy. When my body chemistry goes in another direction, I’m another person for awhile. But those personalities are the average of what is going on in my mind at any time. And thinking of myself as the average of my mind’s competing forces was not useful to me.  

 My current model for what I call my “self” is that my mind is like a riot at an insane asylum. 

Luckily, one of the inmates was wrongly committed. That guy has the job of trying to get the real lunatics under control before the body that supports all of them does something dumb. In my model, if the other patients are calm, the lone voice of reason can dominate the situation. It knows how to avoid the more dangerous patients and coerce the gullible ones. It makes deals. It builds alliances. It does what it can to assert itself as the only sane voice in a building full of irrational actors.  

 But that only works when the other patients are relatively calm. If any of them gets worked up, they are larger than the tiny rational voice and overpower it. Where some of you see free will in this scenario, I see math. If the crazy players in my head outnumber the rational part of my mind, they win.

...You need a robot army in your brain to help your rational player when the crazy parts of your mind start to riot. You can build your robots as “habits” so you can call upon them when needed.  Your tiny rational voice might not have the power to overcome a hospital full of lunatics. But your robot army (the habits you engineered) can dispatch them easily. Get yourself some mental robots by building habits."


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