Forgive me. As you know, my degree is in Psychology and I find the brain as fascinating as space. They also look similar under certain procedures.
By the same token, no one can make you do anything. There are people who will do things and then blame others for what they did, sometimes in a form of manipulation and sometimes because they truly believe others control them.
Sometimes there’s nothing to fear but fear itself.
Speaking for myself,
Way back in younger days and much tougher times for me,
the best single piece of counseling advice I can remember is the question:
What Will You Be Present To?
It’s a great question and became a background mantra. 
We can’t control ourselves, but we can work with ourselves, recognizing our priorities and focusing on enabling that, doing the best we can with what we have, and getting back up when ya get knocked down. (of course, I was a healthy & white so getting up was easier than for many others, still it’s what this particular body and mind experienced. What I have.
We can influence and enlighten our behavior.
It’s one reason why getting in touch with your body on a deeper than “mechanistic” level is important. Why would it be important? Because having an active awareness of your biology empowers your efforts to modify the outcomes of behavior. Beyond that, appreciating your connection to other creatures on a visceral level, can’t do anything but help a person’s sense of self, and belonging.
Back to controlling our emotions
There’s also dealing with one’s “expectations”,
the germ of most anger -
unrequited expectations,
in one way or another.
Exactly. We are not Vulcans, but we can influence the neurotransmitters in our brain. Without using medication, meditation, deep breathing, and other relaxation techniques in a different environment can help. Then of course if none of that helps there is submersion therapy and other like therapies, but I wouldn’t want submersion therapy personally. Then there is medication or a combination of meds and the techniques mentioned.
It’s not wrong to talk about psychology or neurology, but I’m a computer programmer, so I don’t claim expertise. Hopefully I’ve gained some wisdom in my decades. I try to stick my personal experience, whatever I’ve heard that has helped me.
I think it does since it’s not saying what you think it does.
That said the notion we choose our emotions isn’t really the case. Everything that we do is the result of tons of cause and effects that we can’t really control or know. Even the reasons we want something aren’t entirely known. So to suggest you can choose how you feel implies some sort of free will absent all other factors which isn’t the case.
New information and practices and influence and shape you, sure, and I think they mistake that for being able to choose emotions (even though it’s just the practice and not them). Though trying to explain that no matter what they think their emotions are a choice gets me nowhere, especially since they argue personal experience.
Far as I know I can’t observe subjective experiences.
That’s just it though, our brains are like a computer. (key word is ‘like’)
The analogy doesn’t work for me. I don’t have the computer code to debug our brains. Richard Carrier uses the analogy when talking about religion, but he says it’s like and old computer from 1987 and when you boot it up, you have to also startup a bunch of patches and sometimes things still don’t work right. I feel like that some days.
Richard Carrier isn’t wrong, but I don’t know if it’s like a Commodore.
Isn’t that like the number one myth neuroscientists have to keep correcting people on, that our brains aren’t like a computer.
Though from what I have read on neuroscience and other things in psychology we don’t control how we feel or what we like, find convincing, etc etc. Choice seems to be an illusion, but we can influence the process with additional information and practices or conditioning. Sort of like giving more data to work with.
But if you trace it all the way back you’ll end up finding that it’s just so. Like figuring what you like what you like. You can list the reasons why but if you question why you like that you’ll end up with “you just do”.
There just doesn’t seem to be a reason to believe in the free will people on that forum seem to suggest is a thing. If anything the fact they’re all on there is sorta proof of my case, they all come from spiritual backgrounds and so tend to be rather prone to such things.
This maybe true, but we influence the neurology in our brains. It’s sort of like black coffee. It can be an acquire taste, but if necessary, you can convince yourself it’s not so bad.
This is what I said before.
When you “trace it back” you get to your childhood, and in infancy you didn’t have the ability to alter your processes and then there’s what you were born with. You have to work with what you are, and you aren’t a blank slate.
But even that convincing yourself it’s not so bad is rooted in other things. Like…the arguments for some sort of agency or free will fall apart when you pull the thread back far enough.
Either things are determined by cause and effect, in which case you don’t have a choice. Or it’s random in which case you have no choice. Unless one implies they make a choice that was deliberate and yet not based on factors, which would be impossible as being deliberate means you are considering factors. Even if they say they made a choice based on nothing then it was random and not a choice.
No matter how you slice it free will doesn’t make sense.
I agree there is no fee will, but I disagree with what you do with that. “Choice” is still a concept that is useful for being human. It can’t be that everything is determined, no free will, and everything is random. It can’t be that everything is random, and we live for 80 years and remember the past and can make educated guesses about the future.
I can agree that the concept of choice is useful even if it’s not a free one. It’s like assuming you’ll live to old age, helps you plan things out and prepare rather than just fly by the seat of your pants.
However, if the chemical imbalance is bad, then you can’t just convince yourself it’s not so bad. Sometimes the imbalance need medication and/or counseling. So, it’s not that simple.
For the record, I never said anything about free will. I did comment on where or not we have control of our emotions, but I never once said anything about free will.
Right but that is still deterministic, my point is against free will not whether convincing someone will work or not.
My point is regarding free will though.
No, it’s treating an illness, not deterministic. One can’t help it when they are sick and that is my point.
Free will or not, we should help people who are struggling with their thoughts and emotions.
It being an illness is being deterministic since the illness is the cause of it. I know they can’t help it, I’m not saying they can.
But I digress, my main point, albeit somewhat muddy was just to get a sense of the dude and the site overall. I’ve shared stuff from it like this:
And yet when I tried to ask him about this stuff on the forum he just evades all my questions about it. Even the connected one about people lying to themselves, I got nothing from him. It just let to one deflection after another. It just felt weird, laying out all my reasoning for why he might be mistaken and then just getting some random book recommendation or other.
I guess I’m wondering, in general, if I’m crazy for thinking something is off and just not paying him any mind. The vibe on there seemed like “we are open minded but also not willing to rule things out or label things as wrong, there aren’t many truths, it’s a matter of perspective” which to me sounds like playing at being questioners and seeking to know while not actually doing the work of it.
I’m not denying that something ca be useful but be false, as them seeming to think they can choose their emotions might be (can’t really test it and taking their word for it isn’t proof just their say so), but still…