Does free will exist? Do we have a choice?

[Like Ra]

Indeed. No one can make you do something you don't want to.

With some force... Or with some manipulations (not over long time, like you mentioned). Watching some skilful politicians (e.g. Mark Rutte from NL) is such an eye-opening! In some cases, NLP looks a like a miracle.

[sam_henry]

"Free will" was mentioned several times in many threads. Let's a have a dedicated one.

What are your thoughts on "free will" and  "free choice"?

I think the question should be do we want the choice?  Each has pros and cons.  There is a sort of subconscious idea to give up all free will I think.

[Like Ra]

Do We Have Free Will? with Robert Sapolsky & Neil deGrasse Tyson

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFg1ysJ1oUs


Very valid points...

[Max515]

I recommend the book:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determined..._Free_Will
I have it on paper. It's big!

[Like Ra]

Here's an interesting discussion on @bellmar's Discord.

So I've got a thing in my head rn, that I'll put it here for everyone else. So like, we all have these desires, and most of them don't actually come from "us" as in the thinking part of who we are. They come from idk, being hungry, aroused, cold, or warm. They're almost biological in nature. Some can be hyper specific, like wanting a particular type of food. But if we drill down on that, it turns out that it's actually our gut biome telling us what it's hungry for, and not even a desire that comes from our own body.

The important part is that we don't actually control these basic desires. We discover them within ourselves. We might want to want them. We might want to not want them. And maybe we have some conscious choice to what we want to want. We can reflect on that at least. We can prioritize them or try to not indulge it. But we can't change our desires on our whims. They're like raw facts about ourselves that we don't have an conscious control over.

So this is a really rough pass on Frankfurt's Theory of mind / free will, with some other stuff. Frankfurt thought that first order desires couldn't be changed. Second order desires could be, and we have free will when our actions align with the desire we will to be our effective desire. So if your actions and your desires align, in a thoughtful way, free will.

BUT, if you're in a suggestive state I can attach one desire to a different stimuli, however temporary it might be. I can redirect one first order desire's output (so to speak) to a different stimulus (input). I can take your horniness and attach it to socks. Suddenly, when you see socks, you get aroused. Stage tists have been doing this stuff forever, and therapists use it to great effect for variously things--trying to quit smoking, well, attach that desire to other stimulus, and the other thing might trick your subconscious into signaling the brain to make the feel-good chemicals. Do that enough, until it becomes a habit, and it might just stick.

So that's the setup. The payoff is this, I don't know if acting in a way that your desires align with your will actually falls under an exercise of free will. Plenty of experts in different fields would explicitly say hypnosis is a free-will defeating condition. Like can't testify in court levels of free will go byebye. But there's this little catch right there. If I have a second order, considered desire to want to be attracted to socks, and I use hypnosis to shift arousal to socks, and my will was that I wanted to want to be aroused by socks, then I've exercised free will, within the limits of Frankfurt's concept of it. I've changed how my brain works to make it give different outputs to inputs that I choose. I want to want to have bambi take control of our body and act upon first order desires that I normally have wants to avoid. I want her to do the degen things I'm not comfortable doing. So if bambi is in control, I exercised free will, but I've given it up at the same time.

which I love it, but then there's the problem of an infinite regression, right? So how the hell do I know if my want to want bambi's control is actually a second order desire, a desire I choose to want? What if it's actually a first order desire from some place of biology or subconscious the workings of which are opaque to me? Or, what if it's part of hypnotic conditioning? It has a source outside my own self. I can't see where these desires come from, and so I can't be sure that the first order desires I feel are mine, are actually mine. Even if I think upon them carefully, I can't be sure that my subconscious is not also involved in a subversion of my will.

The kick in the pants for me, is that I can't conceive of a single way that one might know themselves well enough to avoid the destruction of ego this might induce. My ego tells me, demands at me, that I'm in control, but nothing supports that claim, and a lot works against it. The ego's control seems to be the illusion.

This is where I can kinda chime in I think. Since it's pretty well studied that hypnosis only grants results you want on a conscious and subconscious level, then the question comes down to the essence of why you consent. For example, one might not be so open to bambi being dumb, but are super open to making socks sexual as per your example. Using the first order - second order merging, this listener can hear a file that suggests both being dumb and liking socks sexually, yet the listener can easily only take on the socks part.

If you read my philosophy I posted here ⁠bambi-philosophy
⁠
I sort of touch on that. Bambi will never truly be someone you don't want her to be. It's actually one of the reasons I think people purge and relapse a lot. Because a lot of the files they listen to probably tap into their desires but also offer a lot of things they do not desire so an unwaivering uncomfortableness washes over them after a certain breaking point. This is why imo hypnosis is only a stronger component of your life if you understand it at its core. Quite the opposite of placebo.

as for your touching on the topic of ego, it's an ultimately biased opinion of mine that hypnosis can't cause ego death. This sort of falls into my suggestion in my philosophy post about impulsive/addictive personalities. I don't think bambi files cause ego death in """weaker minds""" (used heavy quotes because it's not a professional way of saying it at all) I think it's a stronger impulsive side of the listener that causes a full dive into Bambi. If one lacks fulfillment in their life, Bambi will fill that hole. The less fulfilled OS is, the more Bambi there is in the OS, thus losing the tug-of-war so-to-speak with Bambi as a personality.

🙂‍↕️ 🙂‍↕️ I agree that suggestibility does not override sense of self, or moral beliefs. Hell, a command that is too odd might be mentally rejected out of hand. So hearing hypnosis that suggests something you don't want or consent to will not be acted upon.
However, a tist can always give an adjacent command, something less weird or less objectionable, one that moves a position one small step at a time. The combination of classic conditioning and hypnosis does shift positions, little by little.

So I'm not exactly concerned at the methods of changing first order desires. Hypnosis is useful here as long as you back away from extremes. If someone is attracted to legs or feet, but not socks, it might not be odd for them, if primed correctly, to visualize legs and feet first, to invoke that arousal and build it to a useful level. Once there, then connect through suggestions alone, feet, legs, and socks. Effectively, for as long as the suggestions lasts in their subconscious, the reaction to socks is at least similar to feet or legs. It's a parlor tick in so many ways. It'll fade. But it's useful int he context of classic conditioning. Repeat the process for several weeks (debatable and likely subject and change dependent), and there is no substantial difference in terms of behaviors and reaction to stimuli for that subject between an object of their arousal, and socks. From the perspective of the "I" that feels like it's in control of the body, I see socks, and I get horny. Therefore, I'm attracted to socks. While that is a post-hoc justification, all of our discoveries about our first order desires are post-hoc. We find out about them after the fact / as a result of it. We don't reason our way to our most basic preferences. We discover them.

But those basic desires don't always originate in us. Our food preferences are from microorganisms sending neurotransmitters into us. We can change those by eating different foods long enough. Hypnosis + conditioning is similar

I would say a large part of "free will" is accepting yourself rather than building a self. Which I think is this whole conversation distilled in a simple concept.

You know how some people will talk about not being happy with themselves and then one day a "switch flipped" in their head and stuff started clicking for change? To me that's on a lesser level a self-actualized hypnosis over time. Or more specifically it's a great desire overriding habits.

I don't see much of a difference between someone who has the strength to self-actualize change and someone who seeks a hypnotist for it. The end goal is the same. One is just brute forced over time while the other is more targeted.

As someone who's been taking on kink for most of my life, something I am quite keen on is how an idea can be an open door into a larger house of ideas. Had I not initially expressed interest in rope, I wouldn't have ever ended up at Bambi. The domino effect of thrill seeking got me here. I don't think that comes from a different place than hypnotic suggestion slowly changing behavior over time.

Do I think the person who doesn't like the dumb part of a file but liked the socks part could eventually be convinced to like the dumb part? That depends on the person. Because I am aware of my desires (harkening back to the critical thinking and open mindedness I talked about in ⁠moist-mess ) it wouldn't work on me but it would definitely work on, say, an unsuspecting subject. This touches on the idea of nonconsensual hypnosis though. Which a lot of people poke at BS for having when imo it doesn't.

I did mention "destruction" which "ego death" , hmm I find that to be an overly loaded term, when I mean something closer to "ego-loss."

Within the realization one's motives may not or do not originate within themselves, there can be a moment of experiencing the existential sublime, where the boundaries between the person and the world are shown to be permeable. It's not merely the world shaping them as they shape the world, although that is part. It is more fundamental, perhaps even Kantian transcendental, being derivable a priori. The "I" they thought exists, doesn't. The thing that they believe to be them is a bundle of electric jell-o hallucinating a world from each time it's neuron tendrils bump into something--or send a signal they believe means that. Their own experiences of their basic desires cannot be trusted to an Empirical investigation, because the unconscious portions of their mind is opaque to their observations, and their discovery of desires is all post-hoc. Any sense of self they bring to the experience of self has to be assumed because it must exist, like Kant argued space and time must exist a priori. From before any evidence of the self, one must assume that a container of some kind we call the "self" exists in order to hold the bundle of features we ascribe to the self. This is what I called "destruction of ego", but might be better described as "ego-loss." The stripping down of the high wall of separation between the "me" and the "world".

If I can never be sure where first order desire comes from, then I can never be certain of my second order. There must be some degree of preference in order to from second order desires, which might be a first order, of which origin I can never be sure. Hypnosis might make it easier to doubt first order desires. The kick is that no amount of self-knowledge can stop this process because it's actually self-knowledge that drives it, as the unconscious make perfect self-knowledge impossible.
I think Frankfurt would agree to some degree about free will. It's not so much how the actions and the will align, but that they do. So one might observe actions first, and then choose to accept them as your will, or the pattern of them. I'm not sure that would be commonly accepted by what people mean, but I can see it.

Overall, I think people do tend to overestimate their own mental resilience, and I think they are far more plastic than any of us want to admit. Our egos fight to keep the walls up, so to speak.

this is an intersection in which we disagree I think. But only because I've never witnessed hypnosis causing someone to kill their ego. I typically only see that in people who experience strong but positive trips from appropriate dosages of hallucinogens like LSD. But I assume that's why you opted for using different language from "ego death" because you're not really tapping into something that severe. You're tapping into temporary "power outages" I suppose.

There are people who take drugs and then do hypnosis though and that's a totally different subject entirely. Because it's not absurd, for example, for someone to get absolutely toasted with weed, and then engage in some specific kinds of hypno, and experience at least a temporary loss of the ego.

I feel like the reason we disagree though is because loss of ego tends to come with a collapse on the self. Where the self just stops mattering to the person that loses their ego. In favor of a bigger picture. And I have never seen or read about hypnosis doing that for anyone. Hypnosis is largely self serving
(if you wanna talk about how some people can gain hallucinations from hypnosis due to pre-developed cognition quirks, we can though)

I'm not saying there is a casual relationship between hypnosis and doubt of the experiential self. I'm not saying much about hypnosis at all, really. It's more about the role the subconscious portions of the mind play in introducing significant doubt. It might seem I'm making claims about hypnosis, but it's more that it's a kick in the pants to me, because I cannot resolve this issue, especially when hypnosis introduces even more doubt about the authenticity of what should be "raw facts" about my person. Hypnosis is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition, but in this/my case, it is a catalyst or accelerant, if you will, because it can create the right mental environment for conditioning, which very much does aim at creating specific responses to specific stimuli.

Anyways, i'll take a read though this all again later, with fresher eyes, if my brain will let me

oh i completely misunderstood your intent.
okay okay so basically you're wrestling with the concept of the shit you're into being pre-conceived and not something you chose
(is this the part where I talk about how the actions of our ancestors through history have unintended adverse affects on generations after through traumatic creation of instinct?)