I have made of lot of choices in my life and most of them have never really felt like a choice. So why is that? We could get into the whole free will debate if we wanted by as we know from the uncertainty principle even if we don’t have free will we would never know it so let’s pretend we do for a minute. Is everything we do in life a choice and how do we make them?

Well it seems to me that we are born as knowledge sponges sucking up everything we can from grand tidbits of wisdom to a lot of smelly gunk many would rather avoid. And like most smelly gunk it colours us forever. Because let’s face it there is no way to wash out your brain despite what certain scifi/horror genres would tell us. And even if we could wash out our brains would it really matter? Wouldn’t we lose all the wisdom with the gunk?

Ignoring that line of thought for a moment let us move back to the idea of how we learn and thereby uncover one kernel of how we make choices. All of our senses are constantly inputting information into our brain, much of it seems to be chucked out but a lot of it gets imprinted on long term memory. But is it more than that? What does inputting information mean? It means electrical signals spark chemical reactions that activate all sorts of material floating around in our bodies and those signals are sent all over sometimes causing our body to produce one product or another. Of course when I say our body I should really point out that ‘our body’ is nothing more than a colony of cells each with their own needs and not always working in unison for the benefit of the rest. But I digress once again. To oversimplify we are sponges for knowledge and that can be a double edged sword.

Our brains and bodies can store misinformation, in fact contradictory information without too much trouble, possibly because our brains are not just one thing but at least five biological entities struggling to get their message ahead of the rest. So since we can store and recall incorrect information and contradictory information and just plainly we will never have perfect information how do we make choices? Is it a best guess algorithm of the brain/body parts? Doesn’t that make you feel kind of sad? The best we can do is a best guess. Sure all kinds of things are knowable if you set limitations on the knowledge but in the end nothing is certain.

So there we go making choices, with age we hope better choices. Why with age? Well quite simply the old you are the more information you have absorbed which means the more likelihood of interpreting a more likely result from any action/behaviour. Notice I said more likely not likely and far from perfect. Just because you have more life experience does not mean you are going to interpret any of it correctly, remember that whole probably of holding onto contradiction and inaccurate info. Worse if we start with inaccurate info it forever colours how we interpret any future information. Especially we our inaccurate information claims to always be right no matter what (take that faith). Of course that is often the most pleasing information to our lazy brains. What think and burn energy when I can just laze about and watch my body burn another heretic/Armenian/Jew/homosexual/anybody I am told to/feel like?

There is another thing, letting other people lead us is a choice. Sadly it’s an easy choice because we can go back into lazy mode. Is it important to think about our choices? What does thinking about our choices do for us? Perhaps it gives us a chance to re-evaluation who we are, what we have done and where and who we want to be. All those things seem nice and probably provide us with some benefits. But then we can over think and become paralyzed with inaction. I am going to leave that to a deeper discussion another time.

Now let us take a moment to consider what people tell me are complicated/hard choices. Like being the first one to stand up to an established order of things (i.e. to stand up to a large group of people/society that thinks their way of living is right and feel the need to force it on the rest of us). What if standing up to the established order means putting your life/career/welfare on the line. We all want to live...well mostly, except in our darker moments or when we are in constant pain/suffering of one type or another and have given up or are ready to give up.  So the choice between living and living with whatever principles we have come up with becomes our new choice. Most people in that situation choose to live. That means denouncing, denying, hiding, fitting in, or actively participating in whatever goes against our chosen principles. By principles I mean the ideas/actions/behaviours we have chosen to try to live by, be they inclusive or exclusive, self focused or other focused or anything in between or around. (I am sure you would all love it if I got more specific right about now, or maybe ten blog posts ago well tough). Anyway I just did not want people to think I was not considering the ‘hard choices’ we face. But in truth those are not hard choices at all. We simply have not admitted to ourselves that living or living well (happier?) is a higher priority than standing up for or against something. That goes back to the brain being able to hold contradiction and the suffering it goes through when faced with that contradiction in an active manner.

It is easy to say life is complicated or that our brains are complicated, and perhaps those things are. But it seems like we add complication that is unnecessary by not bothering to consider a touch of introspection or at least some self honesty. Ah but you say how can we be honest to ourselves if our brains can hold inaccurate, inconsistent and contradictory information. Well poop, maybe we can’t but let us not let the perfect be the enemy of the good right?

Maybe I should touch on emotion. It’s a nice buzz word we use when we want to divest ourselves of responsibility (a topic for another day). But emotion like anything else that goes on is just another thought, albeit perhaps not as conscious and/or controllable by one area of the brain over another, especially if we don’t bother to train ourselves a little to not necessarily control but observe and be aware of the ‘emotional’ part of the brain (btw I have a sneaking suspicion that what we think is the emotional area/process of the brain and the conscious parts of the brain are probably far from it). Observation and awareness might let us recognize when it is getting harder to think in an introspective/empathic manner. On second thought maybe it would have been best to leave emotion lie.

So let us review, whether we actually have ‘choice’/free will or not is unknowable. But what we do can harm, help or be neutral to others (probably more gray in there but now my brain is lazy). So what do we do? As with anything we do what we want, and others will do the same. But it might be a lot sweeter if we all made choices that were not so thoughtless and painful to others, that we might find ways to fulfill our needs that are not so harmful. And that usually means thinking about what we are going to do, i.e. a bit of introspection, how we are going to behave and what we need or want before muscling out there like a bull in a china shop. But that process in of itself is going to suck up a bunch of time and a lot of energy and can get away from us. And then if we don’t figure out what are the priorities in our lives we are going to keep stumbling through and often blame the world for not making us happy (happiness now there is a huge area of discussion I will leave alone for now). Of course there are those choices that put us at risk- how do we deal with those? And let us not forget the impact of emotion and laziness in giving our choices over to others. So yeah what is the point? Think before you act? Be a little introspective from time to time? Plan? Consider others when considering oneself? Figure out when our emotions are getting involved and affecting your decisions? Try to identify your actually needs and not just what tv/religion/society at large (who are all trapped in the same mess) tell you they are, i.e. try not to give into the lazy mind? Try to be the person you want to be, but first figure out what that is so you don’t chew yourself out when those annoying contradictions you hold are shoved in your face by real life events? I am not sure. You pick or make up your own.