Self and Ego pt.3
Hey team, I recently reread some of my old posts on self and ego, and I wanted to write a follow-up to reflect my current, more evolved understanding. My knowledge and realizations have grown since I wrote those original posts last summer. My most recent book, Determined: The Science of Life Without Free Will by Dr. Robert Sapolsky, discusses at length how free will is nothing but a post-hoc (after the fact) illusion of our underlying biology doing what it would do under specific circumstances. To put it another way: our behaviors, encompassing every action we take, are merely our body's reactions (outputs) to specific stimuli (inputs). These reactions are established by innate sensitivities and further conditioned and rewired over time by everything external to us (parents, diet, lifestyle, traumas, education, etc.). This challenges the illusion of the self as a person in the driver's seat, solely in control of our actions and separate from the all-encompassing factors that sh...