So I want to wrap three separate posts into one commentary, because they each take a different perspective on the same set of problems. The first is Doug Belshaw's reflections on understanding ourselves. Here he considers the implications of "'unhooking' from thoughts. You stop treating them as literal truths or commands." In other words, "observing that the thought is just language, just noise, passing through awareness... it doesn't have to direct your next thought or action." In a similar manner, Carlo Iacono writes, "There is no uncontaminated source. The self that seems to speak is itself a construction, built from materials that arrived from elsewhere, assembled by processes you don't control and can't fully access." As he notes, none of this is new. What is new is the perspective from neuroscience that actually makes sense of this perspective. As Rachel Barr writes, "The past shapes us, but shaping is not the same as puppeteering... Brains are neither pure dice nor pure clockwork; they sit somewhere in between."
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