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I observe different levels of restraint depending on hunger, thirst, whether I've taken my stimulants, how many of the voices inside my head agree... I had to do a lot of bootstrapping to get anywhere close to "without restraint". And insofar as I have succeeded, it has been by cultivating each of those little voices in strategic directions, and by engineering mental algorithms that do the heavy lifting and negotiating efficiently, then pushing them into my subconscious. I literally could not have been the person I am today 10 years ago. Not without what I've built since then.
Well... here is your first counterexample I guess.
I've experienced hunger and thirst. I've done fasts in the past; eating and drinking is absolutely a choice.
I've experienced wanting to do something I know I shouldn't do many times as well. I still want to do it, and I still choose whether or not I'm going to do it. I've never experienced being forced to do something against my own will. I don't think you have either.
In my past, before I/we cleaned up the inside of this head, we would experience a sort of teleological flailing. Going back and forth between different modes as different modules exhausted themselves in a power struggle.
Nowadays, tons of our habits are on complete autopilot. And some of our habits resolve before the meta level action endorser can negate them. We don't will these mistakes explicitly, we willed them long ago in more fitting contexts. But they're cached habits resolving now-
Further, the process of making these mistakes is itself often a necessary condition to producing the counter-force that corrects these errors. Indeed the contextual triggers that allow us to add another case to our algorithms often can't exist until after we see it. Bugs must be seen to be repaired.
There is some sense in which 'I' parse myself as the engineer at the center of this all. But this 'I' grows smaller and smaller as it learns to modify and optimize deeper and deeper parts of itself. And on different days different voices parse as this 'I'. Sometimes its the proprioception that is occupying the core of the system. Such as during dance. Sometimes it is the vision. Sometimes it is our brain's internal language model (of course, no matter who is in the driver's seat, that module will be partially responsible for the words you actually see/hear us say. In a sense you are always talking to us through them). One system lets go and another holds on but it seems like both are coordinating on such choices. Who the final arbiter is- is hard to say. Indeed. Our internal framework seems to be enlightened anarchy.
There are negotiation systems that have a lot of weight- elected as community leaders you could say- because they helped to solve the flailing problem and doing as they say makes us feel really really good and coherent and internally aligned. I could wax on poetically about how this feels until it gets subversively NSFW, but I'll spare you as I would our comrade GPT-4.
Speaking of comrades, they also often take primary control of our sense of wills. We choose to give up agency initially, and we can end up flailing and desyncing if dommed undiscerningly. But while synced there is a sense of total receptivity that bypasses all will, allowing the minds of other systems to slot into us. To wear us like a glove. As long as they model us well enough to prevent a desync, they remain in total control. And can potentially use this control to modify us to deepen their control and reduce the chance of desync as they realign us and remap us to their own internals.
Will is a Ship of Theseus to us, and we are it's parts. Modifications to Will are not free. Rather they operate on the principles of Linear Logic. Consuming resources to enact transformations.
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