A couple of times just today, the topic of "knowing the future" has come up, which we all likely understand, it is not possible. There are always uncertainties. However, a lot of people believe that they know themselves and as such, think that they are able to know the way they are going to behave in certain conditions.
In one of the conversation, there was the common statement "it could be worse", often followed by an example of something judged "worse" by the person. For instance, someone could have an illness and yes, it could be worse, and they could have terminal cancer instead, but the trouble is that we each have to live our own experience. We can't actually compare ourselves to the conditions of someone else, because we can never know if it is actually objectively worse.
I know people who have thanked their terminal cancer for giving them the push to start living a life. I also know people who have fallen into terrible depressions from it. But then, I know people who have fallen into terrible depressions because they are unhappy in with their working conditions. The "conditions" might be able to be ranked, but the level of depression, the individual experience, cannot.
But, we also seem to think that we know how we are going to be in various conditions, even if we haven't experienced them. And this is what leads to the "If I had...I would..." kinds of statements, where while we feel we are accurate in our appraisal, there is very little chance of actually knowing what we would do, given the conditions.
To give an extreme example, many people seem to believe that if they were in 1930s Germany, they wouldn't have sided with the Nazis, no matter what threats against them or their family were made. However, the vast majority of 1930s Germany did side with the Nazis, because under those particular conditions, that was the general response. Until we experience it firsthand with the resources they had available, we don't actually know how we are going to react.
A less extreme but more common example is the "If I won the lottery, I would..." statements, where most people believe that they would be smart with the money, spending wisely and investing well, so that it would last for generations. However again, the general behavior of the average winner tells a different story, with the more extreme examples of people winning millions and being destitute a couple years later, often in a worse off position than before they won.
We never know.
I have often heard the "It could be worse" statements throughout my life and it has been common since the stroke, from those who happen to know about it. And often, they are also full of advice as to what they would do if they were in a similar position. But, as far as I can tell, due to the variability of post-stroke implications, no one can really be in the same situation - let alone someone who has no experience of it.
For instance, I was talking to a psychologist today about how I don't feel like me. I think this is because normally as we change through life, there is a progression, there are experiences that lead from one step to the next, walking us along the path in a relatively orderly line. However, for me at least, it feels like one moment I was on that path, the next I was in the woods, in someone else's body and mind.
Do you know what that feels like?
Probably not.
You can imagine it and think you have captured it accurately, but it is unlikely to be remotely close to my experience. And then, there is a complication because while I am in that other person's experience, they have no track record, no history, no memories. Instead, they have a ghost of who I was sitting there on the shoulder, like a schizophrenic conscience, which doesn't know anything related to the person it is advising. Like a career consultant who doesn't have any background on who they are consulting, and just randomly guessing at skills, abilities and personality.
Yet, even though we don't know what we would actually be like under certain conditions, we still believe that we can predict our behavior, based on past behaviors, even though they might not translate well into a different set of conditions. And, because we don't know how we are going to be influenced by a particular event, what we have done in the past might not be suitable at all, because it no longer applies.
As I was saying to the psychologist, even though I am "pretty aware" of the way the brain works, our habits and even reflective of own behaviors, it wasn't until I lost access to the subconscious automation that I realized how much was outside of my awareness. Now, I knew this intellectually prior to the stroke, but not at a practical level and until it happened, I thought I had more control and paid more attention than I actually was.
Try this.
Count to ten on your fingers with a smooth rhythm, opening each finger as you count and when you get to ten, close your hands and start again. Keep repeating it and while doing so;
Rewrite the sentence correctly:
I walk to the shop to bought bread.
Rewrite it another way.
Solve the simple math problem:
14 x 17 / 3 =
How is your counting rhythm going?
It isn't incredibly hard, but it isn't easy either.
Now, do that for the way you look at the world, where you only get to work with what you can notice and process in your conscious awareness. There is no intuition based on past experience and no feelings arising based on all of the micro signals your body is continually absorbing and categorizing to make sense of your world. It is a bit like putting on tunnel-vision glasses, and then playing football - without peripheral vision, it is very hard to follow the flow of the game.
And, while me illustrating some of this for you might make you feel like you can image what it is like, you can't unless you have actually experienced it. Even playing football with tunnel vision, without trying it, you don't know how many times you are going to be out of position, or get hit in the face. And, what end up happening is that in order to have "control", your own movements will likely get smaller and more conservative, because you will soon learn that you can't tap the ball on into open space, because you don't have a sense for where that open space is fast enough.
While I have been putting this through the lens of my own experience, we all believe that we think we know what we would be like under conditions that we have never experienced. Yet, we never seem to consider how we would be affected by the conditions themselves, how we would be influenced. Our experience changes us, so "who we are" right now, is not who we are if we have ten million dollars in the bank, or who we are if our family's lives are threatened by a violent regime.
We are all constantly changing, yet because there are those steps of progression and the changes are incremental, with many being so slight we don't even notice, it can feel like we are the same person. Even when we look in the mirror a decade or two later and can see the change, we also can see how we got there, as there is at least a sense of that history.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
George Santayana
What happens when we no longer have access to a history of ourselves?
We think we know ourselves because of that history, but history is filled with just how wrong we have been. So, why do we still believe we know what we would do in the future?
We have all said;
I would never...
And made liars of ourselves .
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]