Second thoughts seem to be a feature of my life. Not, I think, due to chronic indecision or a personality prone to regret, but because that is just the way my mind seems to work.
A thought bubbles up, seemingly from nowhere, and then I decide what to do with it. If it is interesting or important, I repeat it and start to play with it. If not, it goes away and my mind turns elsewhere.
Inside my head there is, it appears, a restaurant. A waiter bustles over and says “Today the kitchen proposes…”, and the customer decides whether to follow the recommendation or choose something else off the menu. Over time, the client has got wise to the chef’s repertoire and is able to wave the server away earlier in the process, before the list of specials is finished, sometimes before it starts. The latter takes this in good part, not (as far as I am aware) spitting in the soup. Proof, if it were needed, that my mind is not French.
Thinking this way is not a sign that I am odd (there are, to be sure, plenty of others). This is how science increasingly believes the human mind works. Neither is it a novel observation.
“Do not let the force of an impression when it first hits you knock you off your feet. Just say to it, ‘Hold on a moment, let me see who you are and what you represent. Let me put you to the test,’” wrote the philosopher Epictetus almost two thousand years ago.
Easier said than done, though. For we generally experience our thinking as being continuous, a single straight-through process. A thought arises and we think it. There is no choice involved. As far as we are aware.
But the mind, as the Stoic implies, is not a single system. It is a system of systems. Different bits do different jobs to the best of their abilities. There is a “thought generator” and a “thought accepter”. And then there is the bit which is aware of the process. I am the waiter, the customer, and the amused Parisian watching the interaction from behind the pages of Le Monde.
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom” is a quote attributed to the psychologist Viktor Frankl. Seeing the mind as a restaurant gives us a better chance at exercising this freedom. A mind with different stages in its thinking is a mind which can say “No”, a mind which can reject what is on offer, a mind which can think better thoughts. No need to get caught in rumination or worry, just a process which can be interrupted before it cascades into a chain reaction. Merely knowing this does not, of course, mean that we will instantly be able to do it, but it does suggest that we can try to do it. Practice, after all, makes perfect. If we choose.
But who would be making that choice? We don’t choose the thoughts which bubble up. They just appear in front of us. Do we choose to reject the thoughts we do? Or does something just decide to reject them? If the source of the thoughts themselves is opaque, is the source of our decision over how to treat them any better? A thought arises, followed by a decision. But where does that come from? Not that it always works anyway. Some thoughts just keep on coming. No matter how much we try to stop them.
In Men In Black, the character Rosenberg is revealed to be an alien (like, to be fair, most of the characters), his human form a vessel for a small creature running a control room in his head. Science fiction though it may be, it speaks to the way we see ourselves. There is something in there, running the show. Something that we can say is “us” at the most fundamental level.
We can identify the things we are, processes, systems and so on. But a thing? That’s more difficult. Sometimes one bit seems to be in charge, sometimes another. Each doing their own thing for their own reasons. Even our awareness seems to have a mind of its own, dragged hither and yon according to the latest stimulus, some (a sudden noise, for example) beyond our control, others (your mind daydreaming about dinner as you read this) beyond our choosing.
And, to be fair, it does seem to work. Generally, we do successfully navigate our way through life, doing what we need to do when we need to do it. Doing the right thing (much of the time) without necessarily choosing the right thing. It all just happens. Part of us supplies a narrative, and we call that “us”. Perhaps, seeing other people as defined physical entities, we developed names as a convenient reference for the totality of their systems and decided to apply the same logic to ourselves. Perhaps “we” are just a shorthand which has, well, got out of hand; practicality trumping precision.
We cannot see what is going on inside other people. Nor can we reliably see what is going on inside ourselves. We can point to a restaurant – it’s a building with tables and chairs. But a Restaurant, the activities of cooks and waiters, diners and dishwashers? That’s much harder. It still produces food, though.
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He is now also on Substack, where you are welcome to follow him.
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How we make choices is surely part of the way we have been raised. Parents are charged with forming our characters which entails getting to understand right from wrong, even at baby/toddler stage, and that, therefore, entails making decisions, otherwise known a choices.
It’s an important function of our minds, our souls, but, with respect, the above article is not enlightening in that respect. Stewart has written on this theme before, with similar arguments – it’s as if we cannot comprehend how we make choices. I would argue that we make choices – in the main, certainly with regard to serious, important issues – based on our fundamental beliefs about life and death. Apparently trivial matters, which may involve things like choosing a restaurant, may be irrelevant.
Having said that, I ate in a new Italian restaurant recently near where I live and while we were enjoying our meal, a large group of Muslims entered and were shown to their seats. A member of my party opined that the owner is a Muslim. Only later, did the thought occur to me that if Muslims were eating in that restaurant, presumably the food was Halal. So, I haven’t been back and I will go into ask the question at some point soon, because if it IS a fact that that restaurant is catering for Muslims by making all the food in the manner prescribed by their religion, I definitely won’t be returning. To me, that would be participating in the worship/culture of a false religion. Not permitted to Christians.
An interesting article, for which thanks.