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I’m Crazy You’re Crazy
Call the whole thing off?
It’s taken me perhaps longer than most to figure out that I’m crazy, but looking back over my behavior of multiple decades it’s a hard conclusion to deny.
Those of us who don’t believe in reincarnation or an afterlife have to recognize that our egos are developed in a single pass through existence, one filled with the perception of chosen branching points, where our perception of choice may or may not reflect reality.
The more I look at it, the more I find myself agreeing with the “no free will” crowd, which posits that we’re all sitting with plastic Playskool steering wheels, imagining something called an “I” is steering our 100 or 200 pounds of stuff about the universe, when the reality is that “I” is some sort of patched on entity we dream up in order to turn our sensory jumble into things that happen to it, and turn our actions into things it planned.
In short, our brains and bodies do stuff, and our brains create an “I” which explains the things our brains and bodies do. Sure, our brains do stuff based on past experiences, instincts, and sensory input, but that’s not the same as thinking we did things for the particular reasons we imagine. The “hungry judge effect” is named after a study of parole decisions in an Israeli courtroom before and after mealtime. Judges were more…
