Hmm.. I’m torn because on the one hand, you’re definitely correct that a non-trivial amount of our lives is subconscious, which is different from auto-pilot in my pedantic opinion.

However, anecdotally I’ve found that whether you think you can do something or whether you think you cannot—you are correct. That is to say, I feel like admitting to the biological truth actually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy which causes me to fall to my biological default.

However, if I reject that biological “truth”, I will more often find myself empowered by the notion that I can do anything I set my mind to, whether it be drugs or going for a run.

It’s the classic “mind over matter” phenomenon. Your fundamental beliefs can override your biological defaults, so I think it’s very important to regulate and review your beliefs.

I think you're totally missing the point. The point is that most of your actual lived life is simply stimulus and response. We actually have an extremely limited capacity for making reasoned choices - we just don't have the mental energy. So instead we learn to respond in a certain way to a certain stimulus (habit).

Here's an example from my life: I used to go the gym every Wednesday night after work. Several times over the course of this habit, I realized at the end of a long day that I would be better off going home and getting some rest, and decided to go home instead. In nearly every single instance I still drove to the gym, even though I had decided to go home. Because I was on auto-pilot. If we're talking about willpower, I would have say that it was my lack of willpower that led me to going to the gym and working out that day.

What you're talking about is a kind of willpower, which funnily enough has a biological basis also. Genetics seems to play a role, as do many medications. The marshmallow test seems to show willpower largely stays the same over 4 decades. Ozempic also seems to show you can artificially induce it. It's not mind over matter, it's having a mind primed to do it in the first place. It won't be as easily taught to someone who grabs the marshmallow instantly as a preschooler. We also seem to be able to induce it these days with ozempic, which is fascinating.

I don't think Ozempic operates on willpower... it slows your digestion process, which makes you feel fuller longer and can make you incredibly ill if you overeat.

> 99% of our life we are on autopilot, driven by our habits engaged as response to sensory and internal stimuli.

This is such a critical insight, and over the years it was eye opening to realize gradually how much I judged myself for factors that I clearly cannot control. Which is not to say that I’m helpless, but more interested now in focusing on systemic factors that directly influence automatic behaviors.

Judgement is such a major cultural response to addiction, and also happens to be one of the primary impulses that feeds it. Addicts often turn to their drug of choice to feel relief from the shame…of their addiction to their drug of choice.

> I recommend the book "The Biology of Desire" by Marc Lewis, an ex cocaine addict turned neuroscientist.

Adding this to my reading list. In a similar category, Anna Lembke is a psychiatrist and addiction specialist who wrote a book titled “Dopamine Nation” that I found worth reading.

You say we do not choose 99% of our actions, but then you say that we are on autopilot. This is gonna blow your mind now: we are our brain, so if we're on autopilot we're making those decisions.

My point is: your distinction is meaningless.

Your point flies in the face of decades of evidence in the field of cognitive psychology.

Our brain is not defined as "that which makes decisions". Brains do many things, in many different ways, and the vast majority does not involve anything that could be meaningfully described as "deciding".

For the particular distinction here, the book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Khaneman gives a pretty detailed exposition.

Explicit decision making is slow, energy intensive, and unnecessary the vast majority of the time. And including all the implicit decision making in your definition would be like saying a leaf decides every way it tilts as it falls through the air off a tree.

> This conveniently papers over a critical mechanism of how biological brains operate: we do not choose 99% of our actions. It would be extremely inefficient and energy-consuming.

If we’re talking about the small, unimportant decisions then sure, I agree. But I don’t think the bigger decisions happen on autopilot — precisely because it would be very dangerous.

Speaking of addiction, relapses are never important decisions. Relapses are taking the wrong path (subconsciously because of habits and very strong neural pathways) at one of the thousands of different crossroads you come across in your daily life. This is why addiction is so terrible.

The first few days, the hardest ones, every single thing that happens to you (had a bad day, stranger frowned at me, stubbed my toe) is weighed and a decision is made. For a seasoned addict, many of these events have the automated response of ingesting your drug of choice.

Anecdote: I've quit smoking and any form of nicotine 3.5 years ago. I don't miss it. I have not relapsed once. Yet to this day, there are moments where I catch myself feeling that something is missing. That I have forgotten something important I had to do. A little soul searching later, and it's apparent I am just feeling that a cigarette right now be really nice. It completely sneaks up on me, but the first few months this happened dozens of times a day, the first few days even more. If your autopilot makes the wrong choice just once, you're back to square zero.

Most of our life, we're in the passenger seat.

One thing I've personally found is, if I look closely, my small decisions often have big ramifications due to the chain of events or habits they kick off.

For example, the choice to open that one app leads to 30 minutes of scrolling leads to poor night's sleep leads leads to being on a later sleep schedule that week leads to not cognitively showing up to an important meeting that Saturday and missing an opportunity.

What we perceive of as 'big decisions' exist only within the conditions visible to our consciousness. Behind the scenes though those conditions are continuously shaped by small decisions amplified by the lever of the subconscious and our environment.

In other words, we're good at assessing the gravity of immediate conditions available to us, but we're bad at assessing internal and external processes and their effects. One reason why "know thyself" is such important advice.

Thus we'd be wise to make shaping conditions part of what we consider a 'big decision', perhaps even the big decision. This is another way of saying "we make our own luck".

I learned a lot about this kind of predictive modeling function of our brains from _The Experience Machine_ by Andy Clark. He was on Sean Carroll's podcast not too long ago and they had a great conversation on this topic.