Shall we discuss the decision making process itself? You have three streams of data coming to you at all times. We perceive the need to make a decision when there is some degree of disagreement between these three streams of data.

The primary stream is personal, emotional messages like I feel ok, or I feel uneasy, and includes in what way you feel, good or poorly.

The second stream is the information we take in from paying attention to the details of our environment. We are constantly evaluating if we know where we are, know what is going on, or know if what is being said to us makes sense.

And the third stream is a sense of how much we are receiving from the environment. How it is affecting us. It mostly focuses on an assessment of to what degree we are fearful.

If we detect gaps in our knowledge? If we detect gaps in our knowledge we will experience some degree of fear. If we experience a constant disturbing emotional state, we will experience fear.

With no inconsistency in these three streams, we feel no need to make any decisions. We experience a sense of reward when information from the outside world gives relief to emotional stress, but lack of stimuli can be a stress also.

Remember I said earlier what we ultimately want is feeling and experience. Pain eventually makes one go numb, become habituated to distress, which can make someone become addicted to pain. Finding that new plateau, because it stimulates, breaks through the conditioning.

Now decisions aren’t made in a void. It isn’t as simple as stimulus and response, and the value of experience is not arbitrary. There are those who are clinging fervently to a behaviorist view. I guess because it makes for easy math.

I never liked the idea that my life is a giant Skinner box. I don’t either, and experience denies Skinner’s model. It’s controversial, and there are arguments over interpretation, but looking at the processes as a dynamic whole suggests that your whole venue of experience exceeds brain function alone. The brain follows patterns that don’t make sense from a purely biological model. It has what some call artifacts that mirror processes in the world that wouldn’t seem to have anything to do with our biological survival. For one, the mirroring process responds to everything, and I mean literally everything, as if it were a source of agency. By default, your subconscious mind assigns intelligence to everything.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~