Have I been thinking wrong?

I've been aware of cognitive biases/distortions for a long time but I underestimated how wide their reach is and how sneaky they can be. Observing others and myself I noticed that our mind often makes up explanations for things that sound right to us but are not actually based on reality. For example I play a trading card game with a huge randomness element and people will often make statements based on emotion and selective memory that go against the stats. I have a program tracking my game statistics and notice that my feelings and the stats don't always align. I might think I am getting unlucky and always going 2nd which is a huge advantage to see in the stats that I go 1st decently often too. I might feel sad and go on a journey of self-discovery to find out why and find explanations in my life when it might be just lack of sleep/hydration/vitamins or I might feel especially euphoric one day and make statements I disagree with the next day. I don't know if what I'm saying makes sense because we are biological beings with biochemical/electrical processes going on inside us at all times but what I am looking for is some kind of clarity and truth I guess. I am sure some philosopher has explored these questions so I would appreciate some recommendations.

If I reflect deep enough it feels like I am just observing my mind birthing thoughts, but I have no control over them. I can just decide to not pay attention. Seems related, as in, I know my mind just generates things, and often I just go with it, if I am not actively reflecting on it.

>If I reflect deep enough it feels like I am just observing my mind birthing thoughts, but I have no control over them This is accurate. Take it one step further: "I" am an emergent property of the processes of my mind, just like everything else. It is a thought your mind birthed. The mind is "in control" of itself in the sense that it is a machine that is somewhat optimized to work in a certain way. More accurately it is part of the big machine of our body. Like many evolved machines it doesn't work perfectly, but it works quite well considering how difficult it is to stay alive. Many diseases of modernity arise from our massively overgrown social/linguistic ability, which is what gives rise to "I", but it is obviously a massive boon evolutionarily. How else could we have gotten such huge brains without a significantly widened birth canal? We invented midwifing, surgery, etc. that mostly solved it. The conscious mind allows us to evolve faster with memes than we could with genes. Interestingly, with this point of view, "internet memes" are really more like viruses, hijacking our meme reproduction mechanisms to propagate themselves without necessarily benefiting the host. It explains a lot of TikTok. Another function of the mind, independent of consciousness, is that it allows us to sense truth. Like our eyes or ears it is not as good as it could be, we can be misled or fooled by illusions, but with careful training it can get better. It must also be trained along with social/linguistic ability, so that the knowledge can be transferred and shared and thus contribute to our memetic lineage. Education is, or at least should be, the training process. Navel-gazing is also good in moderation, but maybe don't get so hung up on whether or not the conscious mind is "in charge". If you want some philosophers to read, Hume and Kant are very good. Almost dual to each other. Additionally buddhist & taoist philosophy is good. I especially like the taoists because of their good sense of humour.

>>74686 Thanks for the reading suggestions, I was thinking of reading something like that after all the technical stuff lately. I don't really dwell too much on which part is in charge, but I do have a desire to figure out my own moving parts. To the extent possible.

The statistical thing is one of the greatest modern day problems I think, I remember being keen to it very early on because of stuff my mom would say. She would hyper identify with highly impropable scenarios say when she went to the doctor and "knew" the issue was xyz and they said that was almost impossible and she ended up being right. It was the source of many a argument and discussion and even still is to this day (though with regards to healthcare specifically im more understanding why patients expect to not be treated like a statistic). This isnt to say I also dont fall victim to it, everyone does all the time, but I do at least have some awareness of it which has helped me greatly in making sense of the world I think for the better. At the same time I wouldnt just expect others to have the same kind of like self scrutinizing I have and it also in the past has worked to my detriment in situations where I can control whats going on or am correct in assuming something off the impropable but assume Im wrong (I have a bit more balance now). I think it manifests in even small ways like one thing that would always irk me about my mom is how mad shed get in her car, and how much shed assume others were somehow just idiots for every mistake they made. Id always say "Maybe they are just having a bad day" and she would say something like "its everyone here, they all drive like this". Yet who notices every car that passes us by just fine, and also who knows how many bad days or underslept people we really pass. I think if this could somehow be solved things would be a lot more peaceful. But often the only solution I can come to is if there was some device that could beam your entire circumstances and context to your being and thoughts into another persons brain. I dont see how else we can really simultaneously be human to eachother and also hold the knowledge of these vast statistics of our being and others or truly make sense of them. Im kind of skipping steps here, in that I think even when people comprehend the sort of statistical reality of things they still draw sort of false conclusions off cognitive biasis. Speed of information has helped some of us understand how wrong we perceive the world, and I suspect that will improve. But even once there, there is further cognitive biasis to combat based on how difficult the scale of said information is to sort through and truly understand. Even when we understand far less percent of people do this or far more do that than we thought, we still make innumerable unsustained choices off of this info. A statistic about how many people get mugged can be set in stone but someone who thought it was less than that will be even more vigilant than they were perhaps unwarrentedly and someone who thought it was more will maybe relax when they shouldnt. This is a very messy disjointed post encompassing things im not really explaining that are tangential to your topic but my point is while many would see this thread and go "duh everyone knows about this" i think many dont actually realize it as deeply as they should (and some so deeply they arent even in reality anymore), this topic has a very black and white reception. When the middle ground is the most important and also the hardest to find for anyone no matter your background or circumstance, I think this is an important topic is all.

>>73786 sometimes you just need to "think twice" kinda like how picrel is deemed "logically true" while it's a dumb mindset/teaching since you still would need to tell (some if not all) your plans to your investors and/or benefactors. there's no good point in "believing the presented information" or "believing in your own bias" and this is what people actually do by default when they just pick what seems correct or right at the time or what just strikes them under the jaw like a strong meme. hmm. sometimes we feel like we're disadvantaged when we're actually (probably) so much more privileged than more than half the population. this happens a lot with people experiencing depression from whatever source (malnutrition, EMR exposure, other people causing it), I see this a lot on discord with the "depressed" crowd when "what the actual fuark" but now it seems this is influenced heavily by negative spiral of feedback loops and essentially this is worsened by the prevalence of social media like how [instagram] can cause one to feel insecure or jealous but in reality it all depends on how we take the information -unaware- since if we are we can say it's all BS, like how I used to hate TV commercials and so I've developed on hating it more than loving it. some people do the opposite and love the brand shown during the commercials since they were just right at the peak of the plot of some movie/series and when it showed up and abruptly cut the scene there - their mind was just "still hanging up on that feeling of suspense" and so this feeling translates back to the brand that was shown in that commercial associating the fear/excite centers with the product. they actually were pretty successful on this. now extend these feedback loops and manipulation on the common social media internet platforms, computer games, and even music, and ads. we have what we call the unstoppable machine of brainwashing which is right at our palms. the "smart" phones. I was severely disappointed with the gen Z when I asked them few questions, and most of their answers were simply attributed to [tiktok] videos/trends (I've heard of before) and none of which were from sheer research or experiences. I tried asking some common questions and they didn't know how to respond, it seemed to me that their faces seemed like saying "have I seen/heard that on [tiktok]?" by reflex before actually digging deep into their memory.