No Free Will Mind Training: Remembering 1 – Physical Reminders and Writing

* NOTE:The ‘No Free Will Mind Training’ (NFWMT) articles do NOT make the case against free will, nor is that their intention. This training is only for those who already understand free will does not exist and who want their psychology, feelings, thoughts, and actions to align with this understanding due to the various benefits. The use of the term “free will” for these training articles are always using this definition: FREE WILL, not a compatibilist definition (used to evade). If you don’t know why such free will doesn’t exists or what it means that it does not, please pick up a copy of Breaking the Free Will Illusion for the Betterment of Humankind and/or read some of the other articles on this website first, as this training is jumping the gun.

Here is a current list of No Free Will Mind Training articles (I’ve just started):

• No Free Will Mind Training: Introduction
• No Free Will Mind Training: Remembering 1 – Physical Reminders and Writing (you are here)

Also, be sure to bookmark here: breakingthefreewillillusion.com/category/nfw-mind-training/

This NFWMT article will be about some very basic techniques you can use to remember and bring to the forefront of consciousness the understanding that there is no free will. Please make sure to read the introduction if you haven’t already. This post will focus on how to use physical reminders as well as the use of writing to re-enforce the “no free will” understanding and ability to remember at key times.

Why set such reminders and why re-enforce the idea? Because in the beginning it’s difficult to remember that people don’t have free will and what it means at the time your free will psychology trumps your behavior. You cannot expect that you will just be able to remember at the drop of a hat, the brain doesn’t work like that. It takes many iterations of making associations to the new-found understanding before such automatically starts to kick in. Unfortunately we have to work at changing our behavior, even when we know we should or shouldn’t do something.

This is why irrational habits are so difficult to break. It’s the rare person who can just say that they will change a behavior they have been doing all along, and just do it. Once our brain gets networked a certain way, to change something we need to weaken some connections and strengthen others. That takes time and effort. Making such changes, for this topic, is well worth the effort!

So what is this free will psychology that I’m referring? Basically, most people grow up with the intuitive feeling that they and other people could have done, of their own accord, otherwise. At the time they make a decision, they think all of those options before them are real possibilities, and that if they choose one, the others not only could have happened, but such a different happening would have been “up to them”. Basically, what is happening here is a conflation of our epistemic limits (what we can or cannot “know”) with the ontic (what actually “is” the case). It’s a very understandable conflation, but one that causes many problems in the world.

The illusion of free will begins early on, and is re-enforced through others who think such abilities are possible. This means our brains get strongly configured to a free will mentality, which allows us to easily place blame on others in the desert sense, to place ourselves or others on pedestals above others as being “more deserving” and them “less deserving” of something, harmful side effects of strong types of guilt and shame, certain types of anger and hatred that assume another could have and should have done differently, and so on. I’ll be getting into more of these later in the training. For now the only focus will be on how we start to train our mind to recognize when we are behaving in a way that does not align with the “no free will” understanding, and a key element for that is the ability of our brain to override this poor free will programming with a memory that tells us “what I’m doing here isn’t rationally aligning with my understanding that there is no free will”.

This post has two “tasks” that aren’t too difficult to start to implement, but could make a huge difference in you remembering this important understanding when you need to the most.

Physical Reminders

It may seem silly to set yourself physical reminders, but ultimately such can be very helpful. They don’t have to be something obvious like carrying around a sign that is visible to the whole world. Rather, if you make the association to something before hand, when you see that something your mind will often kick in that association – and it can be fairly small (even the size of a dot).

For example, if you use a pen or pencil throughout the day, a small piece of colored tape on that pen or pencil will re-enforce your understanding when you use this writing utensil. The proverbial “string on your finger” reminder actually does work, and it doesn’t have to be an actual string on your finger. In actuality anything that you set that is out of the norm (for you) and in an area that you can easily observe can work as a reminder.

Make the reminder unique: If you wear a ring on your finger every day, then wearing a ring as a reminder is not going to work. You need to do something that is not something you normally do.

Make the reminder somewhere you will notice: Place the reminder somewhere that you will see easily such as the back of your hand, on a watch, on a fingernail, on a visible clothing area, on a smart phone, or even in multiple areas.

Associate the reminder: Make sure you tell yourself what the reminder is about when you place it on yourself. For our needs you are simply telling yourself that there is no free will, and that certain behaviors don’t make sense in light of the fact that you or others couldn’t have, of your or their own accord, done otherwise. Keep it that simple for now.

Change up the reminder every now and then: If you were to set yourself the same physical reminder day in and day out, eventually you’ll get used to the visual cue you have set. Once that happens, it no longer does an effective job in reminding you. Try changing it up. It doesn’t have to be a big change, just one that is a little different.

Keep in mind that the reminder may not have the immediate effect of you catching yourself before you think or act. In the beginning what is important is, once you are cued in by the reminder, that you think about how the behavior and why it should change. For example, when you have hatred or become angry at another, when you place blame on another, when you think someone deserves what they get, when you place a person on a pedestal above another, or when you have feelings of shame or guilt on yourself (not the same as regretting something you did).

Writing

One of the strongest ways of re-enforcing habits is to write about them. Writing about the understanding that we lack free will and what it means, strengthens the neuro-connections that make the topic something easier to remember.  Or you can write about your expectations or journal about the process. Here are a few writing tasks that you can choose from that can help re-enforce your ability to remember.

Nightly Journal – If you have time to write in a nightly journal, you could write about the things that you did that day which didn’t mesh well with the understanding that we don’t have free will. Make sure to write down the reasons you think it didn’t mesh well. You can also write down the things you did that day that did align with your understanding.  Give yourself props for remembering by writing it down.

Any Writing – If you don’t have time writing in a journal, then any writing about the topic would be helpful, whether that be a few sentences here and there, a paragraph, or an essay. Just write when you can.

Blogging – If you don’t mind your thoughts being public for the whole world to see, consider writing a blog. Not only will this re-enforce your ideas about the topic, but it will help you to remember when free will psychology starts to take hold. It will also allow others to have insight into your thoughts which could help them as well.

Throughout this training I will be exploring different techniques for remembering (at the right times) the understanding that we lack free will. I’ll also be getting into some of the ideas around the lack of free will that should be re-enforced (this article is only showing a few processes), how we can avoid fatalistic and defeatist responses that come from poor thinking about the topic, and much more. If interested in this, please make sure to subscribe to my blog. If you have techniques that you have used that worked, or just have something you’d like to see covered in a later NFWMT article, leave me a comment with the suggestion. There is a lot of ground to cover, so I’ll be breaking up each training post into smaller, consumable chunks that work well together.

STAY TUNED 🙂

**********

Help support the cost of the site.

Looking for the best logical case against free will? click here

Looking for an awesome “no free will” T-Shirt to help re-enforce your memory? click here

The following two tabs change content below.

• Bio
• Latest Posts

'Trick Slattery

'Trick Slattery is the author of Breaking the Free Will Illusion for the Betterment of Humankind. He's an author, philosopher, artist, content creator, and entrepreneur. He has loved and immersed himself in philosophy since he was teenager. It is his first and strongest passion. Throughout the years he has built a philosophy based on analytic logic and critical thinking. Some of the topics he is most interested in are of a controversial variety, but his passion for the topics and their importance drives him to want to express these ideas to others. His other passions include pen and ink line art and digital artwork.

Latest posts by 'Trick Slattery (see all)

• Semantic Shift Day, August 31 – REMINDER! Mark your calendar! - August 1, 2020
• Debunking Dennettian Diatribe - May 2, 2018
• Compatibilism: A Parable (comic) - December 7, 2017