Good Friends in Journal

make life a whole lot better. It’s not just that I enjoy the time and connection that we have together, but that I feel equally valuable and valued by another person who has zero obligations or needs or responsibilities to value me. It is that missing element that I always craved from my family- the feeling that if they didn’t have to be there, they wouldn’t.
I’m intimately aware that internalizing my Family of Origin’s default on their responsibility to love me is the reason that I am now capable of real relationships and friendships.

Last year, sometime, I bumped into someone talking about whether free will or determinism exists. His belief was that biology determines everything, including the illusion of free will. Ofc he cited the study about how decisions are actually made in the brain a few seconds before the conscious mind is aware of the decision, and justifies that decision rather than simply observing that a decision has been made. I made the argument that all of our decisions are made unconsciously and are based on our principle values. When presented with an open question, we simply become aware of that which is most consistent with those values. That argument is still valid, but it’s sort of… above the understanding of most people.
Rather, I think a better argument would be that the study only shows that the people in the study have mistakenly identified when they made their choices.
If determinism were true, no choice would be possible. Instead, though, we consistently and ubiquitously see behavior that cannot be determined from prior factors. Of course, this disproves determinism, but the existence of choosing something other than what prior factors determine also proves free will.
The fallacy of the study was only to show the timing of when the average person believes he/she makes a decision. It did not determine in any rigorous way what a decision is, the process of decision making, or how decisions are made. It’s all just assumed. It’s assumed that decisions happen in real time as a person is faced with alternatives, instead of prior to being faced with alternatives.
This is where IQ comes in. Because, higher IQ allows for longer deferral of gratification. More, and more complex, more consistent, values can be distilled for those with higher IQ compared to those with lower. The most basic example is the marshmallow test. The tester tells a 5 year old that one marshmallow will be available now, or 2 marshmallows will be available in 5 minutes. Success is highly predicted by the ability to defer gratification. Ofc this is why violence, mother absence, neglect, punitive parenting, etc are SO incredibly destructive to children. Not only do these all increase stress, decrease trust, lower security, and inhibit the ability to defer gratification, but it lowers effective IQ for the lifetime of the child.
In basic terms, the more deferral of gratification one has at their disposal, the more patience one has to think through their value principles which will determine how they behave in the future. I’m sure this comes as no surprise.
Anywho, that is the argument I’d make now, vs the sort of more technical argument that I put forward those few months ago.

It occurs to me that IQ can be argued to be a biological or prior determining factor since it’s largely genetic. And while that is true, it is still a choice to utilize one’s ability to think. If one has the capacity to think, the choice is there. Even for lower IQ, the choice remains to think to the extent of one’s capacity. If that capacity is limited, deferring to an authority is also a choice. I think that the high IQ often fail to empathize with the low IQ, and I think that is a default on responsibility as well. There is no choice or virtue in one’s IQ. The high IQ, because they possess a valuable and limited ability, arguably have a responsibility to be a credible authority that others can trust and rely on. Default on this responsibility is, in my opinion, the same as going to school to become a doctor and then refusing to help the bleeding man in the street. It’s not necessarily evil, but it’s a pretty miserable thing to do.