Eric Oliver

They typically dominate our field of consciousness.

that we get cut off from all the other things that are going on that are animating us.

So, you know, we're so busy thinking about ourselves, we don't really taste the food that we're shoveling into our mouths, or we don't notice the beauty of nature around us, or just the smaller ways of connecting with another person.

These are really the challenges of self-knowledge because a big part of wanting to know ourselves is getting to decompress from these ego processes so they don't loom so large and just dominate our conscious attention the way they typically do.

Yes, psychologists have a really eloquent way of describing this and they call this system one and system two thinking.

So system one thinking is our fast, intuitive, reflexive types of thinking.

It's the kind of information processing that our brains do without really thinking at all.

It's much more reflexive and habitual.

It's how I know just to walk to work without even thinking about where I'm going, for example.

And that typically orients us through a lot of the day and we're not even aware of it.

It's just kind of on autopilot.

What we're typically aware of is what psychologists call system two thinking.

And this is when we encounter something that requires a decision, where we encounter some anomalous information or something that's in conflict.

So for example,

when I'm trying to resist ice cream, but I find myself walking to the bodega and that conflict going on.

That's my system two thinking in full flower there.

And when we think of this concept, for example, of free will, what it really is, is system two thinking.

What we can see in a lot of our politics is an intuitive kind of politics where people say, oh, just don't trust my thinking.

I just go with my gut.

Well, the problem is think about what our gut tells us.