Lisa Feldman Barrett

is not in the object.

It's because I have a body of a certain type with certain features that makes me experience this as solid.

The solidity isn't in me and it's not in the object.

It's in the relationship between the two.

That means everything, everything you experience is partly of your own making.

You don't have a sense of agency about it because it happens really automatically.

It's happening automatically now as we're talking.

It's happening faster than you can blink your eyes.

But it's still happening.

And that means if you are partly, even though you don't have a sense of agency, you are partly in control and also therefore responsible for the meaning that is being made.

And when I said at the outset of our conversation that my goal was to try to, you know, as a science communicator, was to try to explain to people that they have more control over their lives.

They have more control over who they are in any given moment than they think they do to give them more agency in their lives.

This is exactly what I mean.

You

You don't have an enduring identity.

You are who you are in the moment of your action.

And actions are a combination of the remembered past, so stuff your brain is using to predict, that your brain's assembling super automatically, and the sensory present, right?

So if you want to change who you are, you want to change what you feel, you want to change what your impact is on someone else,

you have a couple of choices.

You can try to go back into the past and change the meaning of what's happened before so that you'll remember differently, you'll predict differently in the future.