Also, even though the brain appears on a high level to function as a coordinated whole, there are certainly situations where, for instance, the ancient FFFF[1] responses compete with whatever the neocortex wants to do. Indeed, there's even a plausible-sounding hypothesis[2] that subjective experience itself arises from conflicts between the different modules.
[1] Fight, flee, feed, reproduce
Credit to the author, he wrote an (equally well received) apology after he was corrected in this.
We all spend most (all?) of our time being driven by impulses and habits without realizing that we're doing so and without any choice in that matter.
Moments of mindfulness are the exception, typically caused by some "unusual" event - like somebody you know dying.
It's quite a sad state of affairs (IMHO anyway). More like living the live of an extremely sophisticated robot, rather than a conscious, living being.
Everybody should spend a few minutes every day reflecting on exactly how decisions throughout the day were made.
It is sorta misleading, in fact, because a lot of good authors and speakers assume it as a well known fact and add their leaps of imagination to it. It is OK at best as a pop culture thing, maybe a poetic spin off.
Why does it have no place on Hacker ... oh, you know what, scratch that. No point entering that debate. Thanks.
It's not so much about whether the stance is true or not and whether we should debate that. It's that articles that discredit something as trivially untrue by way of a trivially small statement. In the extreme it would be like discrediting [insert pseudoscience topic] by simply mentioning a copy of Nature. There's some degree here, sure. But tabloid-style takedowns, regardless of whether they are right, seem almost out of place.
I am wrong to say this has no place, though, which is in itself a pretty big claim with no substance behind it.
The onus is not on anyone to disprove the theory, the onus is on the theory's proponents to prove it, they haven't done so, not to the slightest degree.
