It happened like this. I'm lying in bed having just awakened in the morning. But I don't want to get out of bed. Like every day.
I have no trouble waking up. In the last half century, I haven't used an alarm clock once. I tell myself just before I go to sleep at what time I'll need to wake up, and just like that, I wake up almost exactly to the minute as planned. I learned this in my adolescence from some radio broadcast describing this method. I tried it and it worked. Fifty years later, I still have no trouble waking up when I need to. It's automatic and accurate. Most animals have a kind of accurate internal clock, and this method is merely letting it run a behavior on autopilot.
Getting out of bed once awake, now that's a whole different problem.
It's always a struggle. Here's a way to understand the problem. For every moment when I want to get out of bed I want to stay in bed for just one moment longer, and any each tiny moment is not enough to make me late. It's a sorites paradox (exactly which lost hair made me definitively bald), and I'm stuck in it in real time. I'm not a believer in discipline. I want the exit from bed to be as magically automatic and seamless as waking up is for me. But it's not. It's a struggle and I lose repeatedly, partly because the logic -- that each tiny moment is not enough to make me late -- is inexorable. And even when that logic fails, I'm still struggling with myself, I want to get up but I don't want to get up. Discipline here just exacerbates the struggle. It might help to structure the waking: stop thinking and just get up. But isn't that just as puzzling? Why doesn't "stop thinking and just do" result in staying in bed? It'a real quandary.
The morning I'm describing above, I gave up. I thought, I'm getting nowhere, let me just think about what I'm going to teach today after I get up and dressed and out the door. Thinking about what I'm teaching engrosses me, always. There's so much I want to convey to the class, and I want it to be well-ordered but also comprehensive. It's a lot and I'm devoted to it and I'm soon far away in thoughts about systems and explanations of them and misunderstandings about them and ... then, suddenly, I discover I'm sitting on the edge of the bed. When did this happen?? When did I even decide to get out of bed???
I'm sitting on the edge of the bed, but I don't know when I made this decision to get out of bed. There must have been a decision, and it must have happened while I was thinking about teaching. But I was thinking about teaching, not about getting out of bed.
You can see where this is going. Somewhere in the back of my mind -- to use a locational metaphor that probably will bias my account of what happened -- somewhere some process obedient to the recognized need for me to get out of bed, moved the levers of my motor functions in the brain and I got up and out of bed without my surface awareness. And "I" -- the surface awareness -- didn't learn about it until well after it was all accomplished.
I thought to myself (to my aware self), if this is really how my mind works, then I should be able to repeat this process with intent. And so I did the next morning. And every morning thereafter.
And if I could do this in bed, couldn't I do this with other actions? What action? Some other situation in which I never want to exit but must. The hot shower, of course.
By now you recognize what a hedonist I am. In the shower, I have the same problem. For every moment in the shower I always want to stay just one moment longer. It's like a little mathematical induction. I should stay in there forever or until I drop, wrinkled like a prune. How I ever get out of there, I don't know. Or I didn't know, and now I do. It's when I'm not thinking about the shower. It must be how I always get out of there, but never noticed. So I tried the bed method and, lo and behold, it worked.
Doesn't that imply that all my decisive choices are like this? Done without my awareness?
There's plenty of research that tells us that our awareness is late in the decision process. Christof Koch, in his book The Quest for Consciousness, describes the work he did on this -- but he's just one of many. Deflationary theories of the mind like Chater's also align with this observation, and experiments with split brains confirm that the mind justifies its actions regardless of the sources of its actions, iow, what we, using our folk psychology call our decision-making process -- "I chose to do this because of such and such reason" -- is actually all post hoc: I do; and then my mind invents or figures out a reason convenient to its self-narrative. Descartes got it backwards. Not "I think, therefore I am"; it's "someone's thinking, but it aint me". :-)
What's new here is that I seem to be able to access this process after the fact, and knowing this, I can game it by letting it do its thing without my struggling with it. It knows I need to get out of bed and turn off the hot shower. I don't need to tell it. All I need to do is think about teaching and systems and ideas, or anything that takes me far from the matter at hand.
The more I attend to this, the more I observe it. Watching my decision-making process has become almost a commonplace, as if I had a constant companion, a kind of double within me. I haven't yet explored all its underground activities. Does it run my biases? Is it the one who loses appetite when I'm in fasting mode? Just how much influence does it have over me?
And who is this person? Is he (it?) my obedient self, the responsible one, or the one frightened to be late or diverge from the program? Or does he have a variety of intents depending on his mood or on the circumstances. And if gender is an identity signal system, an interactive language, does it even have a gender? It could be hosted by a male body but with no sense of sexual identity at all, just decision-making in response to worries and needs, or maybe at most the needs for the actions given to male sex bodies in our culture and no more gender-narrative than that -- male body with no gender narrative and no identity signals? Or is it sensitive to my gender-signaling needs? It could be my inner heteronormative man. And how can I test this possibly deflationary, flat unconscious mind, aside from just watching its actions post hoc?
More likely, there are many inner Me's. The eater, the exerciser, the self-punisher, the self-lover, the self-defender and self-slayer. Let's not count.
I observe the automated decision-makers more an more, at almost any moment of action, especially when I'm changing course -- from writing to getting up for coffee or even grabbing for the cup next to me (as I just did), to putting myself together to leave the apartment, check the range to ensure the gas isn't on (post Covid I can't trust my nose to do this anymore). I'm often unaware of these decisions until after I've (one of the other "I"s) made them. And is the other I aware or is it mechanical? Does it have thoughts ever, and insinuate them into my awareness? I intuit that it is immediately connected to the emotions, and the biases that are irrepressibly tied to those emotions. How is that different from having a thought? On a deflationary or flat view of mind, there might be no difference. The Other Me runs the biases, the surface Me merely fictionalizes to itself an identity-signaling Me-story.
And I do see this social Me and the inner Other I. When I first spy someone that I know I have to socialize with but whom I don't really feel comfortable socializing with, I feel a jolt of negative arousal, almost like fear. Surely that must be the Other inner self.
This is all far-afield. I only meant to explain how to wake up in the morning and get out of bed with no struggle, no discipline, automatically like magic. Try it. See whom you meet, or who meets you.
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