Who are you? Who am I? Do you think you control what you do? It makes me sad to think about, but if you watch very closely, if you take special care to be aware of every little situation, you realize that you don't. Why did you do X yesterday? Because you chose to? Nope. Everyone in that same external situation would have done the same thing, probably.

My friend gave me a thought experiment once. What if, in 1000 years, someone built a machine that could do quite a lot to your brain and specifically your conscious thoughts. What if it could do the most intrusive thing: what if it could literally plant a thought in your head? What if a machine could let anyone make your conscious think about a certain thought? It makes you think.

And then I realized, that is already the case. Yellow banana. Banana banana. Mmm, Bananas! You just thought of a banana. Maybe multiple bananas. Maybe you could taste them a bit. I planted that in your mind. When you read a book, those thoughts root themselves in the forefront of your consciousness. Books work because they are the raw stuff of thought fed directly into the brain. The sum of the things that pass through your consciousness define you and your actions. Language is a super mind-control machine. That's what makes it so powerful. And so dangerous.

Language is not quite the same as the posited machine. The brain is sophisticated enough to be able to select its inputs. You can cut out hearing someone. You can avoid reading a book. You can even absorb language in a negative state-of-mind so that the ideas pass through your consciousness pre-criticized and undigestible. Instead of being absorbed those ideas are scorned.

Some people live life this way, but that inhibits learning. Such people do not grow, they miss out on new ideas which are correct because they leave this critical filter on over everything. Sadly, these people saw an idea that said they should be critical and always have their filter on. This was the last thing they ever learned. I used to always have my filter on. Now, I don't.

And, usually, we don't have this filter on. We are open to the people around us. We read books without remembering to turn on the filter, so that the ideas reprogram our very thinking. Maybe we should, maybe not. Nevertheless, it has strong implications on our free agency.

The New York Times writes of some strong meditators who learn to observe external stimuli dispassionately. Whereas some might be distracted by an event, enough to miss another event, these meditators merely objectively noticed the event, and then the following one. The thought was not forced into their minds, but merely presented in front of them. Don't think "banana", instead think "he just said banana." Maybe this is the answer.

Maybe we can both grow and learn and also have control over what we are.