How to not be a fatalist? Need help from people who care about true beliefs.

Particularly frightening to me has been the idea that doing yoga or meditation might change my goals, especially since the teachers of these techniques always seem to wrap the techniques in some worldview or other that I may dislike.

Yesterday I was in a church, for a friend's wedding. I was listening to some readings from the Bible, about love (obviously 1 Cor 13) etc. I knew this was cherry-picking from a book that a few hundred pages sooner also describes how non-believers or people who violate some rule should be murdered. But still, the message was nice, and some of the people around me were my friends, so I felt good.

And this is what I thought: "The people who wrote these parts of the Bible were good people who tried their best at optimizing the world. They lived long before Science, they were ignorant and brainwashed about too many things, so of course many of their beliefs were wrong, and subsequently their followers did a lot of harm. But their intentions and emotions were similar to mine. Instead of thinking about them as my enemies, I should think about them as my predecessors; a homo sapiens neanderthalensis to homo sapiens sapiens. A few thousand years ago, they made some things right and some things wrong. It is our generations' moral duty to do things better; to correct what they got wrong." And then I started imagining that one day, we could have a rationalist ceremony like this; with all the emotions, but without the bullshit. I viewed the ongoing ceremony as a prototype of something better.

I don't know how much this could translate to your situation. Caring about one's body and mind is an important instrumental goal. And it's great that some people put a lot of research into that. You can admire their dedication, without buying the stupid parts. Perhaps you can make it better. One day, we might have rational yoga and meditation exercises.

There's something rather terrifying about methods that work on the subconscious, because it implies a frightening lack of control over our own lives

If I have a lack of control about my own life, I want to know about it, and then I can interact with it, which actually gives me more control. Instead of illusion of control, I would rather optimize for the real control (even if the reality cannot give me as much real control as my ignorance could give me an illusionary control).

(nods) I think this happens to a lot of people, especially in our tribe... we tend to prefer to engage the world as an intellectual puzzle, even the parts of it that are better engaged with in other ways. I got better about this after my stroke and recovery, but it's still something I fall back to a lot.

I hope it gets easier for you.

Ah, I see.

For my own part, I would agree that we are powerless to do anything other than what we are actually going to do.

So there are at least some versions of fatalism I think are true, and embrace.

But we are also ignorant of what that is going to be, and the process of considering alternatives and deciding what to do is part of the mechanism whereby we end up doing what we do.

As for what choices you have... we all experience lots of choices. Those experiences exist in our minds, just as the experiences of pleasure and pain and fear and love and etc. exist in our minds... there is nothing out there in the world outside our minds that is intrinsically lovable or frightening or painful or pleasurable or "choicey".

But that doesn't mean we don't have pleasure, pain, fear, love, or choice. We have all of those things. To say that my pleasure "isn't real" because it exists solely in my mind is to misunderstand the nature of pleasure; to say that my choices "aren't real" because they exist solely in my mind is to misunderstand the nature of choice.

It doesn't mean anything for your desires/actions/values to be free of causality and reason, because your desires/actions/values are a subset of causality and reason. A variable can't be "free" of itself. Lack of freedom implies something else is in control.

It's a question of where you perceive the "I" to be. Because of the complexity of the machinery locked under the aforementioned 1.25 inch skull, humans have Ruleset 1 for "souls" (though we are unaccustomed to thinking of them as rules) and Ruleset 2 for "objects". If you identify yourself with Ruleset 1, and Physics says that Rule-set 1 is actually derived from Ruleset 2, your human intuitions will scream that Ruleset 2 is controlling Ruleset 1 and free will is dead. .

All the naive intuitions of free will still apply. Currently your emotions say "I am being controlled by causality", and what they aught to say is "I am controlling things via causality". The emotional outcome you're aiming for is a sense of unity and continuity between yourself and the rest of the universe as well as a sense of partial control over it. Try working backwards: Instead of first understanding the situation and then forcing yourself comfortable with it, try first figuring out what sort of situation you would be comfortable with and then checking if it matches reality. (I'll bet it will)

If you're generally tired, you should see a doctor so that common physical causes can be ruled out.

No matter what, I try to get quality sleep. If I'm sleep deprived, I'm absolutely useless. This is easily the number one thing far above others.

The other lowest hanging fruit for me roughly in order are: avoiding alcohol and recreational drugs, work and other kinds of mental exercise, social interaction, SSRIs, basic breath meditation, physical exercise, eating healthy, some caffeine and low dose nicotine. Improving your life situation in various mundane ways should work too, like gjm pointed out.

I try to avoid free thinking and interaction when I'm tired, which is usually in the evening. That's when I'm the most vulnerable to being moody and confrontational and making the kinds of mistakes that haunt me afterwards, or getting racing thoughts on stupid shit that doesn't really matter. I probably have other useful habits I'm not even aware of that I've developed over the years.

I recommend you study and experiment with yourself and try to make a habit of the things that work and ditch the stuff that doesn't. Reaping the rewards can take some time, so try to be patient. You can't improve everything at once, but every good decision makes the next good decision easier.

I think this question is basically equivalent to "How do you combat depression?". I have heard good things about cognitive therapy, and ambiguous things about SSRIs. There's a book called "Feeling Good" that's alleged (by at least one person on LW) to capture enough of the techniques of cognitive therapy that using it is a pretty good approximation to doing actual cognitive therapy. (And of course much cheaper. But also easier to stop doing without anyone noticing.)

I guess the other thing I'd advise is to look mundanely for areas of your life that could be improved, and see if there's low-hanging fruit to pick. I believe some people report large improvements in affective state after improving their sleeping or getting a lot more exercise, for instance. Or if you're in a boring ill-paid low-status job or a relationship where you don't really get on with one another, maybe there are things you can do to improve (or replace) those. Someone else linked to the "Existential Angst Factory" article, which I think is correct in suggesting that many cases of general the-universe-is-useless wretchedness are really the product of "ordinary" unhappiness that might be fixable. Of course all this is easier said than done, especially if you're already depressed.

Well, I'm important to me :P

Well, you're a part of the universe that determines a lot of what happens next in that part of the universe — if only due to locality.

Might be relevant.

Well, it seems theoretically possible that someone with no such issues could share these concerns. But I was not even remotely surprised to check your comment history (after writing the grandparent) and see you looking for a better job.

Assuming that the universe is indeed deterministic, we shouldn't conclude that the choices we make/the programming of our brain/"we" don't influence anything, just as we should one-box on Newcomb's problem; and since knowing that all is determined doesn't tell us what choices to make, we shouldn't be influenced by it in our choices.

Was your intent to point out that these two view points are strictly non-contradictory?. (Your decision algorithm is exactly physics, so no opposition is possible even in principle.)

My intent was to get a better understanding of what the original poster was talking about.

And for fatalism to be psychologically problematic, you also need what-you-value-isn't-possible.

You need it to be unikely. If you have a fairly specific and fixed set of requriements, you are unlikley to have them delivered to you by a determinsitc process that doens't care about you. Being able to change thiings to get your requiremetns is not guaranteed, but is more hopeful. And then there is thesage's advice to adjust your requirements to the situation...

To keep things simple, I was taking it to mean soemthing likefuture events occuring with probability 1. In fact, it is a rather ticker concept, that can inlude the idea that future evnts are inevitabe even if not causally determined, and the idea of acquiescing psychologically to the future.