Many patients who come to see me cannot make big decisions. They can get out of bed in the morning and work a job, but when faced with more complex life decisions like choosing a home, a career, or a mate, they balk. They pace. They lose sleep. The process of indecision shreds their nerves and irritates everyone it touches. For many people, the essential question of therapy is: how do people make decisions? Can I learn to do that?
Almost everyone has been through the pain of indecision, and we all know it feels like a form of torture. When conscious computation reaches its limit, we can get trapped in a cognitive loop governed by the notion that if we just go over it one more time, we will figure it out. Keep it up for a few days, lose some sleep, fray those nerves, and this huge decision gets made by whatever impulse is closest to the surface at the deadline. Basically a coin flip.
When faced with complex situations like creating a career or choosing a partner, we encounter a huge number of criteria with woefully incomplete data. In bouts of indecision, priorities keep shifting up and down, never settling in any one order. Indecisive people get stuck in the process of arbitrarily placing one criterion at the top of the priority pile, making an imaginary decision based on that priority, playing that decision through, and feeling settled for some number of minutes or hours. But then another criterion finds its way to the top of the pile, and the process repeats ad infinitum, until a coin flip eventually breaks the deadlock. This robotic style of cognition turns us into prisoners of our own minds.
A patient who suffers from chronic indecision once told me that "the best decision is a decision made,” which would be true if all decisions were essentially the same. However, it turns out that some decisions are much, much better than others. The quality of a decision has less to do with the actual call that was made, and much more to do with the process that led to that call. In the cognitive loop of chronic indecision, we use what looks like the smartest technology — thinking, thinking, thinking — only to arrive at the least intelligent decision-making process (the coin flip). Because the process of arriving at that decision was so arbitrary, any decision made that way will always leave us doubting, regardless of the outcome.
Many people believe that we would be much better off without feelings, since feelings seem clearly illogical. Some speculate that the human mind will eventually be downloadable, and voluminous futurist writings perpetuate these notions. These speculations are very activating for people who are invested in pure cognition, and these same people also tend to be notably uninvested in the emotional dimension of human experience.
But in fact, the route to meaningful decision-making must run through the terrain of feeling, not around it. Liberation from indecision can only be achieved through the integration of emotion, which operates at the frontier between body and mind. The mind that only knows how to think computationally is not fully embodied. Only the embodied mind can think sensitively, and feel thoughtfully. Integrated embodiment is a particularly human power.
We do not make meaningful decisions through pure cognition. Purely cognitive decisions strive for correctness, but correctness is not particularly meaningful. We need emotion to guide us because without emotion, there is no meaning. A decision that is arrived at through deep engagement with thought and emotion represents a striving for truth, not correctness. Meaning-making through this tension between thinking and feeling is the human superpower, and avoiding emotion renders us powerless through indecision.
It seems almost certain that in the future, the neural circuitry of a human brain will be transferred to a hard drive. Many believe that this computer will then experience some version of human consciousness, which may be true. But the notion that it would somehow replicate the human experience profoundly misrepresents what a fully operational human actually is. Because we are embodied, feeling beings, whatever experience a downloaded brain is having inside of a computer is not a human experience. Conscious perhaps, but not human.
This notion that human essence can be reduced to pure computational cognition not only distorts reality, but it also wreaks havoc in the personal lives of those who harbor it. I have met many people who believe stone-cold rationality is the ultimate form of consciousness. They tend to have lots of trouble in romantic relationships (which are not entirely rational engagements), and they tend to be very hard on themselves for not living up to various hyper-rational personal ideals. While it may be possible to download a pattern of brain circuitry, rewiring a human mind/body into a purely rational creature from the inside is impossible. But it does not stop some of us from trying.
On a long enough timeline, these attempts always fail to satisfy because they represent a turning away from the truth of what we are: cognitive-emotional mind-bodies comprised of stardust, somehow connected to every other bit of matter in the universe. Striving for truth from this integrated position feels like freedom, and looks like decisiveness.