When you learn something new you are supposed to feel empowered, but instead I feel weak. I feel like my strength was stolen from me. My independence, my freedom, my choices, and my decisions are not really mine. I thought I was smart enough to not fall for the medias ploys. But that is the problem, as a society, we imagine ourselves to be such intelligent, thoughtful beings. And we are, but we have flaws. For example, in the TED talk "Are we in control of our own decisions?" Dan Ariely gives countless examples of optical illusions, then he relates them to our cognitive illusions. He explains that if our eyes fool us in optical illusions, even after we know the truth, than our mind can fool us in more discrete ways. Ariely argues that our eyes are our most exercised organ, we use our eyes all the time, yet our eyes still make mistakes. This is similar to decision making. We are confident in our decision making abilities and out preferences but in reality we have cognitive illusions with regard to decisions making. We carry a false state of free will. But our decisions are shaped by our choices, and our choices are shaped by our environment. It is sometimes scary to think that we do not have control over our own lives. But it is nice to remember that by making good decisions we can shape our future options in decision making. In the end, I guess it does not really matter who is in the drivers seat, as long as the driver is an organ donor (yes, that was a reference to the TED talk).
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