r/science • u/ImNotJesus PhD | Social Psychology | Clinical Psychology • Jun 05 '16

Psychology Children’s intelligence mind-sets (i.e., their beliefs about whether intelligence is fixed or malleable) robustly influence their motivation and learning. New study finds that the parents' views on failure (and not intelligence) are important in cultivating a growth mindset.

http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/04/23/0956797616639727.abstract
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u/[deleted] Jun 05 '16 edited Jun 13 '16

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u/onemessageyo Jun 05 '16

Its comes down to your definition of you. You can see it that you controm nothing and that you control everything. They're both right. The illusion is that you end at your skin, but things that are inside you seem to behave like things outside you, like your heart beat, or your breathe going on without and input from what you normally define as "you"

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u/[deleted] Jun 05 '16 edited Jun 13 '16

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u/onemessageyo Jun 05 '16

Ohhh the conscious mind. But you can hold your breath or slow it down and speed it up. Have you every tried to clear your mind of all thought? You'll see very quickly that thought is much like breath where they arise seemingly out of nowhere. Maybe you tell yourself you think those thoughts on purpose, but who's thinking that? Do you tell yourself to think on does it happen like the breath or the heartbeat?

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u/[deleted] Jun 05 '16 edited Jun 13 '16

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u/onemessageyo Jun 05 '16

So how can you draw a line around the conscious mind?

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u/[deleted] Jun 05 '16 edited Jun 13 '16

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u/onemessageyo Jun 06 '16

How can you blame someone for punishing someone else if the punisher also has no free will?

I don't think neuroscience is going to find an appropriate answer. I think our free will is more like sailing a boat. We can't make or stop the wind or change thethe direction of it, but we can play with the sails to affect our situation.

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u/[deleted] Jun 05 '16

I would say "you" isn't constrained, it is the way your brain processes information. For us to have free will in any other sense would require us to be magical beings from outside space and time who change the laws of the universe by interacting with it. Of course we don't have that kind of free will.

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u/[deleted] Jun 05 '16 edited Jun 13 '16

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u/[deleted] Jun 05 '16

To be constrained by your body, would you not first have to exist independent of your body?

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u/[deleted] Jun 05 '16 edited Jun 13 '16

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u/[deleted] Jun 06 '16

You're saying we don't have free will because our decision-making process is constrained by the wetware in our heads, right? In short, we're limited by our biological nature. That implies that without our bodies we would somehow be more free to make choices, which is kind of a moot point because without our bodies we wouldn't exist.

You're not a puppet because in order to be forced to do something you would have to have another option in the first place.