 You know, it's a good thing Riker played at being a tough guy while he was working with the Klingons. You wouldn't want them thinking the Federation was weak-willed. So, we're most the way through February. How's that New Year's resolution coming? If you're like most people, you probably fell off your well-intentioned bandwagon sometime around the second Friday in January, an occasion sometimes celebrated as Quitter's Day. New Year's resolutions are a very visible example of a phenomenon that we experience all the time. We think hard about our values, consider carefully what actions we might take that would be best aligned with those values, commit ourselves to performing those actions, and then we do something else. Even if it's ubiquitous, there's something puzzling about that pattern of behavior if you think about it. I know for a fact that regular exercise will reduce my baseline stress, improve my mood, extend my lifespan, reduce my risk of agonizing diseases. Essentially, it will improve everything about my life in measurable ways. But when the time comes to put on my running shoes, even if all that information and my own determination that I want to go running is at the forefront of my mind, my actions don't always align with my will. How is it possible that I don't do what I want to do, even if nothing is preventing me from doing it? Philosophers describe this misalignment of intention and behavior as acracia, a term that's been in use since ancient Greece. Socrates, or Plato writing as the character Socrates, thought that what we describe as acracia was, by definition, impossible, saying, no one who either knows or believes that there is another possible course of action better than the one he is following will ever continue on his present course. According to Plato, what's actually happening when a person seems to act against their better judgment is that they must not really know or believe that there's a better way forward. When I look at my shoes and decide not to go running, it might look like I am acting contrary to my reasoning, but I'm really reasoning incorrectly. Coming to the conclusion that staying home and replaying Disco Elysium is really the best use of my time. If I claim to know that running is actually the best course of action, I'm either mistaken or lying. If I really knew that, then I would run. Of course, that's not how we usually think about acracia, largely because this dude has had a huge influence on our intellectual tradition. Aristotle's answer to the problem of acracia is fascinatingly nuanced, but the short, short version should be familiar to you. Human reason is locked in a constant, oily, naked wrestling match with our passions, each trying to gain leverage over the other for control over our actions. Although reason might tell us the best course of action in quiet moments of contemplation, when our passions are inflamed, they can weaken and subdue our rational judgment, compelling us to choose something we know in our hearts to be the inferior option. Aristotle's theory of a war in the South between reason and passion plugged very neatly into early Christian theology about sin, a despicable, based body with its wicked craving for vice fighting the innermost spirit in its drive towards godliness. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak, so no running today. This has certainly become the most popular interpretation of those conflicts between reasoning, intent, and action. Many studies in modern psychology are implicitly designed with Aristotle's theory in mind, that there's a superior reasoning mind with a deep rational understanding of what's good and what's bad, a mind that has to exert willpower to pummel the appetites of the flesh into submission. It's a good theory. It fits nicely with many observations about acracia and the subjective experience of wanting to do something but opting to do something else. It's certainly more convincing than Plato's version, where I slink guiltily away from my running shoes after somehow reasoning myself into believing that not running is actually better. But there are some problems with Aristotle's explanation. A few irritating details that don't seem to fit with this simple picture of a sweaty brawl between reason and passion. In his Discourse on the Passions, David Hume noted that technically speaking, reason by itself can only really dissect and compare facts. It can never motivate us to act in any particular way without some input from our emotions and desires. When I carefully consider my options and decide that it would be best to go running tomorrow, it's not like I'm calculating the answer to some formula I found written into the fabric of the universe. I'm weighing and evaluating my situation and creating plans of action with certain passions at the forefront of my mind, calmer more distant passions than the ones which urge me to play video games instead, but passions nonetheless. For Hume, acracia is just one set of desires running out over another, neither of which has any special claim to reason. Reason is just a tool, equally useful for whatever set of passions possesses at any given moment. We can see evidence of Hume's model in the remarkable intelligence people can exhibit while sabotaging their own plans. It's hard to argue that a person who figures out how to defeat several layers of self-imposed security to scroll TikTok for a few minutes is not reasoning properly. Motivated reasoning is another great example. If someone's argument really pisses me off, my brain can turn out logical refutations and counter-examples much more readily than when I'm just calmly reading something agreeable. Is that really a case of passion winning out over reason? On the opposite side of the theory, there are plenty of cases where the supposedly sinful cravings of the flesh actually drag me towards better choices. My teeth feel gross in the morning if I don't brush them. My left hand will throw my turn signal on before I change lanes without conscious input. It feels weird not to. Anyone can tell you how much reasoning I'm capable of in the mornings before I've had my coffee. That sure seems like the base impulses of the body giving the much-esteemed reasoning mind a hand. This kind of throws a wrench in the works for these Aristotelian models of cool reason and impulsive passion being diametrically opposed in some way. Barring extreme cases like Alien Hand Syndrome or Roe Hypnol, doesn't it kind of seem like everyone from addicts to stoics is always using reason to satisfy whatever urges seem most pressing in the moment? That certainly seems to fit the evidence better than Aristotle's version, which has this weird built-in assumption about reasoning in his relationship to good behavior. But there's a subjective element to agency and planning for the future that Hume doesn't seem to fully capture in his account. When I decide not to go running, there's a continuity of experience from my original intention to regret on the other side of my chosen action. I wanted to go running. I didn't, and now I feel bad because I didn't go running. That sure seems like someone's desires were thwarted, but Hume has no real answer for why that might be, or how to avoid the situation in the future. Some philosophers and psychologists have developed another interesting approach to the question of acacia by focusing on the apparent paradox of self-control. Unless I'm unconscious or being literally possessed by some outside force that's moving my limbs and forcing me to do stuff, I am ostensibly always in control of myself, right? I might do things accidentally, or unconsciously, or things that I regret after the fact, but it's not like me sitting down on the couch to play some disco is the result of some third party calling shots on my behalf. But embrace yourself because it's going to be weird for a bit. What if the self that wants to go running is a different entity than the self who wants to play video games instead? In the multiple selves model, there's one Josh who exists as a set of fairly constant values and preferences over time. A long-term Josh, who wants to be healthy, who wants to maximize the time he spends happy over the course of his life, who wants to run in the future and have run in the past. But that long-term Josh doesn't get to interact with the world directly. He has to negotiate with a series of short-term Joshes, entities that spring into existence for a little while and vanish after deciding how best to use this body they're in control of. Long-term Josh has a finite amount of energy he can use to influence the goals and motivations of short-term Joshes, but ultimately they call the shots and their own motivations in each moment can vary based on all sorts of things. A short-term Josh who spawns hungry will assign a high value to finding something to eat. A short-term Josh who's developed the habit of clicking his pen will want to keep clicking his pen. A short-term Josh who's dreading the torturous prospect of cardio will want to go play disco instead of putting on the running shoes. All these incidental desires can be influenced by the long-term Josh, at least for a while, so long as there's some energy left in his tank. But there are no guarantees. A short-term Josh who springs into existence hungry next to a delicious burrito is going to take a lot of convincing, and it might not be worth the effort or even possible to convince him to leave it alone. This multiple selves model might seem like Aristotle's temptations of the flesh with extra moving parts, but let's take a moment to look at what's different here. First, there is not a single unified self that is choosing between an angel of reason and the devil of vice. There is a persistent set of long-term values and an iterative set of short-term values, and whatever counts as you is just the output of their negotiations. Second, long-term values are not necessarily good, good for you, or well reasoned. You could have a long-term desire to be a famous movie star that you starve yourself to pursue, or a long-term commitment to an ideology that compels you to do heinous things even if they offend your delicate sensibilities in the moment. Putting the long-term self in charge would be as terrible an idea as silencing them all together, just because values are long-term does not make them superior. So, what do we get for abandoning the idea of a singular self? Well, it gives us a pretty good account of acracia. I might have reasoned myself into an intent to go running, but that's a long-term value. It's hard to make a short-term Josh care about that kind of thing, at least not without giving away a large reserve of long-term bargaining power. There are a number of things that might make that negotiation less antagonistic, creating short-term incentives to make running more attractive, developing a habit of running at a particular time, even just asking one short-term Josh to simply put on the damn shoes and making the next one try to weasel his way out of them without going for a run-first. It also gives us a compelling explanation for why we feel regret when we fall off of our long-term goals. Even if I decide in the moment that playing video games will be more fun, long-term Josh has goals too, and it sucks to be thwarted like that. The multiple selves model also agrees with some otherwise confusing experimental results in psychology. If you ask someone if they want a candy bar now, or two candy bars tomorrow, most people will demand the single snickers right then and there. If you ask if they want a candy bar in a year, or two candy bars in a year and a day, everyone seems to prefer the second option, despite the fact that the trade-offs and the rewards are mathematically identical. Some economists explained this asymmetry by appealing to hyperbolic discounting, a sort of cognitive error that makes immediate gains seem much more attractive than larger gains in the far future. But for the multiple selves model, there's no real mystery. If the short-term self has a chance to get their hands on a candy bar right now, that's attempting offer. If they're not going to be around to see it regardless, minds will let the long-term self have their way. Procrastination also makes a lot of sense in this model. If your short-term self spawns with the deadline far in the future, maybe their priority will be to burn some time on today's world. If the deadline is in a few hours and you're panicking, the long-term self doesn't really have to do anything more to get the work done. Fight or flight is a short-term problem. More practically, the multiple selves model also suggests a much more robust approach to behavioral change and personal goal satisfaction than just try harder. It suggests that we account for the variable nature of our short-term selves in our plans to realistically consider our habits, tendencies, and impulses to know which way our short-term selves are likely to be pulled and how to account for and take advantage of those impulses in a way that satisfies our long-term goals without needing to litigate every step of the way. It's certainly possible to steer a short-term self away from a particularly myopic momentary preference in an emergency, but it's not a good thing to rely on. Rather than trying to counterman every short-term desire, it's clearly more efficient and effective to find ways to synchronize those goals with our long-term goals. Habit formation plays a huge role in this context. If every short-term self has a nearly automatic urge to lace up some running shoes after lunch, it will be considerably easier to convince any one of them to go for a jog. Also, rather than viewing incidental deviations from a long-term project as damning failures of character, we can consider them as stochastic noise, random hiccups caused by selves that came into existence with just a little too much of a craving for cake, and not enough obstacles to eating that cake. That's not a cause for self-loathing or flagellation. The you who decided to raid the fridge isn't even around to be mad at anymore. It's just a good indication that if you don't like your long-term goals being undermined by a momentary desire to eat cake, you probably shouldn't keep it in the house. Of course, this answer to the paradox of self-control comes with its own set of very weird issues. What does it mean exactly if there are literally multiple individuals with their own goals and priorities in one head? So long as someone's long-term goals are blameless, that is, if their heart's in the right place, should we absolve them of responsibility for their trespasses? In the context of stuff like rights and autonomy, which self should we prioritize? Choosing not to keep cake in your own house is one thing, but what about stuff like gambling or addiction or gambling addiction? By allowing people to exercise more long-term control over their environment in moments of calm reflection, binding themselves to some commitment for action when certain passions have priority, are we empowering them? Or will we just be facilitating persistent tyranny of the long-term self over the short term? What's the balance of power between your selves right now and what should it be? These are all fascinating problems raised by the Multiple Solves model, but I find it a compelling way to think about my own behaviors and falling short of my goals. My short-term self yesterday may have been unimpressed by my long-term New Year's resolution, but today we're making him a killer playlist. Let's see if it changes anything. Does multiple selves theory give a compelling solution to the puzzle of Acreja? What sort of things would you do differently if it were true? Please, leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. I don't usually mention this, but if you didn't know, I do have a Patreon. If you have a little extra cash laying around that you'd like to send my away, there's a link to it in the description. Don't forget to blow up a subscribe while I share and don't stop thunking.