An inquiry about actions, namely behaviors, can be tracked down to some of the three components of the mind's functioning. If we are to compartmentalize the mind as the conscious and the unconscious part, willpower is the faculty of the former, and habit is the faculty of the latter. Stress can be seen as an input to those compartments. Thus, the conscious and unconscious minds struggle to compose an appropriate response to stress, namely threatening stimuli. Habits are the history of the appropriate response to a similar stress input before. In a stable world, habits can deal with stimuli with the help of habits. But in an ever-changing, volatile, and hardly predictable world, giving the majority of votes to habits is a recipe for disaster.
At this point, consciousness, in a healthy system, is inclined to gain a majority vote to deploy actions proposed by its faculty. Thus, every input is seen as different from any historical habit. Thus, newer responses are favored over historical responses from the habits. Yet, conscious responses are not resource-efficient. They either consume time or energy, and the organism must avoid using the function in order to not run out of energy.
In a world where trends persist, habits are resource-efficient; consciousness does not have to design and innovate new actions or habits. But, in a volatile world, the habits have no guiding value.
It is because of this main struggle that living species in chaotic environments are mostly instinctual, using a mechanism similar to consciousness that has the least amount of influence on habits and more influence on consciousness.
In a volatile world, “Adaptability” to me means being more dependent on synthesizing new responses. “Persistence” is to endure the depletion of resources coming from using the faculty of consciousness. Together, they highlight the properties of an excellent conscious response system.
Every moment in an agent has a response system; the organism or agent is under the bombardment of inputs, namely stimuli. It has to derive proper responses to those stimuli in order to survive and thrive. However, there is another interesting thing about that mechanism: the attention faculty. This faculty is about focusing on what is important and can be presented to the semi-council composed of willpower and habits. Attention is the mechanism of voting what is important. And this is always under a frame, which is mostly constructed by the habits of viewing the world.
Considering a human in this framework, several interesting conclusions appear. Nietzsche’s Übermensch is the one who is “perfectly” conscious and who has given habits an infinitesimal vote. Such a person derives their own values from the environment they are in, having a perfect harmony between the inside and the outside.
In life circumstances that are volatile, agents can only adapt by becoming more conscious. Relying on these habits is a disaster. A complete habit set that is derived from the consciousness from eternity from the beginning to the end could have been witnessed to infinite stimuli and used consciousness mechanisms to create a “perfect” map of reality. But that requires infinite energy and time, which we currently know is impossible. Consciousness can be seen as a gain function trying to maximize itself from the disparity between habits and the perfect response.
If a human is in a condition where there is a constant level of discomfort that is depleting or having an increasing level of discomfort, this indicates the success level of their mind’s functioning. Such a mind can be seen as “neurotic,” a term from psychodynamics that basically states constant anxiety from living.
I believe this is caused by the willpower–habit system of the individual. Under stress, willpower is a minority voted by the attention mechanisms to manage unbearable levels of stress, leading to habits gaining a majority vote. And we may remember that in a volatile world, the habit of gaining a majority vote is a disaster. It is a state of prison, which is metaphorically the same case as Tantalus; salvation for the pain is within reach, but some “power” keeps him away from salvation. This is the power of "anxiety crystallized" past “worked” habits, and this is the thing many psychologists try to understand under the name of Self-defeating behaviors.
Since humans all have to use habits, there is a chance of getting into this prison. The only way to break through this is to give a majority vote to consciousness, and that requires energy and time, which is usually spent on making the “Tantalus” behaviors more developed for the sake of the diminished but relatively reliving anxiety coming from performing the wrong behaviors in the context.
Thus, a revolution is required. A revolution that frees the attention mechanism to do something that has never been tried by the habit system before. A revolution for freedom, from the discomforting context. Whether such a revolution could come from the person, is something that is hardly predictable by any framework. But, mostly, they happen. Its success depends on its persistence. On its adaptability.
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