{"id":1797,"date":"2007-01-02T18:54:50","date_gmt":"2007-01-03T02:54:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/2007\/01\/02\/the-illusion-of-control\/"},"modified":"2026-01-21T16:41:40","modified_gmt":"2026-01-22T00:41:40","slug":"the-illusion-of-control","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/2007\/01\/02\/the-illusion-of-control\/","title":{"rendered":"The Illusion of Control"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>A bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control.<\/p>\n<p>As a result, physicists, neuroscientists and computer scientists have joined the heirs of Plato and Aristotle in arguing about what free will is, whether we have it, and if not, why we ever thought we did in the first place. <\/p>\n<p>&#8211;Dennis Overbye, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2007\/01\/02\/science\/02free.html?ex=157680000&#038;en=cd3dca166d3abeb1&#038;ei=5124&#038;partner=permalink&#038;exprod=permalink\">Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don&#8217;t<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Fascinating article. Engage your eyeballs and invest your brain; it&#8217;s worth it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control. As a result, physicists, neuroscientists and computer scientists have joined the heirs of Plato and Aristotle in arguing about what free [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,28,16,30,3,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1797","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-humanities","category-nature","category-quotes","category-science","category-social-science"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1797"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1797\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11954,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1797\/revisions\/11954"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}