How we prioritise

Prioritise

I have found some problems have taken less than five minutes to clarify. Others many days. How we prioritise was one that will sound rather corny, took a good while and is quite obvious. I considered a regular shopping trip and drew a map, putting all the items on one by one to create a visual representation of the simple links. Get bread, milk, tins etc, return a parcel and whilst there see if I can find a nice shirt. Having gleaned nothing from this exercise I tossed the paper on the floor. Then I saw it. The bigger the fretwork the more it is prioritised. No milk, no tea. The parcel has some importance. A full map is quite big when you include all the consequences. One thing may prevent you from doing another. The milk is not just milk, it is no drinks for our guests, no bowl of cereal for the kids.

It is hard to put into words how elementary our existence is. We dress things up and roam around aloof when simple biomechanical processes are at the heart of it.

Unlike your skiing trip, you do indeed head towards the door to go shopping. Then the phone rings. Someone is in hospital and needs a washbag and a change of clothes. Oh well, maybe I can have a look for a shirt another time. A quick dash to the local shop will dissolve the lack of milk situation, costs a bit more but never mind. I’ll drop the parcel on the way. OK. Are you getting it? You broke the fretwork down, now the priorities change.

The process of deciding what to do works in the same way as priorities. We build fretworks, maybe pros and cons, should we should we not, what do we gain and what do we stand to lose. Time runs out or we are forced to come to a decision and then we approximate the relative size of the competing fretworks. The bigger one wins the day. The largest one always gets the go ahead and is often the largest because it hooks into prearranged bunches of links; what we describe as experience. A decision has nothing to do with the factors, but the number of factors and the space those factors each occupy. You think something is ‘important’ so have a big bunch of neurons set up in relation to it.

The clues are all in the language we use. We say, “on balance that was the best thing to do”, “The advantages outweighed the disadvantages”. We might take weeks deliberating what to do, gathering as much information as we can, then it all comes down to a quick assertion of which group of neural links is the largest. It is worth noting that when we later get more information, namely the full story - more related links, we realise that we made an error of judgement. The size on one side would have been different if all the facts were present. More information can also detach sections and thereby discount them, again changing the size by reducing one side.

choice-pair

How do we win an argument? We counter reservations – reduce the scale of someone else’s network of objections. And we add other items that increase the positivity of your point of view. We outline potential repercussions, the details of which need no explanation. When someone’s life is under threat, vast banks of fretworks are called upon. All their hopes and dreams.

It doesn’t matter who you are, a simpleton or a modern-day emperor, we have the same system in our heads. The problem you are presently dealing with may have huge significance to the world order or be rather silly. ‘Silly’, tiny, not of great merit in the grand scheme of things, however, the amount of neurons involved could be roughly the same as something ‘big’. Hence why we place equal importance to it in our minds.

We spend a lot of time choosing and deciding, but not so much thought is put into the mechanics of how it is achieved. We might make a list of all the options then take a pick. We might decide upon something because it is a little different, fashionable or in keeping with our style. Each factor is another tail. The more positive tails the more chance there is that we choose it. You are controlled by how you build each fretwork. Good deeds, criminal acts and spontaneity all derive from the same mental process. The more links the more presence it has. As each fretwork expands it becomes more important to us. We have a job to get done. We need to do the job to get the money. We need to pay the bills. If the bills are not paid the electricity goes off. One thing leading to another.

Choosing what to do can be delayed when we have a circular path. With some links joining back up to where the thought process begun there is no clear boundary between the groups of links. We can’t then measure the size of each group until we begin to separate out each aspect. We end up in a land of limbo, doing very little until this is sorted.

The essence of free will is about experiences and the knowledge you gain during your life. We find best practices (best for you), which are utilised over and over. The path of life is your way of doing things laid down by what you have done in the past. Your past doesn’t dictate everything but will be the default route forward. We change by learning hard lessons and through discovering new joys. We have a store of negative and positive associations with certain actions. Parents may wonder why all efforts to advise their children is so often in vain. We are steered far more by first hand experiences. It is hard to convey the magnitude of an error by words alone. Personal experiences have large scale imprinting within the mind. Many more links created than any third-party knowledge transfer can provide. Along with words there will be sights, smells and sounds to accompany the memory of an event. Plus, the chemical excitations that emotion brings. That can only be felt by the individual themselves. The rush, fright or exultation leave a mark.