How we can “HACK” what we can’t control...!

A devotee of automatic transmission in cars and as anyone who has driven the same model of automatic car for any length of time knows, you soon learn how to induce or prevent a gear change using the accelerator pedal alone. You do this by becoming increasingly attuned to the behavior of your automatic gearbox, unconsciously developing the skill of encouraging it to do what you want. On nearing the brow of a hill, for you might instinctively take your foot off the accelerator to prevent the gearbox changing down unnecessarily for the remaining short climb. Manual climb devotees are blind to this skill because it is something you only learn to do repeatedly driving the same automatic car. The truth is that you can control the gearbox of an automatic car, but you just have to do it obliquely. The same applies to human free will, we can control our actions and emotion to some extent, but we cannot do so directly, so we have to learn to do indirectly – BY foot rather than by hand.

This indirect process of influence applies to all complex systems of which automatic gearbox & human psychology are merely two examples. The problem we face arises because policy problems are given to the intellectual equivalent of manual car drivers, who believe that the only acceptable way to change gear is to use gearstick, rather indirectly with an accelerator pedal. With manual, you merely tell the gearbox what to do but when you are driving an automatic, you to use seduction.

Imagine that you wish to dilate your pupils, increase your heart rate, decrease your heart rate pr boost your immune system. Again, you cannot do this by a direct act of will, but you can use conscious mechanisms to produce unconscious effects

For instance, you can contract your pupils by staring at a light bulb or dilate them by walking into the darkened room. You can increase your heart rate through jogging or decrease it through the practice of yoga or meditation.

It is hacking of unconscious emotional & physiological mechanism that often causes the placebo effect. Essentially, we like to imagine we have more free will than we really do, which means we favor direct intervention that preserves our inner autonomy, which seems less logical.