Willingness, Willfulness, WillPower
What is the difference between willingness and willfulness and willpower?
Provide more real-world examples of how these look in daily life.
The word willful is confusing, but here is my interpretation: If a person is full of their own will, then they can refuse to accept a reality that is contrary to their own or they could attempt to make things happen they way they want (or will) them to be.
What is the difference between having a strong will (supposedly healthy) versus being willful (supposedly destructive).
How does being "full of your own will" lead to burnout and exhaustion?
When it comes to ideas and responsibilities, what is the difference between awareness, acceptance and adoption?
I think that willingness, willfulness and will power are strongly connected to awareness, acceptance and adoption. I am just not seeing the link. What is the link?
Is willpower required after adopting certain ideas or responsibilities? I think will power comes in play when there is acceptance but adoption is missing. In this case, one accepts that one must do something but nothing internal makes one do it other than will power. Acceptance requires reasoning (one thinks through it and see that it is right). Adoption requires emotions (one desires it). Adoption does not require will power; adoption is backed by internal desires. Once adoption (of ideas or responsibilities) happens, depending on how strong the adoption is (that is, how strong the desire is), will power is required in inverse proportion. To need will power is to lack adoption.
If we are talking about doing something (like fulfilling a responsibility), then the responsibility once adopted till it gets habituated still requires some will power to make oneself do what the responsibility entails (since the new way is contrary to the old way).
If we are talking about ideas, then the idea once adopted till it gets deeply ingrained still requires some will power (here will power = conscious awareness when dealing with the idea) to make oneself use the newly adopted idea in favor of the previous and now-discarded idea.
When we said "depending on how strong the adoption is, will power is required in inverse proportion" we are discussing the gap between adoption and habit; the difference between adoption and habituation. And what is habituation? Till a habit is formed one is still getting habituated; one is undergoing the process of habituation.
Now let us discuss openness. Ignoring the context of this conversation, what do you think openness means?
Most people are aware of what openness means; that is awareness about at least a vague meaning of openness exists in most people. But are most people open? a person is open (to new ideas or new responsibilities) if they have understood the meaning of openness and hence what openness entails and also they identify themselves as an open person (that is, they are in principle open to new ideas or new responsibilities). An open person is the one who as accepted openness as part of who they are. As we have discussed acceptance does not equate to adoption. When a person has adopted openness, then the person actively engages in the intellectual contemplation of the idea (or responsibility); weighs its merits and demerits; mulls it over for a considerable amount of time; till the person forms a firm judgement about the idea (or responsibility). The outcome could be acceptance or rejection of the idea (or responsibility); and that outcome is due to the openness and resulting significant contemplation. Having adopted openness reduces the need for will power. Having habituated openness diminishes the need for will power further.
The fascinating thing about will power is that in most normal human situations (that is, when survival is not threatened), most humans have similar amounts of will power. They are either using this will power in support of openness or in opposition to openness.
So, the behaviors that seem like stubbornness, lack of will power, insufficient will power, and wilfulness are all signs of lack of habituated openness.
And what does openness depend on? The simple human quality of curiosity. The simple curiosity is not the same as the habituated openness. But it is the necessary ingredient for openness to develop from a trait to become a habit.
When we humans think that we are far more intelligent than other life on earth, that intelligence, that we are so proud of, is supported by curiosity. Without the curiosity, there cannot be much intelligence.
Curiosity alone is not sufficient for intelligence. Many things are required. Biological aspects like sensory organs and their effects within the brain (like pain, comfort, or pleasure), memory, pattern recognition, logic, pattern reproduction (like muscle memory, recipes). You also need the higher level cognitive abilities of decision making and prioritization (fight or flight, and if so with whom or in which direction). All of these put together results in intelligence; and I may have missed some.
Most problems that humans face can be solved by using a few fundamental built-in human qualities of curiosity, thinking, prioritizing, and then acting on the results of all that cognition.
When we are children, we have much lower barriers to forming habits. For example, in modern times, brushing teeth after getting up in the morning has become a habit. This habit formation is a result of awareness, acceptance, adoption and habituation regarding the benefits of brushing teeth. At some point in time in the past, parents had to be open to the idea and adopt that brushing teeth in the morning is a good thing to do; for children, parents and their own childhood helped in the habituation process.
As we grow older, habituation gets harder. Potential new habits are like discovering that "brushing teeth in the morning" is something that we ought to do. Habitual openness makes it easier to actually form new habits. They help in converting potential new habits to actual new habits.
Curiosity and Habitual Openness can eliminate behavioral issues like procrastination, weak will-power, no self-discipline. Can you elaborate on how this happens?
What other behavioral issues can also get resolved with curiosity and habituated openness? And why?
Curiosity and Habitual Openness can even combat judgmental biases that have subconsciously crept in an adult's mind.
Curiosity and Habitual Openness help dealing with intellectual anchors that lead to inertia like: likes and dislikes, good and bad, truth and reality, this is important and that is unimportant, I love doing this and hate doing that, truth and beliefs, my beliefs and others' superstitions, us vs them, norm and exception, success and failure, pain and pleasure, comfort and discomfort. There are many other such dichotomies.
The willingness vs willfulness is fundamentally related to behavioral response to what?
Willingness versus willfulness is fundamentally related to a person's behavioral response to reality; specifically unchangeable or uncomfortable facts, conditions, and constraints in the present moment. Thus, A willing person will accept these external inputs and adapt to them. A willful person will ignore these inputs and continue whatever they were doing or worse still attempt to fight this external reality and attempt to make it as per their desire or will. Ignoring reality or attempting to change it has a highly uncertain probability of success. Adapting to the reality has a probability of success in accordance with the reality. So, someone attempting to optimize has a safer bet by being willing rather than willful.
When considering optimization, one has to consider the cost-benefit function for which the input is the reality. The output of the function is simply the probabilistic benefit-cost. Thus, willing and willful are two families of this cost-benefit function. For example, a willful function could simply ignore the reality, assume the costs and benefits and compute the output. In another example the willful function would try to change the reality, and hence incur a higher cost for the same benefit and output that result. Within each families of functions, there can be several variations depending on what is being considered as the willing behavior and the willful behavior. To choose a course of action then is simply writing several of these functions. And then simulating them with the input.
In order to construct the cost-benefit functions what do you really need?
To construct the cost-benefit functions you really need a value system that assigns the values to the costs and the benefits.
Value system really boils down to the answer to the question "what do I care about?" So phrases like "I don't care", "I love this", "I like that", "I dislike this", "I wish this were the case", "I wish such-and-such situation did not exist" are implicitly stating the values.
Any person always carries an internal value system. The person may change the value system with inputs and experiences. Being open helps in changing the value system. Alternatively, a person can temporarily use a different value system.
Back to writing the cost-benefit functions, a person who uses multiple value systems to write variations of those functions will have access to a larger set of functions and then can compare the costs and benefits better with these multiple value systems.
What are the meanings of the words: education, learning
What is the difference between active learning and passive learning?
How would those two be different from accidental learning? Is there a better word or word-combination that better represents what accidental learning means.
We will use the term "incidental learning" in lieu of "accidental learning".
A human being is, among other things, a learning machine. Active or passive learning primarily occur during Education. Incidental learning happens with experiences.
If humanity (and humans) were to rely solely on incidental learning, the progress will be very slow.
Thanks to education, we learn many technical and artistic things. From education, we may also learn things like "moral values" and "ethics". As part of living, of which education is a well established part, we learn "values" and adopt our own "value system".
Thus, education and social interactions are the inputs that ultimately result in our "value system".
Or perhaps, we should say that education, solitude, leisure, and social interactions are the inputs that ultimately result in our "value system".
If we add the values and value systems of other people, we can have a richer set of value systems to consider when coding our cost-benefit functions.