> Surely there would be people like me who could resist the dancing plague.
Intelligent humans are in some ways the dumbest humans. You assume that your consciousness/will is the only "code" executing inside your skull.
It isn't. You're just unaware of the rest. What is it doing, and how much influence or control does it have on your overt behavior? Well, wouldn't you like to know.
The biggest part of the illusion that "you" are in control, is your capacity to re-interpret your behaviors after the fact. Someone asks you, "hey, why'd you A?" and your brain panics at the idea of blurting out "I honestly don't know". There has to be an answer. You're not exactly lying when you come up with that answer, it's more like your best guess. I think in some ways, all those teachers and other authority figures that punished you extra if you said "I dunno" when they asked why'd you break the rules have something to do with this too.
Finally, if you could be the one person immune to so-called dancing plagues... would you really want to be the inhuman freak who didn't?
Intelligent humans are in some ways the dumbest humans. You assume that your consciousness/will is the only "code" executing inside your skull.
It isn't. You're just unaware of the rest. What is it doing, and how much influence or control does it have on your overt behavior? Well, wouldn't you like to know.
The biggest part of the illusion that "you" are in control, is your capacity to re-interpret your behaviors after the fact. Someone asks you, "hey, why'd you A?" and your brain panics at the idea of blurting out "I honestly don't know". There has to be an answer. You're not exactly lying when you come up with that answer, it's more like your best guess. I think in some ways, all those teachers and other authority figures that punished you extra if you said "I dunno" when they asked why'd you break the rules have something to do with this too.
Finally, if you could be the one person immune to so-called dancing plagues... would you really want to be the inhuman freak who didn't?