The only difference between you and a dog is that you choose what you want to be trained to do.
Willpower as a concept is (mostly) fake and a significant portion of your life will be spent on autopilot. Make sure your autopilot is very well trained / programmed, and give it good environmental “rails” to follow to keep you on track.
Pavlovian conditioning is also more about innate reflexes and autonomic (involuntary) reflexes. The dog can’t decide (as much as it does decide anything) to drool when it hears the bell, it’s body (and salivary glands) have just associated the bell with the food deeply enough that the former stimulates the same response as the latter.
This means that you can gain more control over your involuntary reflexes by pairing them with external stimuli that you do control. The most common use-case is using sound and smell to calm oneself on-demand without pharmaceuticals. For example:
keep a small keychain or necklace with a sealed container with a cotton swab soaked in essential oil such as lavender. Mediate daily or at least several times weekly in a space you feel safe using breathing exercises and inhaling the scent of the lavender. Then, when you are in a space you feel less safe but need to be able to calm yourself (such as when giving a presentation to an audience) you uncap the container and smell the lavender. Your conditioning to that stimulus should cause your autonomic nervous system to calm itself (however, if you stop meditating,l / practicing calming yourself to the stimulus more often than you use it in the upsetting situation the conditioning will reverse and you will begin finding that stimulus upsetting).
I mostly use this for sleep, I always sleep to the sound of a raging thunderstorm which serves both this sensory function as well as covering unexpected noises that might wake me.
The dog can’t decide (as much as it does decide anything) to drool when it hears the bell,
I do think that it is a mistake to assume that the dog is not conscious, or not conscious enough, to know what the bell means.
Like, we could say that the dog is operating purely on instinct, but that would require that we think of them as philosophical zombies completely incapable of self-awareness.
It is also possible that the dog has learned the bell sound as a “word” that means “food” and simply agrees that it would like some food soon. Not all that different from me asking a coworker if they want to get sandwiches.
The only difference between you and a dog is that you choose what you want to be trained to do.
Willpower as a concept is (mostly) fake and a significant portion of your life will be spent on autopilot. Make sure your autopilot is very well trained / programmed, and give it good environmental “rails” to follow to keep you on track.
Pavlovian conditioning is also more about innate reflexes and autonomic (involuntary) reflexes. The dog can’t decide (as much as it does decide anything) to drool when it hears the bell, it’s body (and salivary glands) have just associated the bell with the food deeply enough that the former stimulates the same response as the latter.
This means that you can gain more control over your involuntary reflexes by pairing them with external stimuli that you do control. The most common use-case is using sound and smell to calm oneself on-demand without pharmaceuticals. For example:
I mostly use this for sleep, I always sleep to the sound of a raging thunderstorm which serves both this sensory function as well as covering unexpected noises that might wake me.
Hope you find this useful!
I do think that it is a mistake to assume that the dog is not conscious, or not conscious enough, to know what the bell means.
Like, we could say that the dog is operating purely on instinct, but that would require that we think of them as philosophical zombies completely incapable of self-awareness.
It is also possible that the dog has learned the bell sound as a “word” that means “food” and simply agrees that it would like some food soon. Not all that different from me asking a coworker if they want to get sandwiches.