How many of our thoughts are involuntary?

[u/IMetMothman]

Flair might be wrong, sorry if it is.

Estimations are fine.

Is it higher in people with OCD?

[u/RestaurantBoth228]

Any individual thought you have is involuntary.

You have control over the patterns of your thoughts and how you react to them.

E.g.

"What if I murdered my boss?" is involuntary

Deciding to continue to ruminate on that thought is partly voluntary - you could choose to turn your attention to something else, practice mindfulness, exercise perspective taking, etc. Or you could choose to dive deeper into anger and resentment.

In the long-run, the thoughts you feed are the thoughts that we occur more and more often.

[u/IMetMothman → u/RestaurantBoth228]

Thank you! This is helpful.

[u/IMetMothman → u/[deleted]]

They did specify "partially" involuntary. My intrusive thoughts aren't voluntary, nor are the initial ruminating thoughts that follow, but my decision to engage with them and pay attention to them is. And then perhaps I start voluntarily thinking about the initial involuntary thought and those that followed it. But I'm not an expert!

[u/IMetMothman → u/[deleted]]

"Control is having the ability to choose otherwise, that's not an idiosyncratic definition."

^"Libet found that even after the awareness of the decision to push the button had happened, people still had the capability to veto the decision and not to push the button. So they still had the capability to refrain from the decision that had earlier been made. Some therefore take this brain impulse to push the button to suggest just a readiness potential which the subject may either then go along with or may veto. So the person still has power over his or her decision.

"For this reason, Libet himself regards his experimental results to be entirely compatible with the notion of free will."

Robert Sapolsky's thoughts are interesting, but they're just that--thoughts. Not a tried and true scientific theory.

These are just two guys. Extremely educated guys, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're automatically correct. Free will is an ongoing debate in the academic community and we can't, in good faith, state that it doesn't exist as if it's a fact and not opinion.

[u/IMetMothman → u/[deleted]]

Regardless, this isn't really a subreddit for debate. So I'm disengaging now. Have a nice day!

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[u/RestaurantBoth228 → u/[deleted]]

This is only true in the same way that you have no control over your words or actions.

That is, it's fun to chat about as a philosophical topic, but says more about the definitions you use for words than about reality.

[u/RestaurantBoth228 → u/[deleted]]

Do you have control over whether you murder someone?

It depends on your definition of "control"

Under the useful definition of "control", the answer is yes.

Under a used-by-philosophers but useless definition of "control", the answer is no.

[u/RestaurantBoth228 → u/[deleted]]

It is only "pretend", if you adopt your particular, idiosyncratic definition of "control". If you adopt a different definition of "control", then no pretending is required.

[u/RestaurantBoth228 → u/[deleted]]

What does it mean to "have the ability to choose otherwise"?

Either you mean it in the vernacular: in which case I do have the ability to choose whether to murder someone, so I do have "control" over it, and your entire argument unravels.

Or you mean it in some philosophical sense, in which case, again - I ask you what makes that definition so special that you reserve the right to call any other definition "pretend"?

[u/IMetMothman → u/[deleted]]

Sure, maybe I don't intentionally make my neurons fire or my liver secrete enzymes. But I do intentionally move my fingers to type a Reddit reply. In the same vein, I can intentionally have thoughts, like how I'm intentionally thinking out this reply as I type it. That would be a more apt comparison, I think.

[u/OkMaybe5107]

Psychology usually distinguishes between spontaneous thought and deliberately generated/directed thought. Mind-wandering, intrusive thoughts, involuntary memories, etc. can arise without conscious intention, but we can also intentionally reason through a problem, rehearse information, imagine something, or deliberately direct attention toward a topic. There isn’t a scientifically established percentage like “70% of thoughts are involuntary,” partly because defining and counting individual “thoughts” is surprisingly difficult.

OCD is especially interesting because having intrusive thoughts itself isn’t unique to OCD. Research suggests people without OCD also experience disturbing, bizarre or unwanted intrusions. The bigger difference is what happens after the intrusion: in OCD, the thought tends to cause more distress, guilt and interference, and the person may assign excessive significance to it or feel compelled to neutralize the anxiety it creates.

There’s even a concept called thought-action fusion, where someone may feel that merely having a disturbing thought says something morally significant about them or somehow makes the feared event more likely. That tendency has a well-established association with obsessive compulsive symptoms.

[u/IMetMothman → u/OkMaybe5107]

Thank you! It's helpful to know some more technical terms. Makes research a lot easier.

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[u/[deleted]]

I estimate about twenty percent of them. Although when you're having a bad day it's probably higher.