Why can’t we trigger our own fight or flight response, purposefully, on command?
In: 46
This will be a bit winding but I promise it’s relevant to your question.
I would argue that you can’t do anything purposefully. What I mean by this is that your question is somewhat loaded in the sense that it pre-supposes that it’s possible to do something purposefully. You could say this in another way as you as a thinking agent chose to do something in accordance with your internal desires.
The problem with this presupposition is that there isn’t actually any evidence to indicate that you actually can choose to do anything. For example, we are aware of only two processes that drive everything in nature. One is causality, which is that something doesn’t change unless acted on by something else, or the domino effect. The other is randomness like in the case of radioactive decay. This may not ultimately be random, we just don’t have any evidence for a non random cause currently.
So what does this mean? Well, if any of us have agency or autonomy and are able to actually choose our actions then that fundamentally requires some kind of mechanism that would allow us to arrest those natural processes of causality and randomness in order to assert our own desires. Despite many experiments, there has been zero evidence to suggest that there’s any mechanism that allows for this and so the logical conclusion is that we don’t actually choose anything. It’s all just the result of completely natural causes that we have no control over.
So for the same reason that you don’t choose to do anything, you also can’t choose to alter your brains bio chemistry in order to trigger a specific response.
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