What are your thoughts on Richard Dawkins?

[Edwardo Piet]

So how, exactly, is it pseudoscientific? It makes no pretense at being scientific. It is a method for individuals to address their own emotions, not a means of interrogating nature.

Well if it's not scientific then how does it even have any evidence supporting it and how is it any more non-worthless than homeopathy or things that definitely are pseudo-scientific?

... says you.  You really need to stop using that word "we".  It's arrogant.

But we're both doing that not just me and I don't see how it makes either of us arrogant.

You cannot speak to anyone else's subjective experiences.

That's kind of my whole point.

I certainly can control how I accept things.

Well we can accept things but I don't personally see how we can control things. It certainly seems that way to you and certainly doesn't seem that way to me.

I understand that you have issues which I don't have to deal with, and no doubt they impact the way you approach things like emotions. I feel for you, I really do, because I know that when I'm caught in the whirlpool of emotions I generally display my worst and not my better sides. But I reckon that for that reason alone, you can only speak for yourself and your own subjective experience, rendering your statements above overbroad.

We can all speak for ourselves more than we can speak for anyone else but... far from being arrogant I'm saying we can't even speak for ourselves as much as we think we can... because we can certainly experience what seems to us but 'what seems to us' is all we can experience and the fact we seem to be able to control things--or at least it seems that way to most people--is not the same as us actually being able to control them.

I'm saying not only do we have zero authority on how others experience things but we actually have less authority over our own experience than most of us think we do, IMO.

"I seem to be able to control this" may indeed seem to be at least weak evidence that we can control it... but when we ask ourselves "how would things seem to me if I COULDN'T control this?" and we realize the answer is "exactly the same way" I think we will realize that we have zero evidence that we control anything at all and considering we're akin to biological robots it makes more sense that we're sophisticated beings that have agency but we have no control we can actually take control of because whatever level of control we happen to be engaging in at any moment... we have no control over.

It's kind of like a... to choose our own thoughts we'd have to think something before we think it, kind of thing, and I'm saying feelings and actions and anything else we do is exactly the same way. Choices are something that are on the outside but not in the inside, ultimately, IMO.

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I understand that you have issues which I don't have to deal with, and no doubt they impact the way you approach things like emotions. I feel for you, I really do, because I know that when I'm caught in the whirlpool of emotions I generally display my worst and not my better sides.

I really appreciate that

But I reckon that for that reason alone, you can only speak for yourself and your own subjective experience, rendering your statements above overbroad.

I think we all only speak for ourselves and our own subjective experiences because it's all we can know. I think that's because it's all we have access to and all we can expereince by definition.

I'm just saying that I think most people think that their conscious experience itself and their intelligent agency leads them to reasonably conclude that they have control over it when IMO I think it doesn't. I think such a conclusion is unreasonable because the alternative possibility of them not having control would be an identical experience... and so I'm not sure what it would even mean to have control besides 'happen to be less impulsive'.

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I can steer -- not control -- my feelings by understanding that my own observations aren't the only ones which matter, and by understanding the difference between things I can change and things I cannot change. I can control my motivation by assigning priorities to those things I determine are important, and ignoring those which aren't. In so doing, I can exert some control over my thought processes, which obviously includes emotionalism.

Well... it depends what you mean by 'I' in these statements. If all that you mean is your brain can happen to gain energy and motivation and happen to resist more and be less impulsive for reasons that you ultimately don't know... and it can also be highly influenced by changes of life circumstances or being at the right place at the right time or coming into contact with the right people or happening to have the right thoughts or right emotions that lead to more right thoughts and right emotions a positive snowball effect... then I agree with you.

But my question would be what would things look like if it was all down to pure luck and circumstance and your own happening to steer things that way better than previously when you had less luck and were more impulsive and had more fails of willpower?

You may have explanations for why your willpower fails less now but then what led you to the things that led you to that? What would reality look like if it's ultimately down to luck and at the end of the day it's all a snowball effect and you ultimately don't know why things started to go right for you even if you think you do? I think reality would look exactly the same and what often seems to us is just seeming and that seeming is not indication of control.

And like I said... I really do struggle at explaining this stuff.