Self-Improvement Without a Self
One thing that I go back to over and over is how it feels to "decide something" in a world without free will.
Where I tend to land after some wondering is something like the following.
Our body does something we'll just call action. We recognize that there is certain information that precluded action. We think this information has some sort of causal power, making us "decide" to do action. Let us call this information our perceived causes.
Now let's consider the two following statements
Statement 1: Because of perceived causes, we decided to do action.
Statement 2: Because of perceived causes, we did action.
In the first statement there is an author who having taken into account the perceived causes makes the decision to author action into existence almost independently of body. In the second statement, there is no author making the decision that causes the authorship of action. Only the action that the body performed and the mind's interpretation of why it did so. Our perceived causes.
Now I usually feel pretty satisfied with this and think it matches my experience pretty accurately. But then I start thinking a bit more about perceived causes and their usefulness because I recognize that my perceived causes may not match the real world's actual causes. I think of actual causes as the true facts in the world that give rise to my experience of my body doing action.
So while I think "Because of perceived causes we did action" I'm wrong, and it's really "Because of actual causes we did action".
The reason I go down this rabbit hole is that there is some life I want to live. To live this life, I need to do some actions and not do others. We'll call the actions we need to do to live our desired life good actions, and the others bad actions. The problem being sometimes we do bad actions and not good actions. We can explain why we did a bad action via its perceived causes. But if our perceived causes are a bad match for that action's actual causes, then we won't truly understand why the bad action happened.
This is where I start to get burnt out and dead end a bit. I intuit that somehow having our perceived causes get closer to the action's actual causes can help us build a life where we don't do bad actions, but I haven't really thought that part out.