alerdz5

You're welcome, I would be more active myself if I had willpower broken down into the smallest pieces possible for my personal use. I don't see why it would be valuable exclusively in the case of actions being done for the first time. If a person does a second set of an exercise, for example, the required willpower for that set is equal, or more if the person is experiencing fatigue. The person in this example knows that it has been done before but that will do little to change the amount of willpower required. Desire and the choice of pursuit are different and it's hard to say if both are required in willpower. Before a decision is made, can there be action? Once a decision to act has been made, is that the point where willpower comes into play? Making a decision can be an element to willpower but what separates running away from a dog that hopped over a fence from running a marathon? An understanding of how to carry out an action could possibly be another factor. In your example of a man in the desert who wants to cross it, if this man was given a map with the wrong directions and followed these directions, he would end up in a place that was not the other side of the desert, but it is safe to say that most people would agree he made it there with his willpower. There's the observation that "What one man can do, another can do". There are new actions that are tried and in these cases, if it is an entirely new course of action then I can see what was happening as being called "faith". If the action was carried out, then it could be said that there was a feeling of self-efficacy from the beginning, working under the assumption that it is required.

I have read books that have touched on the topic of willpower and in experimenting with it on my own, the way I would currently fill out this open-ended sentence completion approach to understanding the topic of willpower is: Willpower requires desire and a belief in efficacy, because without desire, a person will stay in the current position that person is in, and without a belief in self-efficacy, the decision to act towards what is desired would be considered irrational. and In order to possess willpower it's greatly beneficial to be self-connected so that you know what you want and so you can be receptive to evidence that a goal that is desired is out of reach, if it turns out to be.

In my view of surrealist art what is being done is that, through the use of "surprise" and "unexpected juxtapositions", which are terms I read from the Wikipedia page, ordinary scenes are mixed up with surprising ingredients and that challenges assumptions about how life or specific situations "ought" to be. When elements that are typically present are replaced with other elements, the difference in what a person is used to and what a person is seeing can be rationalized or rejected for specific reasons on the part of the person and the experience of surprise can elicit a series of thoughts in the person that is unrelated to the depictions in the artwork at hand. I was watching a surrealist film called The Holy Mountain and one of the scenes in the movie was of a man walking through a giant collection of Jesus statues, the man picked up a statue and walked away with it for 2 or 3 minutes while people pointed at him and laughed. What I thought when i saw it was: (Assuming Jesus existed, the god Jesus with godlike powers.) There are various accounts of Jesus, one of these accounts is in the Bible, there are multiple forms of Christianity, Jesus is mentioned in the Quran, and with all the varying descriptions of Jesus, a common factor to all of the word-based claims of what Jesus was like is that they were delivered by humans. If he was a god close to how he was depicted, it's possible that no declaration of what Jesus was like is accurate. At best, we have close replicas of his true form based on our abilities to describe what we see. A statue is a form of a replica, the person a statue is made to represent can do more than the statue - move, think, breathe, speak, etc.. I saw the man grabbing a Jesus statue as a method of expressing the idea that he was deciding what he thought Jesus was. He was choosing his interpretation of Jesus - either through a preexisting description or through making up his own concept of him. I saw the people pointing and laughing as being those criticizing someone who is committed to their religion when that religion is not the same that the people are practicing. To me, the statues communicated the idea that we can never know what Jesus was really like, we only have our interpretation of what he was like. As I'm reading Win Bigly by Scott Adams I see that it matches the idea of the human mind that he expresses, which is that human beings don't have a fully accurate map of the world, instead people have models which are useful to them. The takeaway I had in it is that it provided an "art-based" communication of the idea that "reality is subjective". And people choosing to criticize others are in the same position as the people that are being criticized - which is holding an interpretation instead of what is real - the real Jesus or a fully accurate map of the world. I will clarify that I don't believe in that but seeing that part of the movie solidified the idea of subjectivism in my mind. That is how I made sense of all of the Jesus statues piled on each other. The surprise element to it caught me off guard but I eventually made a connection that it could be about subjectivism. I can understand the interpretation that it is random details combined, and that could be what it really was in addition to most surrealist art. With the surprise element and the unexpected juxtapositions, surrealist art leaves an opening for a person to bring order to a confusing scene and it shakes up common associations, bringing the mental state that comes up with what is seen compared to what would have been seen, in the expectations of the viewer, opening up another opportunity for ideas emerging in the viewer's mind.

When you said: I see that it could be detrimental to a person's life, however, there are many possibilities for how a person can temporarily alleviate pain and avoid the root cause of it, for example, a person could eat food that is a poor diet choice in large doses, a person can go to a bar and make a habit of going there regularly, or a person can exercise so often that overtraining occurs and it takes a toll on the person's body rather than being a benefit. Each option has a potential of being harmful to others - buying chocolate from a store increases the chance that it will stay on the shelves, spending time at a bar allows the bar to remain in business longer, and paying a monthly subscription fee to a gym will increase the amount of money the gym makes, enabling it to remain open or possibly increase hours. People can turn whichever of these activities into an addiction following a previous person's support of it. Despite the potential for any one of these activities to become an addiction for someone - the activity itself isn't immoral. If it's consensual and there isn't secretly a gun behind the camera as it's being filmed, then, in the context of a person liking a video that another person sees, and that person then going off and watching more and more videos to the point of an addiction, there is no immoral action in that chain of events.