Just because you have a perfect abstract knowledge of good and evil doesn’t mean you act from that knowledge. In our individual case we never have this perfect knowledge, but we often do have our conscience and rationality directing us towards a solution to a problem which is in contradiction with competing desires and emotions. Just because we have rationally conceptualized the more optimal path doesn’t mean we will take it, oftentimes we operate not under the intentionality of reason, and more so on the pressures of the moment, most notably due to emotional responses and instant gratification, but, I’ll argue, more subtly on the level of perceived bodily reactions, from which consciousness itself, and rationality, emerge from. To these situations, I designate the classification of “The Spinoza Effect” even though notably similar ideal conceptualizations of the situation has been recorded before his time, I think his conceptualization of it fully exposes the breath of the ideal.

To say that action stemming in contradiction to reason is necessarily bad, and that only action in accordance with reason is optimal, seems a reasonable claim to make, but I believe there is more nuance to be found in relation to our conscious direction, and the choices that “appear” to stem from it. It seems in line with rationality to suppose that certain situations may call for the relinquishing of reason in their optimal resolving, yet, to do so, necessary includes the rational interpretation of instantiating a non-rational approach. Would the action then be rational if it stems from a rational analysis? E.g. If I decide that given my next interaction with someone, I’m going to act spontaneously in the moment, so as to not overthink the best thing to say, or the best way to handle it, if I decide to relinquish logic and reason for spontaneity and emotion, then the decision to do so, is itself rational, yet the action in itself isn’t rational, but it stems from reason in its instantiation. So, in theory, there never could be situation in which conscious forethought antedated an emotional reaction in which the causal determinacy isn’t rational, by definition, yet the action itself, if characterized by emotion, or by lack of reason, in itself, is always emotional.

Conceptualizing a response to a situation that is predicated on emotions, is as much a representation of our Being as a response that is preceded by conscious contemplation attempting to reason out a logical explanation. This is due to depicting the degree to which someone has conscious awareness of situations, and their ability to have conscious forethought preceding their actions. The very quality of a Being of acting spontaneously or through conscious contemplation, in response to different stimuli, is itself a character trait. The discipline in restraint of spontaneity, the reluctance to move instinctual and habit formed responses to conscious cognizing, all tell you something about the Being which is the person in question. Any action that is manifest from an individual, regardless of its content, the situation presented, or the state of mind from which it stems from, will give a relational description that is always accurate in representing the individual. The conceptualization of the perception that enters consciousness in describing a person’s action isn’t the accurate description, as it is mediated by the perception and the developed biological system which filters and accounts for internal values in its representation into a linguistic account of which we are consciously aware, but rather, the action itself is the direct description, in the pre-conceptualized world. This action itself, regardless of its preceding instantiating cause, represents the type of Being which performs it, as much as someone would like to claim “it’s not me” or “if I had time to think, I would have acted differently” are impermissible excuses, as, it is you, and if things were different, of course things would be different, but they’re not, and therefore the action is descriptive.  

In respect to the actual instantiation of any “action”, whether the motivation is predetermined by rational and non-contradictory forethought, i.e. conscious direction, or spontaneous embodied reaction, the resultant action is always, in any case, a reflection of internal values. Whether those values which are embodied are reflective of the consciously formulated hierarchy of importance, or not, is dependent on the action itself in comparison with the conscious values. To say that action which is preceded by reason is always reflective of these, also doesn’t follow. It is possible that spontaneous, emotionally driven responses to situations do, in fact, upon reflexive analysis, follow in alignment with our consciously uncovered value system. Any action, whether or not employed by conscious direction using our rational faculty, or motivated by emotion and perceptive embodied reaction, tells us something about ourselves. We are not merely our rational consciousness, nor are we merely our embodied reciprocal system, we are both, and both serve to provide data as to what it is we value, and to the nature of our character in general.

Are they the same thing? Our emotional and spontaneous reactions are built upon a biological system that has compiled “bodily perceived optimal responses” to the effects of situational encounters. These spontaneous reactions are the result of the biological system, built up by genetic information, which has incorporated perceptive datum, modified by the biological structure, in which forms the habitual response to situations and stimuli. Further experience serves to inform the optimality and development of these spontaneous reactions, which always present themselves in the actions our body performs within the present moment. Consciousness and its contents are presented to us, subjectively, under the same preconditions, resting on the formulations of our bodily perceptions in cohesion with the genetic instruction of evaluation and integration into the totality of the organism.

Our consciously developed state of mind and its contents are the active result of situational stimuli in the same manner that an unconsciously directed spontaneous reaction manifests itself. Both systems are created from the groundwork of genetic material, and modified through the perceptive lens that is outlined on the foundational structure. Body and mind are essentially undifferentiated in the method towards their state in the present moment, as the foot is conditioned to flex up or down in the movement of the body as it is “walking”, the mind is conditioned to manifest the content which it is currently manifesting, just as the heart pumps blood and the lungs inhale and exhale, our consciousness is also conditioned and tempered by the pressures of the world for which, like our body, being our body, is in the world.

We still make the fundamental differentiations in regards to parts of a whole, but we must acknowledge that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and that, being a whole, the parts (only differentiated conceptually) are essentially modified in a manner that contains a continuity and homogeneity. We often make a hard distinction between consciousness and the body, between sensory organs and the subjective experience of them, when, if looked closely enough, there is no fundamental distinction between these parts. Sure it is useful to delineate the roles and physiological underpinnings which give rise to consciousness, but the scientific endeavor of separating, slicing, differentiation, and defining, doesn’t lend itself to an accurate experience to the subjective Being in which we experience the embodiment of the totality of the organism which we perceive to “house” consciousness. The distinction that “I am that which is behind the eyes”, that “we” are this consciousness which directs and controls the body as a ship’s captain steers a boat, is missing the fundamental connection that predetermines and presupposes the very tool in which it is using to suppose such a distinction. Consciousness and subjective experience have qualities in which we can describe as to their arising through physiology, and through the ways in which “stimuli” affects us and how to “deal” with said stimuli in the science of psychology, but both are missing the mark as to what presupposes even these conceptualizations, even before the descriptive element of linguistics arises to describe something, the bodily perceptions in response to the situation which calls for such a description, plays the role of producing the thought through its habitual, “seemingly spontaneous” creation of mental content that has been developed over the lifetime of the individual in his evolved state of Being. The bodily perceptions which internalize the stimuli of the situation perceive in using the “sensory” tools, but these tools are mediated and imposed based upon an internal value system of importance, all of which developed based on the genetic blueprint and subsequent life experience development of the organism, as a whole and his parts, which presuppose the action which is presently appearing within our subjective experience. This subjective experience is no different in essence to the other aspects of the body in their perceiving based on underlying values that have been created throughout the lifetime of the organism. While physiological differences, material composition, and the functionality of parts of the whole of our physical body can be described and are individually quite different from each other, in regards to the Being which we find ourselves, and the subjective experience in which we go through life thinking we are, we must make the necessary connection towards what exactly makes up and is this subjective experience, in which case, I argue, it is merely what the organism intuits as being “who they are” due to the divisive and separational nature of concepts developed using language, but in actuality, it merely is what it is like to Be the Being which you are, that Being which is, currently, markedly differentiated as a human, which developed language, and developed the ability to have a describable experience.  

Being that we experience ourselves under a certain conceptualized differentiation than the body, we intuit that the rational faculty is entirely different than the spontaneous capabilities, and that the two are separate by a gulf, the former which is us, the later which is not. While they both describe different situations, one in which conscious thought is allowed to arise, conceptualize, organize, plan, and decide, taking substantially more time, and the other in which the perception of a situation fails to be modified and internalized through the biological system to the point of arises into conscious awareness, and reacts before any “Idea” enters conscious awareness, while these two situations are, in their facticity, different, they both are the representation of the organism to equal degrees. The developed spontaneous reaction can be consciously modified by the conscious direction to repeat certain tasks, conditioning the body in a way that is in line with the thought. On the other hand, the very thought to do such a thing, and in fact, the totality of consciousness itself, is modified and created by the bodily perceptions which are filtered and modified by the nervous system and its genetic coding before being filtered through the internal value system and arising into consciousness. In this way, both systems, being conceptually differentiated, create each other, and in actuality, prior to any conceptual differentiation, necessarily are the same in their cohabitation, their cohesion, and their co-creation. Spontaneity is merely conceived as such in consciousness, and conscious deliberation or rationalization is an instinctively driven response to stimuli in the same manner as a bodily reaction is perceived to be a habituated response, they are, in essence, one and the same.