It really is not a frame of mine. We know this because GWAR genome studies find that the SNPs most correlated with obesity are expressed in the hypothalamus, which has nothing to do with higher thought.
Its not like you black out and the chips are in your mouth though, to act on hunger requires conscious effort. That is what the ascetics are practicing, resisting these primal urges because they can be resisted by the higher thinking brain.
And if ascetics were even a significant portion of the human population I would say that would be a useful measure. Instead their numbers are low enough that they are a statistical outlier along with those people that seem to eat as much as they want and not gain weight.
The fact is you can choose to starve yourself to death if you put your mind to it. I would counter that with 'why the hell would you want to'. Wasting a huge portion of my brain time to tell myself (oh yea, don't eat) seems like a massive waste of time and energy.
>to act on hunger requires conscious effort
Does it? I'd like to develop a test where I starve a large people for a little while. Then while I distract them with something I put some easy to eat like chips in their peripheral view and see how many of them realize they started consuming the chips. My ethicist says I can't do this unfortunately, but I imagine that a significant fraction of the group will not realize when they started eating them.
>Wasting a huge portion of my brain time to tell myself (oh yea, don't eat) seems like a massive waste of time and energy.
That's not what the ascetics come to learn. They aren't even thinking about the hunger at all when they are fasting. The sensation is barely registered in their thought. Plus even with your example for those people who do not realize what they are doing with the chips, if you are serious about dieting you wouldn't set yourself up for such temptation like having a bag of tempting candy perhaps in plain view. You'd do what people who quit smoking do and throw away the junk food or otherwise get it out of easy access. Then you've given yourself another layer of friction that requires even more conscious effort to overcome: if you want to act on your craving for chips, you now have to go to the store and buy them.
>if you are serious about dieting you wouldn't set yourself up for such temptation
But that's the point. You live in a world full of this stuff and a huge portion of people do not have the option to setup the world in such a manner they can avoid temptations being around them.
People that fail to quit smoking have the biggest problem when other smokers offer them cigs. And smokers are a 'small' portion of the population, we all eat. That's why we came up with things like bupropion and varenicline so people can quit smoking. Most people tried and failed to quit smoking multiple times.
