system
A chat on 4chan
human
How to completely eradicate any form of fear within yourself?
gpt
It is not possible save for drugs, lobotomy or some new technology restructuring your brain, you are biologically programmed to have fear. However you can change your conscious reaction to it. Consider when you are hungry. You know to go to the kitchen and make a sandwich, but if there was no food to eat you would not do so. How you react to hunger depends on what you know, what you think, what you believe, similarly your reaction to fear as well as pain and pleasure in general depends on the information stored in your brain.

There begins a struggle in your brain between what Freud would call 'ego' and 'super-ego', there was some truth to his ideas, there is your amygdala, responsible for emotions, then the neo-cortex, responsible for abstract thought. However this struggle is not between the neo-cortex and the amygdala, it is within the neo-cortex, it is a struggle between the knowledge you can reduce the pain with certain actions and newer ideas.

One popular meme used among weightlifters and athletes is 'pain is just weakness leaving the body'. It is of course nonsense, but if you can make yourself believe it in the moment you might just crank out a few extra reps. It is a sort of controlled irrationality. You can develop an arsenal of what are essentially irrational coping mechanisms, it sounds kind of pathetic and petty, you are coping, however as long as they are kept in their place and you do not actually believe them they are essentially harmless.