My Brain on Guns
Turns out conscious decision-making is optional when armed robbery is involved.
A vape for your troubles
Two nights ago, I was held at gunpoint for the first time in my life. Which naturally means I’m already posting about it on Substack (it’s on me to say if it’s too soon, right)!
It was maybe a bit before 10pm or so on a quiet street near Eastern Market in DC, just a block from my friend’s place where we’d had a nice, civilized cocktail night. I was walking alone to the metro listening to Don’t Go (Skrillex, Bieber, Don Toliver) with my headphones on (I’ll probably stop doing this, or do it more selectively/carefully given context) when a black sedan came to a sudden halt on the street (left of me, maybe 10 meters in front) and two young men (probably, just saw their eye area, rest covered by their masks) jumped out with pistols in hand and demanded my phone.
In a simultaneously interesting and plain stupid manner… instinctively (and inexplicably) I didn’t immediately hand over my phone. Instead I opted for amateur theatrics, insisting “I don’t have my phone! Wait dude, please!” while fixating on whether the gun pointed at me (guy on the right) was actually real. In hindsight, attempting an on-the-spot authenticity check of a firearm was not my brightest moment.
As the seconds passed with my loud bargaining and pleading, generally making a scene in the quiet street, the assailant on my left grew impatient, snatched away what I was holding in my left hand (a vape…) and pistol-whipped me on the head, immediately after which the guy on the right knocked me to the ground. Thankfully he smacked an impressively sturdy region above and slightly beyond my left ear, avoiding the fragile areas (temple, back of skull). Thanks for the anatomical precision, stranger.
I kept yelling at them to stop and they ultimately fled the scene leaving me bruised but surprisingly unrobbed—minus the vape. Back at my friend’s apartment, after icing my head and joking about losing my nicotine device as part of a covert government health initiative (“Ah, so they were actually the Feds!”) I began reflecting on what just happened. How could my subconscious gamble have possibly paid off? Was it bravery, luck, stupidity—or all three?
Well, now I want to write about how humans make decisions, especially when pressed against the sharp edge of urgency, danger, and limited information. In that chaotic flashpoint, my subconscious took over entirely (I had no time for any conscious deliberation), making rapid-fire calculations and assumptions (or just heuristic instinct reactions chained together) without conscious awareness. Sooo let’s explore what exactly goes into these high-stakes “decisions”, whether we control them, and how we might rationalize afterward to feel better about our impulsive gambles.
Decisions without consciousness: Could a zombie do better?
The most astonishing aspect of this whole bizarre encounter wasn't the theatrics or the gun, or even the strange loss of a nicotine device as collateral. It was realizing afterward that, at no point during the critical moment, was I consciously "making decisions." It felt like something deeper in my evolutionary toolkit had automatically sprung into action, but that something deeper didn't entirely feel like "me." My sense or reference of self (usually always rooted in majority of conscious thought) was kinda suspended.
Even in that chaotic moment, I remember fixating on specific details with surprising clarity: I was staring at the pistol of the guy to my front, the front sight seemed oddly oversized, the barrel protruded a half-inch beyond the slide (a very unusual feature), and the barrel (inside and out) was smooth. It was like a foot away from my face and pointed at me, so I didn't see anything about the back half of the gun. My brain, even under intense stress, might've been processing visual cues and evaluating the weapon's authenticity. This is speculation, since I had no conscious narrative or in-head dialogue at the time, and it could be post-hoc rationalization. But to some degree I also think it was real-time info-gathering occurring.
Moments like these vividly illustrate the philosophical "zombie" experiment: could someone without consciousness—a "p-zombie"—behave identically, even registering such peculiar details? Or does consciousness play a crucial role in nuanced threat assessment, quietly informing the subconscious reflexes that dictate our survival actions?
This doesn't suggest consciousness is merely decorative. Consciousness might serve as the integrator, narrating fragmented instincts and observations into coherent meaning, whether at the moment or afterward. Perhaps consciousness isn't designed primarily for split-second survival gambles but excels in rapidly stitching instinctive reactions and observations into a coherent understanding. I think this is a really exciting possibility for one function of consciousness that's less discussed in literature.
What makes the p-zombie thought experiment fascinating in this context is that it challenges me to consider whether my behavior of observing gun details while instinctively creating a distraction, required consciousness at all. Could a perfectly programmed biological automaton, devoid of any subjective experience, have performed the same survival dance? The question isn't merely academic when you're staring down a barrel, wondering if your next move stems from your essential self or from ancient survival algorithms running beneath awareness.
The more I reflect on those suspended seconds, the more I wonder if consciousness serves a different purpose than we typically assume. Rather than the decision-maker, perhaps it's more like the sense-maker—less the captain giving orders and more the historian documenting the voyage, creating narrative coherence from the chaos. During those moments when the gun was pointed at me, my brain was likely running multiple parallel processes: threat assessment, fight-or-flight calculations, social cue detection. I think *everyone* in that scenario, would probably be running similar processes at a subconscious level. Consciousness might be what stitches these disparate threads into a cohesive tapestry we can later access and learn from.
This perspective shifts how we might think about free will too. If my "decision" to withhold my phone and create a distraction wasn't consciously deliberated but emerged from subconscious processes, would that instance still count as it really being my decision? Or am I retroactively claiming ownership of actions my body executed without my conscious input? There's something unsettling but also liberating about recognizing how much of our behavior in crisis situations might be guided by neural systems operating below the threshold of awareness. There may be some additional structure and distinctions to bake into my standard free will/determinism compatibilist framework, around the language and carefulness pertaining to self/identity/”I”.
What I find most intriguing is that this unconscious processing wasn't just primitive fight-or-flight, it was surprisingly sophisticated. The fixation on specific details of the weapon suggests my brain was gathering potentially life-saving information even as my mouth was running its impromptu distraction routine. I certainly did not think and “decide” okay I should first gather information about the probability of this being a real firearm to properly assign better calibrated expected utilities to various possible actions. This suggests to me that consciousness might not be required for complex behavioral adaptations, but it might be essential for integrating these experiences into our ongoing narrative of selfhood and for extracting lessons that inform future behavior.
If our survival instincts in these dire moments hinge significantly on subconscious autopilot, how much conscious credit can we genuinely claim? Recognizing the blend of instinctive reflexes and conscious awareness guiding our behavior, sometimes precise, sometimes absurd, might be what allows us to better appreciate the nuanced yet meaningful role our consciousness actually plays in our lives.
Outcome Bias—Good Results are not always from Good Decisions
Back at my friend's apartment, ice pack pressed against my throbbing head, we descended into gallows humor. Maybe it was the FDA's new anti-vaping campaign. I caught myself mentally replaying the encounter frame by stuttering frame. The question that kept surfacing: was my refusal to surrender my phone actually smart, or was I just spectacularly lucky not to be bleeding out on pavement?
I'd like to claim tactical brilliance, but the truth sprawls messier across the border between perception and fortune. Yes, my senses were collecting actual intelligence during those elongated seconds—cataloging the oddly manufactured gun, registering the youthful/inexperienced hesitation in their body language, intuiting something like reluctance behind their masks. All real observations, not retroactive confabulations. My brain was indeed processing potentially life-saving information while the rest of me performed an impromptu street theater of resistance. These were legitimate data points my neural circuitry was frantically collecting and processing while staring down mortality.
But human rationality falters in its own elegant trap: outcome bias, that cognitive sleight-of-hand where we judge decisions not by their inherent quality but by how things ultimately played out. The uncomfortable truth squirming beneath my post-adrenaline analysis is that had the same decision—based on identical observations and calculations—ended with me bleeding out on the sidewalk, not a single person would call my choice anything but catastrophically stupid. The universe dealt me a favorable hand from a deck that contained plenty of fatal possibilities; the observations were real, but the gamble was still Russian roulette with better odds than usual.
My response—that strange offspring born from some mating of intentional assessment and primal reaction—worked out this time. But that very success creates an almost gravitational pull to emphasize my perceptiveness while minimizing how breathtakingly fortunate I was in their ultimate reaction. I really did notice important nuances; I just also happened to win a probabilistic game where losing meant potential death. My observations weren’t fictional… but what, like they justified a 90/10 bet at best? (idk, just making some shit up. a lot of incomplete information here) When the "10" outcome meant possibly never seeing morning.
There's something almost algorithmically predictable about how our narratives tilt toward skill after success and toward circumstance after failure. After any positive outcome, our internal PR department immediately drafts a press release emphasizing our agency, insight, and capability. It’s not pure self-deception but it's certainly selective amplification, turning up the volume on factors that validate our self-concept while quietly attenuating those that suggest that we're still something like pinballs bouncing through a cosmic machine (or at least, just that we aren’t in full control of our future).
This psychological tendency extends far beyond midnight encounters with armed assailants. We retroactively ascribe genius to the entrepreneur who launched just before a market surge, wisdom to the investor who sold before a crash, and foresight to the career-switcher who left an industry months before its collapse. Meanwhile, we look at careful strategists blindsided by black swan events and whisper about their shortsightedness. The mental math always works the same way: positive outcome = good decision; negative outcome = bad decision. But reality obstinately refuses to organize itself along such satisfying lines.
The challenge for honest self-assessment feels almost recursive: I need to accurately evaluate how accurately I was evaluating my circumstances in real-time. I did make actual observations during those seconds, noticed genuine details that influenced my response. Nothing invented or imagined. And yet—acknowledging luck's oversized role doesn't invalidate those observations any more than recognizing a poker player's statistical savvy invalidates the randomness of the cards. It's not either/or; it's a matter of proper weighting in a complex equation of causality.
Maybe better decision-making starts with developing a more calibrated understanding of this interplay—how skill and chance dance together in every outcome, sometimes with skill leading, sometimes with luck cutting in. The uncomfortable question isn't whether I made observations (I did), but whether those observations justified betting my life when I could have simply handed over a phone. And I suspect they didn't. The risk-reward calculation, if done with actuarial coldness, would have pointed toward compliance as the rational choice. I got lucky, not vindicated.
Later that night, I wondered how to hold the two truths simultaneously: that I displayed genuine perceptiveness under extreme pressure and that I was saved primarily by circumstance rather than insight. Can I acknowledge my capacity for clear observation while still recognizing how close I came to a much darker outcome through no particular fault in the assailants' decision-making? Can I be both proud of how I functioned under pressure and humbled by how close the universe’s dice came to rolling against me?
This negotiated peace between acknowledging agency and accepting chance feels more honest than either claiming full credit or dismissing everything as luck. It's also vastly more useful for actually learning from the experience. The narrative that serves my ego isn't necessarily the one that will keep me alive if there's a next time. And that's a trade I'm increasingly willing to make—a little less heroism in the story for a lot more accuracy in the lesson.
Caught Between Instinct and Insight
A weekend after staring down that gun barrel, I'm still trying to make sense of how I walked away with just a bruise and minus one vape. I keep replaying those seconds, trying to understand what part of my response was calculated and what part was pure reflex. It's unsettling to realize how little control I had over my own actions when it mattered most.
I've always considered myself someone who makes deliberate choices, who weighs options before acting. But when that car stopped and those guys jumped out, whatever took over wasn't the thinking "me" I recognize. My body started its own protocol while my conscious self was barely processing (or at least definitely not narrating/deliberating) what was happening. This wasn't a profound mind-body duality it was a straight up stark reality that different parts of my brain operate at different speeds, and the emergency systems don't wait for approval from the executive committee.
The timing is oddly coincidental - March 8th, right at the start of Lent. After three years of on-and-off cig/vape/pack nicotine use, some kid with a gun inadvertently took away my nicotine source. I've never been particularly committed to quitting; it wasn't something I considered a serious problem. But now I'm kind of amused by the idea of treating this bizarre incident as an opportunity - a strange sign to imbue with meaning if I choose to. Like, "Well, I guess the universe has spoken through armed robbery - might as well see how long I can stay nicotine-free and make a story out of it." Not exactly the conventional start to a quitting narrative, but it's the one I've got!
If there's anything useful I've taken from this, it's a more realistic assessment of decision-making under pressure. Not that I suddenly understand the neuroscience of threat response, but that I've seen firsthand how my own mind fractures and reassembles when survival is on the line. What an interesting experience, that state of mind. Maybe this recognition will serve me better than any idealized notion of how I should have acted or would act next time!
