Can you "choose" you favorite color?

I can "choose" to say what my favorite color is but I don't feel that I, personally, have the capability to "choose" what I subjectively enjoy. My favorite color changes often with mood and with the complex varieties of mixture of colors.

But do we have any aspect of "choice" in our favorite color? If not what does this imply about the basis of desires and how we look at them?

Another, slightly more complicated question is about other likes and dislikes that have real impact. Why do I like magic the gathering but others find it boring? How can someone like to watch professional golf or soap operas?

Why is it also that I find romantic comedies far less than any of my previous girlfriends or ex wife? Is it nurture? Nature? Society? Choice?

No, and you hit on a significant reason why not. Our "choices" are not some kind of free will operation wherein we elect what we do. What we do is because of determining factors. Factors we have no control over. In this case one of these factors happens to be your mood. Same goes for your like for magic. One day you didn't say, "hey, I'm going to like magic." You like it because various determinants came together to give you an appreciation of it. Same goes for your attitude toward watching professional golf or soap operas. As for the exact reasons, don't expect to find them; too many factors are involved.


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I completely disagree. The concept of "acquired taste" is one that is based on the idea of choosing to enjoy something. Beer tastes horrible in the beginning, But you keep drinking it until you've trained yourself to like it. You can choose to train yourself to appreciate and enjoy many things that you otherwise would not.

Tumah said:

I completely disagree. The concept of "acquired taste" is one that is based on the idea of choosing to enjoy something. Beer tastes horrible in the beginning, But you keep drinking it until you've trained yourself to like it. You can choose to train yourself to appreciate and enjoy many things that you otherwise would not.

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Are you saying that every attempt to train oneself to do something results in success? Because that's what you're implying here. Fact is, "keep drinking it and you may never train yourself to like it." This isn't to say that setting out to accomplish something has a better chance of failing than succeeding, but that there's no guarantee either way. Whatever the outcome it's because of changes that occurred, which were determined by factors one has no control over.


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I'm with @Tumah , although I would say there is a degree of self-fulfillment about 'likes'. In some cases this might be quite small but I believe it is there.

My favourite colour is green and I am an ardent Boston Celtics fan. Whichever is the chicken and whichever the egg, there is a relationship and element of choice and self-determination involved.

And given no reason to move from that choice, it becomes increasingly intrinsic.

Personal tastes can be taught to a degree, that has been well demonstrated by behavioral psychology. By Pavlov before that, come to think of it.

If you want to change the degree to which you like or dislike something, expose yourself to that stymulus or trigger while symultaneously enjoying or being very displeased with something else. Many times. Consistently.

You cant choose your favorite color, lol.

disciple said:

You cant choose your favorite color, lol.

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Why not?

lewisnotmiller said:

Why not?

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Uh, show me where its been done?

Yes, but it will be no where near as instantious as we often think it is. I'm currently trying to shift my diet to something more healthy bit by bit by learning to enjoy more healthy food and thinking about why I eat what I eat. it's a semi-conscious decision to change habits but I expect it to be very slow. it will hopefully last however if I enjoy it, as that re-inforces it. As a rule of thumb punishing yourself into new habits always backfires.

[oh god I want Chooclate! *bangs head on table several times* ]

I find that my favorite color is blue mainly because it is calming. Perhaps its because I associate it with big open spaces like the sky and the sea which makes me feel at ease. Although I feel most relaxed when I'm around Trees when the leaves are out. there's something primal about wanting to be around nature. I tend to feel a bit claustrophic indoors.

disciple said:

Uh, show me where its been done?

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I did it. Put it in my first post.

To be clear, I don't think I can just 'decide' to have red as my favourite colour, and away I go. But our actions inform our thoughts to some degree.
Act like something is your favourite colour for long enough, and it will become your favourite colour assuming no particular dissonance occurs promoting a change.

My favourite colours as a child were blue and brown, near as I can remember. I believe these were the most 'boy' colours I could think of. There was an association between the colour and something. It can be an emotion (some prefer blue as a calming colour) but in my case it was like a primitive and juvenile little political statement. (ie. I like brown and blue because I'm a boy. Only girls like pink, and brown and blue are the anti-pink). Some rubbish like that.

I now like green, in particular, and grey. Again, for me, both are more associative than emotional decisions. Hence I can change my opinions on colour by making different mental connections to those colours. This change would initially be quite artificial, but given a lack of reason to change it, I would eventually internalize it.

Red Economist said:

Yes, but it will be no where near as instantious as we often think it is. I'm currently trying to shift my diet to something more healthy bit by bit by learning to enjoy more healthy food and thinking about why I eat what I eat. it's a semi-conscious decision to change habits but I expect it to be very slow. it will hopefully last however if I enjoy it, as that re-inforces it. As a rule of thumb punishing yourself into new habits always backfires.

[oh god I want Chooclate! *bangs head on table several times* ]

I find that my favorite color is blue mainly because it is calming. Perhaps its because I associate it with big open spaces like the sky and the sea which makes me feel at ease. Although I feel most relaxed when I'm around Trees when the leaves are out. there's something primal about wanting to be around nature. I tend to feel a bit claustrophic indoors.

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I agree with most of this. But whatever you say, I still imagine your favourite colour is red.

Tumah said:

I completely disagree. The concept of "acquired taste" is one that is based on the idea of choosing to enjoy something. Beer tastes horrible in the beginning, But you keep drinking it until you've trained yourself to like it. You can choose to train yourself to appreciate and enjoy many things that you otherwise would not.

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Terrible tasting beer always tastes terrible, you just get somewhat used to it. A good pizza or sandwich always helps it down better, though. An acquired taste has to have some aspect of the taste that is good enough for you to make your brain focus on and filter out most of the sensation of the rest. Coffee is a good example, if it's a decent coffee that is. Same with beer, but I guess one could really apply this to any literal taste. Some foods westerners will find disgusting that others just love. It's mostly cultural and taught.

Kind of like how some chords on certain musical scales will sound strange to people not used to it... similarly music is the same way. Color associations also vary greatly between cultures (white is death in some Asian cultures for example but purity in the West), and I think it's the psychological associations that cause us to determine our favorite colors. Just seeing a lot of certain colors has been proven to have certain physiological affects as well... if anything your favorite color is a reflection of your personality.

Determinism is the belief that we decide things based on causes, free will means without cause. So I'd have to say that if we can choose these kinds of things, we do so because that color makes us feel a certain way or we identify with the attributes of that color. In a sense we choose our favorite colors based on who we are and what we like to feel, as interpreted by our cultural lens of association.

jojom said:

No, ....

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And you presumably cannot choose to speak with less self-satisfied certitude.

Jayhawker Soule said:

And you presumably cannot choose to speak with less self-satisfied certitude.

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Ahhh, "self-satisfied". . . . . . . . . . Actually, JS, the feeling never arose. However, you are correct that no choosing was involved.

Doxastic Voluntarism is just another failed attempt to save free will.


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jojom said:

Doxastic Voluntarism is just another failed attempt to save free will.
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In your opinion -- over which you apparently have zero control.

Jayhawker Soule said:

In your opinion -- over which you apparently have zero control.

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Which goes for yourself as well.


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Differences without a distinction. It doesn't matter why or if you choose anything so long as you aren't harming anyone beyond yourself.

Personally I like gamboge. But that is just me.

Monk Of Reason said:

I can "choose" to say what my favorite color is but I don't feel that I, personally, have the capability to "choose" what I subjectively enjoy. My favorite color changes often with mood and with the complex varieties of mixture of colors.

But do we have any aspect of "choice" in our favorite color? If not what does this imply about the basis of desires and how we look at them?

Another, slightly more complicated question is about other likes and dislikes that have real impact. Why do I like magic the gathering but others find it boring? How can someone like to watch professional golf or soap operas?

Why is it also that I find romantic comedies far less than any of my previous girlfriends or ex wife? Is it nurture? Nature? Society? Choice?

Click to expand...

Tumah said:

I completely disagree. The concept of "acquired taste" is one that is based on the idea of choosing to enjoy something. Beer tastes horrible in the beginning, But you keep drinking it until you've trained yourself to like it. You can choose to train yourself to appreciate and enjoy many things that you otherwise would not.

Click to expand...

I think we have the ability to force ourselves, through repetition, to like something more than we originally might, but that this ability is limited and somewhat unpredictable.

To use the beer example, I used to not like it, and after drinking it enough, I'm kind of neutral on it at best. I still don't actually like it. If I'm going to drink, I much prefer wine, from the first time I tried it. Another example is that I used to have a big sweet tooth as a child and a teen, until I actively began reducing my sugar intake to protect my health and teeth, and now I am very sensitive to sweet things and don't like most sweet things anymore. Our bodies can basically adapt to a new normal level of something. If they couldn't, we'd run into a lot more problems.

An inverse example is that it seems almost impossible to truly and permanently alter one's sexual orientation by a large amount.

To bring biology into the discussion, some things are not found to be more psychological, and therefore alterable through therapy, and other things are found to be more neurological, meaning that's just how the brain is and we're more or less stuck with it. Like, some of our preferences and traits are something akin to software, while others are like hardware. That oversimplifies things, especially considering the existence of limited neuroplasticity, but the point is, not all preferences or interests are necessarily in the same category of how alterable they are.