You can. An experiment, pick a task you don't feel like doing, and try to do the actions required, for the sake of the experiment (not for the sake of the outcome of the task itself). Obviously, you can make your body do whatever you want.
Now, you might counter this argument by saying you were only able to do it because you "felt" like doing the experiment.
Here, we must acknowledge a distinction between wanting to do something and feeling like doing something. And a further distinction between different reasons for wanting, and the ways you think about those reasons (logical steps, assumptions, context).
> "If you did it you must have felt like doing it"
That's exactly correct. Every action you took voluntarily was your choice.
You are always doing whatever you want to do. You may tell yourself many stories in your head, and we can dispute free will, but as long as we assume it for the purpose of this discussion, what you do is your choice.
So to me the biggest step in fighting procrastination seems to be deciding what do you really want to be doing with your life and eliminating wishful thinking (i.e. thinking that you can get foo without doing bar in case where that is not possible)
> That's exactly correct. Every action you took voluntarily was your choice.
> You are always doing whatever you want to do. You may tell yourself many stories in your head, and we can dispute free will, but as long as we assume it for the purpose of this discussion, what you do is your choice.
I understand what you are getting at, and I agree with the basic fundamental idea within a certain context. However, we have to be careful with how we extrapolate and attempt to re-interpret words and phrases such as "choice", "want", "feel like doing [x]", "deciding" , and so on.
The part quoted above basically makes those words meaningless. Regardless of what one thinks about free will, those words have great utility and fulfill roles in the human experience for which there isn't really any replacement.
You yourself demonstrate this quite plainly in your last sentence, when you say we should "decide" what we really "want" to be doing with our life.
That's a fair point. I think we inevitably end up in a discussion about free will if we try to pin those words down. That part of the last sentence could have been written as "thinking what values are important to you".
I'm not going to presume to argue with David Hume, but I'm not sure what I can do with something that tells me I have agency. Or is that the point, that I do have agency?
I guess I knew that already, but probably thanks to him and his intellectual descendants. Free will arguments have never really interested me...
You are conflating different senses of "feeling". Our minds are not monolithic. We may have a deeper feeling that something must be done, but have a short term lethargic feeling pushing against doing that thing.
Some of this debate might on the semantics of what it means to say you feel like doing something. If someone actually does something, sure, arguably there was at some level a process by which the ideation happened and passed through a gauntlet of potential inhibitors motivated by some set of judgments that doing it had some value. So you could say they "felt like it." But that doesn't cover the ways in which they didn't feel like it.
What most people mean when they say "you can do something even if you don't feel like it" is "you can do something even if some other task sounds more appealing, even if inaction provides a refuge from the tension of engaging the task, even if you've been experiencing anhedonia for days/weeks."
In reality our ideas about what we should be doing co-evolve with our feelings about doing those things.