3 - Binary Outcomes and the Biology of Decision

Toye Oyelese

Hi, I'm Dr. Toye Oyelese, and welcome back to Navigating Blind. You know, in the last episode, I kind of zoomed out and talked about the null hypothesis—just admitting that what I don't know always outweighs what I do. That still gives me a chuckle, but today, let's, uh, tighten the focus and get uncomfortably simple. I want to talk about the concept of binary outcomes. Where, for every decision—especially in a real crunch, a crisis—it basically boils down to: what do I want, or what do I not want?

Toye Oyelese

Someone pushed back on this once. "All complexity reduces to want or don’t want? Dr. Toye, that’s way too simple.” And, well, maybe it sounds that way, but let me tell you, that’s actually why it’s practical. When you’re in what I call a burning building—you don’t have time for grand philosophy. You don’t have time for a committee meeting in your head. You need a quick compass: do I want to end up here or not? It's not about good or bad, moral or not—that’s all interpretation. This is functional reality. Want, or don’t want. That’s it.

Toye Oyelese

This isn’t something sophisticated like a psychological model either—it's as biological as it gets. Every living thing, right down to the simple little bacterium, kinda does the same dance. Take a bacterium—it doesn’t sit there and ponder. It just moves toward food and away from, say, a toxin. It operates on preference, but not preference with a story attached. There’s no consciousness. No narrative. Just a baseline mechanism—move toward what sustains you, and avoid what will kill you. That’s want and don’t want at the cellular level.

Toye Oyelese

I remember my early days in rural Alberta—you know, handling diabetes was a daily hurdle for so many families out there. And I realized quickly that, for most people, effective decision-making wasn’t about a huge checklist or weighing a complicated web of pros and cons. It almost always came down to—am I moving toward what I want, or am I steering away from what I don’t want? It stripped so much confusion away. If you’re facing a diabetic crisis, you don’t agonize—you want normal blood sugar, you don’t want dizziness or worse, unconsciousness. So, the choice becomes—insulin, food, rest, whatever it is, you do what points toward what you want to experience, and away from what you don’t. Every result of an action fits that binary.

Toye Oyelese

Now, here’s where this gets interesting—because people think wanting is a conscious thing, like, that awareness gives rise to preference. But it doesn’t. I learned this the hard way, actually. As a child—I had this episode, a lapse, where I lost memory so completely I couldn’t remember my own name. I remember, or, well, maybe I mostly remember the fog, but not the details. And when I slowly began rebuilding my sense of self, I realized I didn’t have to relearn preferences. My body was already breathing. Already finding warmth, avoiding pain. The wanting didn’t shut off just because I forgot who I was. The machinery kept running in the background.

Toye Oyelese

Somebody asked me—so when you got your sense of self back, what changed? Well, I think consciousness just sort of, uh, plugged back into the preference system that had been humming along under the hood the whole time. Awareness didn’t build new wants—it just reconnected to what was already running. That's critical, and I see it play out with patients all the time.

Toye Oyelese

Let me share a story—I can’t use names, obviously, but I had a patient struggling with addiction. Classic scenario: overwhelming craving on one side, the knowledge of consequences on the other, and a kind of paralysis in between. Through counseling, we cut through a lot of noise by breaking the struggle down to, “What do you want in this moment? And what do you want to avoid?” Recognizing that even when he felt out of control, his body’s old preference signals were still firing. The game wasn’t to invent willpower from scratch—it was to help reconnect awareness with the wants already in play, especially those less obvious, longer-term ones. That really changed things for him.

Toye Oyelese

Now, where things get sticky—where life gets properly interesting—is that most of us, unlike single-celled organisms, have a pretty crowded preference system. We want a lot of things—some at the same time, some in direct conflict with each other. Like, I want to sit on the couch with my dog eating ice cream, but I also want to keep my cholesterol under control. That’s a simple example; it gets much trickier when the stakes are higher or the timeline stretches out.

Toye Oyelese

And that’s really the core function of consciousness. It doesn’t create the noise. It’s what helps us arbitrate—all right, which want do I listen to now? Which one gets priority? Someone joked with me once, “So, consciousness is a judge?” And I said, no, not quite—a judge follows rules. Consciousness is more like an arbitrator, weighing all the sides, and negotiating a direction based on the signals it gets. Sometimes it’s not pretty, sometimes it’s not even fair—but it steers us, one way or the other.

Toye Oyelese

Over the years, every practical tool I’ve developed—Mind Enclosure, Best Friend, SW plus A plus T, all those half-acronyms I fumble through during workshops—they’re all just ways to help manage that arbitration process. I might mangle the pronunciation every now and again, but the idea is the same: clarify which wants are at play, and use awareness to tip the scales in a direction that fits not just the moment, but your longer-term needs too.

Toye Oyelese

Still, I know some people say this is reductive. “Toye, life isn’t a program—aren’t people more complex than want and don’t want?” And, yes, absolutely—the richness is there, in the depth of those wants, in how they combine, in the meaning we assign to them. But when it comes to navigating a crisis, or just finding your next step in the dark, reducing the problem to that basic binary—toward or away—really does give you a compass that actually works. You can always add complexity later. But first, you move.

Toye Oyelese

Next time, I want us to dig into what happens when the territory itself changes—when your map doesn’t match reality, and chaos is just, well, the starting point, not the end. Until then, remember: survive first, then thrive.