CONSCIOUSNESS

Here's something by Steven Pinker about consciousness, free will and determinism.

FREE WILL AND DETERMINISM

Here's the total picture on the World Pantheism Movement website about free will and determinism—all my thoughts as well as the thoughts of other bright-minded men and women.

FREE WILL IS A FEELING, NOT A REALITY

Hey! I'm getting there, to the robot self brain flow. The following is another entry on the World Pantheism Website:

Walt writes: A FAAP Free-Willist asserts that ultimately all our choices are determined in a physicalist way by nerve action potentials, etc. but that for all practical purposes, (due to irreducible complexity) we have free will, or what is operationally indistinguishable from free-will.

I would not say FAPP "we have free will." Free will is traditionally defined as the conscious human animal control of our human behaviors. What FAPP is saying in reality is that because no computer can copy a mind well enough to duplicate and/or predict a human act (a human act as understood as a series of synaptic firings), then to that computer (which does not possess a consciousness function via language that corresponds to "I"), the action would automatically be channeled into a category or storage function that would register as "misunderstood and/or random activity" versus another category that would be counted as "understood and predictable behavior i.e. copyable behavior". Since to that computer all human activity would be counted as "misunderstood and/or random behavior", no human behavior can be counted as copyable behavior. Free will and determinism do not exist for an unconscious computer. Only copyable or nonsense behavior as recorded in its memory banks.

Taking consciousness out of the discussion eliminates the concepts of free will and determinism. Only consciousness through language can assign meaning to those words. It's the paradox.

The human brain, because it must understand other human activities so as to respond to those behaviors appropriately for survival purposes, functions as if there is an understandable behavior (purposive function) operating in the counterpart it observes outside itself. So the default mechanism operating in the brain is assigned the words FREE WILL by all the robots operating on the global environment, whereas what an individual brain is actually doing is interpreting and responding to stimuli which a computer would send into the "misunderstood and/or random behavior" memory bank. A computer can not generate an appropriate response to any human activity whereas the human brain, because its program is identical to the program operating in its human counterpart, imagines its response to the other human brain as a FREELY WILLED behavior. It experiences its responses to the OTHER as self-generated behavior because it senses its actions as occuring within its carcass. The SENSATION or FEELING of SELF-GENERATED ACTIVITY is interpreted, via language, as a free will activity because the computer brain can't catch itself being a computer, but it can use consciousness to label its felt activities as free will activities when, in all actuality, the brain is just a computer, with quantum capabilities, responding to another computer with quantum capabilities outside of its housing or carcass.

Can I try to say this more succinctly? Yes, maybe: The brain is a computer which feels itself functioning. The sensation caused by its functioning gives the brain a sense that it controls those activities. The brain's feeling of its own functions is consciously encapsulated in the words FREE WILL which it has assigned to those sensations of function that it experiences. Just as we assign the word "love" to a set of physiological sensations we experience so we assign the words "free will" to the physiological sensations of computation we experience.

BEYOND FREEDOM AND DIGNITY

Paul, you wrote: Even the messages you have just written contain values. You seem to value freedom from instinct, rationality, and science highly. Yet these too are "labels for the electrochemical biases (i.e. emotions) which drive or control human decisions." If you are just a robot, why would you value these? Which part of your robot-self is rooting for them and why?

Freedom value? Probably my brain is reacting through the settings that were created in its quantum functions as a child when my parents divorced and when, possibly, I was locked in closets as a child as punishment. My mother was locked in closets as punishment. I know (speaking as my brain) that when I was 1 or 2, my mother used to tie a card table down over my crib so that I was imprisoned while she left the St. Louis apartment to run errands and to meet with sailors while my father was at work. So I believe the electrochemical settings in my brain physically crave "freedom of movement", probably in the same way that a tiger captured in the wild prowls his zoo cage. And don't forget my adult experience that night in the jail basement when I was locked in a small padded cell and doused with buckets of ice water.

See? I'm describing my values as electrochemical settings (which they are) created by environment and genes and not as human choice values. A value is only an emotional setting for the regulation of the mechanics of the human animal.

My wish is to undermine all values, to show them to be mere electrochemical settings. Once the human animal has that idea in brain, what brain would die or kill for an electrochemical setting? At root, that freedom setting (i.e. value), if it must be so described, is probably tied deeply to my survival instincts. Also the brain that calls itself I must value science and rationality because those intellectual habits led it to understand its human condition as a robot in a hostile environment where people use values to kill one another. So all three of the values my brain seems to emphasize have to do with its survival in a hostile environment. It is the brain that calls itself I that instinctively employs these electrochemical settings, not the conscious I that the brain creates through language. I see the I of myself as an observer of the brain robot, in touch with that brain at one remove, unable to do anything but observe and comment.

The commentary function is really vital to the brain that calls itself I. The I function allows the brain robot to gather more and less-immediate survival data so the brain's I function is of some real value to the brain. At this very moment, it's using its I function to speak with you about its status in the world. It probably hopes that this interchange with your brain will add something of survival value to its memory base.

Again, the brain that calls itself I asks you to understand that it is speaking as it does so that it can see back into itself with ever more clarity. It's probably trying to escape the free will illusion that speaking of itself as I gives to its language and its interchanges with you. The better the brain can escape the free will illusion that the use of "I" creates, the better it can be in touch with its instinctual settings and emotional biases. Probably, the better it knows itself, the safer it feels.

Again, speaking more traditionally, I believe that if the brain begins to speak to itself as a robot rather than as a free will "I", some new electrochemical connections may form out of the quantum effects of the process called thinking which might actually alter the frontal lobes' connections (electrochemical pathways) to the limbic system and sensory devices so as to create a new reality for itself which, through consciousness, would be more directly connected to its instinctual functions.

As I said, when I growl, "Damn all human values," I'm aware of some pretty interesting feelings that arise in my body, feelings of freedom and distance from humanity and humanity's gruesome ways of doing things. But that distance also frightens me because its such a lonely place... speaking for my brain, that is, and not as the free will conscious "I". My brain suggests that your brain try such thought patterns on for size.

By the way, by this way of speaking, I'm suddenly made conscious of a possible connection between this way of speaking and the writings of Beckett or Kafka, both of whom attracted my brain during some of those most disturbing years of my life which led to my suicide attempt and alcoholism. Fortunately, being sober allows me to play in their mental fields without the terror my brain used to feel.

Finally, I want any who read this to understand that I'm not a split personality. I'm very aware of what I'm trying to do and to achieve, speaking, that is, as an interpreter for my brain functions.

ANOTHER IN THE HUNDREDS OF WAYS OF SAYING THE SAME THING

Ron,

I think my perspective on this subject is a result of my past versus my present circumstances. When I reflect back to those days of drinking and feeling powerless which led to my intentionally speeding around a curve and crashing my Volkswagen, I can see that without having any conscious philosophical position on my situation at that time, I was FEELING powerless and hopeless and utterly in the hands of fate—deterministic.

I recall that a young friend asked me as I was beginning my psychological journey from those pits, "Do you feel like life just happens to you?" It was the perfect question at the perfect time because I suddenly FELT my predicament to the bone and answered, "Yeah."

My escape from those suicidal depths through counseling was gaining the FEELING that I AM NOT POWERLESS (the feelings about myself that my childhood had engendered in me), but that I can do something to alter my FATE. Empowerment, I think the ladies call it.

Paradoxical indeed that nowadays I can intellectually accept the idea that my decisions are being made for me by the electrochemical processes operating in my brain, rather than by my thoughts, but the FEELING of powerless does not accompany that awareness, whereas in the past I had the FEELING of being powerless without having an accompanying intellectual awareness of determinism. Perhaps, it's because I now trust my body to make the right decisions which is the result of a recovery in counseling that leaned heavily on processing my grief, i.e. emotional rather than rational processes. Thus I can believe firmly in the deterministic nature of my body's decision mechanisms while escaping any feelings of hopelessness that others might feel when confronted by determinism.

POETRY AND THE DETERMINED MIND

Joe Bescop said (on the Pantheism website):

"Most of the arts require a focused mind, without which, the physical mechanisms tend to become as dysfunctional as the unfocused mind.

"I find with the musical and literary arts this is the case in my practices--more so in the musical than literary arena."

I replied:

At 73 (just had a birthday last month), I notice I've lost the capacity for poetic concentration. It was concentration (Joe's focused mind) that led to my best poetry. It's a state of mind out of which arises metaphorical and happy connections about concrete objects in the material world. Sometimes, however, poems came with me out of sleep. All I needed to do was write the words down and arrange them on the page to look like poetry.

The following is one such poem which was selected for Intro 9, a collection of the best poetry to come out of writing programs around the US that year:

EXPLORATION BY CANOE

The savages had left them.
By accident, by searching, hidden
in bushes, we found them—
canoes of animal skin.
Where water was stillest, we pushed in,
then worked out where it ran swiftest.
Someone had lost our maps—
by a not knowing, we got along.

This river we've not seen the end of
empties to a sea we've not tested,
a sea horizon we must think beyond—
over its edge another place to go or,
up, an endless black the stars gleam through
like small hopes we feel inside of us that say,
Yes. Our boats are working out a long journey.
From this river, the sea's imagination away
and beyond that the endless black or…
over the edge in our animal skin canoes!


I just now realize how much determinism is in that poem which I wrote while a believer in AA. Most fascinating about this concentration process (call it meditative too) is that when the poet focuses purely on a physical activity, like flying a kite, and, following that line of concentration, emotively and accurately describes the physical situation, he often discovers that his brain is talking, giving him words, about an intellectual process that evokes similar feelings. Making the "I" conscious of a connection between the feeling brain and outside world.

Thus a poem I wrote about flying a kite as a child, many years later I understood as a search for God, at the end of which my line came down with the kite, and I came "to lay my line along the earth". I can still recall the powerful way those lines felt when they struck into my consciousness, accompanied by powerful feelings of RIGHTNESS. That process is so powerful a feeling that ancient poets often thought they were possessed by a spirit of poetry. What interests me, nowadays, when the poems no longer come my way, is how a physical activity can equate emotionally to a mental process through the act of accurately and emotionally describing the physical world. It's got to be as powerful as early humanoids felt when they began to become conscious of the physical world they lived in. Thus internal emotional states took on spiritual clothing that we are only just now beginning to unravel.


MORE OF SAME LATER...

In a discussion of poetic inspiration on another thread, I got another slant on free will, consciousness and determinism. It is that poetry, art and music are the means by which the body speaks about its connections within itself and to the world outside of itself. Since most good poetry arises mystically, through deep concentration, and is concerned with discussing physical objects, as metaphor, and the body's relationships to that metaphorical and physical world, I'd say that good poetry is free of the "I-ness" quality of consciousness... whereas more abstract and intellectual "I" conscious poetry is not that good, doesn't resonate with the body. How often in writers writing about writing does one come across the idea that one needs to get away from abstractions and get into the material world with metaphors rooted in the material world? Through poetic inspiration I derive another argument that the human species has little free will since free will is located in consciousness whereas poetry is located in pre-conscious connections in the synaptic landscape.

If the body can write poetry without need of consciousness, why does it need consciousness to make other types of decisions? Decisions are always first a feeling in the body (like poetry) which then through activation of the body parts are realized in the real world in such a way as to allow observers to judge the intent and purpose of the actor's behavior. Emotional decisions can be made and not acted upon if other factors, such as fear or shyness or love, hem in the potential for action in the physical world.

Poetry is powerful because it speaks to the emotional parts of the brain where all decisions are ultimately made, and, again, if poetry can, through inspiration arise without conscious intent, and then influence another body to action, where does the power of decision rest... as we normally think of it? And if poetry has this unconscious power to arise unasked into consciousness and, then, to influence personal behavior and, by transmission, influence the decisions of other listeners, why not recognize that all language operates exactly as poetic language operates? And language began I believe with naming things. Before that, human life was all feeling, with no access to language. It's this power of consciousness that continually obscures our discussions of free will and makes us think we have conscious power over the emotions that deeply make our decisions for us.

In a discussion of poetic inspiration on another thread, I got another slant on free will, consciousness and determinism. It is that poetry, art and music are the means by which the body speaks about its connections within itself and to the world outside of itself. Since most good poetry arises mystically, through deep concentration, and is concerned with discussing physical objects, as metaphor, and the body's relationships to that metaphorical and physical world, I'd say that good poetry is free of the "I-ness" quality of consciousness. Whereas more abstract and intellectual "I" conscious poetry is not that good, doesn't resonate with the body. How often in writers writing about writing does one come across the idea that one needs to get away from abstractions and get into the material world with metaphors rooted in the material world? Through poetic inspiration I derive another argument that the human species has little free will since free will is located in consciousness whereas poetry is located in pre-conscious connections in the synaptic landscape.<br /> <br /> If the body can write poetry without need of consciousness, why does it need consciousness to make other types of decisions? Decisions are always first a feeling in the body (like poetry) which then through activation of the body parts are realized in the real world in such a way as to allow observers to judge the intent and purpose of the actor's behavior. Emotional decisions can be made and not acted upon if other factors, such as fear or shyness or love, hem in the potential for action in the physical world.<br /> <br /> Poetry is powerful because it speaks to the emotional parts of the brain where all decisions are ultimately made, and, again, if poetry can, through inspiration arise without conscious intent, and then influence another body to action, where does the power of decision rest... as we normally think of it? And if poetry has this unconscious power to arise unasked into consciousness and, then, to influence personal behavior and, by transmission, influence the decisions of other listeners, why not recognize that all language operates exactly as poetic language arises? It's this power of consciousness that continually obscures our discussions of free will and makes us think we have conscious power over the emotions that deeply make our decisions for us.

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ARGUMENT FOR A TEXTBOOK

Lily and Graham,

Before you get too deeply invested in your opposition to the facts about dominance hierarchies which is another name for "intrinsic hierarchical structures", I implore you to read Buss's The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology". Specially Part V which is entitled "GROUP LIVING" and, specifically, Chapter 23, "Dominance, Status and Social Hierarchies".

I believe we human animals must accept (1) that we are just like all other animals that have survived via evolved instinctual mechanisms like dominance hierarchies or (2) that we are a special creation outside of the animal kingdom. Evolutionary psychology, which sticks to what can be observed and tested and, thus, is outside of pleasant moral considerations that make us human animals feel good about ourselves, reveals that we are buried deeply in our animal heritage and are not outside of or beyond our evolved animal natures.

We human animals sometimes catch ourselves anthropomorphizing our fellow mammals. The interesting thing about evolutionary psych is that it doesn't allow us to anthropomorphize our fellow mammals. It pays us humans the opposite compliment by animalizing or instinctualizing our human behaviors. The following is a short passage from Buss's "Introduction" to the evolutionary psychology textbook which goes a little way toward explaining why we don't catch ourselves being the animals we are:

Instincts are invisible to our intuitions, even as they generate them. They are no more accessible to consciousness than our retinal cells and line detectors but are just as important in manufacturing our perceptions of the world. As a species, we have been blind to the existence of these instincts, not because we lack them but precisely because they work so well. Because they process information so effortlessly and automatically, their operation disappears unnoticed into the background. Moreover, these instincts structure our thought and experience so powerfully we mistake their products for features of the external world: Color, beauty, status, friendship, charm—all are computed by the mind and then experienced as if they were objective properties of the objects they are attributed to. These mechanisms limit our sense of behavioral possibility to choices people commonly make, shielding us from seeing how complex and regulated the mechanics of choice is. Indeed, these mechanisms make it difficult to imagine how things could be otherwise. As a result, we take normal behavior for granted. We do not realize that normal behavior needs to be explained at all. [The boldface passage is my doing.]

When I understand reality and my place in it through these findings of evolutionary psychology, I feel profoundly my place in the Cosmos, so completely a part of the natural world that even my choices are as instinctual as a gazelle's. In those moments of vision (like right now) I feel a near mystic oneness with nature. I am at one with nature and not separated from it through some magical power which other animals don't have. The only difference between me and any other animals is the evolutionary complexity of the sound system by which I communicate with my fellow human animals and ruminate about my instinctive behaviors. I feel another sort of mystic power when my instincts cause me to communicate with you two as I'm doing just now. I feel this writing instinct so powerfully that I imagine I had a choice about writing these comments..,

BUT I DON'T or DIDN'T!

MORE ON DETERMINISM, FREE WILL AND HAPPINESS

In a later entry on the pantheism website, I added the next commentary.

I wrote: Evolutionary psychology, which sticks to what can be observed and tested and, thus, is outside of pleasant moral considerations that make us human animals feel good about ourselves, accepts that we are buried deeply in our animal heritage and are not outside of or beyond our evolved animal natures.

I'm 73, and I have personally experienced a struggle between my genetic attributes and my cultural sensibilities. I was born with a heavy dose of genetic material from my artsy-fartsy mother, complicated by a heavy cultural dose from my loving grandmother who churched me and who raised me between the ages of 4 and 8, and then, further complicated by a cultural dosing from a traditional Catholic stepmother who was psychologically and physically abusive. I understand nurture to be an alteration by chemical processes of my genetic base, a combination of which created the chemically-derived instinctual person I now am.

For a long portion of my life, I struggled with accepting my genetic inheritance. Here was I, genetically bent toward an artsy-fartsy nature in a man's world, verbal by nature and very much aware of my emotional life. I am empowered by talking about my emotional life with other people. I'm into self-revelation to the point of it hampering my interactions with more traditional males who have no idea what I'm talking about. All of my chemically derived traits separated me from the more genetically average male personality who succeeds in American life in the role of father, provider and husband. Fortunately for me, I'm not attracted to males or I'd be as gay as you please and having also to deal with that. As it is, I had a lot of trouble accepting my nature which did not fit comfortably into the machine shop, factory working life I lived while trying to make it as a writer.

I blamed myself for being what, by genes and nurture, I am. This is why I found evolutionary psychology to be so helpful. Instead of hating myself as a flawed male, I'm able to see myself as genetically determined to be what I am. I found that by honest acceptance of who I am (rather than by fighting it) I learned I'm nothing to be ashamed of. With my happy acceptance of genetic determinism, I even came upon a woman whose own genetic makeup causes her to cherish a male who has strong female instincts when it comes to self-revelation. Many women thought they liked that trait in me (it's poetic) until they discovered the other parts of that instinctual nature which made me a poor role-player when it came to protecting and providing. It takes a truly free and self-actualizing woman to appreciate me. However, I should point out that by accepting my genetic makeup and not being afraid of it, I have been able to contribute more in the protecting and providing side of my current partnership. In fact, I discovered that the best sort of relationship is founded in mutual protecting and providing rather than in traditional roles. Took three divorces to learn that.

Now this brings me to the idea of statistical analysis of human traits. Women hate evolutionary psychology because they think that if they're determined by their female natures, they'll be shut out from positions of power or from scientific pursuits. They fear this finding, even though it's not universally true. So, in order to feel good about themselves, to feel empowered, they reject the facts buried in the findings of evolutionary psych and grasp hold of blank slate, free will hypotheses. They're encouraged in their rejection of the facts by insecure males who tell women what they want to hear in order to grab hold of an insecure female, and they are attacked by another sort of insecure male (think Rush Limbaugh—I do) who hates women for asking him to be more of a male and less of the queer he actually is. [Aside to gays: I don't use the word "queer" with any malice toward homosexuality but to turn it's traditional nastiness back upon Rush and his kind who are so dishonest about their own homosexual tendencies.]

All any of us has to do is accept who we are and be comfortable with the strengths of who we are as individuals. Granted, perhaps, the statistics suggest that women, on average, won't be scientifically apt, but neither are males, on average, scientifically apt. Males sure like to tinker with mechanical gadgets, but that's not science. However, statistics will reveal that some females are quite good at science or at running a company... but not all women. It behooves each and every one of us to find out our own strengths and to play to our strengths rather than our weaknesses. If some woman is a bang up housewife and child-rearer, let her revel in that and let each of us revel in it too rather than beat each other up with labels. If a man is a poor provider, let him accept that genetic and cultural sport and cherish his other traits. Why must each of us want to be what we are not and to hate ourselves for being who we are?

I suggest that instead of allowing ourselves to be emotionally determined by the fact of determinism, we find out about our true and INDIVIDUAL natures, accept ourselves for what we are and discover peace in the world harmony such honesty would bring about.

PANTHEIST WEBSITE: THE NATURE OF TIME

Peter,

I like your thoughts. I see the seeds in it of the way I often see the world as divided between these huge concepts which don't seem to exist in the world in a way that my senses can access and the real world that triggers my survival behaviors and make me an animal more than a philosopher..

I've had an idea for some time about the origin of time consciousness in the human species, how it evolved quite intimately connected to biology. It offers a sensory base to time that precedes conceptual ideas about time by locating time in the biology of the brain.

Here it is. Predation would be at the root of our time sense, in that any prey which escapes an attack before it is actually in the jaws of its predator, can, in a sense, be said to be seeing into the future. The fear that a prey feels and which causes its running, freezing or any escape procedure is an anticipation of a future event i.e. the arrival of a predator. Throughout geological time various species have extended the zone of anticipation, the contemplation of the future, so to speak. In a sense, humans are successful adaptions because they've run anticipation of danger out toward the farthest future to an astonishing degree. Doesn't this mean that the physical structures in our brains could be said to have naturally generated our sense of time?

But, our ability to anticipate danger far into the future seems to alleviate any sense of fear about those distant events... like the collapse of our global environment and loss of potable water. We poor humans still don't respond until the "predator" is at the doorstep. And, of course, what about war?

FREE WILL DOESN'T EXIST—WHAT ONE DOES IS ALWAYS DETERMINED

The following flows out of a continuing discussion on the World Pantheism website:

Graham wrote: What is real about ‘I’? I ask ‘ when does control start or finish in any situation?’ If we have free will then why would we allow any psychological suffering to ourselves? We could just say ‘ this is horrible, I’ll end it’. I tend to do this, ironically, by accepting that I have no control.

As I see it, language brought the I along with it. It's the key feature of self-awareness. I imagine the human species had language (very primitive) before it had self-consciousness. Historically, humans probably had 30 or 40 sounds, like other animals did and do, they could produce—things to do with warnings and alerts and anger or love (i.e. grunts suggesting procreation). By some process (still under debate) human word symbols grew more more numerous and more complex and language's recursive nature (maybe) created self-consciousness. Somehow we became aware of ourselves being aware. (I just had the thought that maybe we became aware of our brute's being a brute rather than of ourselves being aware.) Anyhow, the question of this thread is "did this trick of language called self awareness (I-ness) also break us free of instinct or is being aware of ourselves just another deterministic quality of being a brute?"

Critically, your solution to your own suffering is key to many philosophies and it also is another proof of determinism. In AA we learned to "let go and let God". Buddhists also can speak of "letting go". Letting go in AA was also associated with the concept just don't think about it. Almost all philosophies contain an answer to conscious suffering that has to do with escaping it by leaving it out of the equation. The fact that consciousness creates emotional anguish reveals that thinking about a situation is futile and pain-producing. For example, in my case, I deeply felt that without alcohol, I couldn't be funny and being funny was my key to getting laid. It was a deep-seated electrochemical response. Certain situations in mixed company would trigger the feelings along with the thoughts connected to the anguish. The situation created the feelings and the feelings found the associated thoughts. The conflict between my staying sober versus wanting to approach and humor women always produced anguished feelings when I confronted it. In AA they rationalize that anguish as the feeling of "powerlessness"—fear we won't get what we want and fear that we'll lose what we have—powerlessness in the face of reality.

Through sober time and repeatedly encountering powerless situations, my body learned synaptic patterns that led it to stop thinking about things that it had no control over, which is just about everything in the Cosmos. My body became conditioned to healthier responses. Since the information about "letting go" came to it from outside its awareness, my brute can take no credit for its receiving the information into its conscious element and memorizing it. Nor can it take credit for being forced to encounter its powerlessness over and over until it formed new mental connections that led to new instincts forming that related to humorous behaviors, women and social situations with mixed company.

All the I of my brute has ever been able to do is observe what's going on with its brute and discuss it with itself and with other I's in its experience. Like you, my brute has learned the synaptic solution to conflict—acceptance of conditions beyond its control. It's I realizes what the brute has learned, but its I did not teach the brute to do anything. It only acted as an interpreter through which my brute heard of a potential solution to its troubles, i.e. sobriety. Always... always... always, in counseling and in life, the feelings change before the behavior changes and, then, the consciousness explains to itself and to other conscious I's what happened.

My years of one on one counseling proves it to me. I cried a lot, deep sobbing moments when recalled experience caused powerful moments of grief to engulf me. Thinking about intellectual concepts was never useful. It was recalling from my past in strong detail experiences which, then, caused emotions from the past to sweep through me. I could see no purpose in all my crying and re-feeling of experience while the process was going on. None at all. I do know that after these moments of deep feeling, my brute would walk out of its counselor's office altered in some way. Everything in the environment took on deeper colors for it. It felt deeply refreshed. Its voice came from a deeper center in the chest. Voice overheard reverberated differently.

Through a long process of grieving (feeling only) my brute became changed. The proof that my brute had changed is evidenced to its interpreter the I of me in that the brute is now happily married after three failed attempts. I continually recognize that my brute feels but does not respond to his penchant to desire incest victims and other damaged women to have sex with. He's contented with his present situation. If he was not, he'd find some way to ruin it. Not only that my brute's spouse is delighted at the weird humor of the brute who I interpret for. She likes the humor that my brute gives me to offer her through his non-verbal slapstick as well as the words his humors offer up to her through verbal means.

A key step in my getting sober was in my body learning to deal with situations in which was triggered the feeling of powerlessness. People who are damaged as children, when they are truly powerless over what adults do to them, often have deeply seated psychological responses to situations in which they feel powerless as adults. Any amateur psychologist knows that damaged people's responses to powerlessness can range from blushing to murder.

My view is that the conscious I is an interpreter for its brute's behavior. Consciousness is out of the behavior loop even though it is very aware of the information informing the decisions its brute-self is making. Because the human animal is more aware of and can rationalize (i.e. think about and discuss) its behaviors, the conscious I imagines it has more control than it actually has. Underneath consciousness, the brute is still humming along as it always has, making decisions through emotional triggers that fire or don't fire according to basic survival features still active today. Consciousness merely interprets its behavior to other brutes in its vicinity and even to its own brute.

In short, thinking about possible outcomes causes anguish while ignoring one's thoughts and heeding one's instincts leads to successful conclusions. Mental states, if one is willing to let go of thinking and trust the brute's feelings (i.e. instincts), will always work themselves out successfully.

Lastly, my interpretations run from one subject to the next as my brute's whims lead it. Time flies. My brute wants to get on to its math lessons which give it pleasure. My brute wants me to stop here and go to math. So it signals this need to change activities through a sensation I interpret as impatience. I'm aware in my function as language master and interpreter for the brute that so much of this essay is incomplete and ill-formed. IT DOESN'T FEEL RIGHT. So another piece of the brute wants me to keep working over his essay. Even the instincts for language are influenced by the brute's feeling-based decision mechanisms. Even as I seem to be free of him, through language, he informs even the way I interpret his needs and wants. Which brutish feeling will win out? Will I go on to math or keep slaving over this essay. I am never free of him, the brute. He causes my every action.

MORE FREE WILLIES AND DETERMINISTS

Ron,

Thanks for the response, Ron. My brain has never felt sharper, except in remembering the faces of all its favorite movie stars. I think your basic, clear explanation about predictability clearly reveals why one can be deterministic or free willist even with all the evidence in. However, let me respond and add more considerations.

The brain is also rolling dice when it acts but is much more deterministic in result than the dice because in the millions of synaptic firings going on simultaneously in the brain, only a few (7-10) will make the decision and initiate action. If I know a person well enough and that person is facing a familiar situation, I'll be more accurate in predicting their response than I will in predicting the dice roll. For example, I knew a man who always checked with his wife before he'd take an independent action. By watching him, I learned how better to get along with a wife. In fact he was so consistent that some of us could make good natured jokes about the situation. I doubt whether I'd be so accurate in deciding what a dice roll would come up as. And how many of us know people who have favorite expressions for certain situations. Like God Bless.

Further, mental damage will groove compulsions in people so that they'll repeat certain actions or words frequently. All we have to do is limit supposed free will by a tiny bit, and humans can become even more predictable in many ways, even more predictable than a dice roll.

Another proof of the deterministic nature of human behavior is how well we know our friends. Think in how many ways we know our friends and their actions. The fact that we can recognize our friends and their behaviors and proclivities among strangers is a solid proof of the deterministic nature of the human brain. We hardly notice how habitual their behavior is. Think how often one little difference in a friend's behavior causes us to worry and to ask them questions or to ask friends if they've noticed a change in our mutual acquaintance? In fact the behaviors of our friends are so predictable and familiar to us that the only behavior that really gets our attention is a behavior that stands out from the familiar behavior. It stands out and screams for attention. Differences from the deterministed is what alerts our brains.

Because our brains respond so automatically to the deterministic world they live in, we are hardly aware of that determinism because the brain concentrates attention on the new and different. We don't know strangers and our brains focus on them and notices how different their behavior seems. Since we encounter more strangers than friends during a day, our brain is pickled in the unpredictable. It's always the odd act or different behavior that gets the brain's attention. That's the thing the brain must evaluate, the thing that stands out from all the deterministic events that bombard it. So, of course, a human brain, after a few years of practice, hardly notices just how many deterministic events it observes and ignores. It always notices the new thing. It's function is to notice the new thing and learn whether to trust or distrust that new thing. So, again, noticing free will is the default setting of a brain. It hardly notices how determined life is. It ignores the safe and predictable which is what most of life is.

MORE OF DISCUSSION OF FREE WILL VERSUS DETERMINISM

Walt wrote: George has written that he found adopting his 'robotic' stance has made him feel more empowered (George, correct me if I misunderstood your point).

Walt, I described the moment that I (identical with the concept brain) realized that it (identical with the concept he) was a robot. The brain that is I/me woke up one morning, realized suddenly that its first conscious thoughts were not freely chosen by itself but that thoughts arrived with this quality it possessed called consciousness. This made it consciousness of the fact that it was always functioning even when it slept and had been functioning since the day that it became viable enough to function on in its own. That realization was not its own invention. The realization resulted from a couple of years of reading evolutionary psych which prepped the brain (identical with the concept of me) for the realization of its predicament. Next it experienced a nerve-tingling, joyous feeling accompanied shortly thereafter by a set of words that arose automatically into its consciousness function to explain the feeling it was experiencing. The words were exactly, "I've never felt so free!" The connection of emotional biases to language units caused that set of words to arise and make sense of its situation in the world along with the psychological and emotional acceptance of its plight.

The operant word in that sentence about freedom was "felt". Since emotional biases make all our decisions for us, that's a key realization about free will. Let me also call an emotional bias a set of synaptic connections that runs through the limbic system and into other areas of the brain, making them function together. Any emotional bias will always fire up when the brain (beneath consciousness) in its monitoring of the outside world in search for safe behavior in any situation randomly considers that bias along with many other emotional biases that are triggered by the familiarity of the situation to a past situation. If any bias or set of biases becomes the preferred bias upon which the brain acts in any situation, the set of words connected with that bias will also arise into consciousness shortly after the bias becomes active as a set of behaviors visible to the outside world. The brain follows this line of authority: observe, react (select safe behavior) connect words to it (become conscious of what its observed and acted upon).

Consciousness is a secondary characteristic of the function by which long term memories are formed. The more powerful the learning experience, the more it will stick in memory and be available to consciousness in similar situations. Another important element in my brain's awareness scenario described above is that from that moment on, this brain (now divulging itself on this page) finds itself possessed of a strong consciousness of and an emotional bias for discussing its robotic behavior in all other situations. The brain that is identical with the meme "I" strongly feels the need to spread these memes about free will and determinism. It has never forgotten that morning because the experience was so powerful. Again: the strength of the emotion in an experiential moment functions to enter the experience and all behaviors attached to it into memory and the words that go along with it too.

So what did the brain experience in that moment. What was it free of? And how does all this go along with my falling into and climbing out of the experiential state, called alcoholism? Paul finds this ability to change, reform, rehabilitate, to be central to his concept of the human condition called free will. To keep it simple, I'll stop here. The answer to Paul's conditions for free will is another lengthy dissertation.

MORE DEBATE ON THE WORLD PANTHEISM SITE:

Lot's to respond to here. First, I apologize for any too cranky remarks I may have sent Paul Harrison's way. The only thing that got my dander up (the only thing) is that someone named Beth Love entered the site and introduced two topics—hierarchies and where are the women. Dominance hierarchies seemed very much a part of the free will discussion. Then, when Ms. Love positions were debated, she withdrew, and, next, I hear from Paul that it was my continuing interest in free will that is driving people off the site. Since I'm only interested at this time in those issues and most of my free time reading revolves around neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, I felt that I was being asked to quit participating because one angry and cranky woman complained. Paul, I didn't know that numbers are falling and that you are trying to decide why, but, truly, do you think one discussion thread or two can be blamed for falling numbers? Paul, I can find no movement in the history of humankind where schisms haven't occurred. The more intelligent and forceful (argumentative?) the participants, the more likely that differences will appear.

Thom wrote: I just had that déja vue feeling that we are engaged in little more here than that age old freshman psychology debate about "nature vs. nurture".

Thom, when you say that, I see that you don't approach the topic quite as I do. Our genetic structure lays down a whole host of potential neural pathways. Every experience then strikes lines of meaning (i.e. synaptic connections) across those neurons. Unused neurons begin to die off as experience grooves the most used pathways. All through life, nurture alters the neural pathways. Thus the influences of experience upon neural structures and their genetic proclivities both work by first establishing and next altering the neural architecture of the neural pathways. Thus it is both our genes and our experiences that form the electrochemical substrate of each continuing decision. Since both nature and nurture form the basis for each following decision (a decision is an electrochemical action) and then the results of that decision are electrochemically folded into the next decision (in an unbroken chain), I can't see where my brain can claim free will except in the most ruminative way. Imagination can alter the electrochemical settings. Because our brains do imagine future and past situations, they also experience the sensation of having free will even though the human brain is as bound up by genes and experience as a steer waiting to be branded. Even visions and reflections that arise into consciousness are predetermined by preceding electrochemical states.

Interestingly, Thom, believe it our not, I think something Frost wrote years ago about writing and which has stuck with me ever since may be one of the electrochemical settings that became part of my brain's current electrochemical arrangement when it comes to decisions. He wrote that experience is like throwing large stones into a marshy field so that one may, in future, strike lines of meaning across those stones and travel across. That image of the creative process has always seemed to be most accurate. Did I already mention that elsewhere? Old age plays tricks on me.

Walter replied to Ron asking: "Can we define a term which unites the idea of useful fiction and real phenomena?" by writing "I think perhaps the phrase would be "emergent properties."

Walter and Ron, when I read your discussions of "emergent properties", I guess my paragraph above is already accepted and I'm tonguing a loose tooth to feel the pain. Does this mean that you think that free will will emerge fully in time or will it remain an emergent property that can never be fully grasped or realized? If I continue to do tongue my loose tooth, it's because I'm still trying to get the exact description of free will that satisfies me because all around me every day, I talk with people who can't imagine the complexity of their own bound situations in the real world. With humility and because of having spent most of my working life in machine shops, factories and shipyards, I say that sometimes I imagine that I stand on a hill observing the comings and goings of people in a valley who don't have the view I have, and that makes me feel lonely. Thus, to be anywhere where people are at least discussing from the same viewpoint is refreshing. Of course, my imagination also tells me that I'm most likely standing on a foothill and that just behind me, out of sight, are people standing on the mountain who see not only the people in the valley, but me too, with my limited perspective. Not only that, my imagination informs me that down in that valley are others who also imagine that they stand on foothills or mountains from whose preeminence they also look down on me and others. My very best friend in the world says (as did Jacob Bronowski) that imagination is the most important human faculty in the world. He's a creative genius and, in this day and age, pursues a lonely path of self-publishing. The academic world of writers and the commercial writers of hack fiction and poetry and my pal's imaginative world are at odds with one another, and his view is not particularly cherished at the moment. His view remains personal and limited. He doesn't claim to know anything much beyond his own experience of the world. His name is Geoff Peterson and you can find his work on Amazon. His work is highly personalized and very imaginative.

Two more items.

1) I'm still waiting for the remaining free will advocates to show me how a grizzly's seasonal trips to the salmon run are not exercises of free will, given their definition of the phenomenon.

And 2) Thomas wrote: To a physicist trained in reductionism and statistics, the best tests of free will are either-or propositions. Even an individual electron is free to decide which slit it will go through (or both?) in Young's double slit experiment, yet a barrage of those electrons falls into a predictable interference pattern on the other side.

That idea has come up several times in these discussions and something always troubles me about it. Let me see if I can say what that is. It has something to do with perspective. Maybe our perspective is skewed by whether we base our conclusions on observing physical phenomena like the laws of physics at work or physical phenomena like organic brains at work. We assume that discoverable laws are at work behind the phenomena of the physical universe, but when it comes to observed human phenomena, we seem to assume something quite different is at work, and we assume that we will never be able to conclude what drives human behavior, therefore, human behavior, being unpredictable, is free behavior. I can't for the life of me come to that conclusion.

Further, the tester is an observer outside of the situation or entity she is observing. At the moment any decision separate from the observer becomes observable to the observer, the act of decision has already activated the phenomena the observer is testing. Just because the observer can't predict or tell whether the decision is a free act or a determined act does not define that act as a free act. It just tells us the tester needs more information. This is perhaps why Paul would conclude that our discussion is already beyond solution. And perhaps it is beyond our testing, but I say it is a matter of such importance, it's almost as important as was the conclusion that the Earth is round and that Earthpeople are not the center of the Universe. Just how much would human psychology change if humans could see themselves as less guilty and more determined? Would not forgiveness and compassion result from such an observation, fully realized in the human psyche?

Also when one observes a natural event in the world of physics, for example, the observer already assumes that the outcome is determined by preexisting laws which she is trying to discover. However, when observing human behavior, we seem to already assume that there is free will involved in human actions. If we unconsciously assume that humans do or don't have free will before we observe a human being being human, how does that affect our observation? I think we must hypothesize at the outset, by all evidence in the natural world, that humans are not free and then set up our tests to prove that conclusion. I believe all assumptions and discussions before evolutionary psych and modern neuroscience came into existence were biased by the idea that humans possess free will and are responsible individuals.

A FINAL THOUGHT BEFORE I MAKE HAM AND EGGS FOR DINNER

Another thought rushed in as I was signing off.

Free will is a meme which humans have assigned to a phenomenon which does not exist in the real world. A most fruitful path to follow would be back through time to find the causes of that illusion arising in the brain of the human animal. I'm sure it arose simultaneously with the feeling of injustice in a human animal, the moment when one human first realized that the psychic pain it felt could be connected to the action of another human animal. There is a real connection between that pain-causing activity of one human and the pain of the other human, but that does not make the painful action an act of free will, but it certainly led we humans to assign blame and from blame arose the illusion of free will.

How's that for a flash of thought?

THE DEBATE CONTINUES

Walter Alan Mandell said:

George writes:" It bears repeating... evolutionary psychology has been the lens though which the world culture, from top to bottom, makes sense."

With which I partially agree. But I must also point out there there many human cultures, each of which plays out our common genetically inherited drives, and emotions, and talents in different ways. While the commonalities between all cultures may well be genetically selected for, and hence hardwired into our species, there is little or no evidence that the many differences between different cultures is genetically based. Evolutionarily selected genetic determinism goes just so far. There is also cultural determinism. And ecological determinism. And economic determinism. And perhaps even linguistic determinism ---- while all languages with some effort can be made to express any concept, each language forces its speakers to think in terms of certain categories --- for example highly gender typed gender languages such as Spanish or French force their speakers to associate a masculine or feminine gender to even inanimate objects. And languages with complex tenses force their speakers to automatically think of time in complex ways.

Or to put it more simply, yes, genes determine human culture(s), but so do memes.

To which George "the I of me" replied:

Walter,

I agree with you 100% and your "meme" settings with their accompanying emotional valences in the brain's synaptic landscape are subsumed under the general heading of the "influences of... nurture" which I also allow for in a deterministic landscape. Even at the unconscious level, every sensory impression (with sufficient strength) that reaches the brain, is recorded and makes an impression on the electrochemical hardware of the synaptic pathways. Of course, the bigger influences are the impressions with the biggest emotional baggage. Thus our place of birth with all its accompanying impressions (language, geography, family home and faces, playgrounds and streets, familiar odors and sights, et cetera will have an enormous electrochemical influence on brain structure and predispose us to act and believe in certain ways.

One of the things I'd most like to accept is that all the debating in the world is not going to much change anything (it would allow me to relax and shut up) except a sliver of good feeling arises at the thought that every idea I put into the melting pot of global exchange might subconsciously influence the synaptic structure of other brains in the global debate. Then, of course, I realize that my faint hope that I might somehow disengage is foolish in light of my electrochemical settings which predispose me to equivocate and debate. Had it been different my whole life would have been lived differently.

It's very interesting to me that I speak of things that the I of me is and will be doing or hopes to be doing. As if "I" had a choice, but, as far as I can figure it out, I don't. I consider, hope and wish for many sorts of behavior but am not able to do anything that my emotions don't direct me to do. I'd like to imagine I'd make a good non-theistic Buddhist, but when I try to do it, my sense of it is inauthentic and is quickly abandoned. I tried meditation, but it didn't feel authentic. An atheist I am and until something basic changes an atheist I'll remain.

The meme authentic stirs up some interesting ideas in me about free will and consciousness and our sense of being who we are. Perhaps authenticity is the feeling (or sense) that arises when our acts and thoughts are balanced with each other in a synaptic harmony. And inauthenticity is the feeling that is generated when some synapses are in conflict with other synapses within us.

DOMINANCE HIERARCHIES AND SEEMING INSANITY

Joe, please note several of my previous posts in reference to your position on these matter. In the deepest sense, I agree with you, yet in another I notice your own moral, that is, emotional biases edging into the discussion.

Instead of valuing "inequality" in either a positive or a negative light, we must accept that "inequality is." I agree and I believe that's what you're saying, plus you are objecting to those cultural forces which are trying to eradicate inequality by redistributing wealth? And that's where your own emotional valences come in. It pisses you off! Your sense of entitlement is deeply a part of your own sense of place in the human dominance hierarchy. It's part of your genetic makeup and much of what causes you to value and accept the rewards that you feel ought to accrue to those who win their way up the dominance hierarchy. Your emotions (your value system and behavior triggers) all work together to make up who you are.

I also suggest that those human animals around you who are trying to moderate the situation of unequal wealth distribution on the globe are also demonstrating the sort of stuff you see in monkey tribes where middle-ground individuals seem to wish to moderate extremes and bring a harmony between conflicting individuals.

Me... I seem to be stuck in a place where I'm trying to find emotional contentment (by various rationalizations) in what very little I've achieved, being as how I gave the others of my generation a 23 year head start while I drank and played the artistic type.

There could not be more evidence of the dominance hierarchy at work than in all the ways all the parties in these conversations rationalize and justify their own positions and sense of status in the current cultural hierarchy.

What is interesting to me, the one playing (rationalizing) the outsider role, is that the middle ground of the whole debate is the realization that no one can take any credit about who they are and what they've achieved or for their current status in the global dominance hierarchy. In my deterministic view, everyone is acting according to their inherited genetic makeup and the influences of their nurture upon the chemical switches that activate their every behavior in the current moment. Again, what's confounding about this, is that each of us must continue to rationalize our behaviors in order not to feel out of control. If we didn't imagine that we were responsible for who we are and what we've become, we'd feel out of control and insane which, by the way, is what it felt like to me from about 1966 through 1976 when my psychological makeup was undergoing a hell of a realignment of the synaptic switches of my traditional upbringing and the switches that the culture of the 1960s were activating. I often thought that the world or I or both were crazy. In short, I suppose I'd say that the rationalizations which create in individuals their necessary sense of control are the very rationalizations that lead human beings into disagreement and conflict or...

What makes most of us feel sane inside our individual skulls is what makes the behavior beyond our control sometimes seem insane.

Whataparadox!

Of course my view allows me to imagine that the only reason that things have ever seemed insane is that I didn't have sufficient intellectual tools to comprehend the situation within me and/or my culture. It bears repeating... evolutionary psychology has been the lens though which the world culture, from top to bottom, makes sense.

FREE WILL, CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE LIVING WORD

More discussions on the World Pantheist Movement website:

Walter I like the way you laid it down in your last entry. I'm sure there's a psychological necessity that we humans feel as if we exercise free will. If I felt my moment to moment activities were not in my control, my existence would be anxiety filled. I'd feel out of control, and having, in my past, felt what it feels like to feel out of control, I'd hate to feel that way all the time, so I do believe it's a psychological necessity for humans to feel they are the captains of their ships. In fact, I feel more in control of my life now that alcohol abuse is a long time back in my past, and I don't feel anxiety during most of a day as I did back then when my fears overwhelmed me. So the sense that I control my existence adds to a calm and mostly worry free emotional existence but, of course, I believe I lived my way to my current sense of well-being and did not think my way to it. Thoughts follow acts. Not the other way around.

Ron, you wrote, Can I intentionally as a conscious act of free will fire a neuron? Yes any time that I choose at random or by a whim,to remember in detail some particular memory.

Yes, but what fired up that synaptic whim or randomly fired up the thought that you are going to consciously go through all your memories in order to choose one memory and bring it to consciousness? Unless you consciously search through all your memories in order to choose one to bring into consciousness, then I maintain, something out of your control triggered your reflection and chose the memory to be experienced or to enter consciousness. I'm absolutely certain that we humans are incapable of stopping our thoughts on a dime (without cause) and deciding to have a memory moment. Something triggered the moment that brought you to experiencing a memory moment.

My view of mental life both as (1) experienced consciously in fragments and (2) as existing in memories stored in synaptic patterns waiting to be called into action and/or consciousness to guide our behaviors in the moment is that it commenced somewhere in the womb when the brain was mature enough to retain a synaptic impression. I truly believe we human animals consciously experience our births, but they're so traumatic that we repress them. Imagine the sensations that accompany being squeezed through that birth canal, being expelled into light and sounds so much different than those we'd had in the womb. Suddenly being hit by unfamiliar smells, sounds, sensations of all kinds. We've all experienced what it's like to be an alien in an alien environment.

Once the brain is mature enough to begin retaining impressions in the womb, it NEVER shuts down. One sensation flows into the next, sleeping or awake, and when we awake each morning out of dreams or out of unconsciousness nights (nights of unremembered dreams) our very first actions are not chosen but are decided by habitual actions or necessities and our conscious thoughts flow right out of sleep to trigger our first conscious thought of the day which triggers the next and the next and the next. Our bodies have been carrying us along for several years before most of us recall our first conscious moment. The body is in charge of our lives long before we come to imagine that we control our bodies. Our bodies are carrying us along and we experience what is going on in fragmented moments of consciousness.

I challenge you to an act of imagination, for I believe it requires imagination to get to the point where you have the moment of aha? and you sense that your body and your consciousness are one, that you are an animal in the human environment, that your body is making all the important decisions that keep you alive and well and content in the human environment of buildings and jobs and crowds. I superimpose an image of a stag in its environment over my imagination of buildings and et cetera. Like a stag I move through my environment, following the lead of my instincts. Consciousness slips away into second place in order of importance. My staglike body is powerful and leading where consciousness follows. It's a pretty powerful image. This imagination moment must transcend the conscious thoughts my words on this page trigger in your consciousness. The imaginative leap must be so powerful that you FEEL it, experience it so that you feel you are landing on a new undiscovered continent or planet.

In recovery from alcohol abuse, I often understood the words of some helpful hint, but until the words penetrated through my consciousness and struck fire in my emotional life, they were a dead set of words. Live words are in touch with the realities of the body and its decisions; they are in direct contact with the emotional triggers that lead our lives for us.

A REAL FACT OF EXISTENCE FOR ME

The following arises from my discussions on the WPM website:

Paul, you write "George, I'm glad you retracted the "remarkable naivete" comment. The "Paul you are truly disturbed" comment is also way off the mark. I could respond by speculating on the psychological reasons why you seem so obsessively attached to the idea that you and all the rest of us are robots, why you seem compelled to raise the topic is almost every discussion you visit, but I won't. Ad hominem arguments have no bearing on the merits of the arguments here."

Here's why I think (obsess ?) about the problem of free will. If free will is only an illusion, then how can we continue to thin the human herd of dangerous, more aggressive and less inhibited human animals if they are not truly free to be other than they are? I think we have faith in free will because it allows us to rid ourselves of dangerous predators among us without the qualm of conscience biting us. However, since our reactions to dangerous humans among us is also not a free will action and is also determined by psychological factors beyond our control, then the two considerations cancel each other out. But, further, it's pleasant and realistic to hold in memory the idea that the Universe is an amoral and benignly indifferent place to live in. That contact with reality is, to me, a better stance than an idealist, romantic or religious stance that offers comfort through a lie. Better discomfort through the truth than comfort through a lie. Having once been an implacable romantic most of my life, arriving at the truth about free will has brought me a peaceful resolution to my battle with reality. I've now accepted reality and no longer fight it.

RESPONSE TO A QUESTION ON THE PANTHEISM WEBSITE

"Some of us may use the phrase "The Earth is Sacred, the Universe is Divine" or similar phrases to express our Pantheism.

But what does a Pantheist really mean by using these words?

Although the Pantheist Credo (the WPM Belief statement) states "We revere and celebrate the Universe as the totality of being, past, present and future" and speaks of " our aesthetic and religious feelings about reality", nowhere does it contain the words "sacred" or "divine".

This discussion forum is the place for us to discuss whether the terms "sacred" and "divine" are meaningful in the context of Naturalistic Pantheism, and if they are, just what do they mean.

And my response is?

I have never been a friend of creeds of any kind, and when you ask me about "words" in relation to my behavior system, I'm brought into a personal struggle. As far as I can see, my affiliations have never been based in a shared belief system. I'm a regular on this website because I recognize the intelligence here. I'm a member of the Greater Portland Humanists, but I barely tolerate the reading of Humanist principles with which we begin our Sunday meetings 52 times a year. I identify with the people I see there and with whom I share interesting lunchtime discussions. I love interacting with people who have reached a certain level of self-awareness and Cosmic consciousness even though so many of them leave my piddling consciousness in the dust.

Since I believe that the human animal is a robot whose language life is an adaption for survival by passing on basic information but which plays little role in the minute to minute regulation of human behavior, I guess I act as if intellectual life is really of little importance, and, so, I pay little attention to creeds while I do pay close attention to human behaviors. Thus my infatuation with evolutionary psychology rather then in the study of religious beliefs and creeds.

The study of creeds and the emphasis on creeds would, I think, tend to make someone more or less rigid in his behavior. He would be emphasizing the intellectual rules for his behavior rather than his behavior itself. He could quote from and believe in Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount and, yet, in all his behavior act in a very different manner. A recent study showed that atheists know more about the Bible than do Christians. This is good for us atheists, because it means most Christians are decent folk generally interested in their neighbors rather than in the dogmas of their multitudinous faiths. The dangerous dogmatists are those TV evangelical folk who spend all their time awash in the language of the Bible looking for meaning there rather than in the daily life of America among fellow citizens who all love the Constitution.

I don't know why I am as I am when it comes to my inability to orient my life toward the words of creeds or dogmas as opposed to feeling my way along, because I do delight in a good debate, but when you ask me about the words sacred and divine in the context of pantheism, the question is hard for my brain to get its synapses around.

PS: I mean no disrespect by my response. I am truly puzzled by my interest in debate while not being so much interested in the material with which to debate.

MY VANITY WAS FINALLY DEFEATED

After 7 decades of being too vain to use the vanity press to self-publish, (think about the paradox of it) I have self-published a short book of some poetry that I wrote at a specific period in my life in the early 1990s. This was after my third divorce and after a couple of years of one on one counseling and getting to see myself in all my male charm in an honest and forthright way.

The book is called Gray House By Cold Mountain. You can buy it at Amazon or AuthorHouse. If you're embarrassed by sexual matter, the 2nd half of the book is not for you. If you consider sex to be a natural part of the human experience, you'll enjoy the second half of the book.

PECKING ORDER or DOMINANCE HIERARCHIES

My following comments also appear on the World Panthiesm Movement website:

Most of the statistics I go by are contained in the 1st and 2nd editions of The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology ed. Buss which is filled with overviews of the literature in that field.

From analyzing my own situation in and struggles against reality as it is conceived of in the brains of my fellow animals of the human species, I think there's a basic disagreement among us about what a pecking order is. It's not a political structure; it's a sense within an individual brain of where it fits within the culture in which it finds itself competing for goods and services by which to procreate itself. The brain is constantly analyzing its situation—who to trust, who to make alignments with, who not to trust, who can offer us an advantage, who makes us feel comfortable? All these evaluations take place within a mental picture in our brains of the social structure in which people are worse or better positioned to aid us or harm us. Our evaluations of those around us naturally fall into an hierarchical structure as we evaluate who we can help and who can help us—our allies and our enemies.

If someone is struggling against their place in a culture, they are, by default, acknowledging the pecking order. If there is not a perceived pecking order within our brains, against what are we struggling? What does it mean to be dissatisfied with our station in the pecking order? In short, to me the pecking order is indistinguishable from our sense of being in harmonious alignment with the culture we are born into. Or not. It's an intensely personal psychological phenomenon, rarely acknowledged for what it is, because we are so busy arguing about the politics of it. We have our heroes in the struggle (those we raise UP in our psychological fundament and our goats (those we put DOWN in our psychological hierarchy). We are always looking up and down the scale. Our friends are usually people who stand at a relatively equal place in the hierarchy.

Beth, no one has replied, I don't think, to my comments about sports. If there is a common phenomenon in worldwide culture, it's sports, specially football, soccer, rugby and all the permutations of that game called football. In that arena we find the pecking order being played out for us, a game to decide who is most fitted to rule the roost. Since most play is practice for living within a culture, football is childhood play raised into the adult sphere. Here is an arena where people vote with their dollars and their feet. There's no power structure holding them in place. In the last 60 years, we've gone to great lengths to raise the awareness of women as to their opportunities in sports. Women are playing many sports at the professional level now, yet women do not seem to want to flock to the WNBA, for example. Women seem less interested statistically in physically competitive sports. Not only do they not have a great interest in their sex playing sports, they usually don't much care about the opposite sex's participation in sports either. No one can keep a woman from watching a competitive sport if she so desires, thus, their failure to attend says something about how deeply they don't respond to hierarchical physical game play.

Most evolutionary psychological studies reveal that women do compete and do have a sense of where they stand among their contemporaries, but—IF THEY ARE WANTING TO HAVE CHILDREN—then they are constantly looking for ways to further that ambition, and, if they want their child-rearing efforts to be fruitful, they are constantly evaluating the male's fitness to nurture children either with time or with resources. Most all of this evaluating goes on under the conscious level. To be conscious of it would be too embarrassing. Women recognize a hierarchy of resources. I long ago painfully accepted that most outstandingly beautiful women would prefer a rich man to poor little old me. Nowadays, however, my psychology has begun to compensate by finding the Twiggys amongst us not to be physically beautiful. Too damn skinny. I now catch myself adjusting my psychological measuring stick to fit my circumstances. My wife is beautiful and sexy to me, and that's all I need to know, and since I'm 72 and my libido is not the same as it was when I was younger, my wife must be specially sexy and beautiful to me because our sex life is purring right along.

Evolutionary psychology is a much harder science than counseling and other fields of psychology. If you check into that field or into neuroscience, you'll discover tons of hard data about the human animal's brain. the inside of which is teeming with evaluations based on a pecking order, but the pecking order isn't a single chain of lower to higher. It's an accumulation of evaluations all based on various strategies for survival and procreation. It's this fundamental human drive that keeps us mentally shoving our fellow animals into hierarchies of various kinds.

ANOTHER PANTHEISM DICUSSION

Beth Love said

I was attacked by a German Shepard, and i can tell you, I most certainly did not think everything through, I was lucky enough to have a fully functional instincual reactor...and instantly determined that there was nought to be done than kick some dog ass. I went for him, and he turned and ran, tail tucked. There's a place for intellect, an important place, but it isn't everything it thinks it is.

Reply by George Thomas

That is my point exactly. I'm a strictly materialistic, reductive determinist. WOW... lotta verbiage there, eh?

I go with the definition by evolutionary psychology that emotions evolved for the regulation of behavior or the mechanisms of behavior. My behaviors are strictly determined by the emotional signals (i.e. preference determiners) that control me. Emotions are physiological electro/chemical states in the body that range from intense to barely noticeable, but all action is preceded by a "preference" (i.e. an emotional setting in the synaptic landscape created by genetic and environmental conditions) that sets off a series of synaptic firings that reveal to the outside world what my behaviors actually look like. A spoken thought is also a behavior but my natural human duplicity makes my spoken thoughts untrustworthy or trustworthy, depending on the circumstances of the moment in which they come forth out of my mouth and body. The interesting thing is that language can be used to hide our true selves whereas our actions can't hide our "true self".

What is a true self? To my way of thinking, my true self is my biological self as expressed through its behaviors which are controlled through my electro/chemical makeup at the time of any action. Of course, experience is constantly readjusting (reevaluating) and altering that electro/chemical substrate. Also my tendency to think about or not think about my past behaviors also influence my current electro/chemical state. If I visualize a past experience and have feelings about it, that experience of having feelings about the past is readjusting my electro/chemical substrate. Thus our intellectual life reveals the process by which behavior is changed. Being reflective or un-reflective is a genetic condition, I believe, and also one of those conditions that separate the Hamlets (liberals) from the Genghis Khans (conservatives). PS: I'm revealing an emotional preference here, but I'm not feeling particularly fond of either one at the moment. I expect I respect the middle of the road average responder to the environment.

WHAT HAPPENS TO THE HUMAN WHO SUSPENDS JUDGMENT?

Currently, slowly, working my way through a Darwin biography.... I couldn't help drawing a comparison between a repeated comment (by the biographers) about why an Owen or a Lyell hesitated to make the jump to "transmutation"... i.e. "evolution" while a handful of others, like Darwin, did, and similar comments by people discussing free will versus determinism. Always, those reluctant naturalists stated "fears" that it degraded mankind to put him in the biological line of monkeys.

In almost every situation when we're discussing free will, those opposed to determinism fear that we will lose "moral accountability" if we agree that human behavior is determined by electro/chemical factors beyond our control. Darwin's reply in his journals was that he opposed the arrogance of that idea which put humankind on a pedestal in the discussion of biology. He got this from his Fueguian [sp] experiences.

There is nothing scientific about a moral or fearful objection to the facts of natural selection or determinism. Of course, I know there's nothing scientific about my conclusion that we can measure the accuracy of the facts by the depth of the fear that they arouse in the human subconscious, but it's interesting to contemplate: the deeper the fear the nearer the truth. But who or what is fearing the concept of powerlessness? And why? Would accepting our powerlessness be harmful to our survival or would it create an entirely new world consciousness?

Imagine how fearful we would be if we had to suspend our judgment about all human behavior since those judgments are vital to our survival....... but........ only in a hunter/gatherer society?

YELLING AT THE PRESS

Lou,

I've hounded you in past about the paper becoming more relevant. This instance of the girl who has injured herself with acid is a case in point.

One of your commentators mentioned "Munchausen's syndrome". That syndrome, as well as many more, are being deeply explored in the fields of neuroscience and/or evolutionary psychology. Unlike psychology of the past, these new fields are hard science, based in new techniques for imaging and analyzing the brain and its functions.

Central to their findings is the idea that the brain is not and has never been a blank slate upon which any culture can write any lesson which they care to. The core finding of these new sciences is that the brain is an accumulation of hundreds and thousands of minute adaptations over time (minute computing devices with specific and limited duties) which have culminated (for the moment) in the modern brain which first appeared between 50 and 100 thousand years ago with all its strict limitations and its soaring strengths.

Reading in these fields will open any mind (and the minds of your readers) to what an amazing device the brain is. It contains all that is us, all the chemistry of our feelings and thoughts. The brainRus, so to speak, and its physical functioning produces every nuance of personality that others perceive in us. These states which we label "emotions" and talk about as if they were some sort of soul-state or airy-fairy presence within us are actually electro-chemical states of the body which evolved for the regulation of human decisions. Understanding these basic facts would go a long way toward humanity's beginning to get ahold of ourselves and our actions. Right now, we humans are pretty much by nature out of control of our actions.

These new findings are as important in the long run as Darwin's discover of the mechanisms of natural selection in the biological world. Is it not the duty of a newspaper to inform the public of new findings which may alter humanity's self-perceptions and our functioning in the Cosmos?

David Brooks, the once-upon-a-time conservative writer, brought up this new field of science in a recent conversation with Charlie Rose. He sees its importance as much as anyone in your line of work. That's why I mention him.

Good luck and good reading,
--
George Thomas

YEP. NO! YEP... OKAY, WE'RE STILL DETERMINED

(The following is taken from another contribution of mine in a continuing discussion about free will on the World Pantheism Movement website I belong to.)

I sometimes think that a person needs to be involved in crisis situations before they can uncover the determinism that drives their own human behavior. Because we can reflect ahead (interesting turn of phrase, eh) in most cases, we seem able to ignore that the ultimate determinant in any decision is our emotional life (the mechanisms evolved for the regulation of our behaviors). We can tell other people, "I'm not going to the dance because Emily's going to be there." Or we can say we can't go because we "have homework to do". In discussing our decisions with others, language makes us supply calculations or reasons for our decisions, but quite often we don't relate the feelings that actually determined our decisions. Often we're not even aware of the emotional currents that underpin our decisions. If it was fear of the hurt of seeing ex-girlfriend Emily that kept us from going to the dance, we seldom say that we were afraid. We leave it up to our friends to understand what's going on. And people spend a good deal of their lives reflecting upon other people's behaviors, and they generally do so by trying to think about what others are/were feeling when they made a decision. Note the verb "to make" in the phrase? It reveals that we imagine decision making as an activity that can be formed or shaped. Language colors all our discussion about human behavior.

By the way, if you want to get deeply into the difference between a liberal and a conservative mentality, I believe it's in their capacity for self-knowledge, their capacity for getting in touch with the emotions that underlie their behaviors. The liberal tends to be a Hamlet and the conservative leans toward Genghis Khan. Action versus reflection. The reason we go at each other so mercilessly is that we don't accept that the others' underlying emotional life predetermines their thoughts and actions. So we blame them for their actions. We imagine them in out mental lives as responsible for their emotional reflexes.

Anyhow... to return to the theme of crisis in decisions. In a barroom brawl is one instance where our determinism becomes apparent. Think about all the immediate decisions that can flow from the conflict. Anywhere from running from the bar to participating joyously in the fray or, in the middle, seeking a balcony view where one can watch from safety. Among those who participate, are some who'll grab a beer bottle, break it and try to cause serious harm to an opponent. While another can only use his fists. Another might pick up a handy pool cue. Of course, depending upon which opponent faces you, you might graduate to a broken beer bottle if your opponent has one.

My point is that these decisions in crisis situations are flowing from every piece of experience that has formed our emotional cores up to the moment of decisions, the mechanisms which control your behavior. You may have rehearsed your behaviors all your life by imagining them through, but in crisis your decisions are based upon the exact alignment of all your experiences at the moment they trigger your action. And when I say alignment, I mean every synapse and chemical reaction that has been repeatedly rehearsed by every imagining of behavior and every feedback for every behavior that you've had in the past. You are so primed for action that you don't need to think about it. The switches activate and the behavior begins, but those behaviors are conditioned by so much individual experience as well as genetic inheritance that no person can take any credit for how he acts in a crisis.

Later, after the crisis passes, we often discuss our behavior with others, but by then, we're already shading our discussions, feelings and reactions to the crisis even from ourselves. How many people can tell a relative stranger, "Man, am I a coward! I ran from that bar like a chicken with its head cut off!" No we'll say, "Them damn fools was a trying to kill each other. I got the hell out of there!" Our fear is obvious to another person, but think about all the shades of meaning that can attach to an action that is motivated by fear? No wonder, the more civilized we get, the less we are in touch with crisis situational thinking. A hunter gatherer was always in crisis and those who hunted the mastodon effectively (fearlessly) stood out and became the leader and those of us more cautious became the shamans. Et cetera!

I still side with determinism even though our less dangerous existences nowadays allow us time to imagine (reflect) upon our behaviors and imagine that we control them when, deep down, it's a single uncontrollable synapse that tips the balance of behavior in each decision.

THE PECKING ORDER LIFE REVEALED

In more detail, here's why films like "Avatar" are damaging to the human species. I think all of us must recognize that rooted in our evolutionary adaptions is a "pecking order". We can't help but navigate the world with an underlying judgment structure that places us in value-based human relationships within our cultures. Every time we make a judgment (based on feelings), we are asserting our place in the pecking order. It's a key survival tool. We rationalize our individual pecking orders when we make judgments about others that we put into words. Those we feel negatives about are below us and those we like are equal to or above us. At the level of far above us are our heroes. Of course, we also loathe those we fear and who are in a transcendent place in our value systems. You can see this at work when the mob enjoys the downfall of their "favorite" movie star or the disappointment we feel when one of our heroes in the culture wars falls from society's grace.

We can see our places in the pecking order by taking a careful look at those we place above us and those we place below us and those we judge as equals (i.e. those we are most ourselves with). Even though we may not be consciously arranging our relationships on these value levels, our brains automatically do it. That's the pecking order at work. It's the monkey in us.

My contention about almost all Hollywood films is that they automatically try to trigger our "pecking order" functions in order to trigger us to shell out good dollars. They trigger the "good guy, bad guy" structures in our brains. Every time we shell out dollars to these men who are plying our "pecking order brains" for our bucks, we are allowing our nervous systems to be exercised and our pecking order brain functions are strengthened and reinforced almost automatically. You can see this revealed in almost any conversation about films and/or drama. People automatically like or dislike characters and usually talk about films with this in mind. When you put evil versus good into these films, you begin to push pecking orders into religious realms. I think religious persons are really stuck in a royal pecking order—witness their heavenly and/or religious hierarchies—lords, kings and princes all!

The directors are directing not only the actors but our emotions to make us feel identity with characters in the films and to keep us coming back. This is why people don't like downer films which aren't fun to watch because they trigger emotions and consequent thoughts which are unpleasant. People don't like to watch their REAL SELVES up there on the big screen. They don't want to learn from film and drama. They don't want to think about unpleasant realities. Most people go to films to escape. Most people are always in an escape mode. Anytime I hear someone tell me that they go to movies to escape, I usually lose interest in them because they don't like dealing with reality at any other time in their lives. Okay, I have a pecking order too.

I still recall the first time I told myself that I ought to be rooting for the native Americans in John Wayne movies. I wasn't a kid by any means. It was a great leap forward in one way, but, as my identity with the downtrodden increased so also did my alcoholism, and soon my identifying with the underdog led me to also become an underdog and a loser. The more I hated those "above" me in the pecking order, the lower I fell in the ranks of the pecking order. The more I resolved not to compete with the bastards, the more I was unable to compete. I sank pretty low before the friends of Bill W. helped me stop using the depressant alcohol as a treatment for my depression. By age 31 or 32, I was so low that I spontaneously crashed my car one cold Winter's eve by speeding into a turn I knew I could not negotiate at speed. By the time I climbed out of the bottom of the pecking order, a good part of my earning life was over so my retirement is not in the greatest of financial straits, but I'm content because the "demons" are gone from my life. Like that "demon" metaphor? The religious among us also like to use that term.

Two recent films that demonstrate a way to make films that escape the "pecking order" are Rachel Getting Married and The Last Station. Films that worked against the pecking order in the past were Fellini's 8 1/2 or Juliet of the Spirits. In Fellini films, the characters are always at battle with the pecking orders in their heads, the distorted views of reality they carry around in their imaginations. It's wonderful and enlightening to come to in a Fellini film. Another great film which defies the pecking order is Sante Sangre. A serial killer is portrayed sympathetically, and I came across that film just when Silence of the Lambs was making a killing by portraying a serial killer in an almost evil light. Also, the last scene in The Truman Show was a vital metaphor. When Truman stepped through the containing wall into the real world, he was leaving the god-dominated, false world and entering the real world. That was my emotional response to that film. Scorsese's Taxi Driver approached the "pecking order" from another satirical angle. By making an insane and violent scene become the making of a hero, Scorcese revealed the whole fake pecking order nightmare we live in, surrounded by people whose "pecking order" responses are nearly automatic and not reflective.