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.