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.