AN OLD BEATNICK MEETS GEORGE BUSH IN A TAVERN

Finally watched The Butler last night. Spent a large part of the movie in tears. All the pain that finally buried this "very sensitive" child under alcohol abuse came back last night. The interesting thing to me is how "conservative" I was as child and youth, in that I believed all the myths about America. After WWII, I really believed all the things about America's greatness, its love of freedom and justice and free speech. What the 50s and 60s taught me, finally and painfully, was that the American people were no better or worse than any other nation of people. 

Unrealistic "idealism" is what tortures modern conservatives also. They cling to the past, and they believe all the nonsense they were taught as children. They can't see modern America in a real light, and they are incapable of seeing the "injustices" created by free enterprise or capitalism. I do believe that capitalism is the best method for distributing a nation's wealth as long as the distance between those most and least rewarded does not grow too great. Which it has. 

Sadly, modern Teapublicans can't help "blaming" others for being poor because conservatives cling to the myth of "free will", thus it's easy for them to blame others and to praise themselves. They are controlled by evolutionary forces just as much as the less fortunate are controlled by genes and nurture. Those who succeed usually have a "sense of entitlement". The sense of entitlement describes a psychological or electrochemical state in the brain/body that leads to success. Their "psychological state" is a cause of success rather than an effect of success, and a grown Teapublican can no more take credit for that psychological state of being than a honeybee can take credit for being the queen of the hive. 

This film explores the difference

In my own case, I was driven by pain to try and understand who I was and what made me into the person I was. Success became secondary to that struggle. I was tortured by insecurity and shame. Until I reached the bottom of my personal struggle, trying to escape my worker bee status was next to impossible. It was like trying to climb up a hill of marbles. By the time I did understand the forces that drove me, I was in my 50s, a late start in the rush to earn fame and fortune in the free enterprise system. If only Teapublicans understood their fortunate electrochemical inheritance and quit "being proud" of themselves, we'd have quite a different nation to live in. 

Pardon my length, but simple-mindedness is not one of my strongly evolved characteristics. Complexity of thought comes with the territory of self-understanding. Thus, I am not George Bush and he is not me. Back in the day, however, I'm sure we'd have enjoyed drinking a beer together had we known each other. I enjoyed the company of many a young George Bush in the taverns where I "bought my alcoholism" one drink at a time.

EMAIL TO A CATHOLIC FRIEND...OR ANY RELIGIOUS FRIEND

Dear friend, I liked the Catholic Church when its priests were into liberation theology, supporting peasants in their armed battles against wealthy conservative forces in whatever nation they found themselves. Yes, that was good stuff, but the big dogs didn't like that and liberation is dead now. I see the Pope did tell the impoverished youth of Brazil to "shake up the church", then he directed them to proselytize on the streets which has nothing to do with shaking up Mother Church. He appears to want Catholics to be more like dogmatic Muslims, Mormons and Protestants, knocking on doors.

I understand his wish to grow the Church. When you promise impoverished masses they'll be rewarded in the afterlife, you help keep them cooled down and obedient to their masters on earth...the wealthy. Jeez, Friend, nothing new there. I wish I could eavesdrop during those Cardinal gatherings when they elect the Pope. Their strategies and aims are obvious: "Okay, we put in a conservative Pope when that's likely to more popular, and we put in this more liberal Jesus type when the liberals and socialistic forces are on the ascendency." It's coldly calculated to keep the Church in the best possible light. 

Notice that where poverty is greatest so also all religions have the most members. Sadly, the Pope once a year, around Xmas time, says, "Hey, World, help the poor," but the church does nothing constructive to help the impoverished masses except dole out insufficient charity, enough to hold the poor just above starvation levels and dependent on the Catholic Church. The Church officially sponsors no progressive legislation in any nation that is aimed to lift the poorest peoples out of poverty. Nor does the Pope support liberal and progressive forces in any nation that are struggling to make REAL POLITICAL CHANGE happen. In fact in America the church supports the Teapublicans who in North Carolina actual ended unemployment payments and supports the Teapublicans in other Southern states who are dumping the poor off Medicaid. My friend, the Pope is all smoke and mirrors, mouthing platitudes while doing exactly nothing to really help the poor.

If there were such a thing as an anti-Christ, the Catholic Popes, most of them, have fit that bill. I'm glad I don't believe in religious ideas or I'd be frothing at the mouth about the Pope's anti-Christ identity, but since I interpret what's happening through the rational lens of science, everything makes sense. Everyone is acting just as you'd expect they'd act if they had evolved out of jungle roots and each of them was desperately struggling to keep themselves alive in anyway they can—the Pope being no exception.

If the human species really did have souls and free will, if it really did obey a higher directive, if it really believed in the afterlife of punishment and reward, this globe would be a very different sphere. Modernity wouldn't look so much like the product of a species a few thousand years out of the jungle. My dear Friend, it's so obvious what's going on I think any intelligent human computing machine would see it, but my wish, again, is hoping that people were more than they are, but, so far, they are performing right to type as evolved animals struggling to adapt to modern civilization and not doing too well at it...liberality bless them in the name of goodness.

From your friend, another human being, doing the best he can to stay out of harms way,

Augusto Philipi Lovingstone

MORE DEBATE ABOUT FREE WILL

Ronhorgan wrote: Thus my problem with the determinist position is that it may be demotivating.

Ronhorgan,
My distant computer friend is only one of many reasons that I believe my behavior is determined by factors beyond my control.

The argument that determinism is "demotivating" cannot be a legitimate reason to disregard the evidence for our determinant situation. I note a tendency to bring morality into this particular discussion quite a lot. People cite the lack of moral accountability that seems to accompany a materialistic view of human behavior. People note that we won't be able to hold people accountable for their behavior if we come to the conclusion that human decisions are determined by factors not in their control. But the fear of a particular scientific conclusion is not itself a scientific fact that ought to keep us from arriving at the truth. We would all be Bible literalists if we failed to accept the truth because of irrational fears.

I have to note that we long ago decided that some people are not in control of their behavior when we allow insanity as a plea in trial cases, but insanity, itself, is a label that we put on behavior that does not fit into the normal range of human behavior. In short, it's asocial behavior that our fear of death causes us to angrily respond to. For a time, I believe, in some countries, the rage of a jealous husband was an allowable defense for murder of a rival. If we now realize that such a view of jealousy is unacceptable, it is because slowly a new social norm has arisen into human consciousness, but that new norm is a group phenomena that is evolving as we speak, one brain at a time. We also do not, in America, allow a Muslim father to kill his daughter for asserting her right to fit into American culture. We also are beginning to reign in a parent's religious right to kill his children through neglect of their health needs. As to our overall debate about the death penalty, we seem, because we can debate the issue, to believe that we have free will, but if each of us were honest about our own individual decisions about the death penalty, we would see that individually, our decision were emotional decisions over which we had no control. For myself, my brain is able to consider that—maybe—we ought not to allow the death penalty, but my emotions have not come to that conclusion at all. All arguments against the death penalty fall on my deaf emotional ears so I have made no decision about that particular reality external to my own. Just don't ask me to be the executioner, then, I fear, I would be immobilized by emotional considerations. Future human cultural decisions, if they are basically self-regarding, will naturally lead the human species to the best survival strategies though it will be one individual at a time.

Let me return to another fact that causes me to believe that we are not in control of our own behavior—the moment to moment functioning of the human brain. At any one moment the brain is being bombarded by information arriving from its sensory apparatuses. All of this information is aiming to arrive into our consciousness, all at the same time. Through chemical reactions beyond our control, chains of synapses are firing or being shut down by processes beyond my control. Which impulse from which sensory apparatus that arrives into our consciousnesses is completely out of our control. We hear a sound (a loud crack or a bee buzz) and we instinctively duck and cover. All evidence shows that we commence to duck before we are conscious that we will duck. In short, action precedes awareness.

As to bees, why do we so instinctively duck? It's because those that didn't duck in the evolutionary past and for whom a bee sting was toxic are no longer among us. We now have bee sting kits, et cetera for those who are allergic to bee stings. Same with peanut butter. We have new cultural phenomena arising based on past experience which we are now conscious of, but these are group phenomena. In the individual brain, the duck or don't duck remains an instinct.

My conclusion is that if I cannot control any of the synapses which are firing in my brain and, thus, cannot control which sensory data reaches my consciousness, I cannot be said to be in control of my behavior. Behavior is going on under the radar of my consciousness constantly which, when I become aware of it, I am proud or ashamed of (to name but two possible emotional reactions). Since emotions are the adaptations that regulate human behavior (according to evolutionary psychologists) and emotional reactions are also beyond my control, I conclude here, too, that I am not a free agent. I cannot even choose which thoughts I will think. I conclude we are all day dreamers every moment of our lives while our biological frameworks go about functioning of their own volitions.

PS: I must add here that some of us are able to refrain from hitting the human who is irritating us while others among us can't control that hit reaction. And don't we pride ourselves on our restraint in our afterthoughts? Yet, if most of us were honest with ourselves, we'd see that we were afraid to strike out at our antagonist because we feared the result of that action more than the emotional resolution that hitting our antagonist would bring to our limbic systems. It's fear that keeps us in check, and if we're honest, we wouldn't be so proud of what we can't control.

By the way, an additional consideration here, is that some discussions of my fear-based view of human behavior might label me as conservative rather than liberal. Steven Pinker concludes in his book, The Blank Slate, that the conservative view of human behavior is probably more attuned with evolutionary psychology's findings than the liberal view is. Liberals are hopefully naive while conservatives are pessimistically inhibited. Wouldn't that knowledge of his alignment to evolutionary psychology drive a religious conservative nuts?

MY RECENT LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Conservatives claim Sotomayor’s humanity might bias her judgments in law. Fact is, if she were liberal, she’d be less likely to enforce biased judgments. Recent brain imaging studies show that the conservative brain is less able to entertain two competing ideas. In short, conservative biases are unyielding whereas liberals might alter an outworn bias through new information. Adaptive change is the key to survival.

No one is objective, least of all someone who imagines they’re objective. Recent findings in neuroscience suggest human behavior is more robotic than we’d like to think. The synaptic connections which determine human personality are limited by genetic makeup and altered by life experience. By imaging brain activity, we observe that human actions are triggered before the brain becomes conscious of choice. For example, words form before we’re conscious of choosing them. The batter’s nervous system begins to swing milliseconds before he thinks to swing.