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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

MORE ON DETERMINISM

The following is a response I entered on the Pantheism website in response to Ronhorgan's comment:

Ronhorgan said: The problem with the hot potato is that free will is both true and false. As a young man I could not escape the absolute truth that I was wholly predetermined; a very cheerless place to live.

My response was: I had the opposite experience. The exact moment that I decided in late-middle life that I was a robot, I was filled with an immediate sense of elation, and a paradoxical thought lept into my mind, I have never felt so free. As a youth I tried to believe in a sort of Freudian determinism, but all his explanations for human behavior (also Jung's explanations) seemed endlessly ambiguous and unsatisfying answers to what human consciousness labels cruelty and deceit. Actually no human act is cruel or deceitful; they are emotional labels consciousness, instructed by emotion, applies to the human brain doing its thing. A greater consciousness, an emotionless deterministic robot, observing from afar, would only see actions and not the emotions. It would be able to see how certain actions lead to certain results. It would even be able to quantify the results of the actions it observes. The funny thing is that good science is that distant and robotic observer. And evolutionary psychology is now putting human behavior under the microscope and it can quantify human behavior. For example, it reveals that the degree of kinship has a statistical correlation to the degree of favoritism that one human shows to another. Stuff like that.

When I began to read the works of evolutionary psychologists, every problem I had understanding human history disappeared. My understanding was complete, and I would never have to moan again, "Why O why, Lord?" The Lord is in there because consciousness brought with it dualism. As soon as the brain's auditory functions became complex enough to be multi-layered and recursive, there appeared in nature the brain speaking to itself and the brain directing the body's movements. The brain thinks and the brain that thinks (i.e. overhears its auditory bits rumbling along) has assigned God (the unknown and a concomitant conscious moral system) as an explanation for why the body is doing what it does. In a way, saying that Adam and Eve ate the apple is as good as any explanation for why one human animal harms another human animal as any other. The cause of the harm is buried in the purely physical body and is determined by electro/chemical activities which defy conscious control. Thus the label evil arises from a fairy tale.

Memories (synaptic memories of actions) are stored with emotions and emotions are also the trigger mechanisms for directing human behavior. Thus any act of the body has a memory in the synaptic patterns which are connected to the emotional captain of the ship. The emotional captain of the ship is separate from the rationalizing function of the brain which tries to explain and excuse every action that it has no control over except to rationalize and explain its behavior to itself and to its fellow chimps in the human network. Thinking is as deterministic as action is. Emotions, memories and thoughts swirl around each other, continuously stimulated by input from the environment. A certain emotion will stimulate a certain memory and vice versa.

An input from the environment will trigger an emotion which raises up memories of an action and an impulse to do that action, but that impulse to action (or thought) is then modulated by other emotions labeled as shame or guilt which are attached to other memories of past actions and events and results. Eventually, through that mixture of memory and their attached emotions an action is triggered by whichever chemical mixture wins the competition to act (or not act). From an array of potential actions one action has the chemical strength to cause the action to happen. The strength of an action is determined by the emotional (chemical) power that releases the action. Thus one man in a bar fight breaks a bottle and drives the shards of that bottle into his antagonist's face while another never goes beyond using his fists. His drive (emotional power) to do harm by his actions is modulated by other emotions (chemical determinants) that restrain his acts. The resolutions of his entire brain with all its emotions and memories just can't generate the emotional/chemical response that makes for a killing.

As usual, I wrote far more than I intended, but every avenue down which I follow determinism is endlessly fascinating. Writing about paradoxical stuff like conscious control as opposed to determinism constantly tantalizes me and causes words to flow.

MORE DISCUSSIONS FROM THE PANTHEISM WEBSITE

Okay, Paul, it's 3 am and I woke up thinking about this (damn, I hate this part of thinking), and I got this much. Are you saying that if my unconscious processes make the decisions, then, technically, "I" am making the decisions even if the decisions are unconscious decisions?

Okay, I got that, but then I moved to the problem of determinism. Do I make decisions or does the environment make me make my decisions? Then I had to ask if my choices are "either/or decisions" in that the environment offers my "synaptic self" (LeDeux?) choices that my unconscious processes select from among? Or are my decisions merely "reactions" to the environment and, thus, not free at all?

Then I was really splitting hairs, lying there in the dark. How about this? Those choices that are determined by my genetic makeup are my "free" choices because they lie within me? Any choices made by environmentally influenced distortions of my synaptic self are choices "determined" by forces outside myself and, thus, not free?

But, now, I think, as I wrote the last sentence, probably determined by that last sentence, "My genes are handed to me by my parents. I have no choice in that so even my "genetic choices" (for the sake of expression) are predetermined!"

I just thought also that I'm trying to dethrone reason from its mighty high perch in human affairs. Perhaps, it's rationality I'm quibbling with. And in the term "reason" I don't include the methodology of science because science is tightly linked to the world outside the self whereas all these rational arguments we are having involve the arrangement and rearrangement of words and definitions in order to explain to the unconscious what it's doing and to try and get other beings to see and agree with our inner selves, with our conscious selves.