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.

CHURCH BULLETIN BOARD, MY STYLE

I read the following on a church bulletin board: God, please help me to be the man my dog thinks I am.

I suggest that such a board ought to read: Dog, please help me to be the god man thinks I am.

WILLIAM STYRON (1925-2006) on TERRY SOUTHERN

"I had met a lot of Texans in the marines, most of whom lived up to their advance reputation for being yahoos and blowhards, and I never thought I'd encounter a Texan who was a novelist. Or a Texan who was rather shy and boastful."

I added that quote for a not so obvious reason. You see... I'm not the only one down on Texans. While I'm at it, here's some more from William Styron (author of two great novels I've read—Sophie's Choice and Confessions of Nat Turner):

“I thought of Terry [Southern] recently when I read, in an interview, the words of a British punk-rock star, plainly a young jerk, nasty and callow but able to express a tart intuitive insight: ‘You Americans still believe in God and all that shit, don't you? The whole fucking lot of you fraught with the fear of death.’

“Terry would have given his little cackle of approval at the remark, for it went to the core of his perception of American culture. Like me, Terry was an apostate southern Protestant, and I think that one of the reasons we hit it off well together was that we both viewed the Christian religion—at least insofar as we had experienced its puritanical rigors as a conspiracy to deny its adherents their fulfillment as human beings. It magnified not the glories of life but the consciousness of death, exploiting humanity's innate terror of the timeless void. High among its prohibitions was sexual pleasure. In contemplating Americans stretched on the rack of their hypocrisy as they tried to reconcile their furtive adulteries with their churchgoing pieties, Terry laid the groundwork for some of his most biting and funniest satire. Christianity bugged him, even getting into his titles—think of The Magic Christian. Nor was it by chance that the surname of the endearing heroine of Candy was—what else?—Christian. His finest comic efforts often come from his juxtaposing a sweetly religious soul—or at least a bourgeois-conventional one—with a figure of depravity or corruption. Candy was surely the first novel in which the frenzied sexual congress between a well-bred, exquisitely proportioned young American girl and an elderly, insane hunchback could elicit nothing but helpless laughter. (‘Give me your hump!’ she squeals at the moment of climax, in a jeu de mots so obvious it compounds the hilarity.) One clear memory I have is of Terry in the lounge car, musing over his Old Grand-Dad as he considered the imminent demise of the Super Chief and, with it, a venerable tradition. His voice grew elegiac speaking of the number of ‘darling Baptist virgins aspiring to be starlets’ who, at the hands of ‘panting Jewish agents with their swollen members,’ had been ever so satisfactorily deflowered on these plush, softly undulating banquettes.”

From William Styron’s Havanas In Camelot, pp.116-118

WHERE FALWELL GOT HIS WELL-FALLEN IDEA FOR BLAME FROM

“. . . the Diet of Worms, the same assembly that condemned Martin Luther for heresy, issued a mandate declaring that the ‘evil pocks’ [syphilis] was a scourge visited upon mankind for the sin of blasphemy.” —Styron also, from the same book as above

GOD DID IT FOR US

The cold-blooded reality of fundamentalism in America is demonstrated time and again in American history. Cold-bloodedness began very early. It was Catholic as well as Protestant in the New World. Now it’s also and insanely Moslem. But here’s an early take on how the hyper-religious imagine that their imaginary god works in the interests of Christianity. It’s from the book Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen (p. 72).

[CLIP]
During the next fifteen years, additional epidemics, most of which we know to have been smallpox, struck repeatedly. European Americans also contracted smallpox and the other maladies, to be sure, but they usually recovered, including, in a later century, the "heavily pockmarked George Washington." 
Native Americans usually died. The impact of the epidemics on the two cultures was profound. The English Separatists, already seeing their lives as part of a divinely inspired morality play, found it easy to infer that God was on their side. 
John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, called the plague 
"miraculous." In 1634 he wrote to a friend in England: "But for the natives in these parts, God hath so pursued them, as for 300 miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by the smallpox which still continues among them. So as God hath thereby cleared our title to this place, those who remain in these parts, being in all not 50, have put themselves under our protection ...." God 
the Original Real Estate Agent!

Many Indians likewise inferred that their god had abandoned them. Robert Cushman reported that "those that are left, have their courage much abated, and their countenance is dejected, and they seem as a people affrighted." After a smallpox epidemic the Cherokee "despaired so much that they lost confidence in their gods and the priests destroyed the sacred objects of the tribe." After all, neither Indians nor Pilgrims had access to the germ theory of disease.
Indian healers could supply no cure; their medicines and herbs offered no relief. Their religion provided no explanation. That of the whites did. Like the Europeans three centuries before them, many Indians surrendered to alcohol, converted to Christianity, or simply killed themselves!
[PASTE]

Less malevolently, but in exactly the same manner, golfer Gus Johnson’s claims his imagined god aids his golfing exploits.

WHIDBEY ISLAND SUNRISE

The photo is from a recent trip I took to Whidbey Island to visit old pal from Spokane, Doug. Looking from near Clinton toward Everett.

AN ATHEIST’S MEDITATION

Recently, I’ve been rereading Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson. I first read it a long time ago when I was failing to complete my first attempt at graduate school in Carbondale, Illinois. And of that whole book of which my memories are quite fond, I came across this brief piece of dialogue that struck me as true for myself and others at different times of our lives. Doc Reefy tells George Willard’s dying mother, “I had come to the time in my life when prayer became necessary and so I invented gods and prayed to them. I did not say my prayers in words nor did I kneel down but sat perfectly still in my chair.” Since I know for a fact that all gods that people believe in are made up, Doc Reefy’s words are quite powerful.

Well, there are no longer gods in my life to sit still in a chair for, but I’m learning, at age 69, how to sit still on a park bench (or in my living room at home) and silently open myself in a sensible and wonderful way, and, some days, down by the Columbia River now, I can so clear my mind of all gods and so inhabit my body that I become blissful and want to stand and reel, twirling down the street with my face tilted to the sun. And, though I don’t actually reel down the street, I stand and walk with squinted eyes, or sometimes closed when no one is approaching to run into, and I find myself in a state of bliss when I get into these meditative states of mind, and it’s a very wonderful sense of being alive that rushes in to fill me up and every animate and inanimate thing around me verges on the mystical. Who needs gods who are mere copies of mortals with all a mortal’s failings?

GENETIC TESTING—MAKING SPACE FOR IT

The trip to Mars and back is taxing NASA’s imagination. Below you’ll find a few snippets of info from a “NASA document on crew health” that I clipped from a news article released by the Associated Press who obtained it, using the freedom of information act that liberals passed way back when in the Vietnam era. Thank you, AP, for your diligence in obtaining the info and thank you, liberals, for putting such a law in place so that the AP can use it.

The trip to Mars and back will take three long years. Being still a healthy, normally-functioning male animal, one of the two items that really pricked up my ears (pardon the pun) was sex—what’ll a mixed sex crew do about that ancient temptation or, at least, for privacy for masturbatory urges? Read on MacDuff:

[SNIP]
How do you get rid of the body of a dead astronaut on a three-year mission to Mars and back.
When should the plug be pulled on a critically ill astronaut who is using up precious oxygen and endangering the rest of the crew? Should NASA employ DNA testing to weed out astronauts who might get a disease on a long flight?

Sex is not mentioned in the document and has long been almost a taboo topic at NASA. Williams said the question of sex in space is not a matter of crew health but a behavioral issue that will have to be taken up by others at NASA.

Mars-bound astronauts will not always be able to rely on instructions from Mission Control, since it would take nearly a half-hour for a question to be asked and an answer to come back via radio.

NASA will consider whether astronauts must undergo preventive surgery, such as an appendectomy, to head off medical emergencies during a mission, and whether astronauts should be required to sign living wills with end-of-life instructions.

Already, NASA is considering genetic screening in choosing crews on the long-duration missions. That is now prohibited.
[PASTE]

The one truly most interesting issue NASA is thinking about, as far as the human race is concerned, is genetic testing to weed out potential health problems. Here’s the elephant nose under the circus tent. Not that I oppose genetic testing. I’m semi for it. I don’t believe I would have minded much had I been aborted in my first trimester if it turned out that I had a 90% chance of becoming a serial killer or of having MS. It’s what would have happened in my later years had I survived that would be causing me the most travail now.

I know that what I’ve just said will cause great anguish to serial killers and people with serious health problems and those that love them, but the excruciating anguish is because these genetic defects survived the first trimester. Once one of us human animals is conscious, of course the whole damn debate takes on different dimensions and different sensibilities, and I know that and I hope so do you. Some day, if we survive overpopulation, we’ll need to discuss these issues like reasonably reasonable adults. I doubt that most of the human species is up to that discussion yet. I’ll long ago have returned to the same state of being as that of an aborted fetus by that time.