MY PATH FROM earnestness, which betrays an embarrassing naïveté TO ironic detachment.

ROBERT WRIGH

Eons ago when I was young and naive and suffering all the pangs of ignorance and making enemies as fast as I could meet, analyze and open my mouth at them, I could have used this book, but better late than never. I came upon this book just about the time the 20th Century tipped over into the 21st and all computer hell broke loose. Not. One of the books that helped the world make sense to me. 

"The Postmodern Mind"  from THE MORAL ANIMAL by Robert Wright

All told, the Darwinian notion of the unconscious is more radical than the Freudian one. The sources of self-deception are more numerous, diverse, and deeply rooted, and the line between conscious and unconscious is less clear. Freud described Freudianism as an attempt to "prove to the 'ego' of each one of us that he is not even master in his own house, but that he must remain content with the veriest scraps of information about what is going on unconsciously in his own mind." By Darwinian lights, this wording almost gives too much credit to the "self." It seems to suggest an otherwise clear-seeing mental entity getting deluded in various ways. To an evolutionary psychologist, the delusion seems so pervasive that the usefulness of thinking about any distinct core of honesty falls into doubt.

Indeed, the commonsense way of thinking about the relation between our thoughts and feelings, on the one hand, and our pursuit of goals, on the other, is not just wrong, but backward. We tend to think of ourselves as making judgments and then behaving accordingly: "we" decide who is nice and then befriend them; "we" decide who is upstanding and applaud them; "we" figure out who is wrong and oppose them; "we" figure out what is true and abide by it. To this picture Freud would add that often we have goals we aren't aware of, goals that may get pursued in oblique, even counterproductive, ways-and that our perception of the world may get warped in the process.

But if evolutionary psychology is on track, the whole picture needs to be turned inside out. We believe the things—about morality, personal worth, even objective truth—that lead to behaviors that get our genes into the next generation. (Or at least we believe the kinds of things that, in the environment of our evolution, would have been likely to get our genes into the next generation.) It is the behavioral goals—status, sex, effective coalition, parental investment, and so on—that remain steadfast while our view of reality adjusts to accommodate this constancy. What is in our genes' interests is what seems "right"—morally right, objectively right, whatever sort of rightness is in order.

In short: if Freud stressed people's difficulty in seeing the truth about themselves, the new Darwinians stress the difficulty of seeing truth, period. Indeed, Darwinism comes close to calling into question the very meaning of the word truth. For the social discourses that supposedly lead to truth—moral discourse, political discourse, even, sometimes, academic discourse—are, by Darwinian lights, raw power struggles. A winner will emerge, but there's often no reason to expect that winner to be truth. A cynicism deeper than Freudian cynicism may have once seemed hard to imagine, but here it is.

This Darwinian brand of cynicism doesn't exactly fill a gaping cultural void. Already, various avant-garde academics—"deconstructionist" literary theorists and anthropologists, adherents of "critical legal studies"—are viewing human communication as "discourses of power." Already many people believe what the new Darwinism underscores: that in human affairs, all (or at least much) is artifice, a self-serving manipulation of image. And already this belief helps nourish a central strand of the postmodern condition: a powerful inability to take things seriously.

Ironic self-consciousness is the order of the day. Cutting-edge talk-shows are massively self-referential, with jokes about cue cards written on cue cards, camera shots of cameras, and a general tendency for the format to undermine itself. Architecture is now about architecture, as architects playfully and, sometimes, patronizingly meld motifs of different ages into structures that invite us to laugh along with them. What is to be avoided at all costs in the postmodern age is earnestness, which betrays an embarrassing naïveté.

Whereas modern cynicism brought despair about the ability of the human species to realize laudable ideals, postmodern cynicism doesn't-not because it's optimistic, but because it can't take ideals seriously in the first place. The prevailing attitude is absurdism. A postmodern magazine may be irreverent, but not bitterly irreverent for it's not purposefully irreverent; its aim is indiscriminate, because everyone is equally ridiculous. And anyway, there's no moral basis for passing judgment. Just sit back and enjoy the show.

It is conceivable that the postmodern attitude has already drawn some strength from the new Darwinian paradigm. Sociobiology, however astringent its reception in academia, began seeping into popular culture two decades ago. In any event, the future progress of Darwinism may strengthen the postmodern mood. Surely, within academia, deconstructionists and critical legal scholars can find much to like in the new paradigm. And surely, outside of academia, one reasonable reaction to evolutionary psychology is a self-consciousness so acute, and a cynicism so deep, that ironic detachment from the whole human enterprise may provide the only relief.

Thus the difficult question of whether the human animal can be a moral animal—the question that modern cynicism tends to greet with despair—may seem increasingly quaint. The question may be whether, after the new Darwinism takes root, the word moral can be anything but a joke.

(pp. 324-326 in The Moral Animal by Robert Wright)

FREE WILL, AN IMPORTANT ILLUSION

Tonight on Through The Wormhole, the subject was free will. Do we have free will? Of course not, but the human animal must cling to the concept for the sake of its mental health. To feel as if one does not have "control" of one's behavior is a bewildering state of mind. I felt that way many days back when I drank. Now that I understand I have no free will, I actually and paradoxically feel more in control. In a sense, the truth has set me free, but free from what?

If you watch this particular episode of Wormhole, you'll quickly see that the men who are doing the experiments are the ones concluding that the human animal does not have free will whereas those who believe we have free will did a lot of philosophizing. Stick with the experimenters, the scientists. You'll always be closer to the truth, and I generally feel better the more I know the facts. Odd...that no women were featured in this episode. Why?

One philosopher among them did say that the more each of us knows, the closer to having a sense of control seems possible. I agree with him because the computer with the most data in memory will naturally have more information informing the decisions it makes for the consciousness called "I" that it makes decisions for.

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.

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 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?

THE DEBATE GOES ON: HOW CONSCIOUS IS HUMAN CHOICE?

These conversations go on on the World Pantheism Movement website:

Jim,
Perhaps I ought to admit that I completely understand any human beings desire to say that writing a symphony is many orders higher than my little vacuuming machine, but if you take the day by day composition of a symphony (and I've written four, yes, unpublished novels, plus many other false starts, long projects, plus ten or so volumes of poetry, TV scripts, several big near misses but no cigars) and break it down minute by minute as the hours pile up each day, each decision that is constructing that novel (or symphony) is a feeling by feeling, irrational, process of words coming forth "out of nowhere" that arise from an intense concentration on the job at hand. As far as the bird metaphor, I'm sticking to the facts that the bird is "making decisions" that guide his flight path just as surely as a man walking down a street is making decisions about every twist and turn of his journey. It's when we do our journey while distracted and arrive at our destination with no memory of how we got there that we understand that our decisions are exactly like the bird's. Here's a poem of mine that has been published in a reputable literary magazine from which I'll build a further case for the supremacy of feeling over consciousness as the director of human behavior:

MEMORY OF ALL THE RELIGION I'LL EVER NEED

Back to the wind, I held it
And tied to it a knotted tail.
Spring, and all that wind was with me.
Muddy feet that made me clearly dirty,
I was a thing of earth who sought the sky.
Then I ran and let it go and let it out,
And felt it lift to take the wind. Whipping
Madly in a rush, it sought a surface far above me
Until I lost control of it and it flew itself,
And what I held was something in the wind,
A line that curved to nothingness.

For one full windy afternoon, I watched it
Whip and twist at nothing I could see.
All control I had was in the knotted tale
I'd been sure to fasten to it
To hold it straight and true into the wind.
And then that wind became a calm,
And it began to flutter down and
Down, to lay my line along the earth.
END

"Muddy feet that made me clearly dirty, I was a thing of earth who sought the sky... Whipping madly in a rush, it sought a surface far above me... And what I held was something in the wind... A line that curved to nothingness." How well I recall to this day the skin-tingling elation with which those words, sans any meaning other than a sort of music that came with them, arrived into my consciousness out of nowhere. The choices were being made for me.... By Whom? By What?

In retrospect, you'd think that this poem with its very clear metaphor of kite flying is a conscious and rational process of putting together a creative work about the search for God that ends in atheism, but that ain't so. The title which eventually encapsulated what I imagine the poem is about came long after the basic lines were on the page. As an afterthought, that search is what the poem seems to be about, but there was nothing conscious or willful about the trip from the first words that spilled out of my unconscious onto the page. At first the writing flowed from a feeling about kite flying, a memory loaded with emotion about childhood, and a descriptive process, words tumbling after words, filled with elation but no sense of where it was going to land. At the time, I was still not the atheist that I am now, so the ending was a delightful surprise to me when it arose from the sky down into my awareness.

Later, too, I realized, another flash of insight, that if one describes something in the material world with enough accuracy and emotional force, that material description comes to "feel like" a comparable intellectual process, i.e. kite flying and searching for God. A canoe trip that ends with falling off the end of the world into existentialism. A combat flight that ends up with being shot down and finding a grape arbor from which one selects a grape and eats it like a sip from a chalice of blood.

The interesting thing about good poetry is that it's a discovery, a discovery of a poet's inner landscape that was hidden from him until a metaphor, firmly lodged in the material world, tugged out the flow of words that become the poem. A good poem is as much a delight of discovery to the reader as it is to the poet who created it. The more conscious the poetic process, usually, the worse the poetry. Even the polishing that goes on is an unconscious process. On rereading and rewriting, the poet goes over the work dozens if not hundreds of times and, in each reading, new words and arrangements of words suggest new directions and set off more feelings of correctness. The final "choice" of each word is based on a "sense of rightness" that is not logical or reasonable. It's an emotional choice. The writing of a poem is a purely emotional process during which the words come out of nowhere (usually triggered by an emotion laden metaphor that came out of nowhere, stimulated by something in the landscape, inner or outer). Unbidden, the words scramble out of the unconscious to pass swiftly across the screen of consciousness, unbidden and blindly scurrying to join the other words that call to them to come join their brothers already on the page.

My understanding of the poetic and novel-writing process is, in my declining years, further proven to me by the fact that the level of concentration from which arose my best poetry has fallen off. I haven't written a successful poem in years because the unconscious connections can't be called upon without the missing intense emotional concentration. Some of that may also be due to my emphasis on rational forms like working algebra problems. It's no accident, either, that many poets in the past have refused counseling because they were afraid it would harm their art by making them more conscious of the artistic process. Some of them ended in suicide. You might put Hemingway in that camp to name but one. The healthier I become, the more difficult to contact my muse which probably was a very nasty muse, something like the one that plagued Ernest Dowson. And, again, I did not have the courage to pursue that particular muse any farther, but wonder of wonders, the less emotional my approach to writing, the more I am able, far beyond anything I've ever experienced before, to explain and describe rational processes that escaped me before, yet, as always, the words flow out of nowhere and tell me what I'm thinking, rather than the other way around.

I hope all concerned will understand that the preceding arguments are ON TOPIC and have everything to do with my belief that when it comes to decision-making (specially at those higher creative levels that some of my friends on this site cite as proof that man is more free than I imagine he/she is) humankind is making the decisions first in the unconscious and the rationality comes afterwards. Even mathematicians say there are proofs more beautiful than others. I agree with that as a further proof of my argument. What is beauty other than a most personal emotional response to a woman, a book or a painting, a mathematical proof? Afterward, we try to justify our choices, but the choices are emotional and determined beforehand by the entire synaptic landscape of hidden connections beneath the rational world.

James Doerfel said:

I have no problem classifying both birds and humans as eukaryotes, nor calling the organ housed by a bird skull and the organ housed by the human skull both “brains,” nor placing human intelligence and bird intelligence on a continuum, nor relating bird behavior and human behavior to their eukaryotic organisms. I do wish to maintain that birds and humans are different species—they cannot viably mate. I recognize a different design in bird bodies and in human bodies, despite the fact that they are made from roughly the same stuff. [Given a cup of bird stuff (molecules) and a cup of human stuff I doubt you could tell me which one belonged to which.] I recognize different structures in their respective brains, including structures in human brains which never evolved in bird brains. I also wish to point out for the record that no bird yet discovered is a scientist or an Olympic competitor or a pantheist. And I account for a bird navigating by the stars and a human being composing a symphony by different explanatory matrixes—you know, like science does. Biologists speak of humans evolving a capacity for deliberative choice beyond that of any other known species, and they identify this capacity as the number-one reason for our species’ success on planet earth.
Regarding math, my philosophical aporia does not owe my distrust of mathematics but to the comparative absoluteness of my/our trust in mathematics. What makes math so &%$@ trustworthy… so decisive? I consider mobility, the ability to move up and down the various levels of complexity and emergence, the ability to pan in and pan out, to synthesize a coherent representation from multiple points of view, the benchmark of reason and the scientific method—you know the reason and method we Pantheists respect “as our best way of understanding nature and the Universe.” And, yes, we have the evolution of our bodies with their big brains—brains capable of reason and science—to thank for that.
George Thomas said:

James Doerfel said:

I can see no difference between a bird's flying by the stars and human's learning things to store in memory, memory being the storage capacities of synaptic patterns in the brain for recall when something in our environment compels those favorable memories back into the thin sliver of awareness. Memories, of course we all know, are stored with emotions and people without the capacity to feel (some of whom have been studied) that summons the connected thoughts, are unable to make decisions. (This last sentence is why I say that first comes the feeling (the instinct), then follows the thoughts that some of us believe are the impulse toward a behavior when, actually, it is the voiceless feeling that triggers the behavior, not the thought.) What we and birds do instinctively, we humans have learned the clever trick of discussing (ruminating, predicting) it afterwards. Step by step these improvements in learning capacities increased and at each step, the instinct preceded the thoughts about that capacity.

Jim, I can't help noticing that you express a distrust of the abstractions of mathematics but that in discussions of free will and/or consciousness, you do believe in going "up" several levels of abstraction and speak of "top down" reasoning toward the problems of consciousness and free will.

Title: THE LAST MAGICAL PROPERTY IN THE COSMOS

WAIT, PAUL, I AM A ROBOT, DARN IT. AND I CAN PROVE IT!

It’s now 9 am and as I awoke, my thought machine fired up. Here’s where we are now: I agree with Paul that my unconscious is part of the total package that is described as “me” and that my unconsciousness makes decisions for me. Therefore I must agree that I’m an object in the Cosmos that runs around making decisions without being conscious of making them (pause) except when reflecting upon those decisions afterward, sometimes within seconds of making them. These decisions are stored in memory for consideration at a later date when similar or different situations call my memories back into consciousness. Fair enough? And I have a memory of thinking, a memory that could be called the essence of consciousness because it allows my memories to loop back upon themselves and to become RECURSIVE.

Now… let’s construct a simple carpet vacuuming machine that guides itself. We already have them in existence. We attach to it a simple computer and speaker that fires up when you plug it in and bring it to LIFE. As it runs around vacuuming a carpet, it reports things like, “I’m vacuuming the carpet. Last week I vacuumed the carpet. Tomorrow, when I come to life again, you’ll see that I’ll start vacuuming the carpet again,” et cetera. Next, let’s connect these ruminations to the things Mr. Vacuum is actually doing. When it turns right, it says, “I just turned right.” When it hits an obstruction and can’t move, it says, “I can’t move.” When it backs up to free itself, it says, “You can’t keep a good vacuum down.” Et cetera. Further it stores in memory activities it did yesterday so that it tells you what it did the day before when you awake it to vacuum. And we might as well give it predictive powers so that as long it’s vacuuming a familiar carpet, it can do the same carpet, or household, repeatedly. Once Mr. Vacuum has done his job, he knows how to do it over and over.

I’ve just described a being that runs around making “unconscious” decisions that it can talk about. I’ve just described myself, minus my feelings. I more or less got that concept of robotics from Daniel Dennett’s book Consciousness Explained.

Next! Feelings are described in evolutionary psychology as adaptations for the regulation of the human machinery. So here’s what we add next. We attach a set of tubes and vials with chemicals and pumps and gages rigged into them. We’ll call them the limbic system. And we set the vacuum on an unfamiliar terrain. When the vacuum cleaner hits the end of its carpet world and senses the hardwood edge of a carpet (or a defining wall or object), it pauses, a pump fires up and sends chemicals from a full vial labeled CALM to an empty vial labeled PAIN, and Mr. Vacuum informs you it’s in PAIN. When the PAIN vial fills up, a switch is activated that gives Mr. Vacuum an order to turn right. It turns right but senses hardwood (or obstruction) again and the PAIN vial stays full. The computer automatically orders another direction, and Mr. Vacuum continues to try movements until one of the movements puts it in contact with carpet again at which time the PAIN vial returns its contents to the CALM vial while Mr. Vacuum “calmly” goes on its way vacuuming and, perhaps, if you’re a clever programmer, it hums Church In The Wildwood.

Of course Mr. Vacuum gives a running commentary of everything it is experiencing and doing. It can also be storing all this activity in memory for referral next vacuuming day. Soon, it will have memorized a new household or carpet. So… I’ve successfully added intervening mechanisms for the regulation of vacuuming into Mr. Vacuum’s circuitry. The machine is “feeling” its way through its life and talking about it. I claim, therefore, that I’m a robot just like Mr. Vacuum only I’ve got what is called LIFE. No one has to plug me in, but, wait a minute (pause) I wasn’t plugged in myself until my father plugged into my mother, was I? So I’ve been plugged in too, just like Mr. Vacuum, only it takes me a lifetime to finish my carpet.

Now all that’s left to do is define LIFE in purely material terms, define myself as a collection of matter that is arranged in such a way as to give an observer of my behavior the illusion that I’ve got this MAGICAL PROPERTY called LIFE. And since these other computers (people) need this capacity for projection to recognize my behavior as their behavior so that they can react (find the carpet) correctly for their survival, they give themselves the idea that they LIVE.

Are we, indeed, robots that have come to “life” (just like in science fiction), become cognizant of self and invented the concept of consciousness to describe the process of recursion? I think so. That’s right, we are matter through and through and there is no magical property of life that a power greater than ourselves has bestowed upon us. It’s rocks all the way down. And that's what I, as a naturalist pantheist, understand my condition to be in relation to the Cosmos. "Yep! He's got rocks in his head," some may say, but is that true?