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.

DOWN WITH THE BURKHA AND VEIL!

To spread freedom and democracy as widely as possible, America will need to become extremely feminist in its leanings; the way toward a truly worldwide celebration of liberty leads through the veiled and burkha-clad women of the world. It begins at home in America with making certain that the government loses all control over the feminine reproductive system. A woman's abortion rights are inalienable civil rights.

When we've proven that we really believe that a person (a woman) has complete control over their own bodies, then who knows what ideas might occur to a woman living behind an imposed veil or within the voluminous and smothering burkha. Those crazy, suppressed and fearful Moslem men sense that their greatest fear of American freedom is in how we treat our women as valuable and free people. That's what Islam fears in America, and, to tell the truth, what, also, fundamentalist Christians also fear in their own country—women who can decide for themselves how to deal with their own sexuality.

LONGING FOR ZION

I guess Texas's little pony show down there troubles me enough that I wake up thinking about it. "Troubles" may not be the word I'm looking for. "Intrigues" might be the more apt verb, for that little group of people poses many interesting challenges. Is polygamy necessarily bad for the human animal? Are their women and children actually being dummed down so that they can be controlled? And if the women and children are happy and not being harmed, should any of us care what their men do with them, how they train them and to what Biblical standard they indoctrinate them—as long as they agree to it?

Do they pay their taxes and are they available for military service should a draft come up? That may be all the larger state can expect of them.

I try to think myself into their compound, walk around in it, savor its sights and smells, but such an adventure is hard to imagine. I know their compound looks neat and clean as a whistle. I know one thing for sure—my free nature would rebel against that sort of control over my life. I was a total failure in the military mold. I can imagine the chains of gossip by which they control one another. I can imagine women teaching one another not to be jealous.

I can imagine what it must be like not to be allowed any really independent thinking from the group norm and being ostracized (banished) when one strays too far from the herd mentality. Banished—can you imagine the terror such a punishment would cause in a person who has been cut off from the main body of American culture and then forced to go survive in it? How would the banished one cope, find work, make friends? Being raised, cut off like that, would make it extremely difficult to function in the American body politic.

Of course, straying from the herd in the larger society also causes similar sorts of repercussions. Look at the "gossip" about and condemnation of gay folk and cross-dressers, for examples, in church groups. Look how we try to suppress them and regulate them and hem their behavior in.

And, come to think of it, look at all fundamentalists in their churches, striving with might and main, through non-association and through home schooling, to stay free of contamination by the freedom gene and thirst for new experience that thrives in those of us who have them. It's not an easy thing to be free. Most of the human herd desires to run around in carefully regulated groups because, when the human brain first achieved consciousness, that's the sort of social arrangement it found itself in and the atheist gene complex is fairly new, I suppose, and may not turn out to be the most successful adaptation. And even atheists group together for common protection and warmth of association. None of us are free from the need of companionship.

So there you go. I've just rambled a bit in an unorganized manner, here in the wee hours, because my mind was going a mile a minute, lying there in the dark. Getting up and attending to my consciousness's needs usually gets me back to sleep in short enough time. And I've got to be up at five this morn in order to go catch my plane for Ohio!

I guess the most salient point that emerges when I confront group (herd) mentality like that which controls fundamentalist behavior is how so very close they still are to the people that first made cave drawings. They haven't evolved quite like those of us who understand and accept freedom. The interesting paradox is that our founders' ideas about human freedom protect the very freedom that people longing to return to the herd (and renounce that freedom) are protected by.

So be it—if they are afraid to be as free as those of us in the larger herd choose to be free, let them huddle together in their groups where the male feels free to roam the herd for his sexual release. But, then, when I say that, I'm struck by the fact that the most precious thing our founding fathers gave us was a society in which a freedom to choose is given wide latitude and that women and children, raised in the constraints of Zion, do not quite get the freedom to choose that the rest of us do. Perhaps freedom is the only real reason any of us have to oppose Zions like theirs and fundamentalist churches in general—they don't raise up citizens who truly understand the wide range of behavior they have the freedom to choose among. And people who do not honor freedom above all other values are a threat to the "freedom to choose" itself because they don't want those among them, their women and children, to enjoy that freedom in the same measure they do. Their male freedom of choice is achieved by limiting the freedom of choice of the easily corrupted, because powerless, women and children in their midst. And that is a very scary prospect.